I assume the implication was an intercept facility.

I think it was 600 W 7 St. A quick Google of NSA tap plus that address turns up serious press reports from 7 or 8 years ago. It was clearly put up in a hurry. But I can't imagine I was the only one who noticed. I was just some dumbass serving a music site and it was totally obvious something was up.

Quite the opposite, people worked very, very hard to make Winamp even more non-standard via skinning.

"Is your washroom breeding Bolsheviks?"

Is that what's going on? So many touch gestures seem to rely on landing in the right 2mm diameter area, but the minimum reliable resolution for touch seems to be a 4mm diameter circle. It's even worse for my father, even though cognitively, he would have no trouble understanding the hypothetical requirement. It's also noticeably worse during the depths of winter.

What does "GPU" mean here? Previous uses of the term seemed to imply "dedicated hardware for improving rendering performance" which the SVGA stuff would seem to fall squarely under.

The term GPU was first coined by Sony for the PlayStation with its 3D capabilities, and has been associated with 3D rendering since. In some products it stood for Geometry Processing Unit, again referring to 3D. Purely 2D graphics coprocessors generally don’t fall under what is considered a GPU.

It has been associated with 3D rendering, but given that things like the S3 86C911 are listed on the Wikipedia GPU page, saying "Accelerated GUIs don't need GPU" feels like attempting to win an argument by insisting on a term definition that is significantly divergent from standard vulgar usage [1], which doesn't provide any insight to the problem originally being discussed.

[1] Maybe I've just been blindly ignorant for 30 years, but as far as I could tell, 'GPU' seemed to emerge as a more Huffman-efficient encoding for the same thing we were calling a 'video card'

I don’t agree with what you state as the vulgar usage. “Graphics card” was the standard term a long time, even after they generally carried a (3D) GPU. Maybe up to around 2010 or so? There was no time when you had 2D-only graphics cards being called GPUs, and you didn’t consciously buy a discrete GPU if you weren’t interested in (3D) games or similar applications.

In the context of the discussion, the point is that you don’t need high-powered graphics hardware to achieve a fast GUI for most types of applications that WPF would be used for. WPF being slow was due to architectural or implementation choices.

That's the real takeaway - WPF should have degraded gracefully (read, full speed performance without the bling) but it didn't.

We used to call those things a "Video Card", which you put into your computer to get a video signal out.

Back in the day there was a card called an S3 Virge, which we affectionally called a 3D decelerator card, because of its lacklustre 3D performance.

Most people consider GPU to mean "3D accelerator" though technically it refers to any coprocessor that can do work "for" the main system at the same time.

GPU-accelerated GUI usually refers to using the texture mapping capabilities of a 3D accelerator for "2D" GUI work.

Was it the same 1% that was using each of the long-tail features? I suspect that by refusing to invest effort in at least some amount of niche features, we essentially alienate _everybody_

"I think" is explicitly disclaiming authority. Omitting it changes the social signaling of the response significantly.

Switching "wooden" for "a bit unnatural" also does a disservice: "wooden" describes a specific quality of deviance.

Over-all, I would definitely consider the revision stiffer and more reserved than the original.

I would take things somewhat further: I'd be happy to pay the equivalent of $20 2015 dollars for this service if it were comprehensive. Unfortunately, that might allow for a consumer surplus to occur in the viewing experience and the motion picture industry ties with maybe nVidia for peak pathological hostility to retail consumer surplus.

Wouldn't browser prefetching subvert these small frictions to entry?

I think I've seen sites trying to track outbound clicks recently, has prefetching made that impossible? I don't know the implementation but I've seen the browser sending requests that track clicks while investigating other stuff (idk whether it's working accurately though).

Edit: to be clear, it's not like I've researched this proposal since I don't work for social media companies. It's just a feature I wish I could have on my posts.

Are you suggesting that beggars would ride, if only wishes were horses!?