0 to 1023 is 1024 possible values, but the highest value you can display is still 1023.

When you count on your fingers in base 10, do you tell people you can “actually” count to 11? Of course not. Only if you, in fact, killed Inigo Montoya’s father.

Kirby’s Adventure is the largest NES game ever officially released in terms of ROM size, and has a frankly absurd amount of graphics tiles. Just consider all of those required for the copy abilities thumbnails alone and you’ll see what I mean. It pulled basically every trick the MMC3 mapper is capable of, and was definitely a masterpiece of the system in the original sense, i.e. it displays astonishing mastery of the mechanics of the Famicom/NES.

What I find more amazing is that the MMC3 isn’t one of the mappers that confers any additional sound channels and the American NES didn’t support that capability anyway. So the entirety of the game’s iconic soundtrack fits within the confines of the NES’ two square waves, one triangle wave, one noise channel, and singular PCM channel.

I think ultimately it ran into memory constraints, even with the additional 8 KB provided by the mapper. If you sit back and look at them as a whole, its levels are all quite short. It’s still my favorite NES game bar none, though.

World has everything 3 introduced, except you can’t be a frog.

Kek. 🐸

1023. Otherwise you’d have to stick out your tongue or something for the 1024ths place bit.

Valve’s strategy here seems to be to build physical inertial tracking into the controllers as well. They both have an IMU built in which presumably gives them a pretty decent ability to guess where they’ve been moved in physical space even if they’re outside of the cameras’ field of view. I don’t know if anyone has accurately assessed how well that works in this case.

The only other major PC oriented inside-out system, Windows Mixed Reality, allowed controllers and headsets from all brands participating in the program to freely intermix. I’d doubt Valve would be dumb enough not to also follow this path, if there are ever successive iterations of this hardware.

Linux Desktop!

Linux… facetop?

I just like that they have the complete compliment of normal controller buttons. It seems the world has agreed on twin sticks, a d-pad, ABXY (or triangle square cirlce et cetera, you know what I mean), and two shoulder buttons… Except for VR controllers. Every brand has their own dinky layout and they’re all sparse on buttons, I guess not to “intimidate” newbies, but it requires making weird compromises or binding actions to directions on one of the analog sticks or something, and that always feels lacking.

I hope they also stole the idea from the OG Oculus controllers where it can sense when your fingers are on the buttons but not pressing them, to so they can show your fingers in VR space and help people work the things by sight as well as feel.

Edit: I watched the LTT video. Yes, the buttons have capacitive finger tracking as well. Rejoyce.

But that part was so wholesome. Not to mention physically improbable.

Git is just a cowboy saying get. As in git out, or git gud.

It’s the same line of logic as when you see people post on a forum something like [img]c:\Users\Bob\Documents\My_Image.bmp[/img] and then wonder why it doesn’t work.

“But I can see it on my computer!”

Over the internet, the origin of all data is on someone else’s computer. All means all. And all of it needs to come down the wire to you at some point.

You’re on the right track in one regard, though, in a roundabout way with caching: Browsers will keep local copies of media or even the entire content of webpages on disk for some period of time, and refer to those files when the page is visited again without redownloading the data. This is especially useful for images that appear in multiple places on a website, like header and logo graphics, etc.

This can actually become a problem if an image is updated on the server’s side, but your browser is not smart enough to figure this out. It will blithely show the old image it has in its cache, which is now outdated. (If you force refresh a webpage by holding shift when you refresh or press F5 in all of the current modern browsers, you’ll get a reload while explicitly ignoring any files already in the cache and all the images and content will be fully redownloaded, and that’s how you get around this if it happens to you.)

That’s how it works.

You may be thinking of “lazy loading,” where some scriptwork is used to delay downloading images until some time after the initial page load completes. This still requires all the data to be sent to the user — all of the data always has to be sent to the user eventually — but just not right away. This can have perceptible load time benefits, especially if whatever content you’re loading won’t be visible in the viewport initially anyway.

Oh, yeah. Or, if you’re very close to the horizon and reflecting light that’s already plowed through most of the atmosphere at a very shallow angle before it can hit the mirror satellite, how much attenuation you get from that. Tons, I’m sure.

Obligatory XKCD insertion.

This is one of those rare cases where regardless of where you place the hyphen, “old-ass clowns” or “old ass-clowns,” both are accurate descriptions of the clowns in question.

Nothing, which is why the letter phrases it as a “request.”

In order to be extradited he’d have to actually be charged with a specific crime, insofar as I am aware.

The same a what the sun already has to deal with, really. If your reflection and focus were somehow 100% perfect (impossible, but maybe you could get close) then attenuation from the atmosphere would be the same as what happens to ordinary sunlight over the same surface area, since that also has to pass through the same amount of atmosphere.

The Hubble is also in a rather low Earth orbit (340-ish miles), which enables it to use magnetic brakes which allow it to ditch the excess energy from its reaction wheels into the Earth’s magnetic field so it can stop pivoting when it aims. The further away you get from the planet the less effective that becomes. The bigger your object is, the bigger your reaction mass needs to be.

And the Hubble doesn’t inherently roast or blind innocent bystanders as it swings its point of aim across all of the intervening space between its targets. Maintaining a steady shine on one particular point on the surface is one thing, but these idiots seem to be implying that they will sell sunlight-as-a-service via some kind of subscription model to multiple customers, so they would presumably be changing targets all the time.

The Hubble can only rotate very slowly. Per the article, 90 degrees in about fifteen minutes. Its advantage is that it only looks at targets that are very far away and hold still relative to the Earth, so there is very little parallax to worry about. If you wanted to go faster you probably can’t use the reaction wheel method that it does; you’d have to use thrusters which would consume finite fuel that’d eventually (or quickly) run out, and at that rate there’s no way you could do it as accurately. For the Hubble specifically, the amount of time it takes to get on a target is broadly irrelevant, only that it can keep itself there once it eventually achieves targeting. This would not be so with the hypothetical solar reflectors, regardless of what altitude they were flown at. And low altitude orbits would be the worst, because they’d be flying over the target’s head at tens of thousands of miles per hour in terms of ground speed and would have to rotate very quickly in order to remain even vaguely pointed in the right direction.

Even if they could, the L1 point would be directly centered between the Sun and Earth on the already illuminated side of the planet, which is obviously not helpful. The L2 point would be on the other side of the Earth, on its dark side, and completely within its shadow so also not helpful.

From the L4/L5 points you would not only be rather far away but also only able to hit areas pretty close to the dusk line anyhow.

If you’re going to display pixels on the user’s screen, you have to send those pixels to the user. Magic still doesn’t exist. HTML img tags are indeed a “pointer,” but once the user’s browser has the path to that image file it will download the entire thing.

That said, there’s no reason to send an image that’s any bigger than it needs to be. Sending a scaled down thumbnail if you know it will be displayed small is sensible. Sending the entire 1200px wide or whatever image it is and just squashing it into a 100px wide box in the user’s browser is not.

First of all, I take a bit of umbrage at the author’s constant reference to “website size” without defining what this means until you dig into the FAQ. Just blithely referring to everything as “size” is a bit misleading, since I imagine most people would immediately assume size on disk which obviously makes no sense from a web browsing perspective. And indeed, they actually mean total data transferred on a page load.

Also, basically all this does is punish sites that use images. I run an ecommerce website (and no, I’m not telling you lunatics which one) and mine absolutely would qualify handily, except… I have to provide product images. If I didn’t, my site would technically still “work” in a broad and objective sense, but my customers would stage a riot.

A home page load on our site is just a shade over 2 megabytes transferred, the vast majority of which is product images. You can go ahead and run an online store that actually doesn’t present your customers any products on the landing page if you want to, and let me know how that works out for you.

I don’t use any frameworks or external libraries or jQuery or any of that kind of bullshit that has to be pulled down on page load. Everything else is a paltry (these days) 115.33 kB. I’mna go ahead and point out that this is actually less to transfer than jabroni has got on his own landing page, which is 199.31 kB. That’s code and content only for both metrics, also not including his sole image — which is his favicon, and that is for some inexplicable reason given the circumstances a 512x512 .png. (I used the Firefox network profiler to generate these numbers.)