I still think it was cheating when they changed the Daleks to be able to float up stairs:-)
In the First Doctor story "The Chase", they land on the deck Mary Celeste. Later, one of the Daleks is up on the poop deck. So the Daleks in that story were able to get up stairs (assuming, of course, that they didn't use their time machine to teleport up there or something...)
And, yes, it was very good. Cheap-looking TARDIS corridors notwithstanding.
But this was right after "Curse of the Black Spot" - which was kind of a lemon, IMO. I've really enjoyed the Eleventh Doctor so far but he has had a few really weak episodes.
And I hate River. River is a classic Mary Sue--the kind of character that a 13 year old girl would put in a fanfic. "I'm the Doctor's secret wife, and I'm the only one who can talk smack to him, and I can time travel like him and I'm as mysterious as him and I have a really cool name."
And she's the one who carries a gun so the Doctor doesn't have to... I can see your point. Her "I'm so awesome" moment shooting The Silence in S06E02 left me with a bit of an eye-roll... I don't like when "highly skilled fighter" characters are so "highly skilled" that they just take their enemies for granted. "Oh, I can just let this last one run at me from behind and shoot him without looking. I'm that cool." (Though Tenth Doctor was guilty of this as well, with the Sycorax... And after losing a hand!)
Still, that aside, I've enjoyed her part in the show. What can I say? She's a fun character. IMO anyway. And poor River. She doesn't get any more kisses.:(
After years of not being able to stand Dr Who, I've only just been able to watch this new one. [..] I know the BBC can't spend money; but even the The Dresden Files looked better.
Er... do you remember what the original series was like? This new one is absolutely massive budget compared to it. That shouldn't be taken to mean that the original series was crap, but even in the best episodes you never got the impression that they had tons of money to throw at it.
The new one has quite a lot of effects- maybe too much on occasion- and they're really pretty good for the most part.
Effects cost a lot less money these days than they used to. You can get quite far with a couple of PCs and the right software. Most of the money would be spent on the people to use it.
The new series has a lot more visits to London and Cardiff than the old series had, though.:) But I guess that means fewer trips to the quarry, too.
I'm guessing they were planning on doing a bunch more Dalek stories... as you say, they definitely set things up for it (though nothing leading to anything specific), and they redesigned how they look.
Problem is that the redesigned Daleks look really stupid... like shitty appliances from Sharper Image or Brookstone, from a decade ago.
I tell ya, all this whining about the new Dalek design never gets old (except for immediately).
I mean, it's like you're a Star Trek fan, circa 1987. Oh, lordy, does the new Enterprise look stupid. And the captain is a bald French pacifist with an English accent. And that android guy is just a big Spock wannabe. Clearly this new show is going nowhere.
The thing is, times change. We get new stuff. Unless you want to get the same stuff you've been getting for 40 years, that is. And today's "worst design ever" is tomorrow's beloved classic. So why not get on board while it's still fresh?
Now, don't get me wrong, I think the 2005 Daleks had a lot going for them - the Daleks have had those slats from like the third Dalek story, but it was the 2005 Daleks that made those slats actually look good. To me the 2005 Daleks are like the pinnacle of Dalek designs based on the 1963 originals. But, at the same time, I welcome a turn into new and unexplored territory, and I think the new design has a lot going for it. It's got that new eye-stalk and the new neck vanes, the departure from the slats in pursuit of something sleeker, more like the bands that were on the original Dalek casings.
I guess it's silly for me to say that you should like the new design, or anything like that. But if you're getting hung up on the hunch-back or the bright colors, I'd say get over it and give it a chance.
As for this declaration of a Dalek hiatus - I really think it's unavoidable at this point. There's just been too much Dalek activity since the 2005 series started. "The Stolen Earth" was especially gratuitous - the whole thing was like a giant circle-jerk of character cameos and a ridiculously huge Dalek fleet subjected to a total humiliating defeat... (Though it did bring us Dalek Fred!) That said, I do want to see more of the new Daleks - but I guess I'll just have to be patient. In the mean time I'm really enjoying what's going on with The Silence...
A perfect parallel! The Daleks are an awesome enemy, but once they're defeated two or three times a season, the threat starts to wane. Besides, they all look like bloated, hump-backed iMacs now anyway.:P
Hey, let's bitch about the new Dalek design! Bitching about the new Dalek design is cool.
I know. I literally have not flown anywhere since 9/11. I consider it a matter of principle to keep up with my little boycott. Whenever it is mentioned in my family, they say "oh, you don't like to fly". I say "no, I would love to fly, I just refuse to do all the stupid shit I have to do before I get on a plane". And their response is always to cock their heads like dogs learning a new word.
It's been 10 years of this, and they still find it easier to think I'm a giant pussy who doesn't want to fly, rather than accept the idea that maybe all those security checks are completely pointless. If you've *had* to fly since 9/11, you've pretty must just accepted this and gone on with your life. But to someone who still tries to do the right thing even if no one will ever notice or care, it sucks.
Yeah, pretty much.
Honestly, the ordinary hassles associated with flying are enough to make me hate it anyway. The security stuff just makes it worse. For these reasons I prefer to take the train whenever possible. For some destinations, though, it simply isn't an option.
What do you mean collapsed? I think 99% of Americans would support this. Oh, you mean support by the few people that make decisions and can easily be bought.
Or maybe he meant "support" in the sense of, you know, actually doing something to support it. Practical, useful forms of "support".
Come on, seriously? Skype was a non-open source program before, which met all your needs, and did a great job. Microsoft is likely going to invest heavily in it, and integrate it into Windows 8, XBox360, and a lot of other things, making it more useful to you as more people will be using it.
Well, it wouldn't be more useful to me if they wound up discontinuing Linux support, you know?
These boxes don't provide safety, the boxes provide the ILLUSION of safety while providing the ability of the government to track everyone. If you think that is a good tradeoff, you are my enemy.
The boxes don't provide safety or the illusion of safety. They provide accountability.
Whether it's reasonable to be required to have an automated system in your car that can provide evidence against you if something goes wrong is another matter. I don't really like the idea, personally: the car is mine, it should work for me.
As for kanji, Japanese users expect written homonyms to be distinct (as do we)
There is no equivalent situation in English. You could spell a word with kana or kanji, the same word, same reading, same meaning and everything, but different characters - the distinction is merely whether you're spelling it out by sound or in kanji - or in some cases there could be different kanji as well (and, yes, still the same reading and meaning - the same word in every sense except the writing) - I think equivalence becomes a difficult problem when you consider the international cases.
If I'm writing a file called 'sensor data', I don't expect it to conflict with 'censor data' (homonym), 'detector data', or 'sensor recordings' (synonyms) - while the words are interchangeable when spoken, or equivalent in meaning, they are not the same words. The same is true of alternate writings for Japanese kanji, especially in names.
If it has a different writing, it is a different word; complete with its own (although possibly equivalent) entry in the dictionary.
If I could write Japanese on here maybe I could offer a decent example. As I said, there's not really an equivalent in English.
"Sensor" and "Censor" is not an equivalent example. (And those are homophones, not homonyms)
As I said: there are Japanese words which can be written with different kanji. Not merely homophones or synonyms, and not cases where the meaning is the same but the pronunciation is slightly different (like "minna" vs. "mina") but the same word in every sense but the writing. I don't know all the historical reasons, but I have seen cases of it when I was looking stuff up. Some of 'em are probably "archaic" forms still in use, some of them may be a result of efforts to streamline the writing system, some may be cases where there was historically no single, agreed-upon way to write the word, or the written form varied regionally or something. In some cases a single kanji may have more than one glyph associated with it - and in some of these cases the one kanji actually occupies multiple Unicode data points. Anyway, such cases do exist.
Half-width katakana (JIS) are generally only used as phonetics on systems that don't support UTF- or another native language character encoding; and can be transparently re-coded to the full-width equivalent for storage or transmission in systems that do.
But that's not what happens. Presently you can have two distinct filenames which differ only in kana width. Obviously there's a lot you could do to implement equivalent-name rejection but my argument is that that's the wrong apprach. Just focus on implementing equivalent-name matching and it doesn't matter if there's "identical" names.
As for kanji, Japanese users expect written homonyms to be distinct (as do we)
There is no equivalent situation in English. You could spell a word with kana or kanji, the same word, same reading, same meaning and everything, but different characters - the distinction is merely whether you're spelling it out by sound or in kanji - or in some cases there could be different kanji as well (and, yes, still the same reading and meaning - the same word in every sense except the writing) - I think equivalence becomes a difficult problem when you consider the international cases.
As much as I dislike Windows... what purpose does a case-sensitive file system serve? It just confuses people.
Well, for starters it would allow the OS to be properly compatible with systems and software that use case-sensitive file storage.:) (Yeah, kind of circular logic there.)
I think you have a reasonable point there - but it's mostly something that can be dealt with at the application level. Like if you're typing a filename in a file dialog, the UI can do a case-insensitive match regardless of the underlying filesystem. The OS doesn't need to prevent creation of files whose names differ only in case to provide that.
There's also a much larger issue: simply treating uppercase as equivalent to lowercase is fine for English, but for international languages, providing that kind of feature gets you into issues of Unicode normalization. Japanese gets you a good collection of degenerate cases: for instance distinguishing between filenames in hiragana, katakana, half-width katakana, kanji (of which there may be multiple equivalents)... I expect other East Asian languages contain similar challenges. I don't know about other languages... But shouldn't all those filenames be equivalent, too? Is that a problem that's not solved just because it's harder to solve? Isn't that disparity a bit awkward?
Again, it seems to me that the place to address the issue is in UI, in response to user input - not at the underlying file handling calls. If the user searches for a filename - it's fine if there's multiple matches, and appropriate to return matches based on what the software "thinks" the user intended. And UI already does this to some extent. If you're typing in a filename to load, the UI can display approximate matches. File dialogs for save are very similar to those for loading - so again, you'll see, as you're typing, if there's a naming clash that could confuse you later. So why the ham-fisted rule of "no filenames which differ only in case"?
To take it a step further - do filenames even need to be unique any more? Windows UI has hidden filename extensions by default for years. So you could have two files "with the same name" (apparently, anyway) in a single directory already. If you're going to do that, I think it may be time to start letting go of the idea that filenames are unique. There's been a trend toward identifying files by metadata anyway - content indexing, tagging, and so on. Certainly traditional filesystem calls depend on filename uniqueness - but at the UI level, is it really still an appropriate restriction?
I am specifically referring to names in the kernel source tree using conflicting cases such as:
include/linux/netfilter/xt_connmark.h
include/linux/netfilter/xt_CONNMARK.h
This requires that the kernel source be stored on a case insensitive file system, and will not work with Cygwin, nor with the default filesystem for OS X.
You know, my knee-jerk reaction to this is just "why?" Like, do people really need/want to build the kernel on such systems?
But I guess the answer is yes, and there are just cases of kernel builds that I don't normally consider. I guess building for an embedded target, or bootstrapping might be the common ones.
There's a cultural thing, I think - as a unix user I don't think filesystems should be case-insensitive. But at the same time, I guess I don't think it's especially good practice to have filenames that differ only in case...
If they go with 3.0 I hope they include major changes in it. Otherwise what's the point ?
Well, think of how far the kernel's come since 2.6.0 (let alone the original 2.0, fifteen years ago) and a big jump may make some sense.
There's been other changes, as well. For instance they abandoned the even/odd scheme for "stable" vs. "development" kernels when they started v2.6. So this next big increment to the version number will be the first "stable" version without a dedicated "development" version at a neighboring number. A change in the version numbering scheme is also a good reason to bump up to a new major number.
if i could get content at 1920x1200, then i'd be happy again. until then, it might as well cinemascope scanned into NTSC if it doesn't fill my screen; it'll piss me off.
Here's another wrinkle to the equation:
Of course 16:9 content needs to be letterboxed on a 16:10 monitor... But what about 4x3 content? Personally, I've got quite a lot of that: old TV shows and even a few movies, lots and lots of anime, games and so on. I'm on board with the HD thing but I also have a real soft spot for my old favorites. It's safe to say I easily have more 4:3 content than 16:9 content:
To me this makes the 16:10 monitor the better device for video playback. And of course, a computer monitor isn't used just for video playback either - so there's other benefits to the extra resolution as well.
the last thing i want on my screen while the movie is playing is lit-up controls or extra space for them.
Personally I could never really understand the mindset of people who, while shopping for a computer monitor, consider "how will movies look on this thing?" as the first criterion.
I mean, OK, different people have different priorities, sure. But to me a PC is much more than a movie player.
Tried it, it's rubbish. The problem is that while left-white viewing angle is very wide, generally up-down viewing angle is just awful.
Depends on the monitor you get, of course. IPS panels tend to have pretty good viewing angles, though of course you also get extra latency (I've heard) and higher cost. For me it was worth it.
How about explaining why the picture sucked at my local cinema before this 3D craze took off?
The article did mention another practice that was somewhat common at theaters doing film projection: extend the life of the projector bulb by not lighting it at full intensity...
Slashdot Mirror
The Eleventh Doctor is awesome. Most of his episodes are awesome as well. I have no idea what you're complaining about.
I still think it was cheating when they changed the Daleks to be able to float up stairs :-)
In the First Doctor story "The Chase", they land on the deck Mary Celeste. Later, one of the Daleks is up on the poop deck. So the Daleks in that story were able to get up stairs (assuming, of course, that they didn't use their time machine to teleport up there or something...)
Neil Gaiman did one episode.
And, yes, it was very good. Cheap-looking TARDIS corridors notwithstanding.
But this was right after "Curse of the Black Spot" - which was kind of a lemon, IMO. I've really enjoyed the Eleventh Doctor so far but he has had a few really weak episodes.
And I hate River. River is a classic Mary Sue--the kind of character that a 13 year old girl would put in a fanfic. "I'm the Doctor's secret wife, and I'm the only one who can talk smack to him, and I can time travel like him and I'm as mysterious as him and I have a really cool name."
And she's the one who carries a gun so the Doctor doesn't have to... I can see your point. Her "I'm so awesome" moment shooting The Silence in S06E02 left me with a bit of an eye-roll... I don't like when "highly skilled fighter" characters are so "highly skilled" that they just take their enemies for granted. "Oh, I can just let this last one run at me from behind and shoot him without looking. I'm that cool." (Though Tenth Doctor was guilty of this as well, with the Sycorax... And after losing a hand!)
Still, that aside, I've enjoyed her part in the show. What can I say? She's a fun character. IMO anyway. And poor River. She doesn't get any more kisses. :(
After years of not being able to stand Dr Who, I've only just been able to watch this new one. [..] I know the BBC can't spend money; but even the The Dresden Files looked better.
Er... do you remember what the original series was like? This new one is absolutely massive budget compared to it. That shouldn't be taken to mean that the original series was crap, but even in the best episodes you never got the impression that they had tons of money to throw at it.
The new one has quite a lot of effects- maybe too much on occasion- and they're really pretty good for the most part.
Effects cost a lot less money these days than they used to. You can get quite far with a couple of PCs and the right software. Most of the money would be spent on the people to use it.
The new series has a lot more visits to London and Cardiff than the old series had, though. :) But I guess that means fewer trips to the quarry, too.
I'm guessing they were planning on doing a bunch more Dalek stories... as you say, they definitely set things up for it (though nothing leading to anything specific), and they redesigned how they look.
Problem is that the redesigned Daleks look really stupid... like shitty appliances from Sharper Image or Brookstone, from a decade ago.
I tell ya, all this whining about the new Dalek design never gets old (except for immediately).
I mean, it's like you're a Star Trek fan, circa 1987. Oh, lordy, does the new Enterprise look stupid. And the captain is a bald French pacifist with an English accent. And that android guy is just a big Spock wannabe. Clearly this new show is going nowhere.
The thing is, times change. We get new stuff. Unless you want to get the same stuff you've been getting for 40 years, that is. And today's "worst design ever" is tomorrow's beloved classic. So why not get on board while it's still fresh?
Now, don't get me wrong, I think the 2005 Daleks had a lot going for them - the Daleks have had those slats from like the third Dalek story, but it was the 2005 Daleks that made those slats actually look good. To me the 2005 Daleks are like the pinnacle of Dalek designs based on the 1963 originals. But, at the same time, I welcome a turn into new and unexplored territory, and I think the new design has a lot going for it. It's got that new eye-stalk and the new neck vanes, the departure from the slats in pursuit of something sleeker, more like the bands that were on the original Dalek casings.
I guess it's silly for me to say that you should like the new design, or anything like that. But if you're getting hung up on the hunch-back or the bright colors, I'd say get over it and give it a chance.
As for this declaration of a Dalek hiatus - I really think it's unavoidable at this point. There's just been too much Dalek activity since the 2005 series started. "The Stolen Earth" was especially gratuitous - the whole thing was like a giant circle-jerk of character cameos and a ridiculously huge Dalek fleet subjected to a total humiliating defeat... (Though it did bring us Dalek Fred!) That said, I do want to see more of the new Daleks - but I guess I'll just have to be patient. In the mean time I'm really enjoying what's going on with The Silence...
A perfect parallel! The Daleks are an awesome enemy, but once they're defeated two or three times a season, the threat starts to wane. Besides, they all look like bloated, hump-backed iMacs now anyway. :P
Hey, let's bitch about the new Dalek design! Bitching about the new Dalek design is cool.
Yeah, those hassles. wheew. Took me 10 minutes from the time I got my automated ticket until I was waiting at the gate.
Whew, what a fucking hassle.
Can't say that's ever been my experience.
Glad I could give you a convenient opportunity to be a smart-ass, though. You must have been waiting all day. So was I, apparently.
We tried, what did you do?
I did the only thing I could, stopped flying all together...
So you fly separately now?
I know. I literally have not flown anywhere since 9/11. I consider it a matter of principle to keep up with my little boycott. Whenever it is mentioned in my family, they say "oh, you don't like to fly". I say "no, I would love to fly, I just refuse to do all the stupid shit I have to do before I get on a plane". And their response is always to cock their heads like dogs learning a new word.
It's been 10 years of this, and they still find it easier to think I'm a giant pussy who doesn't want to fly, rather than accept the idea that maybe all those security checks are completely pointless. If you've *had* to fly since 9/11, you've pretty must just accepted this and gone on with your life. But to someone who still tries to do the right thing even if no one will ever notice or care, it sucks.
Yeah, pretty much.
Honestly, the ordinary hassles associated with flying are enough to make me hate it anyway. The security stuff just makes it worse. For these reasons I prefer to take the train whenever possible. For some destinations, though, it simply isn't an option.
What do you mean collapsed? I think 99% of Americans would support this. Oh, you mean support by the few people that make decisions and can easily be bought.
Or maybe he meant "support" in the sense of, you know, actually doing something to support it. Practical, useful forms of "support".
Come on, seriously? Skype was a non-open source program before, which met all your needs, and did a great job. Microsoft is likely going to invest heavily in it, and integrate it into Windows 8, XBox360, and a lot of other things, making it more useful to you as more people will be using it.
Well, it wouldn't be more useful to me if they wound up discontinuing Linux support, you know?
These boxes don't
provide safety, the boxes provide the ILLUSION of safety
while providing the ability of the government to track everyone.
If you think that is a good tradeoff, you are my enemy.
The boxes don't provide safety or the illusion of safety. They provide accountability.
Whether it's reasonable to be required to have an automated system in your car that can provide evidence against you if something goes wrong is another matter. I don't really like the idea, personally: the car is mine, it should work for me.
whoosh!
Whoosh? Really? There was a joke there and I missed it? Hard to believe, it's such a small post... There's nowhere for a joke to hide...
As for kanji, Japanese users expect written homonyms to be distinct (as do we)
There is no equivalent situation in English. You could spell a word with kana or kanji, the same word, same reading, same meaning and everything, but different characters - the distinction is merely whether you're spelling it out by sound or in kanji - or in some cases there could be different kanji as well (and, yes, still the same reading and meaning - the same word in every sense except the writing) - I think equivalence becomes a difficult problem when you consider the international cases.
If I'm writing a file called 'sensor data', I don't expect it to conflict with 'censor data' (homonym), 'detector data', or 'sensor recordings' (synonyms) - while the words are interchangeable when spoken, or equivalent in meaning, they are not the same words. The same is true of alternate writings for Japanese kanji, especially in names.
If it has a different writing, it is a different word; complete with its own (although possibly equivalent) entry in the dictionary.
If I could write Japanese on here maybe I could offer a decent example. As I said, there's not really an equivalent in English.
"Sensor" and "Censor" is not an equivalent example. (And those are homophones, not homonyms)
As I said: there are Japanese words which can be written with different kanji. Not merely homophones or synonyms, and not cases where the meaning is the same but the pronunciation is slightly different (like "minna" vs. "mina") but the same word in every sense but the writing. I don't know all the historical reasons, but I have seen cases of it when I was looking stuff up. Some of 'em are probably "archaic" forms still in use, some of them may be a result of efforts to streamline the writing system, some may be cases where there was historically no single, agreed-upon way to write the word, or the written form varied regionally or something. In some cases a single kanji may have more than one glyph associated with it - and in some of these cases the one kanji actually occupies multiple Unicode data points. Anyway, such cases do exist.
Half-width katakana (JIS) are generally only used as phonetics on systems that don't support UTF- or another native language character encoding; and can be transparently re-coded to the full-width equivalent for storage or transmission in systems that do.
But that's not what happens. Presently you can have two distinct filenames which differ only in kana width. Obviously there's a lot you could do to implement equivalent-name rejection but my argument is that that's the wrong apprach. Just focus on implementing equivalent-name matching and it doesn't matter if there's "identical" names.
As for kanji, Japanese users expect written homonyms to be distinct (as do we)
There is no equivalent situation in English. You could spell a word with kana or kanji, the same word, same reading, same meaning and everything, but different characters - the distinction is merely whether you're spelling it out by sound or in kanji - or in some cases there could be different kanji as well (and, yes, still the same reading and meaning - the same word in every sense except the writing) - I think equivalence becomes a difficult problem when you consider the international cases.
As much as I dislike Windows... what purpose does a case-sensitive file system serve? It just confuses people.
Well, for starters it would allow the OS to be properly compatible with systems and software that use case-sensitive file storage. :) (Yeah, kind of circular logic there.)
I think you have a reasonable point there - but it's mostly something that can be dealt with at the application level. Like if you're typing a filename in a file dialog, the UI can do a case-insensitive match regardless of the underlying filesystem. The OS doesn't need to prevent creation of files whose names differ only in case to provide that.
There's also a much larger issue: simply treating uppercase as equivalent to lowercase is fine for English, but for international languages, providing that kind of feature gets you into issues of Unicode normalization. Japanese gets you a good collection of degenerate cases: for instance distinguishing between filenames in hiragana, katakana, half-width katakana, kanji (of which there may be multiple equivalents)... I expect other East Asian languages contain similar challenges. I don't know about other languages... But shouldn't all those filenames be equivalent, too? Is that a problem that's not solved just because it's harder to solve? Isn't that disparity a bit awkward?
Again, it seems to me that the place to address the issue is in UI, in response to user input - not at the underlying file handling calls. If the user searches for a filename - it's fine if there's multiple matches, and appropriate to return matches based on what the software "thinks" the user intended. And UI already does this to some extent. If you're typing in a filename to load, the UI can display approximate matches. File dialogs for save are very similar to those for loading - so again, you'll see, as you're typing, if there's a naming clash that could confuse you later. So why the ham-fisted rule of "no filenames which differ only in case"?
To take it a step further - do filenames even need to be unique any more? Windows UI has hidden filename extensions by default for years. So you could have two files "with the same name" (apparently, anyway) in a single directory already. If you're going to do that, I think it may be time to start letting go of the idea that filenames are unique. There's been a trend toward identifying files by metadata anyway - content indexing, tagging, and so on. Certainly traditional filesystem calls depend on filename uniqueness - but at the UI level, is it really still an appropriate restriction?
That's all ready there.
[citation needed]
I am specifically referring to names in the kernel source tree using conflicting cases such as:
include/linux/netfilter/xt_connmark.h
include/linux/netfilter/xt_CONNMARK.h
This requires that the kernel source be stored on a case insensitive file system, and will not work with Cygwin, nor with the default filesystem for OS X.
You know, my knee-jerk reaction to this is just "why?" Like, do people really need/want to build the kernel on such systems?
But I guess the answer is yes, and there are just cases of kernel builds that I don't normally consider. I guess building for an embedded target, or bootstrapping might be the common ones.
There's a cultural thing, I think - as a unix user I don't think filesystems should be case-insensitive. But at the same time, I guess I don't think it's especially good practice to have filenames that differ only in case...
If they go with 3.0 I hope they include major changes in it. Otherwise what's the point ?
Well, think of how far the kernel's come since 2.6.0 (let alone the original 2.0, fifteen years ago) and a big jump may make some sense.
There's been other changes, as well. For instance they abandoned the even/odd scheme for "stable" vs. "development" kernels when they started v2.6. So this next big increment to the version number will be the first "stable" version without a dedicated "development" version at a neighboring number. A change in the version numbering scheme is also a good reason to bump up to a new major number.
letterboxing = waste
if i could get content at 1920x1200, then i'd be happy again. until then, it might as well cinemascope scanned into NTSC if it doesn't fill my screen; it'll piss me off.
Here's another wrinkle to the equation:
Of course 16:9 content needs to be letterboxed on a 16:10 monitor... But what about 4x3 content? Personally, I've got quite a lot of that: old TV shows and even a few movies, lots and lots of anime, games and so on. I'm on board with the HD thing but I also have a real soft spot for my old favorites. It's safe to say I easily have more 4:3 content than 16:9 content:
16:10 monitor playing:
16:9 content: 10% waste
4:3 content: 17% waste
16:9 monitor playing:
16:9 content: 0% waste
4:3 content: 25% waste
To me this makes the 16:10 monitor the better device for video playback. And of course, a computer monitor isn't used just for video playback either - so there's other benefits to the extra resolution as well.
Linux - where watching a movie is as simple as....
mplayer dvd://1 -vf $(mplayer dvd://1 -vf cropdetect -ss 600 -frames 25 -vf cropdetect -vo null 2>&1 | sed -e '/^\[CROP\]/!d;s/.* (-vf \([^)]\+\).*/\1/' | tail -1),dsize=16/10
(Sorry - I could resist)
Fortunately it's not quite that bad. :)
For doing schematics/layout and some visualization work 1920x1080 is preferable to 1600x1200.
I prefer the third option: 1920 x 1200. :)
the last thing i want on my screen while the movie is playing is lit-up controls or extra space for them.
Personally I could never really understand the mindset of people who, while shopping for a computer monitor, consider "how will movies look on this thing?" as the first criterion.
I mean, OK, different people have different priorities, sure. But to me a PC is much more than a movie player.
Tried it, it's rubbish. The problem is that while left-white viewing angle is very wide, generally up-down viewing angle is just awful.
Depends on the monitor you get, of course. IPS panels tend to have pretty good viewing angles, though of course you also get extra latency (I've heard) and higher cost. For me it was worth it.
How about explaining why the picture sucked at my local cinema before this 3D craze took off?
The article did mention another practice that was somewhat common at theaters doing film projection: extend the life of the projector bulb by not lighting it at full intensity...