The tile of this post seems like a non-sequiter.
Why would a company not do that?
If you trying to project your own ideas,
a part of that process is killing competing ideas
Goa (India) ONSITE
We're developing an enterprise developer tool for the Mac.
We have a small house to work out of in Dona Paula, an outskirt of Panjim, located in a quiet neighborhood, very close to the ocean.
We're looking for 2 developers to pair up, initially for a 10 month period.
The work involves app UI design and speech recognition algo design targeting the MacBook.
you can start working immediately.
we will pay you a salary and offer performance linked bonuses in the form of equity.
Goa (India) ONSITE
We're developing an enterprise developer tool for the Mac.
We have a small house to work out of in Dona Paula, an outskirt of Panjim, located in a quiet neighborhood, very close to the ocean.
We're looking for 2 developers to pair up, initially for a 10 month period.
The work involves UI design and speech recognition algo design targeting the MacBook.
you can start working immediately.
we will pay you a salary and offer performance linked bonuses in the form of equity.
Absolutely.
Paint is by a long shot, Microsoft's best product.
It's easy to build since it's codebase is pretty small
and they haven't changed it much since it was introduced.
So it's rock solid.
IDK why they're fixing what ain't broke.
Darn, it would be nice if MS was forced to break up in to different product divisions so that their Office product would be released on various platforms.
Except... it is released on various platforms. That 'Linux desktop' isn't part of it doesn't mean that Office isn't on pretty much every other relevant platform (Windows desktop, macOS, Android, iOS, web, ...).
They clearly nailed it, this video from the dev team shows how the understood their users and stuck to the requirements instead of the typical MS feature creep product
I have feeling that dithered fills have nothing to do with Paint itself but were feature of GDI, even one pixel wide lines and such things were dithered when drawn with dithered color.
It probably got removed in Windows 2000, when GDI gained alpha channel support, as the dithering mode was specified in upper byte of 32b COLORREF, which probably got at least internally repurposed as alpha (also, alphablending dithered surfaces is not exactly sane thing to do).
I remember dithered fills being in Paintbrush itself, using Windows 3.1. My memory is you had 16 colors to work with, and to get more than that it supported dithered colors. You could have, say, a red/yellow checkerboard. The UI let you treat these like other colors: you could save them, and draw with them. When you did that, each pixel in your BMP would be set to of the 16 allowed, but the overall impression would be of more than 16 colors.
In Paintbrush you had palette of 20-ish colors, which were or were not dithered depending on whether they were displayable by your graphics adapter. (The default palette consisted of 16 default EGA/VGA colors and few dithered ones, with particularly notable burgundy-ish color that almost didn't look dithered). In the control panel you could set arbitrary 24b RGB colors for user interface elements which were dithered in exactly the same way.
Interesting thing related to this is that Windows 3.1 had significantly different default color scheme depending on what graphics driver you selected during installation. The really default color scheme was similar to OS/2 2.x (pastel colors, active window title with black text on light blue background, different background color for MDI master and slave windows) and significantly different one was used for graphics drivers with 16 or less colors (ie. the one that everybody remembers, with white text on dark blue or black background for active window title bar). Obviously the reason for this was to eliminate dithering in default color scheme.
On the other hand, this was not applied consistently. Windows 3.1 post installation tutorial essentially introduced the pastel yellow (also used in the default color scheme for MDI window background) as the "help popup color", even thought this color was dithered on VGA. Another inconsistency was that Windows 3.1 shipped with CTRL3D.DLL and some (2 or so) applications that used it. (Until Windows 10's consistent Metro-ish style I regarded CTRL3D as the most consistent UI that Windows ever had, because most applications consistently used this same UI style. The Windows 95 HIG mandated style is also nice, but it was never used consistently used by anyone, not even Microsoft itself).
I learned programming in Qbasic. My parent's computer had some "menu" launcher, which let you choose between Win 3.1 and DOS. Most games (Doom / Lemmings / Commander Keen) were DOS based. So yeah, do I need to feel old now?
They did the same thing with the calculator, turning what is probably the simplest app on the entire computer into a Metro-ified flat-design-meme store-dependent mess for absolutely no benefit.
I went to open my calculator this morning and it told me it was in the middle of an update and to try again later. 5 minutes, 10 minutes, and 15 minutes later it still wasn't done. I ended up using Google to calculate some basic math! How does Microsoft screw up such a simple application?
I've opened up the calculator a couple of times and gotten a prompt to rate/review it on the Windows Store... What is the purpose of doing that with built-in apps? It's just annoying.
cmd.exe and calc.exe from ReactOS can be used since ReactOS aims to be fully binary compatible. They look a bit bad though.
Or this is a good opportunity to use tools not built into the OS or write own replacements. It's a bit silly to have calc program dictated by the OS version.
I wonder if you could get into legal trouble if you start to re-distribute calc.exe from older Windows version, as a free download. Probably yes, but it would look so ridiculous if MS lawyers would go after a random person doing that.
The thing is that your Windows 8/7/Vista/XP versions of calc don't even run on Windows 10. The only thing you can run is the Calculator Plus that was released for XP. Of course Microsoft did remove the download for that one.
Not him, but I would have stayed on 8.1 too if it weren't for processor support. The only annoying thing about it is the start menu, which i only use for maybe 10sec/month. It's faster than win7 and has a bunch of features I would miss, and compared to 10 it's not as bloated with non-win32 apps with less functionality for everything, tracking that you can turn off, and all the other win10 stuff you've heard already.
It really I've was already using Launchy instead of Cortana. So, when I saw what a mess Calculator had become in 10, Launcy ended up replacing that too for simple calculations.
It's sad, because by themselves programs like Paint and Calculator are simple. But, when done well, they come together to improve the quality of life while using Windows.
Some time ago someone recommended SpeedCrunch to me for calculator stuff and I use it all the time now. It's a little bit less intuitive since it takes a syntax instead of presenting buttons, but it does a ton more.
I sometimes use a python REPL instead of a calculator. Python has `bin()` for binary representations. Plus imaginary numbers are built in. For more complicated stuff I reach for Wolfram alpha.
Open source is associated with philanthropy and with being really smart. If you're a really smart coder, out to change thw world, you'll obviously build a library or framework to help the other, not so fortunate coders around you as a way to bring relief from the tyranny of the big monopolistic corporates (read Microsoft). It's your David changing the evil ways of their Goliath.
This is a great question.
The PC has been around for a long time now.
For the most part, users/developers have been sitting around, twiddling their thumbs and waiting for the tool and app gods to rain their blessings.
This question begs the need to be proactively involved in the process of designing how you use your PC
Same sentiments. In the beginning, the user and developer of the PC is the same person. I just feel that there are so much untapped computing power waiting for people to tell the computers to go do intelligent things.
Right. Early PC apps were developed by developers mostly for the developer community and PCs were used mostly by developers themselves as a cheap replacement for workstations.
When they started proliferating in the end-user space and experienced exponential growth in volumes, innovation took a back seat and commercialisation drove the chariot. Now that everyone's become rich, we need to get serious again about making it a lot more useful. Automation would probably be the first area I would address in that endeavor since the capabilities of the PC are now quite robust.
It definitely is an automation of tasks - it automates away you having to be concerned with multiple platforms, at the small cost of wasting computer power of all of your users.
Well, mental health has always been and will continue to be an issue that needs to be addressed in the workplace.
This is because the workplace now is at least half composed of programming related tasks.
Programming is such a mentally tasking task due to the need to get everything just right to get your computer to do what you want with it, that the fallout from it could be compared to a hangover.
Your mental faculties do get tired by the process of programming leaving you in the lurch when you step outside that mental zone, and making you susceptible to attacks on issues unrelated to programming, that many managers and other people that don't exercise their mental faculties enough tend to indulge in.
As a programmer, it's just as important to learn what to do outside of your programming related tasks, specially ways to relax and rejuvenate your mental faculties.
If you don't do this, you'll burn yourself out leaving you susceptible to mental disease.
Exercise.
Cooking.
Sketching.
Paying attention to grooming.
Practicing ignoring people as much as possbile in public.
Reducing the amount of information I process outside of programming. --> Not using a smartphone. Using public transport. Minimizing internet use, no social media.
Walking as much as possible to help slow things down.
Consciously taking breaks from mental work, instead of just getting absorbed in a programming task.
The equivalent of interval training.
its possible to strengthen your ability to focus while you program through interval training.
Observing nature, such as bird-watching, wind conditions, cloud formations etc.
I would state that in a much stronger way --
A programmer should only think of their programming as a tool
and concentrate first and foremost on what they are building.
Good habits should emerge from that bent of mind.
If all you do is code to specs, you will never become a good programmer.
Yes, and in addition, this is a good way to choose projects.
We need to "reinvent the wheel"" a lot more
rather than just building on top of frameworks that we have inherited from the past.
The more work we do at the lower layers of our stacks, the better the quality of our software will be, in terms of its usefulness.
There's so many coders around now that there's not enough work at the top of our stacks anymore
Re: b)
For video, the encoder contains a model of the decoder, including the amount of buffering available to the decoder.
The bit-rate controller at the encoder uses this model to ensure that the decoder always has the right amount of data in its input buffers.
It also ensures that the information rate of the channel is matched with that of the compressed stream in a live transmission setting.
The transport scheme which operates at a layer below the codec, therefore only needs to take care of delay and packet delivery/loss related issues over the channel. Media is typically transmitted over UDP.
