The best argument made against comparing lcd and crt technologies comes at the end of the article. The author points out the absurdity of discussing what it's like to read a book using a zoomed-in image of one of the book's pages.
I almost find this argument compelling, but I'm still as fascinated as when I was a kid with what makes an image on a crt look different from the pixels in my head.
I find the noise of a crt much more pleasing than the noise of a bad lcd. To me the crt is musical but the lcd is shrill.
I think hard drives are similar. There was something pleasing about the the 30MB ESDI in my first computer, but as hard drives got larger and faster, they also got more scratchy-sounding. Now I have a cheap PCIe M.2 adapter, and the sound it makes is like the newer hard drives, only less rhythmic. That alone makes it an irritant.
When I think of quirky conspiracy sites, I picture yellow-on-blue text and bright red text inside a blink element and links at the bottom to lycos and altavista.
This is the example of people trying too hard to make things "scream". Just plain Times New Roman or system font conveys a slightly different form of illiteracy...
You can be the most literate person in the world, but if the way you present yourself is a bunch of flashing pink and purple Times New Roman on a lime green background, I'm going to assume you have nothing useful to tell me. There are a whole lotta legible fonts you can use that show you give a tiny fuck about how you come off to other people.
Does watching or listening to baseball feel too fast-paced? I haven't played much attention to baseball in many years, but I agree with you, baseball is supposed to be slow.
I haven't answered on SO since someone edited my answer to say something I didn't write. It was minor, but I don't like that on principle. It adds huge personal risk to every question I answer.
SO wasn't even the first site with this phenomenon. IMO SO is way more cordial than some of the forums from the early 00s. And before that, many irc channels were known for being brutal to people coming for help. I was part of the problem there until I realized there was a problem and decided to change my approach, but it took years to unlearn what I had picked up from other channels ops.
The visible range corresponds to the typical energy differences between different states of an outer electron in a molecule, which also correspond to the typical energy differences between the input and output molecules of a chemical reaction.
(The near infrared range corresponds to the typical energy differences between different vibrational states of the atoms in a molecule. Such energy differences are smaller than the energy differences encountered in most chemical reactions, which involve extracting or adding atoms from/to the molecule, which obviously needs more energy than the vibration of those atoms, when they remain bound in the molecule.)
Thus it is normal and expected that the output molecules of an exothermic chemical reaction may be in an excited state from which they can decay to their ground state by emitting light exactly in the visible range.
As long as it is living, in any organism a lot of exothermic chemical reactions happen. In many cases the energy produced by those reactions is used for something useful for the organism (i.e. the excited output molecules transfer their surplus energy to other molecules), but it also may escape as emitted light, reducing the efficiency in the use of the energy produced by an exothermic chemical reaction to less than 100% (the efficiency is also reduced when the energy of the excited molecule is transferred to other molecules than those intended, which eventually results in warming the environment instead of doing useful work).
So you're saying that there is something special about the visible spectrum? I've always wondered why most eyes we know of work in that range (modulo some leftovers from our time as aquatic creatures)
As other's commented it is "special" because a good portion of the radiation from the Sun is in the same range.
It's also special for a few other reasons. The most obvious one being that UV light is destructive to many forms of animal life, there isn't much utility in being able to see for example something like X-Rays. They don't occur naturally in any quantity and the mechanisms that create them (lightning) also give off visible light.
On the other end of things, lower energy photons are what we would call heat. Some animals can see it, but not humans. We can sense it just fine through other mechanisms however.
This is all well and good, but the implication one level up was that there's a fundamental link between visible light and the energy levels involved in most low energy chemistry (or something).
Of course visible light is visible because it hits our eyes (is emitted by sun and is not filtered), but the comment about valence shells is quite a bit more fundamental than that.
I invite you to consider that most of the light that earth species have had available during their evolution comes from a blackbody emitter at about 6000 kelvins (solar photosphere).
The sensitivity of the eyes is indeed matched to the available light.
However the causal dependencies are more complex than this. If the available light would have been from another range of the possible frequencies, the eyes could not have used the same kinds of photoreceptors that are used now in the eyes of all animals.
For instance, if the available light would have been only infrared, then photo-chemical reactions could not have been used for detecting it, but such light could have been detected by its warming effect, like some snakes do for detecting infrared.
If our star would have been much colder, with negligible visible light, then such light might have been not usable for splitting water and generating free oxygen in the atmosphere. In such a case, the planet would have remained populated only by anaerobic bacteria and viruses, like in the first few billion years of Earth's history.
I thought reflection works by the photon giving the atom energy, which it then releases in form of another photon, which has the same frequency due to the energy level, but not necessarily the same polarity.
IIRC, colinux is similar to user mode Linux, which boots a kernel in userland. That is, the kernel runs under windows as an application rather than alongside it.
Unlike in other Linux virtualization solutions such as User Mode Linux (or the forementioned VMware), special driver software on the host operating system is used to execute the coLinux kernel in a privileged mode (known as ring 0 or supervisor mode).
By constantly switching the machine's state between the host OS state and and the coLinux kernel state, coLinux is given full control of the physical machine's MMU (i.e, paging and protection) in its own specially allocated address space, and is able to act just like a native kernel, achieving almost the same performance and functionality that can be expected from a regular Linux which could have ran on the same machine standalone.
So my understanding is that it's a Windows driver which contains a full Linux kernel and does some (scary sounding!) time sharing with the Windows kernel running at the same CPL.
I did not remember that from when I used to use colinux.
The colinux home page also says:
To cooperatively share hardware with the host operating system, coLinux does not access I/O devices directly. Instead, it interfaces with emulated devices provided by the coLinux drivers in the host OS. For example, a regular file in Windows can be used as a block device in coLinux. All real hardware interrupts are transparently forwarded to the host OS, so this way the host OS's control of the real hardware is not being disturbed and thus it continues to run smoothly.
So just like UML, colinux hooks int 80h (or sysenter) and forwards the request to windows. Thus while it may make use of direct access to the MMU, most devices iirc are virtualized.
I wanted to like viewmax, but I think Digital Research was short-sighted. They intended it to compete with dosshell.exe, but the real competitor was windows. I was excited to get to play with GEM, but I had no way to write programs for it.
Back then it still wasn't a given that Windows would really take off as it did.
For example, I only got that computer because getting one with OS/2 was out of my budget, and actually what I really wanted but for several reasons did not buy one, was an Amiga.
