Day: December 26, 2017

Christmas movies from before 1918

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUySE5moIFI Nothing evokes yuletide wonder quite like huddling around a modern Christmas family classic such as Die Hard or Eyes Wide Shut . But did you know that there are christmas movies more than a century old? Keep the holiday flame going through Boxing Day with the Nitrate Diva’s pick of ten pre-1918 xmas films. Embedded above is James Williamson’s joyous and celebratory 1902 The Little Match Seller , just a few minutes long.

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Christmas movies from before 1918

Latency: why typing on old computers just feels better

How long does it take, from keypress to the letter appearing on-screen, in a basic terminal window? My Core i7 PC with a GTX 1070 video card and 32gb of RAM might — might — be about as fast as 35-year-old Apple IIe. And almost nothing else is. It seems that modern computers are so complex that there are just some things they can’t do quickly . Compared to a modern computer that’s not the latest ipad pro, the apple 2 has significant advantages on both the input and the output, and it also has an advantage between the input and the output for all but the most carefully written code since the apple 2 doesn’t have to deal with context switches, buffers involved in handoffs between different processes, etc. On the input, if we look at modern keyboards, it’s common to see them scan their inputs at 100 Hz to 200 Hz (e.g., the ergodox claims to scan at 167 Hz). By comparison, the apple 2e effectively scans at 556 Hz. …If we look at the other end of the pipeline, the display, we can also find latency bloat there. I have a display that advertises 1 ms switching on the box, but if we look at how long it takes for the display to actually show a character from when you can first see the trace of it on the screen until the character is solid, it can easily be 10 ms. You can even see this effect with some high-refresh-rate displays that are sold on their allegedly good latency. Only one modern machine, doing one task, can keep up with the Apple IIe’s keyboard latency: a second-gen iPad Pro’s pencil input. Nothing else (including the iPad Pro’s own keyboard) hits 30ms. I had my own agonizing tangle with this problem. My favorite writing app, WriteRoom, is so laggy on my 12″ MacBook that I just don’t bother: an earlier version still shoots fast as lightning on a 2000s-vintage Snow Leopard iMac. Somewhere between Snow Leopard and Yosemite, between Core Duo and Core m3, between WriteRoom 2 and the most post-Lion versions, so much more horsepower is required draw words on the screen that a contemporary Mac is visibly slower than a decade-old one.

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Latency: why typing on old computers just feels better

Russia is planning to put a luxury hotel on the ISS

While American private corporations are working to offer paying customers a short trip to space (or the edge of it ), Russia is cooking up something grander. According to Popular Mechanics , it saw a proposal detailing Russian space corporation Roscosmos’ plan to build a luxury hotel on the ISS. Anybody whose pockets are deep enough to shell out at least $40 million for the experience can stay there for a week or two. An additional $20 million will buy them the chance to go on a spacewalk with a cosmonaut. The publication says Russian space contractor RKK Energia conjured up the strategy to be able to pay for the construction of the second module it’s building that will set it back $279 to $446 million. RKK Energia is already building the first of the two modules to serve as a science laboratory and power supply station. Although the second module has always been part of the plan, the Russian government is only paying for the first one. The tourist module will reportedly look like the first one from the outside — you can see an illustration of the science module below: [Image credit: Anatoly Zak/Russianspaceweb.com] The inside, however, will have four sleeping quarters around two cubic meters each with 9-inch windows. It will also have two “medical and hygiene” stations, as well as a lounge area with a 16-inch window — after all, if Russia wants guests to pay tens of millions, it will have to be worth it. RKK Energia is hoping to fly one or two tourists per Soyuz flight after NASA stops buying seats on the capsule for astronauts headed to the ISS, which will happen once Boeing’s and SpaceX’s commercial crew program vehicles are ready. To be able to jump-start construction, it has to find 12 (wealthy) passengers willing to pay $4 million up front. And if at least six passengers pay for a week-long stay at the space hotel per year, the company can recoup its investment within seven years. As Popular Mechanics noted, though, the ISS is scheduled to be decommissioned in 2028. The space contractor said the module takes five years to finish, so it will have to start building soon. Source: Popular Mechanics

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Russia is planning to put a luxury hotel on the ISS

A Christmas gift from Game Boy ROM hackers: Super Mario Land 2 in color

The Christmas holiday season is traditionally a great time to kick back and catch up on forgotten video games, and usually, we recommend doing so with majorly discounted video game sales. That’s still the case (and every platform, from Steam to Nintendo eShop to Xbox Live to PlayStation Network to GoG , seems to have a sale going on right now), but this year’s coolest holiday offer cannot be purchased: an out-of-nowhere ROM hack for one of Nintendo’s best original Game Boy games. Today, a classic-game hacker who goes by the handle Toruzz released a “ROM patch” for Nintendo’s 1992 game Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins . This 25th-anniversary release adds a “DX” suffix to the game’s name, and that’s because it’s been designed specifically to run on original Game Boy Color hardware. As a result, the ROM hack adds support for the Game Boy Color’s expanded color palette—which could run up to 56 colors on the screen simultaneously, as broken down by various sprite-specific palettes—along with support for the GBC’s faster CPU. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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A Christmas gift from Game Boy ROM hackers: Super Mario Land 2 in color