The thing I specifically paid for (that Google Maps doesn't seem to offer) is answering the question "what transit lines/stops are nearby and how soon will a service arrive at the stop?" Last I looked they limit the number of lines shown in this way for freemium users.
If you're just putting in a destination and getting a fastest route (much like you'd do in Google Maps), then I didn't see much benefit to the premium version.
For anyone who's read the book and played the game, a question. I have done neither but bought both last year for a rainy weekend's fun. Anybody have strong feelings about which I should start with?
The two things are quite unrelated and only connected by one important story element. Definitely read the book first (also to let your imagination not be 'poisoned' by the game's art style), but then be prepared that the game doesn't have much in common with the book except this one story element.
As always, it depends. I would suggest to start with the book, as the game is kind of spoiler. Also it allows you to better compare your own vision of this cool retro futuristic world with game creators vision.
TL;DR: if you're on the fence, go read the book. It's good and short to boot.
I have to admit I've only seen part of a playthrough of /The Invicible/, but haven't played the game myself.
Still, as a general rule, I personally would (almost) always recommend starting with the book form before trying a visual adaption.
Having seen the visuals first will heavily influence your imagination and internal vision of the writing, which would deprive you of one of the greatest joys of reading. This book in particular paints some truly awesome mental pictures that I wouldn't want to have spoiled in any way.
Another reasoning goes that the experience that came first tends to "win out" regarding your perception of the material. To me at least, a book is somehow less polarizing than a movie or a game. It stands for itself, and oftentimes (as is the case with /The Invicible/) has been standing as a recognised work for decades; it doesn't need to prove itself and can be taken as an artistic expression more or less free from the kind of economic incentives that necessarily plague a larger production.
Any adaption comes with changes and, quite possibly, shortcomings that can be more or less individually tolerable. If you play the game and don't like it for the way it tells the story, its art style, a clunky UI or whatnot, you take that baggage with you to reading the book, or in the worst case even lose interest and forego doing so altogether. That would (arguably) be a much greater loss than the other way around.
Adaptions do have their advantages, mainly in creating an impressive audiovisual environment, which can evoke some very immediate emotions. But those themes have been chosen and interpreted by the adaptor and are not necessarily identical to the original author's intentions.
Condensation in adaption to a different medium generally comes at a loss of depth that IMHO makes it hard to re-experience the source material without bias, and thus encumbers its full appreciation; not least because even in the best case it forestalls the setting, and often the twists and the conclusion as well.
In the end I would argue that a book tends to give a humanistically richer experience. It gives ample time to fathom its themes, to reflect and interpret them without visual distractions. Adaptions of great works can be great in their own right, but not too many stand the test of time as well as the books that came before them, and in that light I myself prefer to keep that order.
True indeed, but it's important to not lose the uncertainly they had at the time, and the degree of o-ring failure being not so binary.
According to what I recall of Allan McDonald's version of things, they had a good amount of data that colder temperatures meant worse sealing performance from the o-rings (soot making its way past the first o-ring and in some cases damaging the second, basically). Like you said, it was a well-known issue in some circles. They also knew the Challenger launch the next morning would be very cold indeed, something wild like at or just above freezing, I think.
The engineers at Thiokol raised their concerns and were asked what a safe temperature to launch is and said something like 53F, basing this on the fact that a previous launch at that temp was successful. NASA (and Thiokol) management balked at this because the booster's certified minimum launch temp was something lower like 30 or 40F. Then they basically asked them to prove it would catastrophically fail at the temperatures expected the next morning, which they couldn't conclusively do since they didn't have the data to back it up. Management reversed the no-go recommendation based on this.
So yes, the o-rings performed as expected insofar as colder = worse, but it was a matter of how much worse at temperatures lower than any successful previous launch.
> Then they basically asked them to prove it would catastrophically fail at the temperatures expected the next morning, which they couldn't conclusively do since they didn't have the data to back it up.
Turns out they _did_ conclusively prove that, just not within the time or budget (or casualty) constraints demanded by management at the time.
Depends what we mean by grade school. For young kids (and honestly most adults) I don't think you need much more than this: "A wing, or anything that sends air moving past it down toward the ground will cause some lift (a push toward the sky), but also some drag (a push on your front toward your back). How much of each depends on the shape of the wing and how it's moving through the air. Really good wings cause a lot of lift without a lot of drag, which is good for not using a lot of fuel to get where you're going or for going really fast."
From my perspective, a much superior explanation would be something like: "A wing causes an aircraft to fly because its shape, and the angle at which it moves through the air, creates regions of higher air pressure under the wing, and lower air pressure above the wing. This causes an upwards force on the wing, and a corresponding reaction force downwards on the air itself."
GIVEN a customer is filing a complaint against a copper merchant THEN the text of the complaint is written to media with a read guarantee for minimum 4000 years
No doubt I'm picking an easy target here, but it takes like 700 ms to switch back and forth from the Chat tab to the Calendar tab in the Teams desktop client on my boring work-issued laptop (i.e. commodity hardware). This is repeatable, first time, every time. It doesn't even bother to animate anything or give feedback that a UI interaction has occurred until 500+ ms after the click.
Some things do run very quickly, for sure, but so many of the high touch pieces of code out there from big name corps have some of the worst performance. Hundreds of millions of people use Teams, and many of them use it a lot throughout the day. You must just be getting lucky in what apps you use on a regular basis.
I think they’re referring to actual implementation, which in their experience would require some sort of massive architectural stupidity to produce a slow UI on desktop.
And you’re referring to your (and most other people’s) daily experience, which is of a major software firm producing daily used software with a super slow UI on desktop.
With a little cynicism, these two views are quite compatible.
Wow, that tweet they link to with a super punched in shot looks really really bad! Hard to believe Cameron thought this looked better than just a normal 4k transfer, yikes. Was really looking forward to a UHD release of The Abyss but now I'm not so sure...
I really hate the result, they apply something like some gaussian filter followed by deconvolution which makes people's faces very uncanny: super soft skin with super sharp wrinkles
The one on the right looks like you ran an edge-directed upscaler on it. Those things have distinct artifacts, and sometimes it looks like all curves turn into snakes. Or it can make new diagonal curves out of random noise.
Not knocking edge-directed upscalers though, they can work in real time and are very good for line-art graphics. You can even inject them into games that have never had that feature before.
The automated HD 'remaster' of Buffy is the prime example of how badly this can go wrong. A great breakdown of the problems is on YouTube here:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=oZWNGq70Oyo
Great video and a travesty. I’m not a huge fan, but I respect that people are. That they ruined the show and it’s hard to find in it’s not ruined form…
> Hard to believe Cameron thought this looked better
I doubt he even looked, he's too busy with his blue monkeys these days. Most likely someone duped him on taking on the AI upscaling and he signed off on it without looking and the movie studio just shipped the output without QA to save time and money, because they're going to streaming not in cinemas.
I also found the studio audio description track for Aliens very ordinary. It's a film that says "aliens" on the tin, but there are no verbal descriptions for them other than "giant", "towering" and "beast". Not really doing Giger, Winston or Cameron justice there. I'd be surprised if he heard it, or read the script prior to recording.
It seems little wild to assume the maker of a movie would care less about the movie than a random mob on the internet (instead of maybe just having a different opinion) but the assumption does feel very internet.
I inherited a 34” flat Sony Trinitron from a roommate moving out. He inherited it from the guy who sold him his house. It was the two inches shy of the largest CRT Sony made, and it was a damn 200 lbs (91 kg) white elephant.
I eventually foisted it off on some deliverymen for free. They didn’t believe me when I told them the weight. When they finally lifted it, it was gratifying to hear one grunt, “Damn. I guess it really is 200 lbs.”
352x480, not 240. The Abyss, being shot on film, is 24fps. A VHS of The Abyss would achieve 29.97fps by using 3:2 pulldown which is lossless since it duplicates fields to make up the difference.
It depends. A large movie - yes. But many movies were made with less of a focus on the cinema and more on the video rental ("direct-to-video") or TV syndication.
TV content like Star Trek the Next generation were definitely never meant to display in high definition, and such things can show in props etc.
TNG is famous for being shot on 35mm film. Because of this, it had a higher "definition" than most other television productions and was able to be very well remastered for later releases, with some wonkyness around reshooting/remaking a lot of visual effects that had not been done on film.
Yes, no argument there. Many shows were shot on film and it made a big difference even back in the SDTV days, because electronic cameras just weren't any good. It wasn't only about resolution. There were electronic cameras with great horizontal resolution, but the look was still very "cheap" with blown highlights, muddy colors etc.
Another famous example is Friends, also shot on 35mm film. It has the advantage over Star The Next Generation is that the props in Friends are actual, real life things, so if we now see the fine details of something, we just sea a teapot a little better. While the prop in Star Trek has a higher risk of looking like that duct taped PVC pipe it is rather than the SciFi ray gun it portrays.
Or say, that one actress in the pool scene where you see her from behind nude and, in low definition, nothing could be seen. Once they upscaled it, things were... more visible.
Since the film does not run in theaters indefinitely and at the time VHS was a common format, among others.
Given film reciprocity and resolution related to period produced film stock and processing techniques, VHS and other reduced resolution formats from the same period, look better, to me! than rescans(4k, which super35 barely supports) and up-resing. Again IMHO because I guess people take this otherwise.
I own equipment capable of view films and plates from any period of film production. I have processed and looked at found "film" from before 1900. I use quotes because it wasnt the same as today and many varieties of techniques existed to capture images or make moving images.
What do you mean 'again'? You never said that in your original comment.
Given film reciprocity and resolution related to period produced film stock and processing techniques, VHS and other reduced resolution formats from the same period, look better, to me!
What you're describing is just nostalgia, nothing more. That's fine, no need to rationalize it.
Why stop at VHS? Why not copy it a few times back and forth between tapes?
I don't see how these can be compared. They are totally different color schemes. It's possible that if you took the right image and displayed it using the same color scheme as the left image that it would look better than the left image.
Isn't this what the "safety number" in Signal is for? Obviously you are still trusting many other things there (the client software, OS, hardware, whatever out of band method you use to compare the numbers, etc.), but I thought the safety number pretty much addresses the MITM concern specifically, if you bother to check it.
Right, the issue is that nobody checks it and they don't really tell users upfront why they need to. It also notifies you if the number changes later, but seems like that can happen for benign reasons too, so it might go ignored. WhatsApp and Telegram are similar.
Someone could orient an E2EE app around these trusted identities, but it'd probably not be very popular.
If you're just putting in a destination and getting a fastest route (much like you'd do in Google Maps), then I didn't see much benefit to the premium version.