Disqus - Latest Comments for unconed

Re: If-less programming

unconed — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 19:56:26 -0000

The problem is you lead with 'abomination'. The HackerNews egos are frail and easily offended.

Re: Brian Hutchinson: After throwing $84M at slum housing, city spending $128K per room on renovations

unconed — Sat, 17 Nov 2012 05:43:44 -0000

Heh, as if all those shiny new developments are being built to exacting standards. Any of you walked around the olympic village recently? Leaky, cheap messes, the lot of them. Heritage is worth preserving, they figured that out in the rest of the world a long time ago. But of course, not in Vancouver: this city is too much of a special snowflake for that.

Re: Stop "Fixing" My Font Smoothing

unconed — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 12:56:26 -0000

Dmitry: I never said it was expanding by whole pixels, it's quite the opposite.

The purpose of font rendering is to determine the shading of every pixel by how much the original, idealized character outline overlaps with every pixel (in the case of box filtering) or with an arbitrary filtering kernel. This is a classic sampling problem.

During this process, the font renderer has the freedom to expand or contract the outline by any amount, including fractional pixels, before it starts rasterizing.

Might I suggest you read up on sampling theory before you write articles like this.

Re: The Magical Tech Behind Paper For iPad's Color-Mixing Perfection

unconed — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 12:43:53 -0000

Pure yellow and royal blue do make grey, if you're talking about adding light together. It's ink that works differently.

Yet another longwinded article about color that fails to address this misconception clearly and early.

Re: Stop "Fixing" My Font Smoothing

unconed — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 21:04:04 -0000

"Antialiased text looks more slender and because it has less pixels to play with, so instead of spilling out to more pixels it tries to fit in less. "

This statement doesn't make much sense. If you look at the non-subpixel text, it isn't snapping to whole pixels horizontally at all.

There is no reason why OS X couldn't rasterize the exact same shapes for both rendering methods and make this problem go away. OS X is applying a deliberate effect to expand the font outline by a fixed amount of pixels, in subpixel mode. That is, 10pt text is fattened relatively more than 20pt text. It's obvious when you e.g. look at a PDF which has a vector stroke outline on top of regular text. The outline isn't expanded to match.

I've always thought this was a deliberate choice to mimic the way ink bleeds outwards on paper, like books and newsprint. Metal type has historically been designed with this in mind.

As for why CSS transformed text doesn't use subpixel rendering... it's because this is equivalent to compositing images which have separate alpha channels / opacities for each R, G and B channel. GPUs do not support this natively.

Re: No 'Positive Detection' of Methane on Mars, NASA Announces

unconed — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 19:36:25 -0000

Given the time scales and distances involved, I think it's more likely that space faring civilizations kill themselves off before they manage to colonize another world. Look at humanity: we've been around for hundreds of thousands of years, but it took us 50 years to go from discovering flight to pumping out atomic bombs.

Research shows that most humans are unrealistically biased towards positive thinking and that we ignore long term threats in favour of short term gratification. Evolution never required us to be more considerate, and our dreams are mostly to feed our own egos. Even the Apollo program was really just an intercontinental dick swinging contest, not a grand project of science. And now corporations have turned into amoral legal entities with personhood, while their employees only care about covering their own asses.

It's happened before. Ancient Greece's stagnant culture was steamrolled by Roman military might, and Rome eventually burned and fell apart while its people sat around being entertained and the incestuous elite ran the show. The difference is that if our modern civilization falls, there won't be enough natural resources left to kickstart a second modern age.

I think on a cosmic timescale, sentient life is like a match in a gas filled room. It lights up really big and really pretty, and then it dies out, having consumed all its fuel.

Re: Understanding matrices intuitively, part 1

unconed — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 18:12:00 -0000

It blows my mind that is not how linear algebra is introduced, I realized the same thing doing computer graphics and now find matrices easy.

What's more, you can explain vector-matrix multiplication intuitively this way. All you're doing is splitting the vector into its coordinates, and mapping them onto the distorted grid, using the rows or columns of the matrix as new basis vectors.

Matrix-matrix multiplication can then be done by splitting one matrix into its rows or column vectors, and transforming them individually as vectors using this principle.

The asymmetry of matrix multiplication is explained by doing this process twice, once from the left, using rows as vectors, and once from the right, using columns as vectors. You will find you have written out the same algorithm in two different ways.

And for the real kicker: you can explain homogeneous coordinates / projective transforms intuitively. Imagine you're playing an FPS game like Portal and you're looking around standing at a fixed position. Your brain tells you you are seeing a 3D space rotate around a common origin (i.e. an affine matrix transform). But really, the screen is showing 2D shapes scrolling through your field of view, i.e. translating. So, if you express 2D shapes as 3D shapes floating in front of a camera, you can use 3D matrix transforms to perform 2D translations, and you get perspective projections for free. This principle is applied everywhere in computer graphics, leading to 4D matrices/vectors for 3D engines.

Re: Why programmers think that they don’t have talent for web-design?

unconed — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 19:19:19 -0000

Should leave this link here:

http://webtypography.net

A bit old, but the advice still stands. The only difference is that nowadays, you can just use pixel units directly instead of ems, as all browsers support scaling them properly.

Re: Font Rendering - Mac vs Ubuntu - Arunoda Susiripala - Web Geek

unconed — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 15:32:41 -0000

This is both correct and incorrect. It's tricky.

When rendering with subpixel AA, OS X fattens up fonts by a constant amount in pixels—so small text is fattened more than big text is. The reason for this seems to be to mimic the natural outward bleeding of ink that happens on paper and which makes fonts appear bolder than originally designed... but then, typographers designed their fonts with this effect in mind in the first place.

Oddly, OS X never applies the bleed to non-subpixel AA rendered text, even though the same technique could apply. This is what makes text go lighter when it switches from subpixel to non-subpixel AA, e.g. when rendered on a transparent layer.

Re: Utilities Try to Tame the Backlash Against Smart Meters

unconed — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 15:36:17 -0000

And they'll call up family, friends and journalists on their much MUCH more powerful cellphones to complain about it.

Re: Alberta aboriginal rock etchings defaced with drill, power washer, acid

unconed — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 16:27:27 -0000

Or the protestants in Europe who defaced Catholic art in the 16th century: http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

Re: iPhone 5: Apple’s 16:9 compromise

unconed — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 12:15:52 -0000

What kind of math do you use? 1440x900 is a 16:10 screen, not 15:10 (i.e. 3:2). And because iOS introduces a slightly taller screen resolution, you're contemplating switching to Android, where you'll have a zoo of resolutions to deal with?

The problem with the new iPhone isn't the phones, it's the crazy people who own them.

Re: http://flirtatiouslabs.com/post/31401127751

unconed — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 13:06:07 -0000

Actually, if you read the current platform policies, Zynga is already in violation. You're not supposed to trick people into sharing by hiding the skip option, you're supposed to provide clear "post" vs "skip" buttons:

https://developers.facebook...

Re: From Linux to OSX - 1 Year Later

unconed — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 18:15:46 -0000

"And who the fuck designed all the official Mac keyboards without a right control key? "

The same people who gave it two Command keys and made that do everything. I actually like how old school unix stuff on Mac still uses CTRL. It means I can use archaic commands like CTRL-C in the few cases I still need it, while being able to use e.g. copy/paste shortcuts everywhere, as I rightly should be able to.

If you weren't an Emacs user, you probably would've noticed that commands like "find next", "open special characters", "minimize all", "hide window", etc are completely consistent across the entire Desktop OS, and this is one of the lovely things about the entire experience.

(edit: btw, don't mean to belittle your choice of editor... but there is a reason Textmate and Sublime Text have such a following... you can't shove the square peg of Emacs or Vim into the precision-rounded-corner-hole of OS X and expect it to fit)

Re: It’s Really Time for the Harassment to End

unconed — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 15:43:19 -0000

"Hardly innocent" is not "Equally guilty", and the fact that you equate the two is a perfect example of what this person was illustrating. Throughout this thread, you sit on your high horse, telling other people what they actually meant to say. Presumptuous much?

Re: It’s Really Time for the Harassment to End

unconed — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 15:33:05 -0000

Atheism+: "Because I know exactly what you meant, and you don't."

How about you let her do her own talking?

Re: Men's rights campaign stirs conflict on Commercial Drive

unconed — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 20:39:41 -0000

Guys in North America have the privilege of being:
* Called pedophiles if they talk to children in public
* Suspected rapists unless they walk in a wide circle around a woman at night
* The default suspect in violence between a man and a woman
* On the hook financially if a crazy woman impregnates herself with his sperm
* Expected to pay for drinks, dinner, several months of salary on a ring, and all other aspects of courtship
* Expected to treat female spaces as sacred while male spaces are fair game for everyone

Want more?

Re: Men's rights campaign stirs conflict on Commercial Drive

unconed — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 19:20:11 -0000

So what you're saying is that you feel absolutely justified in having the ultimate trump card to ruin a man's life, simply because you are the one with the vagina. And that if you chose to sleep around and got pregnant, then it's perfectly fair that you are the only one in this equation completely covered by society no matter what you choose.

Yes, this is all about about equality indeed.

Re: Men's rights campaign stirs conflict on Commercial Drive

unconed — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 19:15:23 -0000

The statement was that women are more often the *initiators* of domestic violence than men, which Girl Writes What has the citation for, but which you dismiss out of hand because you don't like what she has to say. I dare you to watch one of her videos and refute her assertions.

Re: Men's rights campaign stirs conflict on Commercial Drive

unconed — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 17:35:17 -0000

You seem to be perceiving this as a zero sum game. Women are owed payback for what the evil men have been doing to them and have to extract concessions? Those same women who, by the way, pinned ribbons on civilian men during time of war, shaming those men into enlisting, only to not bat an eye at them when they came back crippled and unable to support a family?

Here's a newsflash: society has been unpleasant for the vast majority of people in it, for the vast majority of time that we have been on this planet. You, and I, as modern people, are not owed anything because of what happened to the people before us. All we can do is look at the situation *today* and make it fairer.

It certainly doesn't help to go back and apply the modern view of a world with universal health care, birth control and egalitarianism, ... to that of a woman in the middle ages who had the choice of financial and physical stability through marriage, or a life of supporting bastard children by herself. Sure, she effectively rented out her uterus to her husband. But at the same time, he pledged to tend to her needs for the rest of her life, and her life was vastly easier because of it. That's how things worked back in the day, and the women were just as concerned with finding a "good husband" for each other.

Meanwhile in today's world, a woman can lie to a man about birth control, dump him after he gets her pregnant, and then cripple him financially by extracting money for decades, no matter what her intent was or what evidence he has. That's not a world in which there is balance between the interests and welfare of men vs women, it's a world that rewards women for acting like psychos, and it drags all of the sane women down along.

Re: Men's rights campaign stirs conflict on Commercial Drive

unconed — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 17:02:10 -0000

"Inferior feminine reasoning skills"... nice, yet more insults you project onto me. And how does "here's a short nugget" translate to "this one article will entirely support my view on a complicated topic"?

In fact, these are not my "superior male reasoning skills", most of these talking points come from the excellent Girl Writes What, who knows her shit and, unlike me, has the time to go digging for the references. And unlike you, seems to understand that there is such a thing as nuance: there are many different forms of abuse, and angry domination is just one of them. Enjoy:

http://owningyourshit.blogs...

Re: Men's rights campaign stirs conflict on Commercial Drive

unconed — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 16:46:46 -0000

But centuries of injustice against women also include centuries of injustice against men, that is to say the 99.9999% of men who didn't have the luxury of being kings.

An objective study of history shows that women in general were well treated and well respected in their communities, and from the time we have been tracking it, women have always reported a higher satisfaction in life than the men.

Re: Men's rights campaign stirs conflict on Commercial Drive

unconed — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 16:43:34 -0000

I'm afraid I don't have time to go digging, but here's a short nugget:

"Data from Home Office statistical bulletins and the British Crime Survey show that men made up about 40% of domestic violence victims each year between 2004-05 and 2008-09, the last year for which figures are available. In 2006-07 men made up 43.4% of all those who had suffered partner abuse in the previous year, which rose to 45.5% in 2007-08 but fell to 37.7% in 2008-09."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/s...

Now factor in the fact that men are conditioned to underreport and "suck it up", and whatever gender disparity is there disappears. That isn't to say that there are differences in gender and the specific situations that occur, but again, it's not the wide gap that feminists seem to believe it is.

Re: Men's rights campaign stirs conflict on Commercial Drive

unconed — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 16:24:10 -0000

You are putting words in my mouth and confusing observation with endorsement.

I never said it was good for a woman to be taken care of. I merely said that this is the view that society has in general, and that includes both men and women.

If you disagree, then you have to ignore the mountain of evidence that shows that more care and money is spent on women's issues than on men's. And that more controversy is generated when something bad happens to a woman than when it happens to a man.

And that you bring words like "revolting" and "disgusting" into it shows that this is an emotional issue, rather than based on an assessment of objective reality.

Re: Men's rights campaign stirs conflict on Commercial Drive

unconed — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 15:41:54 -0000

If you could let go of your preconceptions, you would in fact notice that it is a bias on the part of society. But it's not nefarious, it's just a consequence of evolutionary psychology and the selective pressures of reproduction.

More money is spent on women's shelters than men, despite more men being homeless. Men are more likely to be victims of violence than women, yet men are expected to just suck it up. And domestic violence is perpetrated equally by men and women, with the stereotypical view of "angry man dominates frightened woman" being the least common type of domestic violence, with "angry woman dominates man" being twice as common, and the most serious injuries occurring in mutual abuse between partners. Women are more likely to hit their partners and initiate violence. The stereotypes, and the behavior of e.g. law enforcement in dealing with incidents, do not reflect reality here. In war in the congo, rape victims are both men and women, and women are the perpetrators as well. Yet charity after charity concerns itself with the women, nobody cares about the men. But despite women being the least likely group to experience violence, they are more likely to be afraid of it, and this is what modern feminism is really about: the feelings of women, rather than their situation.

All of this is proven by any study that has asked the same questions of both men and women.

If society was biased to explicitly favor men over women, why do men never seem to come out on top? Why isn't more money spent on men? Why has "women and children first" been a perpetual trope throughout history? Why have wife-beaters always been shamed by their communities as immoral, and battered men shamed for being ineffective? Why do women hold all the cards when it comes to extracting money from an ex-husband? Why were men sent off to die as disposable tools in war, doped up on cocaine in e.g. World War 1, leading to a huge boom in drug addiction among males in post-war London, which was conveniently ignored and swept under the carpet?

Society has always been more concerned with the welfare of women than men. The only thing that changed is the what's considered good for a woman: it used to be the care and financial support of a husband, whereas now it's the care and financial support of the state, through women's programs that don't reflect the statistical reality.

That doesn't mean that sexism doesn't happen, it's just not the sexism that feminists think it is.