shod · HackerTrans

shod

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14 年前議論

I'm usually eager to jump on board with recommendations from Stoyan’s performance calendar, but Anne’s description of baseline loading doesn't comport with my experience in Webkit browsers (and possibly others). They don't "display instantly after file download", but display almost line by line as the file is downloading, with a partial image appearing from top to bottom as information becomes available. Since this particular trick is about perception -- users being given some visual indication that that the image is loading, and data as soon as possible -- the difference between progressive and baseline loading seems like it should be subtler than the article suggests.

14 年前議論

Might I suggest Python instead? It's more immediately useful to kids interested in the sciences.

14 年前議論

"Older browsers" means those that predate native JSON methods. Libraries often use eval() as a fallback.

14 年前議論

Irrelevant to your point, but motion interpolation isn't entirely worthless -- it helps, for example, with the motion judder problem that frequently occurs during camera pans on LED-lit TV’s. My new TV offers a clear-frame alternative that mimics the rapid blinking of CRT’s by injecting black frames or lines, which I prefer over motion interpolation, but it significantly reduces brightness and gives some people headaches.

14 年前議論

I recently bought a new TV, and out of excitement left it uncalibrated. First film we watched was live action, which I don't watch much of, and it looked fine to me. The second film was anime, which I watch a lot, and I could tell that something was wrong: characters seemed to morph rather than move, like a bad Flash animation, and quick movements like mouths during speech seemed to lack their usual snappiness. It was only then that I started futzing with calibration settings and realized interpolation was a default. While researching afterwards, I found that people watch more live action than cartoons have a very different experience -- when cartoons were mentioned, it was often to say that motion interpolation looks fine to them there but bothers them when watching live action.

Perhaps obvious, but opinion of both 48 vs 24 FPS and motion interpolation seems to have a lot to do with expectations we’ve built from watching previous films (e.g., I watch so little live action that I was oblivious to the frame rate change there). I feel like that’s something people overlook (even in this thread) when they talk about these issues; 24 FPS isn’t better per se, it’s just that if you watch enough stuff intended to be played at about that frame rate, anything significantly higher starts to look wrong.

(Irrelevantly, a cool anecdote about motion blur: it’s what led Spielberg to prefer CGI dinosaurs over stop-motion techniques for Jurassic Park. Although animators were producing some fantastic dinosaur models, the lack of motion blur still left them feeling unnatural and out-of-place on film.)

14 年前議論

Or the "someone" GuiA recalls was Mitch Kapor.

14 年前議論

That's true when the risks outweigh the benefits, but it's not always true otherwise: we vaccinate everyone against smallpox to -keep- it rare!

Unfortunately, the cost of removing this sort of security theater as a deterrent is invisible and hypothetical, whereas the benefits are obvious.

14 年前議論

I haven't looked at Aperture or Lightroom, but iWork's price change isn't quite as dramatic or inscrutable as you think: the retail package was $80, and the 3 App store components are $20 each. Apple likely lowered the price as an incentive to push users into its App store, where it gets a cut from every piece of software sold. Dividing the components and selling them individually probably brought in quite a few new users such as myself who didn't want to pay $80 for the full iWork package since it's only Keynote I'm interested in.

Services are more deeply and negatively affected by price changes than software, though. A price change that seems insignificant to you can drive many users away. Look at the fiasco with Netflix last year; they changed their prices by about $6 and subsequently lost about a million subscribers within a few months. Some users see price increases as an indication of a service's instability in the marketplace (and therefore a cue to jump-ship). Most users have lower tolerance thresholds for price differences when comparing services than they do when comparing one-time purchases (like software).

Regardless, now would be a really bad time for Dropbox to increase their pricing. Many Mac & iPhone users are watching iCloud closely and realizing that it could make Dropbox redundant for them. A price increase, even one as small as a ~$30 a year change for their 50+ plan (corollary to your $3 a month change), could push enough users away from the service that Dropbox is better off sticking to its guns.

14 年前議論

Dropbox isn't a software product; it's a service. What's more, it's a service that needs to be priced to compete with Apple's own iCloud.

15 年前議論

I agree, but in the case of bad Kindle conversions, the only thing Amazon can fairly be faulted for is requiring users to accompany their reviews with ratings. It's up to the publisher to perform the conversion.

Whenever I have a complaint about a Kindle conversion (twice in two years), I try to rate the book based on the author's work -- the text itself -- but make the review title something like "Do not buy for Kindle", but I can see why reviewers might choose to do otherwise: it is, after all, the publisher's product and the publisher's fault for producing a sloppy "printing".

15 年前議論

They're called public schools in England because free and tax-funded education is a relatively new phenomenon. At a time when people could choose between private tuition at home and religious tuition in classrooms, public schools offered a classroom education to any fee-paying member of the public, regardless of creed.

15 年前議論

Yes, but Harvard and Yale are higher education institutions whereas Eton is a secondary education institution. That was hugh3's point: "the British elite will judge you not only by your university but by your high school."

I want to say the English equivalent of America's Ivy League universities like Harvard and Yale are its older private universities like Oxford and Cambridge, but the truth is the reverse (Oxford, for example, dates back to about the 9th century!)

15 年前議論

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eton_College#University_admissi...

15 年前議論

"iFlow wants 50% like they were getting before the agency model."

You may not have intended this, but that sentence reads as though iFlow is merely making less money than it wold like. The problem's worse than that. iFlow would be losing money with each book sold.

iFlow doesn't have the clout to negotiate contracts with individual major publishers: books are made available through a wholesaler. The wholesaler distributes the publisher's cut, takes its own, and gives iFlow itself a cut of _less than_ 30% of the sale price. Since Apple suddenly wants an entire 30% of the sale price, iFlow would literally be losing money with each transaction to make up Apple's "cut".

As part of the agency model, all books must be sold at the same retail price, so iFlow can't simply bump up the price of its books to compensate, either.

15 年前議論

To be clear: the NASB estimates that 93,000 deaths so far (as opposed to "eventual" deaths), the ICRIN estimates 500,000 deaths so far, and the RAS estimates 60,000 deaths so far and in Russia alone, were caused by Chernobyl. These are the deaths the article outrightly dismisses in favor of the IAEA/WHO's figure of 9.

The latter figure may be the correct one, but the article is still wrong in using this death toll to decide that "rooftop solar is several times more dangerous than nuclear power" if Chernobyl is the example of nuclear power against which we are comparing rooftop solar: this is a callous and casual dismissal of the horrific disfigurements we see in children at Novinki, the hundreds of thousands of displaced families, the rescue workers who lost body parts to the cancer they subsequently suffered, and to the many other horrors and humiliations Chernobyl's victims have suffered.

15 年前議論

"The World Health Organization study in 2005 indicated that 50 people died to that point as a direct result of Chernobyl. 4000 people may eventually die earlier as a result of Chernobyl, but those deaths would be more than 20 years after the fact and the cause and effect becomes more tenuous."

In other words, this article only counts the deaths of reactor staff and emergency crew, and goes on to outrightly dismiss cancer deaths.

The article's stated purpose is to show a comparison of death tolls. The dramatic loss of quality of life due to radiation poisoning for thousands of people exposed to the highest levels of radiation surrounding the Chernobyl disaster, and the displacement of hundreds of thousands, is also worth considering when weighing the negative impact.

That said, with Chernobyl, we're talking about the absolute worst-case scenario for a nuclear reactor improperly contained (actually, not contained at all) and neglected long after warning signs were shown. We shouldn't practice historical revisionism or insult its victims by downplaying its impact, but we should also remember that its particular history will not be repeated with the containment barriers and safety measures in place at today's plants.

15 年前議論

Another update: Tepco has confirmed that 11 engineers were injured in the blast. No word on their condition.

15 年前議論

25 reasons I know Mark Peter Davis isn't living in the stone age:

1. He drives a car.

2. He owns keys, cash, and cards.

3. He receives medical care.

4. His life expectancy is above 35 years.

5. He owns a computer.

6. His basic survival doesn't automatically involve exercise.

7. He has alternatives to walking when traveling long distances.

8. Universities exist in his time.

9. He sleeps on a mattress.

10. Medicine exists to help control many causes of death. He'll likely die of natural causes after a long life.

11. Flight is possible for humans.

12. He's able to express his thoughts in a way that can be recorded and processed by non-living machines.

13. He's able to consider nutrition in his diet.

14. He meets people outside his immediate community without necessarily considering them a threat.

15. He considers his own impact on the wellbeing of the planet.

16. When contemplating his family's safety, he is able to consider the assistance of police, firemen, and medical professionals.

17. Monetary investment exists in his time.

18. Monetary transactions exist in his time.

19. He's learning a foreign language.

20. His child's education includes reading, writing, and arithmetic.

21. He recognizes the concept of mental health.

22. He recognizes that disease has medical causes.

23. He is able to form written contracts to help counter the deceit of others.

24. Industry exists in his time.

25. He typed that post.

16 年前議論

and to shake one's booty means to wiggle one's butt. allow me to demonstrate.

16 年前議論

It's "Windows Only" logic: exclusivity through ubiquity. Why bother catering for the niche marget when you can score big with iOS?