On Tue, 16 Jul 2013 16:22:46 +0200
"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tuesday, 16 July 2013 at 00:26:51 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> > Vista doesn't have that horrible MS Dock taskbar
> 
> Worth noting you can turn that off: I have 7 on the laptop I'm on now and after a few settings changes, it is very similar to vista. To get a good taskbar you need to turn off the group similar windows function (which I hated when it was introduced in XP anyway).
>

Yea, I did actually manage to get my Win7 taskbar (and file explorer and start menu) into a fairly XP state (and I do actually like being able to manually rearrange the taskbar tasks now), but it took an enormous amount of obscure, and often third-party, hacks.

> Your quick launch still keeps their place but that doesn't bug me like I thought it would, it is actually kinda nice.
> 

Win7 doesn't even have quick launch unless you hack it back in. (Which I've done of course.) But MS sure as hell doesn't make "No I don't want your idiotic new UI ideas, just the kernel" easy.

> > window screenshots *every* freaking time your mouse goes near
> 
> Oh yeah, that is annoying. I hate hover things in general.

Me too. :/

> The worst of them is on websites. My bank website used to have hover menus right above the login thing...
> 
> So I go to the address bar and type in my bank dot com. Then i move the mouse down toward the login form and click it.... but oops, on the way down, I hovered over the stupid menu, so now by click is redirecting me to some new site! AAAARGGGTHHHH!
> 

Yea. Makes no sense to me how *all* menu bars *everywhere* work on a "click to open" concept, including the web browsers themselves, but then the entire web decided "No, we have to make menu bars operate on an incredibly inconvenient, distracting AND non-standard "hover" basis.

> God I hate hover crap.
> 

My sentiments exactly :)

> > I do actually like a lot of the ribbon stuff though. I don't see what the big problem is
> 
> It's different. I still haven't really figured out the new Paint UI. I don't think it sucks, but it does take some getting used to.
> 

One useful tip to minimize clicking: You can switch between tabs^H^H^H^Hribbons with the mouse's scroll wheel. The occasional extra clicking to switch ribbons was probably the one thing I can understand people not liking about the ribbons.

> 
> > Hmm, yea, that's not too bad, although I have found Linux FF tends to have a better default UI (that is, matches the system better) than Windows FF anyway.
> 
> Yes, I agree. And even there, I had to do an about:config thing to kill the unified back/forward nonsense.
> 

THAT'S POSSIBLE?!? PLEASE TELL ME HOW!!! Or is the forward/back dropdown list still unified? That's the part that really bugs me.

> > and so does the unified "stop/reload"
> 
> Oh yeah, that's annoying. But the keyboard is a bit better there, f5+esc are easy to hit and more reliable anyway.
> 

Good tip, although my hand and mind are usually in mouse-mode when I'm on the web.

I can understand the rationale for unified stop/reload: There's never a time when *both* make sense to use. No point in reloading while loading (gotta stop first), and makes so sense to stop when it's not loading.

But that reasoning falls apart the first time you reach for "stop" and the damn thing changes to "reload" just before you click. I'll take them separate, thank you.

> > Remember the old Sega GameGear's crappy LCD?
> 
> lol I actually liked it because it was backlit! Ate through batteries like mad but it was usable in varied lighting conditions.
> 

And it was color! (One of my all-time favorite commercials is the old GameGear one where a kid is sitting outside playing a GameBoy, grabs a big thick fallen tree branch, clonks himself over the head with it, turns back to the game, and goes "Whoa! Color!") I had a GameGear. I liked it. It was even blurrier than GameBoy though. And you're right about the batteries. Shit, it went through them *six* at a time! I usually just used the power cord though.

> > Screen size makes much more of a difference on PS3 than resolution. Probably at least 95% of PS3 games I've tried include text that's so damn *small* that's it's barely readable on even a 29" set
> 
> Yes, I can barely even read it on my friend's larger tv in the call of duty game (especially when we play split screen, no point even trying to read the score, 8, 3, and 11 all look the same to me at those sizes)
> 

I never played CoD multiplayer. But I have to give them *huge* credit for how (with the exception of multiplayer I guess, and maybe it's only the Modern Warfare series) there is *no* tiny text at all, unlike most PS3 games.

It always perplexes me how so many PS3 games will have a big 'ol box or area for text, and then the text is so small that 90% of it is just margins and padding.

> 
> > Really HD is only a moderate improvement if you compare
> > it to a *real* SD set instead of "SD on an HD set".
> 
> Aye. And even so, meh. I was called a troll a while ago because somebody on youtube did a cgi remake of some Star Trek 2 scenes, and I said my old VHS copy looked better.

lol!

Of course normally, calling a youtube commenter a troll is kind of like calling a sasquatch "hairy". ;)

> But it did. The cgi artist did a fine job, sure, but the original director and model makers did a *better* job and the VHS captured it just fine. (One thing I think the cgi artist missed was the deliberate angles and coloring choices the director made in the original movie, to get across the contrast of hero and villain. If you've seen the movie, you might remember what I mean - the Enterprise was often shot with bluer light and taller angles (if that's the right term), making it look more good and innocent, whereas the Reliant had low angles and redder lights to look menacing - a perfect fit for the scene. The cgi artist had bazillion polygons but didn't capture the same atmosphere.
> 
> Then there were things that just looked silly, like cgi smoke. Bah, the original effects were kinda cheesy too but I bought them. Maybe thanks to the actors but still, my old tape looked fine whatever the reason.)
> 

Yea, I'm actually not a fan of CG effects. *Sometimes* they work well (There's a giant compressed-air canister that breaks loose in "Gone in 60 Seconds" that I *never* would have guessed was CG.) But usually, even today, they lack the "realism" sense you get from more traditional effects.

Some of my favorite visual effects are in Terry Gilliam's old early-80's movie "Time Bandits". It not exactly the best movie I've seen, but I love the visual effects. They have a certain "real, yet otherworldly" quality that you just don't get from CG.

Actually, I'm not big on GC movies in general. I think cell-style just looks a lot better. Something about the smoothness of the animation in GC cartoons just doesn't look right (I've never figured out what exactly it is about it), and really takes away from the experience. (Although I am one of the few people who did like FF: Spirits Within...go figure.)

On Tuesday, 16 July 2013 at 21:33:33 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> One useful tip to minimize clicking: You can switch between
> tabs^H^H^H^Hribbons with the mouse's scroll wheel.

cool, I'll have to try that.

> THAT'S POSSIBLE?!? PLEASE TELL ME HOW!!! Or is the forward/back
> dropdown list still unified? That's the part that really bugs me.

I cannot for the life of me remember how. I'm looking at the user set about:config values and can't find it there either. But it is obviously still in force!

The dropdowns are unified, but I searched for the thing and came across this:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noun-buttons/

which claims to separate that too. idk if it is crap though. My general assumption with [s]add-ons[/s] [s]software[/s] most everyhing is that it is until proven otherwise, but maybe it will be good.


> But that reasoning falls apart the first time you reach for "stop" and the damn thing changes to "reload" just before you click.

Yeah, I've done that before.

> And it was color!

indeed. And nice bright colors too, going back to the backlight but just the palettes in a lot of the older games seemed so much brighter than they do nowadays.


> Of course normally, calling a youtube commenter a troll is kind of like calling a sasquatch "hairy". ;)

hehehe

> (Although I am one of the few people who did like FF: Spirits
> Within...go figure.)

That's a film I feel that I should give another try. I watched it once a while ago and was meh, but that could be due to bias since I've heard a few people say it really wasn't that bad.

On Tue, 16 Jul 2013 16:35:47 +0200
"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday, 16 July 2013 at 00:28:11 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> > They're corporations. It's not about turning a profit. It's about being under a legal obligation to shareholders to extract *as much* money as possible.
> 
> Indeed. But at this rate, they're not even staying competitive with their corporate alternatives. The cable company will have to shape up or accept defeat, but nope, they keep raising their rates. Maybe they're just milking what they can.
> 

Yea. While they're desperately trying to hoard money...they're just doing it very stupidly ;) The action of "squeezing sand" comes to mind.

> And yeah, I agree with the sad state of tv. A lot of what I watch are actually reruns but there's a lot I like about regular tv over dvds: the cost (which was a pure loss with cable, but a win with over the air), the variety, and actually I kinda like commercials because they give me a chance to get up. Yes, I could pause a dvd whenever, and change the discs for variety, but eh the regular tv is nice and mindless.
> 

PUO's do piss me off. I wish I could find a (likely of sketchy pedigree) player that would let me disable PUOs so I wouldn't have to waste a DVD+/-R (and often downsample to single-layer) just to get rid of them (well, I *think* Media Player Classic *might* be able to, but I mean a proper set-top player). It's kinda weird how it's easier to find a regionless player, or a player with a hidden regionless setting, than one with a way to kill PUOs. (Not that I like region coding any better.)

> > (usually anime)
> 
> Sailor Moon rocks btw!
> 

Maybe I just haven't seen far enough through, but I always thought it was weird how it seemed like every episode Tuxedo Mask would end up having to come save her sorry ass. :)

Pretty Cure isn't bad either as a slightly later "Magic Girl" show, at
least the sub version anyway. The fighting is standard generic
stuff, but aside from that it's just very cute. Actually, there was a
fantastic GBA game based on it, which is what originally drew my
attention to the series: "Futari wa PreCure: Arienaii: Yume no sono
wa dai...something" Umm I forget the rest of the name, but it's a
side-scrolling platform puzzle game with a "co-op but only
one-player" concept. Quite brilliant IMO. A shame it never had a
western release.

It is interesting though, how compared to live action stuff and most western works in general, animes/mangas tend to have much broader demographic appeal beyond just the "core" audience for a given work. For example, While there's certainly some good Seinen I like (like Cowboy Bebop, Death Note, and Ghost in the Shell, as far as the really obvious examples go), there's also been a bunch of Shojo that's managed to really hook me: Kodocha, Marmalade Boy (the manga, haven't seen the anime), Clamp's Suki Dakara Suki, and some others. And that's not an uncommon phenomenon at all.

('Course, then there's other great ones that I'm not really even sure what category they'd *technically* fall under: Like FullMetal Alchemist and K-On.)

> > were going to redo the protocol, I'm sure they could have done something far better than the non-degradable new system we ended up with.
> 
> Yeah, my thought is at least they could interlace the frames, using the same signal they have now, just changing it from a high res compressed stream to a lower res, redundant and error-correction supporting stream. So it sends frames like:
> 
> 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 1 3 2 2 1 4 3 2 1 5 4 3 2
> 
> well that's confusing looking, but the idea is if the resolution is like 1/4 the size, we should be able to send each frame 4 times in the same digital signal. So then if your connection cut out and you lost a frame, it is ok because you'll have another chance to pick it up 50ms later. So if you then have a small like 16 frame buffer in the box you could pick up almost a second to recover a frame and piece it together from its sub-frame checksumed chunks as it is rebroadcast, to give the user a smooth picture.
> 
> 
> Or something like that, I'm not a signal expert nor a reliability engineer, but it seems to me that it ought to be possible.

I was initially thinking along the lines of "there's gotta be a way these days to make a better analog format than NTSC/PAL", but yea, that certainly sounds like a direction to pursue as well. And frankly I barely know shit about analog EM signals, so I could be wrong about that part anyway.

On Wed, 17 Jul 2013 04:31:40 +0200
"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tuesday, 16 July 2013 at 21:33:33 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> 
> > THAT'S POSSIBLE?!? PLEASE TELL ME HOW!!! Or is the forward/back dropdown list still unified? That's the part that really bugs me.
> 
> I cannot for the life of me remember how. I'm looking at the user set about:config values and can't find it there either. But it is obviously still in force!
> 
> The dropdowns are unified, but I searched for the thing and came across this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noun-buttons/
> 
> which claims to separate that too. idk if it is crap though. My general assumption with [s]add-ons[/s] [s]software[/s] most everyhing is that it is until proven otherwise, but maybe it will be good.
> 

Ahh cool, last I checked that add-on was pretty much useless, but it looks like it finally got a major improvement last year.

Hot damn! I think I actually managed to get FF *v22* to not suck! It was an absolute royal fucking PITA though. It's amazing how much new idiotic bullshit Mozilla manages to cram in and accumulate with every new release, and never with any clear way to disable. FF has more dumb shit to undo now than ever. But it seems to finally be possible, and the under-the-hood improvements do counteract the problem pf needing to load it down with so many more "undo Mozilla's latest brilliant idea" add-ons. I think I'm going to make a little article soon explaining how to do it all.


> > And it was color!
> 
> indeed. And nice bright colors too, going back to the backlight but just the palettes in a lot of the older games seemed so much brighter than they do nowadays.
> 

Haven't you heard? Real is brown!:

http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=222

The worst offender I've seen so far (of both the ultra-brown and the ultra-bloom) is Need for Speed: Undercover (at least the PS3 version anyway). It's somewhat of an older one though, and luckily Need for Speed visual styles have gotten a lot better since then.


> > (Although I am one of the few people who did like FF: Spirits
> > Within...go figure.)
> 
> That's a film I feel that I should give another try. I watched it once a while ago and was meh, but that could be due to bias since I've heard a few people say it really wasn't that bad.

It had a major audience problem: Gamers didn't like it because, aside from having a Cid, there was nothing Final Fantasy about it (kind of a strange complaint though, since at the time none of the FF games ever had anything to do with each other.) And non-gamers weren't into it because it was a movie that was (allegedly) based on a game, which is never a good sign.

So it was disliked because it was based on Final Fantasy *and* because it *wasn't* based on Final Fantasy. Quite an unfortunate situation.

Some of the animations were a little awkward sometimes, but considering
the state-of-the-art at the time, I thought it was entirely forgivable.
And hell, even if it had been crap, I'd still have loved it just
because it was a CG movie that *wasn't* a cartoon (or a mix of
live action with tons of obvious CG effects).