At the time a single seat of PowerAnimator, the predecessor to Maya, cost $50k-$60k. $30k was for the SGI machine to run it and the other half was the software license.
Microsoft bought Softimage, one of the top competitors to Maya at the time. They charged iirc $4k or $8k and a PC to run it would run $4k-$5k
Softimage is long gone but it's what Valve used for the Source Engine and Half Life 2
Just because the comprehensiveness of something is on a spectrum is not a reason to just not bother and have none at all.
Also, when done well a spec is a great way to learn & understand the language too. http://golang.org/ref/spec is so much more usable than Typescript's docs.
I agree that specifications are useful. I also think they're often presented as a panacea. It is important to acknowledge that they're a tool, with pros and cons, like any tool. The existence of a specification does not immediately mean that any and all ambiguities are resolved.
If an implementation isn't doing what you expect, is it just an issue with that single implementation? A problem with all implementations? A problem with what you expect? If another implementation does do what you expect is it correct or just lucky?
A spec resolves such discrepancies. Indeed, the spec may be where the problem is, but once the spec is corrected then implementations know what they must do. Absent of a spec, who knows?
Not to defend the OP because I agree that null is bad. But, in my limited experiecne with Swift I just add a few characters at the right place and the null's are now incorrectly ignored and the warnings go away. So, the language gave me warning, but it didn't really force me to deal with it correctly. Is Swift a bad example of a null-safe language?
You literally tell it to break, a null-safe language will not actually prevent you from shooting your foot, it'll just make sure you do so knowingly. "foo!" is essentially a shortcut for
> I just add a few characters at the right place and the null's are now incorrectly ignored and the warnings go away. So, the language gave me warning, but it didn't really force me to deal with it correctly.
Personally I don't really see that as an issue, we're talking about null safe by default vs not safe by default. It being simple to break the null-safety is a good thing, as long as it requires you to do it deliberately
And it is. But it's arguably NOT functional. On the 25th floor the view would be incredible but the windows are tiny and so unless you walk directly up to the window you can't see the view. In pretty much any modern building the view would be front and center, full floor to ceiling, wall to wall windows.
I prefer that modern style. check out an old museum and a modern one. The modern one will have all kinds of amazing affordances. Places decided to highlight the view, places decide to give a sense of space, places designed for eating in unique space.
> Lots of people seem to enjoy those "ugly mouse statue things".
Sorry, they're still crap. Seriously, taking the MTV VMA statue and robotically slapping his characters head on it? I recently watched the Nathan For You episode "Dumb Starbucks" and those statutes remind me the lazy, deliberately terrible parodies he displayed at an art gallery to establish his bona fides as a "parody artist."
I can't find the YouTube clip of it, but here are some screenshots:
I had a hard time taking this article seriously after seeing the first picture with the caption "new ugliness". The picture depicts art by KAWS, arguably a very successful modern artist - someone must think what he is doing is worthwhile. I personally don't like his art, but saying it's "ugly" is rather subjective..
You're saying it as somehow "subjective" is bad. Of course it's subjective, and the whole point it a lot of modern art is subjectively perceived by most people as ugly, while being praised and promoted by "experts".
Why not both? If we, collectively, perceive most of things surrounding us as ugly, then we, collectively, can feel like we live in ugly times, even though there's no objective measure of ugly. While feelings are subjective, their prevalence can be objectively seen and argued about.
Imagine instead the headline were "we live in frightening times", and described how a lot of people fear what's going on around. Fear is not objective - it's an inherently a subjective feeling. But the number of people feeling afraid can be studied (e.g. by polls, or other sociological means) and if it's high, the argument can be made that it is the "frightening times". And definitely there's ample precedent of using "frightening times" in the headlines. So why not "ugly times"?
I didn't mean that subjective is bad, but the way the article is written makes it sound like the author thinks there can be an objective view of what constitutes a good aesthetic. Also, I'm not sure I agree that "most" people think modern art is ugly. Haven't seen any statistics to indicate that.
Doesn't that assume that people only think beautiful art is "worthwhile"? People - in particular the sort of people who deeply care about art - may see value in ugly art, if the ugliness helps achieve the goals of the artwork.
Modern (popular) music sucks because it's not human. It's produced by software, quantized, gridded, autotuned, copy/pasted, and though the result is technically perfect, it isn't human.
Modern architecture is the same. It's copy/paste design, assembled by software, the human element is gone. When buildings were designed by artists on paper there was no avoiding the designer's humanity and creativity being infused into the design. Today it's just lego blocks. You see the same buildings in every city you visit.
Music produced by software that’s quantized and gridded has been some of my favorite stuff for decades and listening to it does the same thing any recorded music can do such: remind me of something, occasionally teach me something new, be a tool for growth or mourning or comfort. Something being virtuousic or analog or raw doesn’t necessarily make it good. Simplicity or rigidness is not inherently bad. sometimes you want Raphael instead of Bosch. You may want The Knife instead of Fleetwood Mac, or Parry Grip instead of Paganini.
There was a time that the pinnacle of stereotypically bad music was Girl From Ipanema on an elevator. Except it’s a great song, even played for muzak.
Compound that with how the barriers around genre have gotten so much more flexible that you can chart with a Nine Inch Nails + Billy Ray Cyrus + Hip Hop song, and it kinda seems like we’re in a golden age.
Haha speaking of barriers and Nine Inch Nails: have you heard the cover of "Head like an hole" by an improbable (but good!) Miley Cyrus? It was made for an episode of Black Mirror.
The Oscars are not decided by critics. They're decided by peers. Directors vote for best Director. Actors vote for best Actor. Composers vote for best Music. Etc...
> The Oscars are not decided by critics. They're decided by peers.
That's the Oscar nomination process: it's by peers.
The entire Oscar Academy (ie all previous winners in good standing) get to vote on the winners in all categories.
Which is why many in the industry consider "it's more important to just get nominated", & also why the final winners are often a popularity context. Many of the ppl voting aren't skilled in the areas being voted for. E.g. there's 4x more actors voting for technical categories, etc.
This is not how it works. Anyone in the Academy can vote on the nominees. The nominees themselves are decided by the people in their specific category.
Each person belongs to one of 17 branches. Each branch nominates for its own category — e.g., editors nominate editors, actors nominate for the four acting categories. Everyone gets to nominate best picture. For the final voting of the winner, all branches vote for everything.
WebP's lossy codec is based on VP8 intraframes; the lossless codec is original. Either mode of which is contained in a RIFF file, which is where the dimension limits happen (RIFF's headers have enough space to represent 2^14-1).
WebM is, strictly speaking, a container format that is a subset of Matroska. It doesn't have any real relation to WebP.
One solution would be to hold multiple images inside of another wrapper container like zip. The client code would have to handle stitching them together.
This not remotely true. There are plenty of karaoke songs that are the original recording from the original artist. At least in Japan, where the word "karaoke" originates
for me, I can't sing along if it's not close to the original because my brain remembers every tick of the original and wants to match the key of the original as well.
Also, I had a friend who got addicted to Smule which is an online sing duets with random strangers. It uses auto-tune so that anyone can enjoy themselves. I never tried it but he said it was amazing and he got a ton of joy from it.
Me, I like the idea that I can show off my amazing singing skills so if this auto-tunes everyone then that will go away. On the other hand, it's always been frustrating that box style karaoke places rarely have a large selection of western music (most of them are targeting the subset of their local market that would actually to got a box style karaoke place). My hope is that with this more of them will support just using the room as a place to use this service and then my friends and I can sing from a larger variety of songs.
> I can't sing along if it's not close to the original because my brain remembers every tick of the original and wants to match the key of the original as well.
I don't know if this helps at all, but you probably want to learn to sing in a different octave, not a different key. This means shifting your voice up and down from the original in multiples of eight notes. You can sing in a different octave without changing the background music and it'll sound completely normal, and have the same feel as the original song.
Microsoft bought Softimage, one of the top competitors to Maya at the time. They charged iirc $4k or $8k and a PC to run it would run $4k-$5k
Softimage is long gone but it's what Valve used for the Source Engine and Half Life 2