Interesting Links for 1-6-2011

[andrewducker]

• Wikipedia improves students' work: Students become much more concerned with accuracy when their research is posted online
  (tags: wikipedia academia students)
• Government changes to the benefits system are already having a devastating effect on people with mental health problems
  (tags: uk health mental_health welfare)
• EU bringing in mandatory anti-skidding tech for all cars from 2014 (video)
  (tags: cars technology)
• Women rank happy men as less attractive
  (tags: psychology sex attraction happiness)
• Doom - compiled to Javascript, running in a web browser. The HTML5 version of a dancing bear...
  (tags: doom games javascript web)
• The rights to Superman are about to become....confused.
  (tags: superman law rights)
• Woman charged with handling stolen goods after food was taken from a bin outside of Tescos.
  (tags: food law wtf)
• The Revolutionary New Birth Control Method for Men. (Held up for over ten years by politics! GAH!)
  (tags: contraception birthcontrol men)
• Five years ago today, The Pirate Bay was shut down by the police. You can tell, can't you?
  (tags: copyright EpicFail)

Comments

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

Interesting how varied the framerate is in the JS Doom game. I had about 6fps on my machine, which was roughly mid-range 2 years ago. However, some people managed to happily get 30fps on older hardware, or 2fps on very new hardware.

On the other hand, it inspired me to play Doom again. I loved that game, and the Archvile (from Doom 2) is probably one of the scariest monsters I've ever encountered in a videogame.

[andrewducker]

I suspect it varies dramatically depending on browser. I wonder what the memory footprint is like.

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

One person on Slashdot said on an 8-year-old laptop, with 1.6GHz Pentium M:
Opera: 8fps, Firefox: 4fps, Chrome: unresponsive

Another person quoted ~30fps on Safari on a 4 year old MacBook Pro, which my PC should be at least on par with, if not better.

Someone else quoted 170MB of usage (at least, that's what the JS process was using). I can't really check at work.

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Latest build of Firefox (4.0.1) is giving me close on 40fps.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

I'm getting 4-6fps on an intel Core 2 4400 1.2ghz, with 2 gig system ram, and Firefox 3.6.17.

Which was roughly mid-range about 3-4 years ago or so I think.

[andrewducker]

I suspect the older version of FF is killing your speed there - FF4 is dramatically faster at JS and sound manipulation.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

I'll have to give it a try at home and see how IE9 on my quad-core i7 handles this. (I'll also give it a shot on the 64-bit version of IE9 to see if that makes a difference.)

-- Steve thinks it should run alright, given how spritely IE9 seems to be on it. The joys of having oodles of RAM...

[seph-hazard.livejournal.com]

This little netbook won't let me watch the video on the one about anti-skid tech, but I'm wondering if that might stop aquaplaning. I was a passenger in a car crash on Monday that was caused by skidding over a puddle, and somewhere between the internal bruising, the aching whiplash and the pyschological shock I'm interested at the moment in things that might make this not happen again...

[andrewducker]

I'd hope so. It brakes different wheels separately, and tries to prevent them from locking up, which should help a lot.

I hope the damage is only temporary.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I'm not entirely sure.

During the winter-bits, the local roads that aren't main thoroughfares tend to get polished to a good sheen when the layer of compacted snow freezes. My own entirely unscientific testing (find section of road with no other cars about, be travelling at little over walking pace) of mid-90s ABS seems to show that when there's no traction at all, the computer just shrugs its registers and gives up.

More testing is required, probably with not-rubbish tyres, too.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, not much you can do with no traction at all. I assume that things have gotten better over time, but there are limits.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that it's actually quite hard to discover what your car does at the edge of its performance envelope (If I can use that phrase without sounding like a complete Clarkson), and that when you do find out it's generally the wrong sort of a time for a learning experience.

(This is when I start talking about having a scratch 9K that I can use for testing purposes.)

[andrewducker]

What's a 9K?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Saab 9000. I seem to have continued to keep Saabs since a shopping accident in the mid 90s.

[seph-hazard.livejournal.com]

Oh, certainly - I'll be fine in a couple of weeks. It was just all a bit of a shock!

[hirez.livejournal.com]

That sort of thing is No Fun At All. I remember coming back from a Whitby and driving past Sheffield in a biblical-style storm. There was standing water right across the carriageway and all I could do was keep the car pointing in a straight line while the steering went disturbingly weightless...

... Which probably isn't helping. Sorry about that.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

The superman thing is actually somewhat funny to me.

Not being an avid DC follower, when I look at a rack and see multiple different titles about the same superhero, some seemingly set in different universes/timelines and some possibly in the same one, I don't really see how a title being produced by someone else entirely would make a difference to that.

[luckylove.livejournal.com]

The Edinburgh Advice Shop people know of four people who have died before their ESA tribunal dates came through and a number of suicides relating to these awful changes. I'm not due to be reassessed until January 2014 as I was last assessed this January. I'm getting reassessed now, four months after my last one, just because of the changes. I'd just gotten over the stress of the last assessment enough to consider joining a gym and now it's starting all over again. They usually give me 12 months to recover, four is a fucking joke and no one's laughing.