It really is - any many people focus on its features as a GUI library, but it goes so much beyond that. Providing data structures, concurrency primitives, file management, networking, high performance drawing, etc. And it provides all these in a cross platform way that often feels nicer than other C++ libraries in my experience. Sometimes these are less robust than alternatives, but often they're much more elegant.
Well, Qt provides a QFile class to do standard file operations. eg create, remove, rename, etc.
It also has the QFileInfo class to retrieve file info, such as creation/last-modified/last-accessed date.
It just seems super weird to not also have the matching functions available to set those dates. Which we really wanted for our client side Qt/C++ GUI, as I'd just finished doing the server side part in Go which does provide those.
And Qt seems to provide pretty much everything else... but this one weird bit which is missing. :/
To be honest I find everything outside of the GUI subset really really poor. Plus the fact you can basically never escape callback soup, and it's really hard to integrate the Qt event loop in to anything else.
Interesting - I've never cared for professional reviewers or anything of the sort - instead I just look for the biggest user review site around, which is currently probably Steam and read the comments a bit and then if I'm on the borderline I'll watch a YouTube video of actual gameplay. I can understand why they existed before, but what's the benefit of professional reviewers in this day and age, when it's far easier to determine what the common opinion of something will be?
Video game reviews usually have opposing goals: journalists want to elevate video games to an art and to elevate their criticism to art criticism, but users want them to quickly provide a helpful recommendation (which is represented by a number score).
Steam reviews are concise by design and give you a better idea of whether you'll have the same kind of positive opinion (for example, if all the positive reviews are memey, that says something significant). So I'd say they're definitely better.
I think some people who were video game reviewers will go on to become popular youtube "video essay" producers like this guy: https://www.youtube.com/user/Matthewmatosis and the rest will get new jobs.
The games press doesn't "want to elevate video games to an art". Games are art. And there are both game reviewers and game critics and the distinction is pretty clear once you've spent a few minutes figuring out if that particular person's thinking matches your own enough to be worth considering.
> users want them to quickly provide a helpful recommendation (which is represented by a number score)
Speak for yourself. I'm a "user". I also appreciate criticism that places a game in a historical, textual, and social context and that often tells me more about whether I'll like the game than "oh yeah, it runs at 60fps solid on my 1080Ti". A game reviewer might have put me off of Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus or NieR: Automata because of gameplay ephemera they didn't like; game critics turned me onto both games because they were must-play experiments in how we tell stories.
> Games are art.
This is really off topic but simply put, not all games are art. And I don't mean that in the way you might guess. Soccer is a game, it is not art. And games in general are not going towards a future where they are considered closer to art. The most popular game in the world is League of Legends, which people would think of as closer to an esport than art.
There's a small section of games which try to be pieces of art. Maybe they are. But most people playing games don't think of them as art, they think of them as games.
Appeals to "most people" are ugly. Most people reading books and watching films don't think of them as art, either. What they think their nature is and what their nature is wonderfully different things.
The only reason to sniff at any game, even something like League of Legends, and declare it to Not Be Art is to deny the active artistic intent of the creators involved. It is exclusionary for no good reason.
Videogames use art but its not art. Or more specifically, its not created for their artistic value. Videogames are a amusement product over an artistic product.
For example, a stunning artistic videogame but boring versus a ugly game but funny.
This argument has been used against many media now very readily accepted as art: that they're just amusements, they're not art. They frequently come from critics of other media that don't want to expand the club, and they are invariably demonstrated to be incorrect over even the short term.
As for your example, there are boring but beautifully shot films--2001: A Space Odyssey certainly fits that bill for me. There are engaging films with crude cinematography--the original Clerks comes to mind, for a certain time and audience. You are drawing a distinction without a difference.
There are many types of videogames with many different audiences, similar to movies. You can argue that videogames aren't art by pointing to Call of Duty, just as I can argue that movies aren't art by pointing to Suicide Squad. If you argue that movies are art by pointing to Citizen Kane, I'll point to Spec Ops: The Line or the Stanley Parable.
I also think you're conflating "art" and "visual design".
Even within Call of Duty, I would certainly call the single-player campaigns, from the original game up through today, successive iterations on a presentation of a narrative message even completely divorced from the ephemera of play (which is itself artistic in nature, though less universally obviously so).
Quake would be a better example, but I'd hold, too, that the decisions and the ephemera of that are art as well. Nothing says you can't play art.
Depending on reviewer, the review could be equal to a recommendation by a friend or colleague. This can give you more insight into the reason for a particular review.
Not exactly just against cheap gadgets - remember the Connexant keylogger from earlier this year? It seems to be a common thing for driver developers to log keypresses for development purposes yet fail to disable that functionality in release... easiest fix? Don't install closed source drivers for 3rd party hardware.
If it's your work computer then all bets are off. It's your employer's privacy at stake, not yours. Moreover you shouldn't ever consider your activity on your work computer "private" since your employer can and probably does monitor your usage.
Stutters like mad for me, so bad that I closed it even though it seemed really sweet. Chrome and Firefox on Windows, recent i7 and higher end nvidia GPU.
It's not about what any individual person may say, but about what gets produced in the end. Pure HTML and JS tools like Bootstrap make it easy to crank out basic web templates for developers, while tools like Flash made it easier for designers to make beautiful toys.
This is a really good observation. Flash allowed a designer to work in their tool and export that content directly to the web. Back in the day you'd buy a cheap FTP-enabled web hosting account, and upload your exported index.html and content.swf as-is and that would be it.
As a designer these days I don't think there's anything like that kind of workflow available any more.
Well. It sounds to me now that you're making a slightly different point - and an altogether better one.
I actually made a similar argument yesterday to someone - whatever we feel about Flash as medium for normal web content or as a browser plugin, that shouldn't taint it's reputation as a content creation tool.
Yeah, at this point in the game if it's not Android or iOS it's dead in the water. Spinning up another platform is likely difficulty to impossible - we've seen so many try and fail, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Tizen, Jolla, Ubuntu. It's a chicken and egg problem, to get more users you need existing users making apps and bragging about their device.
It's hopefully not impossible - look at history for numerous cases of dominant OSs being displaced by newcomers. What are the odds that we have arrived at the point in history where that never happens again?
>look at history for numerous cases of dominant OSs being displaced by newcomers...
Er, what? Let's see, what we're the dominant desktop OSes back in 1997? Windows and Mac. 20 years later? Still the same. Even 30 years ago it was DOS, the direct predecessor to Windows, and Mac.
In servers, various flavours of Unix have dominated for even longer. Arguably the dominant version at any one time was just the one that was closest to being a generic Unix as possible. Incompatible 'innovation' was punished mercilessly in the market.
The problem upstart OSes have to face is that encumbent OSes have established ecosystems of hardware and software support. Look at mobile. To compete with iOS you don't just have to compete with Apple, you have to compete with a $100bn+ ecosystem of apps, peripherals and services. Same with Android. Microsoft was just a few years behind them and it was too late even for them to break through with all their resources.
Unless Google or Apple do something monumentally stupid, they're going to stay dominant for decades to come.
Nothing time and money can't solve. And if there's one thing Google has, it's money.
The problem is that Google has the attention span of a hamster on crack. Instead of giving a new handset platform time to grow and mature, it'll jettison the whole project before it gets a chance to gain traction.
You're talking about both what burglars say they do and what affects the risk of being caught. Both of which have no impact on how burglars actually behave in the field. They may report the most ego-boosting thing they want to, but behave very differently. A better way is to simply compare crime rates in areas with CCTV to those without.
Wow... that's quite a price tag. For ~$60 USD you can pick up a 1080p camera with quite good quality, nice Sony sensor and hardware H.264 with no mandated cloud connectivity - then hook it to Xeoma, Zone Minder, Blue Iris or similar software and automatically ship the latest motion detection results up to your favorite cloud storage platform or your own server.
I guess I'm probably not the target market for this though, but if you're a tinkerer there are some interesting options. And fun to be had in the firmware reverse engineering department too.
Can you link to a specific product which achieves all those things? The cheap cameras I've tried either don't support open protocols, or they want to stream your video to China, or both.
Any cheap Hikvision or Dahua camera will usually support ONVIF. ONVIF is the key search term, if it has that it supports the standard open protocols and it'll work with most software around. Try searching it on ebay or aliexpress. Some of these do offer their own cloud too, but it's disabled by default on all I've tried so far.
I have had good experience with an amcrest camera. It encourages you to set it up with their (terrible) service, but it also has an RTSP endpoint. It works pretty well with Zoneminder as well.
How is the security of Amcrest with where they stream and store your video? I can't find anything on their site on where the company is actually based out of. They just mention that sales in the US are sold out of the US. It's like they go out of their way to avoid answering the question of where they are headquartered.
I'm just getting into the world of surveillance cameras, but I think it's more important to decide what you want to get out of any given camera, than to be concerned with any particular brand of hardware. For example, if you are hoping to capture license plates you will likely want a camera with a narrower field of view so you can get the maximum pixels per inch of coverage area. If instead you want to monitor a large area to just see people coming and going, you might want a very wide field of view, but then don't expect to be able to read license plates or get a really clear face shot from that camera.
Only catch with the Pi might be decode/encode performance if you plan to do anything with the video on that side of things, you'd have to have video software that can take advantage of hardware acceleration on the Pi.
I'd be interested if you know any shortcomings of these, so far my experiences have been quite positive, though I have only been running a Hikvision and a cheap rebranded one for about a month.
Biggest catch is probably software - you basically need a Windows box or VM for one-time configuration as ActiveX or proprietary tooling is common, once that's done you're all set and don't need to touch that tooling again, just monitor your camera via the standardized ONVIF and RTSP stream.
There's potential security catch too - I managed to dump the firmware off one and crack a telnet password, but I had to manually enable telnet and so long as you do not expose it to the internet, there's not much harm there. I've read about older cameras that had hardcoded default telnet passwords with telnet on by default and unable to be turned off, fortunately I haven't seen anything that egregious yet.
Overall, the shortcomings, while present are very manageable as far as I've seen. Definitely not a perfect "out of the box" experience like a Nest device will be, but cheaper, more flexible and more interesting to me as a tinkerer.
