Google manually adjusts its results for censorship reasons. This is probably why google has gotten so much worse, they don't want information to be freely accessible, they only want things they approve of to be seen.
I reckon you're right, but I doubt that it's manual or under Google's control. Google is too important a tool of control to be left in the hands of Silly Valley idealists.
I've always wondered why Sergey Brin and Larry Page retired when they did, it coincides almost exactly with the beginning of the SERP quality decline. Wonder what sort of conversation they had with intelligence to quietly walk to the door, cash out, and say nothing about the company since.
What happened was they got what they wanted: full control of running the business. Then they quickly learned that was actually a lot of work and not very much fun, made some fairly unpopular decisions (business, product and policy) with a fair amount of public backlash, put Sundar in charge and backed away.
Table based exceptions only work if everyone plays ball. Its not practical to introduce them after the fact because they will not work with any existing code including OS callbacks. AMD64 can use them because they were there from the beginning.
Am I the only one who prefers the way x86 did exceptions? I really don't like that with table based exceptions, every function must include bloated unwind tables, and is also forced to conform to a very restrictive set of code generation rules. It also makes writing and assembly and dynamic code generation difficult.
It takes years to build up trust but a single lie to destroy it. The Western mainstream media is rather biased and often misrepresents the truth, occasionally outright lying, but as we know even a single lie is enough to permanently destroy trust. So at this point even when they tell the truth nobody believes it, and many people often believe the exact opposite of what they say.
The mere fact anyone lumps all of the various outlets together indicates they have no idea what they're talking about, have a terrible bias themselves and aren't a reliable source of anything. Seriously, if you think that The Economist, Le Figaro, Fox, The Guardian, FT, Le Monde, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Le Canard Enchaîné, Reuters, etc. have the same bias and "misrepresent" the truth as a policy, on purpose and in the same direction, you're out of your goddamn mind.
> From what I can tell up to and including Windows XP the painting was done in software
Defamation and blasphemy of the highest order. In XP the GUI was fully hardware accelerated and highly performant. Possibly the most perfect thing to have ever been created. In vista this was all torn out and replaced with software rendering that ran like treacle. All for a transparent window gimmick.
Are you talking about the compositing? I haven't used Vista, but I definitely remember that in Windows 7 you couldn't use the glass theme unless hardware acceleration was working, because it relied on compositing on the GPU.
Windows XP supported partially transparent windows, but I'm not sure if this required hardware acceleration or there was also a software rendering fallback.
Not at all, the original 16bit x86 was well designed. The 32bit extensions were pretty decent too. Its not until much later that it really started to turn to shit. The real disaster started when Intel started haphazardly adding terribly thought out SIMD instructions. AMD64 truly sucks though, this is where the original encoding should have been replaced.
The UK government hates its own country and people, why would they bother with something so trivial as national security. That would be like a serial killer worrying about infection whilst dismembering their victim.
I think it might just be the NTSC composite that looks bad. I have never felt any desire to use RGB on my PAL Mega Drive since the composite output looks excellent. On PAL it gives just the right amount of blending to smooth out the dithering, but at the same time is sharp enough to resolve individual pixels, and lacks any sort of rainbow effect which apparently plagues NTSC.
No game was ever fully optimized for PAL because it is literally impossible. The only way to fix the squashed down graphics would be to completely re-scale all the art. This re-scaled art would no longer fit in the existing 8x8 tiles so you would then have to completely redo all the background and sprite mappings, you may have problems with overlapping parallax layers no longer lining up to whole tiles, and might have problems with video ram since the re-scale art now requires more memory. Basically a fully PAL optimized game would be pretty much a completely separate port built from the ground up.
But lots of games are successfully pal optimised. You are probably right, maybe it's easier to change resolution of 3d rendered games as it seems towards end of N64 is when optimisation started happening.
