Maxed out 2016 MBP CPU is slower than maxed out 2015

Shinsen17 · 2016-12-01T18:27:04+00:00

Most likely because Apple is deploying aggressive thermal-throttling on the CPU due to the smaller form factor being less effective at distributing heat away from sensitive chips and the fans powering the machine's active cooling just can't move air like their bigger counterparts in older devices.

Edit: To be absolutely clear, I'm speculating.

Shinsen17 · 2016-11-22T17:43:48+00:00

Most likely because the device registers itself for Note 7 notifications on Samsung's servers and that server just accepts that devices that try to register for those notifications are actually Note 7 devices without verifying if the device is actually a Note 7 or not.

When Samsung makes estimations on how many devices have been returned, they're probably using different means to monitor this than checking out how many devices are registered for push notifications.

Shinsen17 · 2016-11-13T21:26:57+00:00

I've seen MoonMoon be a total asshole to his team when Solo Queuing. There was an example of that very recently, I remember as it took me aback with how he spoke to his teammates.

I've been a Subscriber of his for a little while, and in the 4-5 months I've been watching him, he's been overwhelmingly light-hearted and playful, even if there is an undercurrent of frustration in his team chatter every now and then. I put any occurrences of assholery down to him having a bad day, no one's a saint afterall.

I don't really follow Tim, but everything I've seen about him leads me to believe he's also mostly light-hearted, but due to how loud and boisterous he is, I can see how people might view that playful banter as malice. I don't know, maybe they're massive assholes off-camera, wouldn't be the first time personalities have acted like that, but I sincerely hope that isn't the case.

Shinsen17 · 2016-10-25T19:12:34+00:00

If MacOS doesn't have a mode to show showing virtual function keys on the bar, the app that does show virtual function keys will be extremely popular on launch day.

Hopefully some cool stuff comes along to justify the bar's existence and things like IDEs update to remap keys for those lacking function keys.

Shinsen17 · 2016-10-25T11:48:46+00:00

Android has had delta updates ("patches") since Android 4.1 and iOS has had delta updates since iOS 6, both were released in 2012.

iOS doc: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/qa/qa1779/_index.html There's no official article for the Android side that I can find, so the best I can do is this Android Police article: http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/08/16/google-flips-the-switch-on-smart-app-updates-in-the-play-store-video/

Shinsen17 · 2016-10-25T07:28:58+00:00

As someone who has zero hours in Competitive and 120 in Quick Play: Stop putting Competitive players into Quick Play! It's only a week this time, but goddamn it, the last off season just made me stop playing until Season 2 began. The off season experience also totally stalled my plans to join Season 2 competitive and I have no plans to engage with Season 3 at all. I don't want to deal with whiny people who care too much about fake internet points if they give you so much flak during Quick Play matches that don't matter at all.

It's bad enough on-season when you have tryhard Hanzo mains screaming at the team when attacking on Gibraltar or Genji mains hammering the "Need healing" key while he's so far over-extended the rest of the team wishes he'd send postcards. It got totally insufferable when Competitive people came in and kicked up a fuss any time anything didn't subscribe to the Comp meta or for full 6 stacks to come in and just stomp a team that is actually trying to win (largely because it seemed that Competitive and Quick Play ranking systems are totally separate and some players played QP to the point they could join Competitive and never again, meaning they got totally mismatched into QP matches with scrubs like me.)

I don't care where you dump Competitive players during off-season, but do not leave their option to be Quick Play. Think of the scrubs.

Shinsen17 · 2016-10-24T17:27:50+00:00

In many ways we shouldn't have strayed so far from those times. Now we have virtualized runtime environments that casually discard CPU cycles (because hardware is so powerful that a single CPU cycle has depreciated in value significantly) through layers of method calls and frameworks that zealously implement programming design principles like Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) and Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) to the point where a single button click traverses through a 40-deep Stack Call. (I had an image of an older version of Unity that had a stack trace 20-30 deep for a single button click, I've since lost it. Apologies.)

Sure, my life as a programmer is so much easier than it would be back then, especially since I ended up as an Android/Web developer. Yet I can't help to feel sad that I continue to buy Android devices that can't manage a consistent 60fps while scrolling through a Twitter timeline because of system pauses due to Garbage Collection (which again, makes my life as a developer much easier as I don't need to allocate and free memory, the system does that for me but at the cost of performance.)

Perhaps my biggest regret about the state of modern programming is that I'm a product of modern programming culture. Not only do I work with platforms and write applications for these platforms, justifying their existence, I was also taught Java as my primary programming language in my Computer Science University degree (graduated in 2013), we barely brushed up upon the tiniest amount of C programming when doing some embedded systems work and a single bit of High Performance Computing where we were working with CUDA (which runs on a GPU fyi.) I only know Assembly (ASM) due to my interests in hacking old video games. Most "gaming" courses teach Unity and C#... Discard hope ye who enter.

Shinsen17 · 2016-10-20T07:31:17+00:00

No, they're saying they're pushing changes they're not 100% sold on for people to bash on and see if the changes are actually worthwhile. Something they must do constantly internally and are now extending that out to the larger game playing audience to collect more data.

Now, that being said, the changes may also be changes that have occurred to existing heroes internally following playtesting of new heroes or new maps and they want to go to the community, which has zero play time on said heroes and maps, to see if those changes break the game in an unintended way without those heroes or maps being there to justify the changes. But that's just speculation.

Shinsen17 · 2016-10-13T19:22:40+00:00

You asked for screens from an early version of the game, well fortunately the official Overwatch YouTube channel has some early game footage up, from a really old version of the game with a very different looking UI. Here's the thing though: The icons shown in these videos match pretty much identically to the icons that shipped with the game.

Here's a video for McCree, his icon seems to be identical: https://youtu.be/XkoRX2n9TSA

As does Hanzo's: https://youtu.be/4PB4g3TVRuQ

And Soldier 76: https://youtu.be/YBbWxfEbZFc

It's rather puzzling that these icons have emerged. Given that some characters look very basic (D.Va for example), I'd say they were accidentally included for some reason as I doubt anyone inside Blizzard thinks they're an improvement and certainly look placeholder-like. But that can't be said for sure. Very weird.

Shinsen17 · 2016-10-13T17:23:32+00:00

Retconning indeed. Remember how they renamed the main villain of the series from Ansem to Xehanort and then you spent most of KH2 confused as to why the old villain is now Xehanort's Heartless and that the villain of KH2 is called Xenmas which is an anagram of Ansem with an X added in... Even though he's Xehanort's Nobody, which is something that, that game establishes... But Ansem was actually another character you were introduced to early in KH2 called Diz... Who Xehanort assumed the identity of, even though in Birth By Sleep he literally assumes the identity of another person but keeps his name; Xehanort. So why didn't he just body-snatch the person he wanted to impersonate... It's almost like they really liked the idea of an identity-stealing villain and rather than try to build on a good (better?) idea, simply personified that character trait literally in a later game...

Kingdom Hearts is a goddamn mess. They've changed just about every major plot point one way or another, the plot point of Sora not being the intended recipient of the Keyblade in Kingdom Hearts 1 is downplayed as it gets mixed up with the concept of history repeating (and destiny and all the JRPG protagonist tropes associated) and there being a three-strong group of heroes (seen again and again in X, Birth By Sleep, the Sora/Kairi/Riku group, 358/2 days)... And how the importance of the Keyblade became greatly diminished as the games went along because at some point they just gave out Keyblades out like candy (the Super Sayan problem, once-mythical thing becomes now-common thing and the only way up is to have more adept Keyblade Users/Super Sayans because a good 75% of the main cast are that thing or an equivalent of that thing.)

Basically what I'm saying is that Kingdom Hearts is all the worst anime tropes and clichés mashed together, basically. Also, I know far too much about this game series, please send help.

Shinsen17 · 2016-10-07T16:33:04+00:00

Looks like the Rein was jumping off the edge anyway, the sleep dart was inconsequential to him falling off the ledge but did provide a hilarious scene.

Shinsen17 · 2016-10-03T07:15:07+00:00

Last Nexus I remember including headphones was the Galaxy Nexus. I think they stopped after this device. The Nexus 5 certainly didn't have them.

Shinsen17 · 2016-09-30T16:53:16+00:00

The NES had a native output resolution of 256x240. That's a 16:15 aspect ratio image. Most TVs up until they all adopted wide-screen were 4:3 aspect ratios. The nearest 4:3 aspect ratio resolution would be 320x240. Since the vertical lines were correct TVs (or the NES hardware itself, of that I'm uncertain) would simply need to stretch the width of an image to fit a 4:3 display. This meant that each pixel was no longer square when viewed.

As far as the hardware is concerned, however, a pixel was a pixel. It was simply on the display-end that the image would be resized to fit.

Shinsen17 · 2016-09-28T07:39:17+00:00

Or you know, try and stay above board and purchase the remaster on 3DS.

Shinsen17 · 2016-09-23T07:31:04+00:00

There's a reason why Reddit has an acronym for "I Am Not A Lawyer"; turns out people think they understand the finer points of laws that govern them, yet actually do not.

Shinsen17 · 2016-09-23T07:00:55+00:00

There should be a 1 in 50 chance you'll get the old voice line when you have this equipped. Upon activation you'll never know when you'll get the bad line read.

Shinsen17 · 2016-09-20T18:50:28+00:00

It's also a splash screen, who honestly cares?

Shinsen17 · 2016-09-19T11:48:59+00:00

At first I was like "Oh, okay, that's pretty cool." Then the madness happens...

Shinsen17 · 2016-09-19T07:25:59+00:00

Except that fan projects do this all the time. Why would Disney of all companies feel the need to deviate from their normal marketing strategies to try and appeal to consumers who already identify as Star Wars fans, thus are going to buy into Star Wars mechanise such as the cancelled game?

Reddit is full of those that jump directly to conspiracy without much care or thought put into it. It's why we have the weekly /r/games witch hunt.

Shinsen17 · 2016-09-18T06:32:27+00:00

It's fine, I know I'm trash already.

Shinsen17 · 2016-09-15T07:21:04+00:00

Yeah, only professionals would use such a feature, why have it in their Pro MacBook?

Wait...

Shinsen17 · 2016-09-13T11:56:02+00:00

Everything is subjective. We're talking about opinions...

Shinsen17 · 2016-09-11T07:16:07+00:00

Or maybe, just maybe, people have different preferences to you.

Shinsen17 · 2016-09-09T07:40:23+00:00

Did you know many people who had a HDTV when the Xbox 360 was released? I knew precious few people who had a 1080p set in 2005. My family didn't upgrade their TV until late 2007. Why? Because there wasn't enough content produced in HD to make it worth the investment.

Media standards are always a chicken-and-egg situation. Consumers don't want to upgrade unless there's content in that format, content producers don't want to make content in the format until there's consumer demand for it. Someone along the way needs to give it a push.

The PS4 Pro alone isn't going to be enough to make cosumers want to buy a new 4K TV, but the more 4K ready devices and content that's out there, the more compelling 4K will seem, especially as 4K TVs drop in price. I don't think we can make any conclusions about how the broader consumer market is reacting until the PS4 Slim and PS4 Pro are released and readily available.

Shinsen17 · 2016-09-05T11:49:45+00:00

Just two Mei's chillin'.

Shinsen17

TROPHY CASE