712 karma · joined March 4, 2011
The article is 100% on the mark.
So glad Flipper exists and I don't have to deal with this stuff anymore.
If it's Gore saying it - maybe he should talk to his producers then, and ask them whether they actually have budgeted the "proper" VFX talent/timelines for the show. He has creative control - the people doing the work do not.
And it is not an OS thing. The OS renders subpixel antialiased fonts just fine. But Zed uses its own font rasterizer, and it completely falters when faced with a "standard passable resolution" screen - the letters become mushy, as if they have been blurred - and rather sloppily at that.
Trees with RDBMSes do stay a pain, though :-)
The cause could have also been an extra check introduced in one of the routines - which backfired in this particular failure scenario.
Truth be told, I do have a suspicion that some folks (possibly - some folks close to Avie or other former NeXT seniors post-acquisition) have noticed that with dynamic loading, hard drive speed, and ubiquitous dynamic dispatch of ObjC OSX would just be extremely, extremely slow. So they probably conjured a scheme to show fancy animations to people and wooing everyone with visual effects to conceal that a bit. Looney town theory, I know, but I do wonder. Rhapsody was also perceptually very slow, and probably not for animations.
There were also quite a few tricks used all the way from the dithering/blitting optimizations on the early Macs. For example, if you can blit a dotted rect for a window being dragged instead of buffering the entire window, everything underneath, the shadow mask - and then doing the shadow compositing and the window compositing on every redraw - you can save a ton of cycles.
You could very well have do-wait-do-wait loops when custom text compositing or layout was involved and not thoroughly optimized - like in early versions of InDesign, for instance - but it was the exception rather than the rule.
I suspect the move from public to private ownership did adversely affect the upgrades of those, as well as electrification on several key routes.
If I remember correctly they do not even have something as basic as an electronic coursebook - which became mandatory in Germany in the 90s already. And at least in NL if you have a set of routes in a certain direction / route set - drivers would get route familiarization both for the main routes and for the bypasses.
Connecting effort and outcome is hard as orgs get bigger, and a lot (a LOT) of those strategies have to do with optics and the "sponsors" being "on the wave" at the moment (trusted by owners/board). While it is not realistic to say "we do the work until it works and costs be damned" some tools for this are required, and I would say putting out a "bet horizon" of a year or a quarter is setting up some nice political battles in the future.
Well done, well done.
Maybe if the generation of those queries is from templates and it is the concern at hand - a better approach is using a restricted templating system like Liquid where all possible queries are canned and pre-generated via specific template helpers, but I doubt this mandates a Repository still.