mark-r

46 ms·

601.
by mark-r 5y ago
The last Windows app I worked on, I made sure the tester always tested at that resolution because it was so ubiquitous. I even wrote a utility to set the app resolution so I could run it at that size myself.
602.
by mark-r 5y ago
Kodak gets picked on unfairly. They weren't completely blind to the digital camera revolution, they produced the first digital camera prototype but it was laughably incapable. Their problem was building a business model that took a c
603.
by mark-r 5y ago
Exactly, that was my point. That difference wasn't mentioned in the post, and you have to have some knowledge of how image formats work to realize why it's so.
604.
by mark-r 5y ago
So paying users get a slower site? That seems counter-productive.
605.
by mark-r 5y ago
In particular the ordered dither can look very similar to halftoning, because it results in varying size dots.
606.
by mark-r 5y ago
That seems odd to me. Isn't PNG compression based on a LZW-type algorithm, making the bit count of the inputs irrelevant as long as you're only using two distinct values?
607.
by mark-r 5y ago
False dichotomy. Dithering is hardly the only or even best way to reduce image sizes. Just opening his 200x200 original in my favorite editor and resaving as JPEG with my usual parameter choices reduced it from 30K to 11K with no noticeab
608.
by mark-r 5y ago
I use the Python datetime module for stuff like that. Excel can be useful too, since it treats dates as a number of days.
609.
by mark-r 5y ago
I knew a guy who was a computer tech early in his career. One of his rounds was on a military base, and they had just moved their computer room up one floor. They started having problems with their tape drive, it would just randomly pop u
610.
by mark-r 5y ago
I had the same problem with my garage door opener. Tried shading the sensor but it still didn't work reliably. Finally replaced both the sensor and transmitter and it has been good ever since. My theory is that the lens got dirty or
611.
by mark-r 5y ago
Stackoverflow only exists because someone was upset with expertsexchange. The business model seemed to work for them.
612.
by mark-r 5y ago
Since compression can produce any bit combination with equal probability, the only way to reliably auto-detect from the contents is to put some kind of fixed flag at the front. At that point you get more flexibility by making it a new colu
613.
by mark-r 5y ago
When I was a kid, I was equally interested in hardware and software. Realized I couldn't afford the parts to play with hardware, so software it was.
614.
by mark-r 5y ago
The problem is that the big insurers are some of the most profitable companies ever. Just look at the lists of highest paid CEOs. As long as they can afford the most and best lobbyists nothing will ever change.
615.
by mark-r 5y ago
These days our editors are already doing a huge amount of parsing of our code. I know I've seen one editor, probably Visual Studio, that can determine your nesting level and draw vertical lines to delineate it.
616.
by mark-r 5y ago
I don't think 8 characters was ever an official standard, just a de facto one. The problem is that it's too large for most modern use cases. These days I find myself using smart editors that combine auto-indenting with tab-to-spa
617.
by mark-r 5y ago
Back when the Tab character was first invented, the indentation was always to a multiple of the 8th column; there was no option for anything else. Not sure why anyone thinks living 50 years in the past is a good idea.
618.
by mark-r 5y ago
As you get higher in resolution, I'd expect the difference between AA and non-AA to get less noticeable. Is that not the case?
619.
by mark-r 5y ago
I just use Python as my desktop calculator, it works pretty well.
620.
by mark-r 5y ago
This is sound, pragmatic advice. But it doesn't mean we have to like it.
621.
by mark-r 5y ago
Is "vary bad" a clever pun, or just an amusing typo?
622.
by mark-r 5y ago
There was a sub sandwich place near the University I went to. Went in one day and was told they were out of bread. I figured that meant they were really in trouble, probably fell behind on paying for supplies.
623.
by mark-r 5y ago
I know a guy who hates McDonalds and Burger King, but loves Wendy's. There's no universal rule that applies to everybody.
624.
by mark-r 5y ago
I think they had one of those in Tomah, Wisconsin. Closed unfortunately.
625.
by mark-r 5y ago
There's value in having a lowest common denominator. sRGB isn't going anywhere for quite some time.
626.
by mark-r 5y ago
I worked on software that had the ability to change the hue of an object. If you had a bright blue car and wanted it to be yellow, changing the hue to yellow worked perfectly. Then the perceptually correct zealots took over and mandated t
627.
by mark-r 5y ago
The silver lining in all this is that it has led to the availability of free font licenses. Google Fonts is a fantastic resource.
628.
by mark-r 5y ago
Only a fool would believe these reconstructions were real. Unfortunately fools are more common than we would hope.
629.
by mark-r 5y ago
Oh but it IS impossible, that hasn't changed. We're just getting better at generating believable fakes.
630.
by mark-r 5y ago
I worked with such a person, briefly. It seems he had never heard the phrase "the shortest distance between two points is a straight line". He had plans for the product stretching out 5 years, and architected accordingly. He kn

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