The 2408 (rev A00 on that site; A01 is vastly better) is one of the most notorious monitors ever made in terms of input lag. Inverse ghosting isn't an issue on it, though. Like I said, there is a slight correlation (because you need at least a 1-frame lag to make overdrive work), but that's all there is to it.
Overdrive is commonly used on all types of panels - TN, *VA, *IPS.
It isn't related to input lag as much as the summary would like you to believe. Somewhat, yes, but not that much; also, PVA panels are generally the ones with biggest input lag.
Some *VA panels have an input lag of 3-4 frames, some have only 1; some TN panels have a lag of 1 frame, some have 3. Some panels have overdrive that you cannot even notice, some - like the Dell 2407WHP-HC - will make you want to poke your eyes out.
What's much worse than input lag and ghosting are the eternal marketing races for MOAR BRIGHTNESS!!!11 and MOAR GAMUT!!1ONE, eventually leaving you with a monitor with a *minimum* brightness of 250 cd/m2, happily roasting your eyes out in anything but daylight, and with a gamut so large that skin tones heavily shift towards red, wildly inaccurate colours, and easily-visible fringing when you turn ClearType on (surprisingly, Windows Se7en will have proper low-level wide gamut management and will tone it down to sRGB on request, eliminating all issues; probably one of the few things that are actually good enough in that OS).
Meanwhile, HP and Dell are shipping laptops with RGB LED-backlit displays with 105% NTSC color gamut. Apple is slipping, badly, from this user's perspective.
The wider the gamut, the more inaccurate the colours are. You DO NOT want wide gamut.
Take a ruler and a rubber band. By default, the band stretches from 0 to 5 units. Place marks on the rubber band at positions 1, 2, 3 and 4. Now stretch the band on the right side. It expands from 0 to 7 units. Where are all the marks?
Now imagine that done in three dimensions (R,G,B). What used to be a (2,2,2) can be (3,2,4) on a stretched three-dimensional band (read: wide gamut monitor).
It's possible to emulate the original (2,2,2) to an extent, but by doing so, you lower the dynamic range. In our rubber band example, you would reach the original (2,2,2) by using actual (1,1,1) or thereabout, which means that your original (1,1,1) will also have to be a current (1,1,1).
Bah, nobody will read what I wrote, anyway, the discussion is too old and there are too many replies.
Yes, you are right, I misinterpreted MrMr's question - some time ago, there were complaints about the calculator not producing expected results because of how its math engine was made.
Sadly, that wasn't the best driver software out there. Many moons ago, I remember the Logitech mouse drivers let you use the scroll wheel WITHOUT having to click to focus on the window to scroll. You just moved your mouse to the zone even if it wasn't in focus. Sadly, I can't find that nowadays.
I'm an experienced developer who had been fiddling around with programming since the days of ZX Spectrum, and I'd be very happy if I earned the equivalent of $14 per hour (it's more like $8.50). Maybe I should switch to construction... Or another country:)
* Configure My Documents (or your home directory) to the terabyte drive.
If you are using Windows, that part is a real bitch.
Sure, you can move My Documents easily to another drive... But not so with the entire profile directory. There are hacks to do it after Windows is installed, but for the most part, they are much too complicated. The "solution" is to do a fresh Windows install with customized settings that will move Documents and Settings off the system drive. However, it's never simple with Microsoft: if you do that, you risk some Windows updates failing, believe it or not.
MP3 is plenty good enough, it just requires more bits. Why have 192kbps MP3 when you can save room with an equally good 160kbps Vorbis?
Why have 160 kbps Vorbis when hard drives are growing in capacity and dropping in price?
I used to encode things in 192 kbps, then VBR, and now I want to smack myself over the head for doing so; blank CDs weren't so cheap back then, and I wanted to save a little bit of money. Looking back, it sure as hell wasn't worth it - I have crappy, lossy mp3 encodings of rare albums that I cannot obtain anymore, and a hard drive that could easily hold 2000 albums encoded with FLAC.
Sure, there was a time when storage was a premium, but now it isn't. Save room for WHAT? Five years from now, when you will be able to cheaply have 10 TB of storage space in your computer, are you going to regret having 160 kbps Vorbis instead of FLAC encodings? I know I would be, so now I'm encoding every CD I still have in lossless. If I were interested in HD video (which I'm not), I'd have no intention of re-encoding it to smaller sizes, because I *know* there will be a time when I'd regret it. Of course, YMMV.
QUESTION: "I read in a newspaper that in l981 you said '640K of memory should be enough for anybody.' What did you mean when you said this?"
ANSWER: "I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time."
Gates goes on a bit about 16-bit computers and megabytes of logical address space, but the kid's question (will this boy never work at Microsoft?) clearly rankled the billionaire visionary.
"Meanwhile, I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again."
Basically every browser ever made has a "don't load images" setting. Nothing unique to Opera about that. Same with turning off Javascript and plugins.
Sure, they have those settings... Hidden somewhere deep inside the Preferences dialogs or through 3rd-party extensions. Not on a toolbar, not on a configurable keypress, not per-tab but globally, and usually requiring you to reload the page to see the changes.
One of its really great features is the ability to browse the web with image loading turned off, either completely, or just by allowing already-cached images to be displayed. Ever ended up on a random forum while googling something and had half a dozen megabytes of flashy avatars and signatures loaded, plus someone embedding giant images into the thread? I have. Image loading toggle is a keypress or a mouse click away.
If you globally turn JavaScript and plugins off, you won't be surprised by a site loading a megabyte of JS from somewhere (damn those huge libraries), or by any kind of Flash content or embedded videos. Helps security, too. You can always whitelist sites you regularly use.
The third great thing about Opera is instant Back/Forward navigation. Nothing is reloaded. Extra bandwidth savings. Extra time savings, too, with mouse gestures.
Of course, things would be a bit better if the format war didn't happen and if we could get to choose to backup to Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, the prices of both being affordable by now... Thanks, Sony!
Elbot: I realize this is a typical marketing question, but I'm supposed to ask it, otherwise they'll use the low-grade oil on me. So, where did you find out about me?
Me: On Slashdot.
Elbot: That explains all these geeks who have been visiting me.
Me: You are a geek robot!
Elbot: Well, that's still one step above being human!... damn, he's good.
Wasn't there a story on/. just yesterday, featuring a Mozilla employee bitching about a proprietary web?
But I suppose limiting Lively to IE and Firefox (on Windows only!) is okay when the product is made by your sugar daddy. Nothing wrong with proprietary by Google, no sir.
If zebra striping doesn't actually make it easier to identify which cells actually belong to a given row - maybe a rethink of what is trying to be accomplished here could help. Perhaps highlighting of the row under the cursor? I'd mod you up if I had some points.
I've worked for a reasonably large company and designed a web app that was potentially to be used by several thousand different people (by the time I left, about eight hundred did). So, I've done some rather amateurish usability testing by observing what people actually do when reading tabular data.
Over 60% of my test subjects used the mouse to scan a table (a striped one, obviously). They would move the pointer to the first column, and then slide it to the right until they've reached the column of data that interests them. So, I've added row highlighting on mouseover. This lowered the amount of "mouse movers" to about 45%, and the time needed for them to find what they wanted in a row dropped by a third. Then I went a step further and added zebra stripes for columns in a highlighted row. Final result: only a third of the people remained "mouse movers", and the time needed to find data halved.
It's just the beginning; it's going to get worse as they become more aggressive. RapidShare wants your money, simple as that, and rest assured that the frustration with discerning those silly cats and dogs _will_ make some people pay.
I have the 1TB GP model and I have a hard time believing that it uses significantly less power than my 250GB Hitachi drive. It consistently runs hotter than the Hitachi. I thought maybe the sensor was wrong but it feels hotter to the touch too. As of right now my Hitachi is at 42 C, WD is at 44 C. It has hit 50 C before, while the Hitachi peaks around 46 C. I had a drive that insisted it was 5C below ambient temperature, and another one that claimed 49C just after turning the computer on.:)
That said, your Hitachi probably has one or two platters, while the big drive has three. It's normal that drives with more platters have a higher operating temperature. You still might need to work on improving ventilation inside your case, judging by those temps - HDD cages are notorious for blocking airflow, the air intake on most cases is usually highly restrictive (even if it only has a honeycomb grill; snip it off).
Idle and seek noise are extremely low, and vibrations almost negligible (this is also a very important thing when you have two same drives, for example in a redundant RAID array *cough*).
There's no talk of perpetual motion. No whisper of broken scientific laws or free energy. Zahn would never go there - at least not yet. But he does see the potential for making electric motors more efficient, and this itself is no small feat.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you remember if there was a big difference between the 2407WHP-HC and the non-HC model when it comes to the input lag?
Having trouble finding numbers to pin on models.
I don't remember, but I can check ;) http://www.digitalversus.com/duels.php?ty=6&ma1=88&mo1=116&p1=1217&ma2=88&mo2=249&p2=2366&ph=12
The average difference is half a frame.
Here's a comparison with the 2408: http://www.digitalversus.com/duels.php?ty=6&ma1=88&mo1=116&p1=1217&ma2=88&mo2=342&p2=3161&ph=12
The 2408 (rev A00 on that site; A01 is vastly better) is one of the most notorious monitors ever made in terms of input lag. Inverse ghosting isn't an issue on it, though. Like I said, there is a slight correlation (because you need at least a 1-frame lag to make overdrive work), but that's all there is to it.
Overdrive is commonly used on all types of panels - TN, *VA, *IPS.
It isn't related to input lag as much as the summary would like you to believe. Somewhat, yes, but not that much; also, PVA panels are generally the ones with biggest input lag.
Some *VA panels have an input lag of 3-4 frames, some have only 1; some TN panels have a lag of 1 frame, some have 3. Some panels have overdrive that you cannot even notice, some - like the Dell 2407WHP-HC - will make you want to poke your eyes out.
What's much worse than input lag and ghosting are the eternal marketing races for MOAR BRIGHTNESS!!!11 and MOAR GAMUT!!1ONE, eventually leaving you with a monitor with a *minimum* brightness of 250 cd/m2, happily roasting your eyes out in anything but daylight, and with a gamut so large that skin tones heavily shift towards red, wildly inaccurate colours, and easily-visible fringing when you turn ClearType on (surprisingly, Windows Se7en will have proper low-level wide gamut management and will tone it down to sRGB on request, eliminating all issues; probably one of the few things that are actually good enough in that OS).
When it comes to monitors, HardForum is generally the place you want to thoroughly check out: http://www.hardforum.com/forumdisplay.php?f=78
A 105% gamut is almost 50% larger than the sRGB gamut.
Meanwhile, HP and Dell are shipping laptops with RGB LED-backlit displays with 105% NTSC color gamut. Apple is slipping, badly, from this user's perspective.
The wider the gamut, the more inaccurate the colours are. You DO NOT want wide gamut.
Take a ruler and a rubber band. By default, the band stretches from 0 to 5 units. Place marks on the rubber band at positions 1, 2, 3 and 4. Now stretch the band on the right side. It expands from 0 to 7 units. Where are all the marks?
Now imagine that done in three dimensions (R,G,B). What used to be a (2,2,2) can be (3,2,4) on a stretched three-dimensional band (read: wide gamut monitor).
It's possible to emulate the original (2,2,2) to an extent, but by doing so, you lower the dynamic range. In our rubber band example, you would reach the original (2,2,2) by using actual (1,1,1) or thereabout, which means that your original (1,1,1) will also have to be a current (1,1,1).
Bah, nobody will read what I wrote, anyway, the discussion is too old and there are too many replies.
Yes, you are right, I misinterpreted MrMr's question - some time ago, there were complaints about the calculator not producing expected results because of how its math engine was made.
Sorry :(
But did they fix the [calc] bug? Or does it still produce 'scientific' and 'wrong' results for 3+2*2?
Ages ago. http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/05/25/141253.aspx
The calculator in Windows 7 is also vastly improved: http://lifehacker.com/5078756/windows-7s-calculator-bundles-real+life-uses
Sadly, that wasn't the best driver software out there. Many moons ago, I remember the Logitech mouse drivers let you use the scroll wheel WITHOUT having to click to focus on the window to scroll. You just moved your mouse to the zone even if it wasn't in focus. Sadly, I can't find that nowadays.
It was very buggy, so they removed it.
Try KatMouse: http://ehiti.de/katmouse/
I'm an experienced developer who had been fiddling around with programming since the days of ZX Spectrum, and I'd be very happy if I earned the equivalent of $14 per hour (it's more like $8.50). Maybe I should switch to construction... Or another country :)
* Configure My Documents (or your home directory) to the terabyte drive.
If you are using Windows, that part is a real bitch.
Sure, you can move My Documents easily to another drive... But not so with the entire profile directory. There are hacks to do it after Windows is installed, but for the most part, they are much too complicated. The "solution" is to do a fresh Windows install with customized settings that will move Documents and Settings off the system drive. However, it's never simple with Microsoft: if you do that, you risk some Windows updates failing, believe it or not.
*sigh*
MP3 is plenty good enough, it just requires more bits. Why have 192kbps MP3 when you can save room with an equally good 160kbps Vorbis?
Why have 160 kbps Vorbis when hard drives are growing in capacity and dropping in price?
I used to encode things in 192 kbps, then VBR, and now I want to smack myself over the head for doing so; blank CDs weren't so cheap back then, and I wanted to save a little bit of money. Looking back, it sure as hell wasn't worth it - I have crappy, lossy mp3 encodings of rare albums that I cannot obtain anymore, and a hard drive that could easily hold 2000 albums encoded with FLAC.
Sure, there was a time when storage was a premium, but now it isn't. Save room for WHAT? Five years from now, when you will be able to cheaply have 10 TB of storage space in your computer, are you going to regret having 160 kbps Vorbis instead of FLAC encodings? I know I would be, so now I'm encoding every CD I still have in lossless. If I were interested in HD video (which I'm not), I'd have no intention of re-encoding it to smaller sizes, because I *know* there will be a time when I'd regret it. Of course, YMMV.
I've read that it was an IBM engineer who said it. Could be another urban legend.
Anyway, Gates denied saying it: http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1997/01/1484 (Oldest link - it's from 1997 - that I could find.)
QUESTION: "I read in a newspaper that in l981 you said '640K of memory should be enough for anybody.' What did you mean when you said this?"
ANSWER: "I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time."
Gates goes on a bit about 16-bit computers and megabytes of logical address space, but the kid's question (will this boy never work at Microsoft?) clearly rankled the billionaire visionary.
"Meanwhile, I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again."
Basically every browser ever made has a "don't load images" setting. Nothing unique to Opera about that. Same with turning off Javascript and plugins.
Sure, they have those settings... Hidden somewhere deep inside the Preferences dialogs or through 3rd-party extensions. Not on a toolbar, not on a configurable keypress, not per-tab but globally, and usually requiring you to reload the page to see the changes.
Nobody suggested this yet, so I will:
Use Opera.
One of its really great features is the ability to browse the web with image loading turned off, either completely, or just by allowing already-cached images to be displayed. Ever ended up on a random forum while googling something and had half a dozen megabytes of flashy avatars and signatures loaded, plus someone embedding giant images into the thread? I have. Image loading toggle is a keypress or a mouse click away.
If you globally turn JavaScript and plugins off, you won't be surprised by a site loading a megabyte of JS from somewhere (damn those huge libraries), or by any kind of Flash content or embedded videos. Helps security, too. You can always whitelist sites you regularly use.
The third great thing about Opera is instant Back/Forward navigation. Nothing is reloaded. Extra bandwidth savings. Extra time savings, too, with mouse gestures.
Of course, things would be a bit better if the format war didn't happen and if we could get to choose to backup to Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, the prices of both being affordable by now... Thanks, Sony!
Elbot: I realize this is a typical marketing question, but I'm supposed to ask it, otherwise they'll use the low-grade oil on me. So, where did you find out about me?
Me: On Slashdot.
Elbot: That explains all these geeks who have been visiting me.
Me: You are a geek robot!
Elbot: Well, that's still one step above being human! ... damn, he's good.
On the other hand, an Opera user trying to use Firefox feels lost, the same way :)
I'm still using 9.27. Tried 9.5 and it had so many quirks that I reverted back. Not quite sure if I should even try 9.6...
It's Google. It will never go out of beta. Many Google apps have not supported Opera and Safari properly for years now.
Wasn't there a story on /. just yesterday, featuring a Mozilla employee bitching about a proprietary web?
But I suppose limiting Lively to IE and Firefox (on Windows only!) is okay when the product is made by your sugar daddy. Nothing wrong with proprietary by Google, no sir.
Burn, karma, burn!
I've worked for a reasonably large company and designed a web app that was potentially to be used by several thousand different people (by the time I left, about eight hundred did). So, I've done some rather amateurish usability testing by observing what people actually do when reading tabular data.
Over 60% of my test subjects used the mouse to scan a table (a striped one, obviously). They would move the pointer to the first column, and then slide it to the right until they've reached the column of data that interests them. So, I've added row highlighting on mouseover. This lowered the amount of "mouse movers" to about 45%, and the time needed for them to find what they wanted in a row dropped by a third. Then I went a step further and added zebra stripes for columns in a highlighted row. Final result: only a third of the people remained "mouse movers", and the time needed to find data halved.
Interesting stuff.
It's just the beginning; it's going to get worse as they become more aggressive. RapidShare wants your money, simple as that, and rest assured that the frustration with discerning those silly cats and dogs _will_ make some people pay.
:)
The only challenge is how to get you to pay.
But if they're WD GP, you are going to save a lot of Watts in your redundant reduntant disk array array.
Ugh. No wonder :/
Maybe you could get a 2x5.25", uhm, thingie with a fan. Scythe has one, it's called "Kama Bay".
That said, your Hitachi probably has one or two platters, while the big drive has three. It's normal that drives with more platters have a higher operating temperature. You still might need to work on improving ventilation inside your case, judging by those temps - HDD cages are notorious for blocking airflow, the air intake on most cases is usually highly restrictive (even if it only has a honeycomb grill; snip it off).
Can you take a couple of pics?
In fact, WD GP drives are the quietest on the market. Found this gem just the other day:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article804-page2.html
Idle and seek noise are extremely low, and vibrations almost negligible (this is also a very important thing when you have two same drives, for example in a redundant RAID array *cough*).
The power savings aren't 10W, though.
FTFA:
There's no talk of perpetual motion. No whisper of broken scientific laws or free energy. Zahn would never go there - at least not yet. But he does see the potential for making electric motors more efficient, and this itself is no small feat.
Why the headline, Taco?