Posts by The Indomitable Gall

Re: Why?

The key concept in the article is "non-linearity" -- in the oversimplified version, things don't act as you'd expect.

Sound does many, many funky things. If you expose a computer microphone to a sound above the frequency your computer can sample, it creates interference patterns at a lower frequency, within the audible range.

Now, if your target has active noise-cancelling circuitry, it's designed to detect and remove frequencies acting in predictable ways, and enhance short-lived sounds in the frequency range of human speech. The hack is mindboggling in the mathematics involved, but the underlying principles (lost harmonics, ghost signals etc) are all well-established.

Suffice it to say that you couldn't do this with analogue electronics -- computer processing is most definitely required.

" Flat typically loads much faster "

No it doesn't. There's no software in the world that cares whether the pixels in your bitmap simulate depth or are just part of a flatshading.

3D image design doesn't mean 3D graphics.

Re: It's everywhere, but sometimes you can fix it

" The rot has even gotten to LibreOffice which installs by default its "human" interface with fugly flat monochrome icons. Doesn't look to me like it was designed for humans. "

Perhaps it's inspired by the phrase "to err is human..."?

" "3D-like" UIs were there for years. No wonder flat ones seem harder to navigate. "

That's not it. The reason 3D-like GUIs were invented in the first place was because in laboratory tests, users found them consistently easier and less confusing to navigate.

Re: Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater

I think the main thing here is the conflation of flat vs 3d with abstract vs skeuomorphic.

The 3D interface was never completely skeumorphic to start off with. Sure, the buttons were skeuomorphic, because buttons in the real world stick up and then move down when you press them; but I have never had a desk where the paper was below the desk surface, which is where the 3D in Windows 95 et al placed it. Worse, look at the scroll controls in Windows -- you click "up" to move the paper down.

So the 3D interface and its success can't have been down to mimicking the real world, because it didn't.

Thus the 3D interface is not truly skeuomorphic.

The problem with 3D came in Windows XP when Microsoft made icons more 3D. Prior to that, the icons were front-on representative drawings of computers, monitors etc, with 3D implied by lighter lines on the top and left and darker lines on the bottom and right; in Windows XP, all the icons were 3D representations of the ideas with continuous graded shading that made them less iconic, lower contrast and overall harder to process.

Debating "flat vs skeuomorphic" is an oversimplification of the debate, because it conflates icons (which should generally be mostly flat, as they are symbols) with UI elements (which should generally be 3D, as it marks things out as interactive).

The problem, of course, is that this confusion is now universal, because icons in almost all settings act as buttons.

If we look at iOS, the lines are very blurry, because the fact that icons must (Apple rules) fill the rounded-corner-square, means they're visually both buttons and icons.

On Windows, icons have transparency, so they're not visually buttons. So Microsoft invented "tiles" -- i.e. flat buttons to stick your partially-transparent icons on. The name alone tells us that "flat" is a stupid interface: you interact with buttons, but tiles just sit on your wall.

On small screens....

" On small screens, a flatter UI can have some advantages because it uses less screen space (less relevant today because of high res high dpi screens). "

Actually, on small screens, 3D-effect controls are even more useful, because most small screens are now touchscreens.

One of the less-discussed benefits of the 3D button is the matter of target areas. To the user, the click target is the "top" of the button, or the inside of the check-box or radio-button. To the computer, the whole area is a valid target area.

This means that the whole area containing 3d effects becomes part of the margin for error in user clicks, and allows you to put buttons closer together without compromising the usability of the interface. This density of buttons is often visually more appealling than using blank space as padding between buttons.

When you're interacting with your finger rather than a mouse, you need a much wider margin of error, and in flat interfaces this often leads to sparseness of elements, and only the centre of the active area is marked -- the boundaries are absent. This makes it significantly easier to accidentally go over the boundary and hit the next interactive element.

For example -- the YouTube interface. Even on a medium-small device like the iPad Mini, it's not uncommon for me to accidentally press the timeline and rewind a video instead of playing/pausing it. This is pretty frustrating.

Re: I wonder

I think he was right to ask it, and I say the absolute proof of this is the Sky TV adaptations.

David Jason is one of my all-time favourite actors (Dangermouse is still his best work, incidentally).

But David Jason is also the quintessence of institutionalised "national treasure" -- they dragged Only Fools And Horses out well past its sell-by date, and made it all soppy and sentimental, and then when they had finally cancelled it, they brought it back to give it a happy ending twice, completely against the core point of the original concept. People kept watching it even after it became essentially unwatchable, simply because it was Only Fools And Horses, and in their heads it was "great". And the "national treasure" pull was so strong that they even made that god-awful young Del-boy series Rock and Chips, which was so meta in its double-nostalgia it made your head spin.

Then there was A Touch of Frost. It was a fantastic series. They had a great lead character, well acted by Jason. He was a bit old, but it was fine. They kept convincing him not to retire, and talking him back into the studio for "one more series", until we had a TV detective a good decade beyond retiral age, who presumably needed a stunt double for any run of more than a few metres. But we can't cancel A Touch of Frost, can we? It's a national treasure! And the writing and direction got really, really crap towards the end. The second-last series was so dire I'm surprised they even bothered to commission the last one. And the last involved some really sad stuff in the run-up to the finale, yet they still painted it as a happy ending, because national treasures always need a happy ending... even if that happy ending is at the funeral of their best friend. Shoddy, shoddy writing.

So that brings us back to Discworld. Rincewind was the wizard who ran away from everything, so 68-year-old David Jason was not the right man for the character by a long chalk. The only reason to include Jason was... he's a national treasure. And that still wouldn't have been enough if Discworld hadn't been... a national treasure. People watched it because... national treasure.

If his writings had survived, that whole national treasure thing would have led to loveless stringing out of the series to satisfy our lust for national treasure.

The very symbolic way in which it was done also cements in fans' consciousness exactly how much Pratchett is against that, and kills the commercial viability of national-treasure-pot-boilerism, because many of them would see the writing of a non-Pratchett Discworld novel as betraying their man.

Re: cheap arse DIYs

The scary thing about SBCs (from Intel's perspective) is that their ubiquity is making them a replacement for microcontrollers in hobbyist toys, and the hobbyist toys tend to spawn gizmos on Kickstarter, some of which get big. Intel put their money into true microcontroller (Arduino) rather the SBCs, which makes a fair bit of sense, because they certainly weren't going to challenge the Pi -- Arduino is the only other significant single tech used for Kickstarter gizmo prototypes.

Intel's place in the microcontroller/embedded space was historically based more on the availability of experience x86 assembly coders than any technical advantage. But assembly is mostly a thing of the past in desktop coding, so there's no migration path from Windows to embedded -- the entry to microcontroller coding is Arduino, and if there's no x86 on Arduino, Intel is going to continue to lose market share in embedded.

Re: They don't get loyalty

I personally suspect that the Pi got where it is today because the biggest vendors of Pi hardware and accessories all have "Pi" in their names (well, in the UK at least) -- as well as several of the smaller ones.

If they started selling the Raspberry alternatives, they'd get shot down for trademark infringement... oh, and probably get pushed down the list when it comes to supplying precious limited Pi stock.

I've finally got a Pi, because the release of the Zero W means they've finally got a product that is almost (but not quite) what I want -- it's still missing straightforward battery power.

If C.H.I.P. had a UK distributor, I'd be all over it, but it doesn't, because Pimoroni and The Pi Hut can't touch it.

Re: A rational and reasonable write-up of the issue.

"Though on the point about the FUSE emulator, I don't see why notifying (or not) the originators of an open source product that you want to use it is relevant, so long as the terms are complied with."

I think in this case it's being mentioned as part of establishing a timeline of events by witness testimony.

Re: I'm not sure you can make the its not porn argument

The warrantless search argument may well have held water in a European country. Evidence from a passer-by is all well and good, but the FBI have, whether directly or indirectly, incentivised computer techs to engage in FBI fishing trips by proxy. It seems to me like a total fiddle -- FBI employees aren't allowed to go fishing, so they get "contractors" in to do the job instead.

Best Buy's problem goes beyond the loss of public trust -- the people who go out of their way to search for potentially prosecutable material are doing so during their hours of employment, so they're effectively getting paid by Best Buy to look for the stuff, but taking the bounty themselves when they find it.

Technically, Best Buy should be firing anyone who takes the reward, but there are too many members of the public who will still consider these people "

heroes, rather than greedy invasive self-serving little ****s.

Re: Time to dig out my old Apple II?

Capacitor rot can be fixed with a few cheap capacitors and a soldering iron. The real problem is junction depletion in the chips. If the junction between layers of silicon becomes degraded due to lack of electron flow, you can't do anything but try to find replacement chips, and even a lot of new-old-stock chips will have the same problem.

Re: Who is paying these corrupted judges, uh?

" There is no damn monopoly! iOS is and Apple OS product, the App Store is for iOS based devices and customers. Period. "

No, the app store is for some iOS-based devices and some Apple customers.

The App Store does not allow software houses to market new apps for older 32-bit iOS devices (Apple will only approve new 64-bit apps).

The App Store does not allow software houses to maintain distinct versions for older and newer versions of iOS, effectively forcing publishers to drop support for older devices in order to get access to the latest libraries and hardware features and to keep their software current.

This is perhaps the weakest link in Apple's armour -- their policies seem to promote early obsolescence of hardware by choking out the software ecosystem.

Prior to the release of iOS 10, I regularly deleted apps and installed as required, as part of my memory management strategy. However, I can't do that any more, because the moment one of my favourite apps becomes iOS 10 only, my non-retina iPad Mini won't run it any more. I'm also really worried any time I'm offered an upgrade that the new version will suffer fatal bugs and there's no way to roll back -- and if the fixed version is 10 only, I'm stuffed.

Basically, Apple is taking software away from people who've already paid for it and making you pay them more money to get access to it again (by buying a new device) and this money isn't even shared with the app developers who's product it is that I really want.

Re: Alternatives?

The problem is that Google has the most data, so Google can target ads best, so Google is the most valuable advertising platform from the perspective of both the advertisers (they get seen by the people they want to see them) and of the site hosts (they get higher clickthrough, so more revenue).

Unless you're a well-established specialist site with a very specific demographic of visitors (like The Reg) you're not going to be able to make the direct relationships you need with advertisers and bypass the need for The Algorithm.

Re: Not very scary...

Zebrafish... duh!

(You have now failed your PhD viva/defense.)

Re: Relevant and accessible?

" He's appalled by it, being European, and sees it as an embarrassment that people even try to go to uni with that level of appreciation of the subject they are studying. "

You say that as though things are any better in Europe. I taught in a French university for a brief spell, and because their pass mark for the year is calculated on an average basis, most of my students failed my course and still got their degree -- heck, the number attending the resits was about a quarter of the number who failed the course.

This was bad enough with final year students, but it was a major problem for continuing students, because they'd progress with the next year and progress to advanced courses in subjects they had failed at lower levels, so they didn't have the prerequisite knowledge they were supposed to have picked up during their studies.

Re: Vader

" Still has the usual issues with the fairy tale of the US. "

Not proven. The rag-tag bunch of soldiers fighting on the South Pacific-inspired beaches were wearing uniforms that were ambiguous in whether they were modelled on US or Japanese uniforms. Two of the main fighters in the battle were oriental martial artists, and another pivotal figure was of Middle Eastern extract. And then the real biggie is that there were two Death Star explosions, and not on a planet scale. You can justify the lack of planet scale explosions by continuity (Tarkin using Alderaan as a test for the weapon), but it also gives a much slower, expanding explosion, and in the context of two such explosions, we see something that really doesn't send out the "Team US, heroes of the world" message you think it does.

Re: Critique

K-2SO is a very clever character. He's comic relief with an explanation -- his hyper-honesty is deftly defined as a side effect of the hack, whereas C3PO's witterings were presumably part of the factory spec. But more than that, they've used a good understanding of people in it. Autistic human characters in TV and film are typically portrayed unfairly as being quite "robotic", and here they have used behaviours that mimic certain traits on the autistic spectrum to make a robot seem more human (his excessive frankness and inability to stop himself blurting out inappropriate things people don't want to hear).

I'm massively, massively impressed. For anyone writing a Star Wars story, one of the heaviest millstones they've got to carry is that the comedy droids are an established part of the formula, and they managed to turn that to a strength.

" But these last two - especially R1 - are just too infested with PC messages to allow me to enjoy it properly. "

I'd like to point out that Lucas's original vision for Star Wars was for a female lead, so it's more Star Wars than you think. The fact that Lucas put a woman (Mon Mothma) high in the ranks of the Rebel Alliance should indicate that Lucas's galaxy far far away was also far far more equal than 1970s Earth.

As to the merits of female leads, well, the one in Rogue One is infinitely better than the one in The Force Awakens. How so? Because The Force Awakens was too knowing and conscious about their female lead -- the conversation between Rey and the orange alien woman was far too self-absorbedly "worthy". But then again, J.J. Abrams has never been one to do anything without making it painfully obvious. (Thank the Force he didn't smash the whole thing up with gratuitous lens flare!)

However, in Rogue One, you have a strong female character whose sex/gender/sexuality is not really relevant to the plot, and she's simply a strong character who happens to be female. The only place in the entire plot where her sex matters a damn is in the dialogue between her and her father, which is an extremely well-written father/daughter relationship.

And the men around her weren't "bumbling idiots". She was brash and reckless and her life was saved several times by men, and yet she wasn't "damselled" in the process.

And crucially it was men who convinced her to fight. They could have slipped into the same lazy "sisters are doin it for themselves" mode as Rey-and-the-orange-woman, and had Mon Mothma be the one to talk her into helping the alliance, but they didn't -- they went with the desert-dwelling terrorist surrogate father and the amoral secret agent.

In fact, the whole character development was one of absolute equality, because Jyn and Cassian were both jaded fighters at the start, and both taught the other to care -- Cassian taught Jyn to care about the cause, and Jyn taught Cassian that the cause was worth nothing if you didn't care about people.

Re: Not seen R1 yet but...

" Meh, most of the Expanded Universe was crap, with the notable exception of the Heir to the Empire trilogy and Grand Admiral Thrawn. I'm glad it's gone. "

If the best thing in the "expanded universe" was the work of a cheap pulp writer like Timothy Zahn, I too am glad it's gone.

Of course, "the" EU was not internally consistent either, as Dark Horse wrote their stories independent of Zahn to start off with.