> It's their own fault for being idiots and not actually screening it in cinemas
Do you think they really just forgot to screen it?
Or could it instead just be that it's difficult to get broad distribution without a gigantic budget and/or sequel to a safe franchise? Somehow I imagine it was harder for them to get screenings than it was for Iron Man 2.
C++ has been around long enough to have had several distinct epochs of style and best practice. It's not necessary to do much manual heap management in modern C++.
And the subtle upside of using ref-counting is that the ownership and lifetime of your data becomes self-evident in the types. It takes awhile to appreciate that, but it makes garbage collection feel a bit like dynamic typing: yes, it requires you to think less, and there are heroic, inspiring optimizations behind it, but ultimately makes it harder to understand the runtime behavior based on just looking at the code.
This post is interesting because he's identifying those limitations of GC: he's ending up having to add reference management to his GC code, by making sure to null out references, etc. It's nice to have the type system do that for you.
1. The videos show these flying pixels in a grid using variable output to form images like the Mona Lisa -- but a perhaps more interesting possibility is using them for non-uniform sampling of an image.
Imagine all of them emitting max light output, and having none of them fly in the black areas of the image, and the highest concentration in the brightest areas.
2. This could be a basis for free-floating advertisements or information. Imagine walking around a giant outdoor mall (like the labyrinthine Irvine Spectrum) and having pixels appear above you announcing that the next IMAX 3D showing of Avatar is coming up, forming into a giant floating arrow saying RIGHT THIS WAY and floating towards the theater at walking pace.
The download client is pleasantly lightweight and unobtrusive.
It's a far cry from the standard Windows crapware that sits uselessly in your tray, wants to be always running, and bothers you to ask about downloading inconsequential 0.0.1 incremental updates every week.