What grinds my gears

"Net neutrality" means that service providers and other companies who are in the business of transferring internet traffic from one place to another, have a completely neutral stance on what is transferred from where and to where. They do not give special treatment to data coming from or going to specific internet domains. They just transmit data from place A to place B, and that's it. Everybody is treated equally. Why is net neutrality important for end users? There are many reasons, but one of the most important ones is that it keeps prices down. In other words, you, as an end user, end up paying less for online services, such as for example online video rental services. Why? Because net neutrality ensures healthy competition between companies. All companies are on equal footing when it comes to online services. Companies compete with each other with amount and quality of content, rather than the amount of lag that you experience when you access their online service...

How many times has this happened to you: You have bought a product, but it turns out you have no use for it after all. Thus you would like to sell it to a friend or acquaintance. The product is completely unused, unopened in its original package, and exactly like new, and you have the receipt and possible warranty papers. Yet no acquaintance is willing to pay the full original price for it. They always want a significant price reduction. But why? This seems to be a very strange instinct that 99% of people have, and I suspect that in one form or another it's something that corporations have in one way or another succeeded in implanting into people's minds. Or, at the very least, are very happy about. For some reason this instinct is so strong, that most people would prefer to buy the product directly from the shop than from a friend, unless they get a price reduction, even though this makes absolutely no logical sense. It doesn't matter if the product is completely u...

In imaging, especially in computer imaging, gamma correction is something that both gets largely ignored, and can be a real nightmare at the same time. In order to fully understand gamma correction, we need to understand how human vision, as well as display devices, work. Our perception of brightness is dependent on the amount of energy carried by light. In other words, the more energetic the light is, the brighter it looks. However, the relationship is not linear. One could hastily think that if we double the amount of energy, it will look twice as bright. However, the human eye doesn't work that way. Doubling the amount of energy does not double the perceived brightness. The actual function is quite complex. Thus we have two different concepts: The absolute amount of energy carried by light. The technical term for this is radiant flux . The perceived brightness of the light. The technical term for this is luminous flux . (Yes, it's confusing.) As said, the relatio...

There's a somewhat worrying trend appearing in PC gaming in the last few years. Just yesterday I was browsing the featured games on Steam's front page (on that scrollable area), and out of 14 featured games, six were either pre-purchase offers or early-access offers. In other words, almost half of them. A pre-purchase offer means simply buying the game before it has been published. In other words, pay now, get the game when it comes out. Oftentimes (although in some cases not) there will be a very minor incentive to pre-purchase the game, such as a slightly reduced cost (eg. 45€ instead of 50€) or some extra content (which usually just means a few extra props that are rather inconsequential from a gameplay perspective.) In the worst cases you don't get any advantage at all for pre-purchasing. Before the prevalence of Steam (and other such applications), ie. when basically all games were purchased as physical discs, there might have been a slight "advantage"...

Most people who have never tried translating text from one language to another think that it's a rather trivial thing to do. They are very wrong. Having translated some things between English and Finnish I have really gained an appreciation for the difficulty that this entails. Translating, especially when we are talking about things like TV shows, is also a very thankless job. For example people who translate anime from Japanese to English sometimes get a lot of flack because they are "butchering" the work by needlessly localizing things rather than being faithful to the original. But the thing is, it's not always that simple. Some time ago I was thinking about adding English subtitles to a comedy sketch video by Spede Pasanen (" seteliautomaatti "). What I thought would be an easy job resulted to be more difficult than what I imagined. Take for instance this exchange: "No, mihis the meinaatte mennä?" "No, kun sattu tää solmiokin, niin...

Let's take the classical trope of the "damsel in distress": A woman gets kidnapped, and a man has to rescue her. Is this trope sexist? "Of course!", says the feminist. It reinforces the notion of women as being weak and fragile, incapable of defending themselves, and having to rely on a man to help them. Does this reflect the actual, real world, on average? That doesn't even matter. Works of art should be used as tools to change people's attitudes, not reflecting reality. But never mind that. Let's just grant that the original trope is sexist. How about the gender-reversed version? In other words, a man gets kidnapped and a woman has to rescue him. Is that sexist? Of course it is. But not in the opposite direction. In the same direction. You see, this panders to male sexual fantasy. This has undertones of SM and dominatrix fantasies. The woman is nothing more than a tool to excite the man's imagination. What if both the kidnapping vict...

People always complain how Hollywood produces nothing more than mindless action flicks for the masses. They are dumb, they have no subtlety, they have no depth... just mindless action for 90 minutes. Then they decided to make the new Godzilla movie better. Rather than just 2 hours of mindless action, it would be subtler. It would build suspense and intrigue, it would hint rather than show, it would have a deeper plot... In other words, it would be smarter than your average action-packed mindless action flick. And of course people complain. There is no pleasing them. If they make a mindless action flick, they complain. If they make a smarter and subtler action flick, they complain. Nothing is ever good. They complained that the 1998 Godzilla film was too stupid. Now they complain that the 2014 Godzilla film is not stupid enough. I think that it's the people who are stupid here. Personally I love the new Godzilla movie precisely because of its subtlety. They could have gone...