Author: Dag-Erling Smørgrav

One step forward, two steps back

I play a fair number of games. I go through about one PS2 game a month, on average, plus various PC games once in a while—mostly platformers and first or third person shooters on the PS2, and strategy / adventure on the PC, with some puzzle gmaes like Oasis thrown in.

The one thing that never ceases to surprise me with these games—especially console games—is how most of them share the same two elementary flaws, which you’d think they’d discovered and fixed years ago. Continue reading “One step forward, two steps back”

This is your brain on… what?

According to this Seattle PI article (which is unsurprisingly full of factual errors) music producers are up in arms over lossy audio compression. Listening to an MP3 (regardless of bit rate, apparently) is “like hearing through a screen door” and even CDs “contain less than half the information stored to studio hard drives during recording” (no mention is made of the fact that the half that is removed is below your stereo equipment’s noise threshold). But what really pisses me off is that these are the same producers who keep reducing the dynamic range of their recordings to make them sound louder. Some modern pop / rock recordings have a dynamic range as low as 4 dB!

Open Sores

Ah, the joys of building a community around an open source project! Build your software, release it, flog it left and right, and before you know it you have a thriving community of users asking for advice, reporting bugs, suggesting improvements, sometimes even submitting patches. Then, of course, you have your kooks. In fact, I’m beginning to think that you can measure the success of an open source project by the level of kook activity on its mailing lists. If all mailing list traffic is invariably polite and constructive, then you have a niche project which only attracts a small number of highly specialized and competent people; only a truly great software project will make enough of a splash to attract the attention of a genuine, grade-A, accept-no-imitations kook. Continue reading “Open Sores”