The end of the article speculates that the sheet system was dropped since the tiles appear scrambled. I'm wondering if the artists still used the sheet system, but a memory optimizer tool re-ordered the tiles to help free up a little more space on the ROM.
> I'm wondering if the artists still used the sheet system, but a memory optimizer tool re-ordered the tiles to help free up a little more space on the ROM.
Seems unlikely. Managing the "physical" layout of sprites on a sheet is a lot of work; there's no reason to do that if it's going to be thrown out by an optimizer in the end.
Besides, notice that, on the optimized SF2 sheet, all of the tiles for one sprite get written out in order; they aren't interleaved left-to-right like the tiles would have been on a sheet.
The way Super Street Fighter II has a mix of methodologies seems to count against that. Why only run this optimiser on the new art?
I could see artists might still use a grid when sketching and planning to keep a handle on sprite size / memory usage. But not in the hand packed sort of way, more just each sprite drawn unscrambled on a grid. You wouldn't go through all the rigmarole of hand optimising memory layouts if some stage in the build system is going to ignore it and do its own thing instead.
Because if you change the tiles, you need to redo all the tile number tables throughout the program. Much easier to only change it for new graphics added to the game than to rework a bunch of old stuff that works.
Back in the earlier days of Android phones, it was fun to burn custom ROMs to try community-developed interfaces. This community was always upset when phone manufacturer's made it more and more difficult to do this. However, I think I'm understanding that this "signed, approved boot chain from power on to end user application" for all digital devices" is necessary for security purposes and would hopefully make it impossible to burn a custom ROM onto a phone.
You can satisfy both if there's a physical connection on a chip somewhere that you have to manually cut to disable the secure boot option - that leaves clear physical evidence that you did it, and would satisfy the free software types.
What are we gonna do w/o plastics? So much of our economy and lifestyles make heavy uses of these materials.
I'm not a fan of plastic items ending up in lakes, rivers, and oceans, but perhaps we're lucky that more of the world didn't take up plastic recycling the way that we'd hoped for.
The world needs carbon sequestration, plastics are full of hydrocarbons, recycling plastics is problematic. Seems like the problems complement themselves.
You're misrepresenting the recommendation. You did not include the instructions "link directly to [the footer navigation options] from your header" or "Be sure to also include some form of "Top of the page" link for quick access back to the initial scroll view."
Why put a link to the footer in the header which contains links to other pages when you can just put your links directly in the header?
I know the reason why, because it makes the page cluttered, whereas having it at the footer does a better job of hiding it. But isn't that the exact problem that the hamburger menu was made to fix?
That question is addressed in the article as well:
"The biggest headache when coming across these menus on the web is the complete disregard for accessibility."
And by "accessibility" I'm quite certain the author means "usability for people with impairments that don't allow them to use a mouse and keyboard or touch screen".
The article discusses the problems of a hamburger menu but doesn't address why its used, and then goes on to suggest a solution which does a worse job of what the hamburger menu is actually designed for.
You asked "Why put a link to the footer in the header which contains links to other pages when you can just put your links directly in the header?" The article answers this question, quite clearly and in detail.
Ironically it seems like you didn't read my comment. The first line explains why thats a bad solution, because its just moving clutter around the page but with extra steps
I read it, it just doesn't make sense. There's nothing harmful or disruptive about having lots of links tucked away at the bottom of the page, out of the way. Hiding those links in a hamburger menu doesn't fix the problem, because there's no problem to fix. But it does introduce several other, more significant problems, which are described in the article.
I know Facebook/Meta is huge and well established, but a 40 year bond seems like an eternity in the tech world. Is Meta that entrenched that people are this confident that they'll still be around in 40 years? Perhaps there's a lot more to their staying power and value than some web pages, apps, and VR hardware, but I'm not very aware of it.
I did note in an article a couple weeks ago that they participate in groups that commission undersea Internet cables. Those sorts of infrastructure investments seem to have more staying power to me than the other offerings.
I think I'm trying to state: "Aren't the bulk of Meta's offerings too susceptible to trends to garner the trust required for a 40 year bond?"
Consider the very first cohort of internet companies - AOL, CompuServe, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, etc...
None of those businesses are around today, but how many of them had their equity erased and had their bondholders take a haircut? I can't say exactly, but my guess is that none of the top 10 biggest internet companies of that era had their equity fully wiped out.
Bondholders get the $$ first when a company goes under. And typically businesses don't completely disappear and lose all their assets. They usually have a slow decay then get acquired by someone else who takes over the debt.
In any case these factors will presumably lead to an interest rate premium for bondholders. It's just a question of whether you want to take the risk or not.
>I think I'm trying to state: "Aren't the bulk of Meta's offerings too susceptible to trends to garner the trust required for a 40 year bond?"
Meta has more cash on hand and revenue than most countries. They are an institution unto themselves at this point, regardless of the future success of any individual product.
To avoid taxes many companies keep profits offshore in lower tax jurisdictions, only paying US taxes when money is repatriated. It is super common for companies to have billions offshore but to keep it there, take out US debt to und share buybacks or other US domestic initiatives and then only repatriate each year the amount needed to service that debt.
IMO, it’s a stupid loophole that legislators should close.
Maybe some lawyer can read the fine print that everyone agreed to.
Can they sell our emails + IP addresses to marketing companies who are going to exploit us based on our facebook posts/likes by targeting our insecurities? That might last 40 years.
Me, many years ago setting up electronic payment.
-OK, it's asking me for my bank account and routing number. These must be pretty secret.
-Oh wow, they're both printed on my checks. Uh...this system works?
I love this sort of reporting. It's enlightening to learn about the infrastructure that makes our way of life possible. I love learning how these projects are funded and who's funding them, who is implementing the projects, how they are implemented, what some of the concerns are, and the related political drama surrounding these projects.
I feel similarly about oil, energy, and food production and delivery.
So much goes on without most people even giving it a second thought.
Every one of those has hundreds ro thousands of people involved. Researched, seeds, planted, grown, harvested, collected, processed, quality controlled, containerized, packaged, distributed, opened, preparedz put on your bun, served.
All those steps have at least one person involved, plus management, plus sales, plus quality, plus food scientist research, plus people's tastes research. Plus the manufacturing of the tractors, packaging systems, quality control equipment, processing equipment... hundreds more people.
We eat like kings of old with hundreds of people working to feed us one meal, and we don't think anything of it.
Your comment reminds me of Leonard Read's classic essay, "I, pencil" [1] about the many thousands of hands that make a simple pencil, all guided by local decisions and price signals, without a single mastermind.
Thanks for linking this! I read the introduction and skimmed the text. The details of manufacturing such a simple object are fascinating, of course. I certainly agree that they demonstrate one of the reasons why centralized planning doesn't work.
Going from "central planning doesn't work" to "therefore we have proven that unregulated capitalism leads to utopia" is...odd.
The irony is that central planning would be more possible now than ever.
Previously, there was a data collection, storage, and processing limitation. Manual collection, entry, and early computers simply couldn't process quickly enough to continually model the economy at the requisite fidelity.
But now, we still have the human data reporting problem, where the storage, network, and computational resources are possible, but the first mile "getting true numbers, reliably" still prevents the implementation of an effective centralized system.
That's the economy right? We can take it a step further. If you are getting a burger from McDonalds, and you are using their self-service kiosk, there is a whole world/economy behind that. Software, Hardware, Touch Screens, CPUs, Connection, etc... If you are using an international card to process your order, there is a whole set of banks (throughout the world) involved in that particular and single transaction.
This kind of makes you think: All that efficiency comes at a cost (fragility). There should be contingencies to that. (ie: Cash acceptance is mandatory, at least one human kiosk, a list of close food suppliers that you can use in case your supply chain breaks, etc...)
Basically covers (not too deeply) how a 12-pack of Coke cans in your local grocer involved work on every continent except Antarctica. The book itself was pretty good too, but this was probably the best chapter.
That is what I have been stating on HN since the start of HN? Commodities are the basic fabric of our economy, but Silicon Valley ( and by extension on HN, ) treat it as if some simple, unimportant, easy to optimise and automate domain.
You would expect COVID could force them to learn or think about some of these things. But most still dont.
I found the book maybe a bit overly optimistic/idealistic about how he thought infrastructure dependencies would impact the world, but a lot of the information was fascinating nonetheless.
Me too! To add to that, whenever I see good visuals of global energy markets, and traders in a room full of screens, I get excited in a way I use to get excited seeing a terminal being used before I knew anything about coding.
I still randomly will encounter people who asked what I do and then happened to see terminal on the screen and are like oh wow you're a really technical person. One time it was a stewardess and a court reporter who saw me tailing logs on an application I was debugging. And they're like how can you even tell what's going on when all I was doing was looking for the obvious patterns of java stack traces.
Another was a guy sitting at a bar next to me who turned out to be a NFL sports reporter. And same deal I opened up the terminal and he's like oh shit your real smart. As I'm literally just listing a directory and then doing a git status.
What's even more fun is when you have actual experts doing things with the very computer you're fixing; using tools and datasets way beyond my comprehension, get amazed by opening a terminal or CMD and fixing something.
One of my proudest moments in masters was they had the masters students demo each week to the undergrads. So I'm in a big auditorium on a pc with a projector behind me. This was in 2000, computer still had a floppy drive. They wiped the computer every week, Windows NT.
I popped in the floppy did D: and typed `ls`... and error, and the whole class laughed at me. Having been switching a lot lately I typed, I believe, `echo dir > C:\Windows\ls.bat` and (or whatever the right pipe command is, it's been a while), and typed `ls` again. Then double birded the whole class. And started launching the demo.
There were audible gasps esp from the professor who was like, hold up, what did you just do. So I spent 3 minutes explaining it to the class, then we did our demo.
I was at the time quite proud of them all being flabberghasted while I also flipped off over 75 students, actually still am.
I seemed like a genius once to it support at big co when I heard him having issues with "ok I fixed the text what do I do now" which I just said esc:wq. Guy was like what the helly you say, I repeated. He was like thanks and wrote it on the bottom of the white board. From them on I skipped the line at that office.
"Why does he get to skip the line. Oh this is his 3rd time in here this week" (8 am on a Monday).
There is a scene in Orwells Homage to Catalonia that reminds me about this:
A young italian peasant militia man, stands with open mouth, astonished off his genious officers, who were reading a simple map. So, this is an old trope.
Education is important it seems and while I don't think that everyone needs to get along with a terminal, everyone should at least understand what it is. For most people computers are essentially dark magic. And I think this us not doing good to society that has become so dependant on Computers.
jokes on you, a new generation of people are coming up having known nothing but smartphones. I work with one as a developer. She only uses her macbook because she has to. Very little insight of how the underlying OS and fundamental computing stacks works and yet she writes good fast code.
The companies are all colluding to lock down computing more and more and who do you think will push back against this? Not them thats for sure. If you never let the greater population understand the freedom they have now, they wont fight back when it comes time to try and take it away. Its probably too late anyway.
Pretty soon you'll be writing code in a locked down appliance with no freedom (or AI takes your job).
Bet when you started the greybeards of the time were miffed you couldn't just do assembly or read a hex dump like it was a newspaper, and you turned out alright (maybe).
I work with developers like that too. When they see me doing rudimentary things in Linux, they view me as a wizard. My job is safe and my skills are rare and valued.
If you have enough abstraction (like with the web) and understand basic performance principles, like instructing the computer to only do, what is neccessary, then one doesn't need to understand the system beneath, to get performant code.
It is mostly enough to know that method A is expensive (e.g. drawing a big image) so if you avoid it, than this what brings you good enough performance.
So sure, no one is talking about high performance low level graphic engine code. For this you clearly need to understand the bare bone metal interface.
And of course the baseline is pretty low these days. The ordinary web is full of horrible inefficient ways of doing things, so you are probably already above standard, if you avoid the worst habits..
For me, it was sitting in the back of a lecture hall, with a law prof, showing how AOL instant messenger danced across on the school's wifi unencrypted. I miss those days of easy ethereal magic.
Well, not showing how a bullet is made, but an attempt at coarsely portraying the assembly of one rifle round, and then its shipment, firing, and the flight of its constituent bullet.
