Domain: tested.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to tested.com.
Comments · 30
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Re:Reports of My (desktop's) Demise are Premature
Surely Microsoft haven't changed their mind!
https://www.tested.com/tech/pc... -
Re:Hybrid bluetooth vacuum tube amplifier
I never said there isn't reason to use a higher quality cable than the cheapest piece of shit that can be cobbled together and sold with the HDMI logo on it, whether earned or not. It's not like there aren't counterfeits out there or anything.
I did say, however, that if you already have good enough SNR to actually get the whole signal, a better cable isn't somehow going to get you more information than what you're already getting.
Seriously, look at the marketing for some of these cables. Please tell me what the fuck you are getting out of this $1500 HDMI cable that you don't get from a $30 cable which is probably overpriced as well, because Belkin. Please explain what properties the first one has, beyond a level of price gouging that the pharmaceutical industry wishes they could get away with, that somehow increase signal quality above a certified cable from a reputable manufacturer at 1/50 of the cost.
This is of course an extreme example of what I was referring to, but there's no shortage of $100 cables that do exactly what a cable that costs 1/3 the price would do in the exact same environment and equipment. Previously performed testing would tell us that there is no difference as long as you are receiving adequate signal, and using magic cables that purport to come close to superconductivity for the close to the price of actual superconducting materials are nothing but a colossal waste of money, sold by modern-age hucksters plying on people's ignorance seeded by an analog past where the cable quality only suffers diminishing returns, rather than a threshold of garbage-signal-versus-adequate-signal that we get with digital communications.
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Re:and this is news because...?
If you want accurate emulation, use higan (f.k.a. bsnes) on a decent computer. The Pi can't handle accurate SNES emulation. RetroPie just uses Snes9x. While it was more accurate than Zsnes, it's not great by today's standards (Higan is cycle-accurate).
Both are better than Zsnes - it has horribly inaccurate sound and can't even run some of the levels in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island at all (of the games I played).
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Re:Three monitor gaming?
The GTX 1080 definitely is more than capable; not sure about the 1060, but I'd guess it might be able to since it has the same three DisplayPort connections as the 1080. According to this review I found from some guy, the GTX 1080 "supports up to 16 simultaneous viewports in one pass," which I gather could mean separate monitors.
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Re:Home key?
Long-press the home button
Is the home button the little triangle, circle or square?
http://files.tested.com/photos...
If you're struggling at this point you should probably just put it down and forget about it.
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Re:Home key?
Long-press the home button
Is the home button the little triangle, circle or square?
http://files.tested.com/photos...
It's the circle. The mini tutorial that comes up on a clean install points it out and explains it. Even if you skipped the tutorial, 15 seconds of button mashing will reveal it. But you knew which button it was already, you just wanted to be purposely obtuse.
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Re:Home key?
Long-press the home button
Is the home button the little triangle, circle or square?
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Re:Not sure I understand....
Well, it does make sense to avoid redundant hardware, i.e. using the power and platform capabilities of an otherwise at that time unused desktop-PC to play in another area of the house. Graphics cards aren't cheap.
I'd personally like more of an HDMI-over-Ethernet kind of solution for that, however: http://www.tested.com/forums/h...
According to one poster in the link above, the latency is about 30ms. -
Re:Seems tempting, but terrible.
This is just wrong. There is no carrier when I buy apps on Google play. I buy from the google web site. Most of us are not using contracts for mobile phones, my phone is unlocked, my phone provider varies with whatever SIM I use, they do not receive Play store money from Google.
This is true enough if you're using a wifi-only tablet. On Google Play, it says "No Carrier -" plus the model name of my tablet. That being said, I have many phones, many of them unlocked, I can tell you for a fact that Google Play (even the web version) knows what is the last carrier I was using with each phone. I can show you a screenshot if you want.
Also here is an old article. I say "old" because my carrier US T-Mobile no longer does this for any phone, even locked ones, but for a time, Google Play used to filter tethering apps from its app store search results (based on the request of carriers). And Google Play did this filtering even with unlocked GSM phones as evidenced by the quote below.
If you just want to get out from under the carrier’s thumb, you’ve got precious few options. GSM phones that store the carrier identity on SIM cards can be removed from the device. Just power off the phone, pull the SIM, and power the device back up. Now your Play Store should be free from carrier interference. When you put the SIM back in, your apps selection will go back to the way it was, so no updates for the unauthorized tethering apps you sneakily downloaded. Also, rooted users can manually alter the files that identify the carrier, allowing them access to blocked apps.
Obviously, that didn't prevent me from downloading an app from a web site instead, which is what I ended up doing anyway, but I'm quoting that paragraph only to prove the point that carriers, even GSM and prepaid carriers, do have more influence than you think over Google Play (it's just that they don't exercise that option as much as they could, simply because they're getting a cut from Google Play).
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Re:NXP is a huge secure element provider.
I didn't see any of that in the Wired story. It essentially stated: "plug it in, it infects your PC, Antivirus software is useless, and future USB devices plugged into your system can be infected". When Bruce wrote about it along with quite a few others, the evidence seems to point to a rather bad security flaw.
Well, as USB itself does not provide DMA (again, this is requested and handled at the driver level), a USB device can do absolutely nothing until the system recognizes it and starts talking to it (e.g. via a driver). You clearly didn't follow what you've read, or you'd understand that the nature of this vulnerability is that many devices don't have firmware programming disabled and can be reprogrammed to behave as other devices (in fact, you do seem to understand this, as you said "The problem lies in that USB trusts the device to be what it says it is, even if that is more than one thing", which is correct; it's equally correct that a USB device can be more than one thing, e.g. an audio device and a video device, so that's not a flaw, the flaw is in the devices being reprogrammable in the first place). Which, of course, means the devices have to be identified by the system and a driver has to exist for whatever they identify as.
Further proof that it is a device issue here, and evidence that USB devices must be "accepted" by the host before they can to anything at all, here. Not that this should be necessary, given a basic understanding of what you're talking about and a bit of logic.
Meanwhile, devices utilizing any of the DMA-enabled buses*[1] can just power up and happily start reading and writing your RAM, with the system being unable to stop them. If a cheap Firewire device was shipped with its firmware still writable, well, just imagine the possibilities. In fact, it's been done and the sky hasn't fallen yet, so I think we're okay.The short answer to this one is I only usually have 1 set of devices that are relatively permanent for those other buses. It's not a thumbdrive that gets passed around.
That's you; Firewire is still fairly widely used in media production, and the devices using it include cameras, control boards, and DAT decks, which do get passed around. And without USB, where do you think you'd plug that thumb drive?
Drop 2 sets of file transfers through the disks on that one hub, and see what happens.
Okay, so you're doing two copy operations and are surprised when seek times slow them by more than 50%? You don't copy files on spinning disks much, do you? I do it all the time, albeit with SSDs, and have not once seen the slowdown you are talking about, so either you're full of shit, your equipment is full of shit, or you don't really know where the slowdown is coming from, but none of that is the fault of USB.
I have about 10 disks hooked up and was copying files between 3 sets (3 full speed copy operations, including 2 SSDs) with each disk capable of +100MB/s on large file sequential read/write speeds.
Which is it, 10 or 2? One, two, or three transfers? All this goalpost moging makes me think you're just full of shit.
You state that your drives can handle 100MB/s; USB3 is 5gbps (that's 640MBps), while SATA is 1.5, 3., or 6gbps (187.5, 375, or 750MB/s) depending on whether you've got SATA I, II, or III ports. On a high-end mobo like you claim to own, it's probably SATA-III, so 6gbps. That includes a fair bit of overhead, so the best you can e -
Re:It's supposed to look that way
I'm not sure I'm buying the "NES relied on blur and shadowing" argument.
Here's an example that may convince you. From a snes game, but still 240p.
Crisp Blocky pixels: http://files.tested.com/upload...
With NTSC blur and artifacts: http://files.tested.com/photos...
Which do you think is closer to the artist's intention?
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Re:It's supposed to look that way
I'm not sure I'm buying the "NES relied on blur and shadowing" argument.
Here's an example that may convince you. From a snes game, but still 240p.
Crisp Blocky pixels: http://files.tested.com/upload...
With NTSC blur and artifacts: http://files.tested.com/photos...
Which do you think is closer to the artist's intention?
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Face Recognition in Casinos
"One of the most important advances in casino technology comes from facial recognition systems, where guests entering the gambling area are photographed and their visages are compared with an ever-growing database of known cheaters and suspicious people."
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Re:Kickback time
...except when the state does it, it is legal.
I don't see a problem with the YouTube tax. According to TFA, YouTube would be subject to the already existing tax on video-on-demand. This means they would have to pay a percentage of whatever people pay them to watch YouTube (on paid channels), just like their competitors.
The tax on smartphones etc is more problematic. It may lead to smartphones that disable or cripple video streaming just to avoid the tax. If you're wondering why your cellphone or digital camera can only record 30 minutes of video, it is to avoid another tax on "video cameras" that was designed to compensate culture workers.
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Re:Safe workplace
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Re:Pricing Is For Cloud Storage
If you think your reliability for keeping data is better than Google's you are insane. Unlike Microsoft, famed for the Sidekick data loss caused by destroying the backups they were keeping on the same SAN as their originals, Google actually backs up to tape and has demonstrated the ability to use them several times.
On the other hand, what you should be scared of are the privacy implications. There is a massive difference between sending email through gmail; where your email client will actually have been checked for what garbage it puts in files; and using local applications which are probably failing to zero stuff in files. I would never use Google drive without making sure I encrypted it.
Actually, by preference you should send your gmail with GPG, however that does rather spoil the search feature. That's another discussion though.
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BSNES? Well there's your problem.
BSNES would make a supercomputer beg for mercy. The author of the program even wrote an article entitled, "Why Perfect Hardware SNES Emulation Requires a 3GHz CPU." Just use SNES9X as it is pretty efficient and it doesn't suffer from some of the... errors... that the BSNES author harps on again and again in his defense of BSNES.
http://www.tested.com/news/why-perfect-hardware-snes-emulation-requires-a-3ghz-cpu/2712/
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Re:Hardware
All these silly things are keeping Android from being a serious competitor to the iPhone
What world do you live in?
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Which is rather annoying
I've no objection to pentile displays in principle. Humans do have higher green perception and so perhaps such a display can be useful. For that matter it is similar in principle to the Bayer pattern that still digital cameras use for their sensors.
The problem I have is like you've noted with overselling it. You can't claim more resolution on less subpixels. The net result will be a more grainy image. Cameras like to do this too, their "megapixel" count is the total acquisition area, ignoring that each pixel in fact captures only one colour.
Also it seems that maybe it is not such a wonderful idea, since Samsung seems to be working hard to develop and market non pentile OLED displays. They call it "real stripe" and you can find more infor here: http://www.tested.com/news/pentile-vs-real-stripe-amoled-displays-whats-different/1868/.
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Re:Thunderbolt?
Its only/main real use will be DisplayPort.
Wow, for a "geek" site, Slashdot seems inordinately populated with techno-IDIOTS, who don't bother to KEEP UP on IN THE PIPELINE THUNDERBOLT PRODUCTS. And there is beginning to be interest shown by other companies, like Canon, AJA, Apogee, Sonnet, and others.
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Metric, imperial, and beer
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Not an April Fool's joke.
Welcome to 2 months ago: http://www.tested.com/how-to-make-2d-glasses-for-3d-movies/47-279/
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Re:My wife will have what I'm willing to support
If she gets an iPhone she knows she's on her own.
If she get's an iPhone she knows she can be on her own. It's not a fucking PC, it doesn't need a fucking support department. Android might need a factory reset and restore every once in a while. iPhone doesn't.
If you like iPhones that's your perorgative, but if you honestly believe the marketing slogan "it just works", you're brain dead.
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Re:My wife will have what I'm willing to support
Android might need a factory reset and restore every once in a while. iPhone doesn't.
Oh really? Why can I name at least two friends who's iPhone's stopped working until they had a clean OS restored? On one of the phones the WI-FI broke, and the other the voice calls entirely stopped working.
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Re:My wife will have what I'm willing to support
If she gets an iPhone she knows she's on her own.
If she get's an iPhone she knows she can be on her own. It's not a fucking PC, it doesn't need a fucking support department. Android might need a factory reset and restore every once in a while. iPhone doesn't.
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Touchscreens vs. Touchless
It looks cool, but it seems like it will need to be cleaned almost daily from all the touching.
A touch-free interface seems like it will be the next generation interface. -
Let's crash that party.
NOT FINAL HARDWARE. People who bought this product also bought: Swampland, Bridges.
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Spam reaches slashdot again.
This whole article was stolen word for word from tested.com:
http://www.tested.com/news/5-ways-google-can-make-android-truly-tablet-worthy/355/
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The linked story is ripped off from my site...
This linked story is copied in its entirety from my site, Tested.com. While they have posted a link to the author's profile on the story, the content is copyright Tested. The link to the original story is http://www.tested.com/news/5-ways-google-can-make-android-truly-tablet-worthy/355/.
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Re:I disagree
iPads can be taken apart.
http://www.tested.com/ipad-autopsy-video-we-take-apart-an-ipad/47-24/