I am pseudonymous, though. I don't really care if you can e-stalk ANTSANTS to find that they posted in X forum or played Y game, as long as it stays separate from my real identity.
However, if you're gonna be creepy about it, maybe I should be more proactive.
Seconding this. I have browsed forums where important users threw temper tantrums and deleted all of their posts, making it downright impossible to follow years worth of valuable dialogs.
I am a staunch proponent of anonymity and privacy (hence why I post here under a pseudonym), but you need to make the decision about the level of privacy you want before you post. Changing your mind 1. screws over the community and 2. won't save you from the determined taking a trip through the wayback machine anyway.
I agree, I love FM and will always think good FM or "real chiptunes" are more impressive than good sample-based synthesis, because you can't just lean on your sample library. There are a few Genesis trackers out there, including Deflemask[1], vgmmaker (which sadly, the author took down because he got tired of dealing with unappreciative jerks, so you'll have to Google a bit to find a copy), and YMDj [2] (a "native tracker" that runs on the Genesis itself)
And I'm unimpressed by the technology but dig the music! It takes all kinds.
I like dubstep when people put some thought into it and aren't just lazily fiddling with an LFO, but to be fair, getting into breakcore as a teenager might have permanently ruined my taste.
I do like these demos for their music and their visual aesthetics, but I'm sorry to say, they aren't in any way technically impressive. The first one [1] is literally an FMV, it's all pre-rendered video. The second has one neat effect, the rotating scanline-aligned box that you've seen on other platforms, but all the hard part for other platforms, rasterizing it in realtime, is trivialized by the "mode 7" affine transformation video mode. Just need to calculate one 2D affine matrix per scanline, or load it from a lookup table, and the graphics hardware handles the rest. Plenty of commercial games had similar effects; it's just barely more impressive than seeing a rotating cube on a PlayStation. And even the (admittedly awesome) music isn't doing anything new, it's just using higher quality samples than most devs could afford to use in their games back in the day, synthesized on a PC with more powerful synthesizers.
I'm sorry, I know I sound like a total dick writing that. Again, I do enjoy the music and the visual aesthetics of this group's demos a lot more than a lot of other unarguably more technically impressive demos. Hell, I've watched Smash It about a dozen times now! I'm sure that we can expect really awesome stuff from them in the future as they get more experience. Just had to point out that "THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING OF WHAT WE CAN DO ON FUCKING SUPER NINTENDO" is an apt description of the tech on display, which is important, because the demoscene is about the intersection of style and technical achievement, not one or the other.
>Text evolved from shapes chiselled into rock or pressed into wet clay, so the roots of typography are as tactile and 3D as it's possible to be.
>Even ink on a scroll has a 3D feel. The 'paper' - whatever it's made of - has texture, and the way the ink sinks into it has depth and texture too.
>Likewise with traditional printing. The sequence of pages creates a 3D object, and old-fashioned heavy letter press books have texture and depth you won't get on a screen.
But you don't see the depth of the stroke or the texture of the paper when you're reading. You see abstract lines. You don't see the imperfect squiggles our meat-appendages create unless you really focus; at a glance, your brain autocorrects them into the intended strokes.
>Minimalism has one big problem - it lacks scale-independence. A hand-printed book has visual detail across a range of physical dimensions. You can see the cover across a room, but if you look at the print with a magnifying glass, you'll see detail at that scale too.
>Minimalist digital typography has detail at exactly one dimension - the size of the content. Zoom out, and you can't see the content. Zoom in, and you see pixels.
A symbol is a symbol. A flat monochrome floppy disk icon represents the concept of saving a file just the same as a lovingly rendered 3D floppy disk or even a photograph would.
Text glyphs are very flat, abstract symbols that represent sounds or ideas (indeed, I'm pretty sure the whole "flat design" trend was inspired by typography in the first place). Sure, we've been hunting beasts for much longer than we've been reading and writing, but written language is still a very old invention in the human timescale. And art predates even that. Humanity has had plenty of experience with symbolic visuals over the ages, I think we're equipped well enough to use basic smartphone apps.
I also used ME for about a year but I don't remember it crashing once. Never understood why everyone had such problems with it, I thought it was just Windows 98 with USB drivers.
John Romero was making shareware games for years before he met John Carmack. He wrote the level editors, much gameplay code, created many levels for, and significantly contributed to the game design of all the id games from Commander Keen to Quake. His absence is arguably a big part of why most of the later id games just aren't as fun as Doom. Daikatana bombed for a lot of reasons (zero experience as a manager, dotcom-era ridiculousness in hype and project scope, infamously horrible marketing campaign that he had no part in, etc), but not because John Romero was an incompetent programmer or game designer.
If you have the time, watch this series in which John Romero and (Bioshock level designer and apparent Doom fanboy) Jean-Paul LeBreton play through the first episode of Doom and analyze its level design in depth:
Yeah, the possibility of a "gatekeeper effect" is what's worrisome here. There's no way you can anticipate everything a user might want to do with their computer, so while opt-in sandboxing can only help, mandatory sandboxing could stifle the creativity of developers who must go through a gatekeeper (even a benevolent one) any time they want to ship a program that uses hardware or software abstractions in some unforeseen way.
Or alternatively, Joe User goes "[grumble grumble] guess I gotta delete that dang PulsePolicyD that's keepin' me from runnin' muh binaries [copies and pastes the first command found when googling "how i run X" into shell]" and it's all for naught.
Media players are rather large programs that users feed lots of untrusted data (gigabytes of pirated movies/tv shows/porn from suspect sources etc) into. All it takes is one exploitable bug in your media player of choice (or more likely, in a hardware-accelerated codec it uses) and one maliciously malformed video for your home directory to be nuked, keylogger to be installed, or worse.
Yes. Asynchronous image loading and rendering is already built into the browser, and the rest of the content shouldn't take long to load to begin with. Fancy dynamic Javascript frameworks that break up what should have been a single response into 20 different responses, asynchronously firing dozens of superfluous repaints as the data trickles in, cause far worse performance, latency, and usability problems than rendering a single chunk of HTML ever did.
I don't know of anyone that has ever experienced any kind of technical problem with their landline telephone or cable TV services. Rather, you pretty much need a cell phone and (to a much lesser extent) a home internet connection to participate in society today, and the marginal utility from having a separate home line or a cable TV service in addition to those services is not enough to justify the cost for most people.
That's debatable. Even in 64-bit mode, x86-64 processors treat 32-bit integers as the default word size for the majority of integer instructions, requiring a operand size prefix byte (on top of the larger integer itself) for almost every instruction that operates on a 64-bit integer. If you want to complain to anyone about this, complain to AMD. Really though, 32 bits are enough for the vast majority of array indices and symbolic constants, why waste memory bandwidth and cache space on 64-bit ints for the sake of consistency?
It's really sad to see some indie devs (or even, to go off on a bit of a tangent, projects like GNOME and Ubuntu Unity) killing themselves following the "PC is dead, mobile is the future" hype off a cliff instead of focusing on the much more stable and receptive PC userbase.
However, if you're gonna be creepy about it, maybe I should be more proactive.