They're bringing out 100Hz televisions (UK) because 50Hz TVs flicker. Even at 50Hz, your eye still sees seperate frames. 24FPS is regarded as the MINIMUM framerate required for humans to percieve something as fluid motion instead of individual frames, but realisticly, unless you get up to about 70-90Hz most people will still be able to see either a flicker or seperate frames - especially on a large screen such as a cinema (your peripheral vision is quicker to sense changes in light than the center of your eye - this is because the center of the eye is mainly concerned with accurate focus and colour and contains less of the more light sensitive 'rod' cells).
So basically, you probably need about 70FPS (preferably 90) and a refresh rate that matches in order to percieve real-life type movement with absolutely no flicker. Obviously your monitor only draws frames up to the value of it's own refresh rate (a 70Hz non-interlaced monitor can obviously only render 70 frames) so there is no reason to ever require more frames than this in a game - your monitor won't draw, your eye can't see them and your brain won't percieve them. People who spend money to try and get 200FPS instead of 120FPS are really quite stupid. They're better off spending their money on a decent sound system or a better screen.
If cards can shove out 100FPS+ by default these days, then it's a sign that the games developers aren't making the most of the hardware and should shove out more detail/more polygons/bigger textures/better lighting etc to make the scenes look better, while keeping the framerate around 70-90fps.
Possibly... but the trailers on BBC don't normally jump on to your video without you asking... It's something you're getting given without having asked for it - like a junk mail though the door or a telephone sales call (obviously less instrusive than either of these which is why it doesn't really bother me).
Don't be fooled by the supposedly massive power output of this system. I've heard such systems many times, and pumping that much power (probably 1000W PMPO ~= 500W RMS?) into tiny plastic housed speakers really sounds quite crap.
I've got VASTLY better sound by connecting the audio output (headphone socket) from my old Soundblaster AWE 32 (ISA) straight to some Mission bookshelf speakers using a custom cable (3.5mm stereo jack to twin speaker cable!). That sounds card had a reasonable 12W RMS power amp on board that most new sound cards don't have (only line out or 4W headphone). I was surprised at how good this set up actually sounded. It lacked in the old bass department if you turned the sound the right up, but it was fine for normal listening levels or watching films.
A cheap (and VERY old Yamaha amp from eBay) made this set up even better (and provided me with a tuner!). All this for much less money and WAY more sound quality.
If you don't believe me, try it yourself. Get a really cheap old amp, and use your real hi-fi speakers - I can guarantee it will sound better than any plastic computer speakers ever will.
You don't need 5 channels - this just makes music sound crap and is just a gimmick for gamers. It's far better to get a decent stereo set up working first and if you really want 5 channel audio - then an old dolby digital amp off e-bay will definitely sound better than a package like this Logitech system.
The "1000W" figure is a complete joke! My £1000(GBP = $1500USD) NAD system is only 65W per channel and sounds stunningly good even using bookshelf speakers. Never EVER be tempted to equate output power to sound quality (especically if the power is measured PMPO rather than RMS) and never underestimate how bad small speakers sound compared to larger ones. Two tiny (10cm drivers) speakers + subwoofer does not in any way equate to the quality obtained by two half decent mid-sized bookshelf hi-fi speakers.
I've not been tempted by Sky+ myself, purely because whenever I've seen it in a shop, the quality looks awful. It always seems to have very visible compression artifacts which I think would annoy me. It looks more like it's come from the Internet than a dedicated satellite feed. The digital stream that comes off my cable box (NTL) seems much higher quality and in the vast majority of cases, there is no visible compression at all. It's pretty much DVD quality on every channel (when not sat 2feet from the screen anyway!).
All current PVR/DVR systems are quite restricted in their capability because they only have analog inputs/outputs.
It's a great shame that people like Sky and NTL (digital satellite and cable operators in the UK) don't put IEEE1394 firewire connectiors (in and out) on all their equipement, so that instead of getting a nice digital signal in MPEG 2 format - converting it to analog, then reencoding it back to MPEG 2 when it would be so easy for the box to just stream out MPEG 2 so that the original source could be recorded unaltered. I can't believe that some enterprising hacker hasn't made an add on board for DVB or digital cable that you can shove inside your box so you can stream the MPEG 2 stream to a PC for digital recording.
One day all video recorders will be firewire only, record digitally, have access to the program guide and have a built in DVD writer for making recorded shows 'portable'. The thing is, due to lack of innovation, it'll probably take 5-10 years, even though all the technology to do this exists now.
The posts below the one referenced indicate this is a hoax. If you read the FAQ it contains the following question:
"I just read TiVo is going to pull out of the UK - is this true? Where can I get a new TiVo box from? TiVo are not pulling out of the UK. Read the real truth here."
I can't believe that story actually made it on to slashdot.
Has it got so bad that now even the admins don't read the article?!
The TIVO units have a facility for manadory recordings. It's not a hack - it's a feature:) The TIVO people can update the boxes at the time they download the new programme information with instructions to record one or more shows (unless the user is wants to record another show at the same time).
The BBC probably paid TIVO to cause this to happen as a promotion for the comedy programme concerned. So it's not a hack or anything - they're just exploiting the services TIVO provides anyway.
What's odd is the BBC channels aren't supposed to contain any advertising (all UK people who own a device capabile of recieving the terrestrial signals must buy a TV licence, which covers the cost of the BBC channels) but this move strikes me as an advert in it's own right.
It is *NOT* an offense if you can't produce your licence on the spot (in the UK). In fact the police advise you not to leave your licence in the car (for identity theft reasons). The law states that you must provide your driving licence, insurance and MOT documentation to your local police station *within 7 days* if requested to do so by a police officer.
I agree - seems that these people only want the support of US citizens. The whole site seems to be US biassed even though it claims to be international.
I'm not going to support it... Neither should anyone else. Why is that site so incredibly biassed towards US? It's supposed to be international.
> Ever bought a foreign DVD only to discover it > won't play on your American DVD player?
It doesn't have a PentiumIII 700 - it has a lower spec Celeron-like processor running at 733 on a 133MHz bus. The other components you mention are hardly expensive... A DVD drive sells for about $12 when bought by the palette. A 5.1 audio chipset probably costs just a few dollars. They're not buying this stuff from their local PC World - they're importing it en masse at a fraction of it's retail price.
Dell sell some of the most expensive computers available - of course they're not going to be as cheap as an XBox.
I don't understand... Why do locks have/need master keys? I though you could only have one lock tied to a specific key. Are we talking about "Yale" type cylinder locks here?
Why would someone produce a lock for which a master key could be made anyway? Surely crimials would just steal or make a master key and they'd be laughing...
Is a master key an accidental side effect of the way a lock works, or are most locks intended to have a master key?
No no no! Why do people always believe what they want to belive.
This is an urban myth. MS does *not* lose money on the sale of an XBox. It has lost money *so far* when incorporating all the development costs, but it doesn't lose more money each time someone buys one - it makes a small amount of the already lost/spent money back. The cost of the box easily covers the production cost of the unit and also incorporates a small profit for both MS and the retailer/distributor. Admittedly it probably makes more money out of the games, but buying loads of XBoxen will not send MS off into Chapter 11.
Err, this may be a silly question, but where are you going to get the CPU power from to encode 4 video streams?
My 1Ghz Athlon is at 80% encoding HALF-frame video into MPEG4 and it drops seriously large numbers of frames if I try and encode at the native resolution (720x576 for UK PAL).
I tried using MPEG2 but that uses up seriously massive amounts of hard disk space, just to get it up to VHS standard.
Unless someone makes a hardware MPEG4 encoder, I can't see how you can easily encode 4 video streams at once unless they're done in a fairly low quality/resolution.
> you're kidding me, right? Get UT2003 in > 1600x1200 with everything maxed out and even > on a 9700pro you won't see more than 30 or > so fps
So what's the problem? Your eye can only see about 30fps anyway - so your proving the point that existing hardware is fast enough.
Nobody needs any more than 30fps - even your monitor can only draw about 85fps max at that resolution - and even if it could do more, the phosphors don't fade enough to actually show you all the frames anyway.
People that sit there for hours trying to get an extra 10fps when they're already getting 120fps (on a 70Hz monitor) are really quite sad.
Unless you can upgrade your eyes to see more than about 30fps, there really is no point. Games designers should be trying to improve the quality of the picture so it draws the best possible image at 30fps, rather than simply trying to dump out as many frames as possible to look good in the reviews.
> A few more and a correction. > SATA 1.5 Gbps (not 1.2)
No - I was correct! Please actually read the specification yourself if you don't believe me! It's here - look in section 2.2 on page 12(13 in acrobat).
It's definitely 1.2Gbps which equates to 150MB/sec.
1.5Gbps would be 187.5MB/sec which is wrong.
Unless of course you think there are 10 bits in a byte which of course there aren't - there are 8. Always.
> And that's not even mentioning that WD > probably has the most unreliable, loudest > drives on the market.
I strongly disagree with this statement. Unlike Fujitsu and IBM, Western Digital do not have the reputation of making unreliable drives.
Their new drives feature Fluid Dynamic Bearings and make almost no noise whatsoever (I have 80Gig ones in my computer). You can just hear it spinning up if you put your ear to the case, but I promise you it's silent from then on - even while it's moving the heads.
Buy a domain name for your e-mail (or whatever) and then when asked for your e-mail address, use something like: realplayer@myname.com or amazon@myname.com etc. That way - when you get spammed, you have a rough idea of who to blame and a fairly straightforward way of filtering out the spam (simply shove all mail from realplayer@myname.com in/dev/null and most of it should go away.
The address will be valid enough to allow you to receive your validation key/password/order confirmation, yet fairly disposable as it's unique to the site/company that's trying to spam you.
I've always done this - and the only address that gets loads of spam is newsgroups@.com:)
Some mail filters even let you 'bounce' the mail back as though it's undelivered. This tends to cause most corporate senders to remove you from their lists (sometimes this process is automated)!
This is getting a little silly, but the diseased guy knows where you live and is standing in your doorway with an infected needle. Are you really going let him keep stabbing you with it, even if you know you are immune to his disease?
I get your point and respect your opinion but I think I would still want to prevent someone from using up my DSL line to try and hurt my machine and if the guy upstairs left his tap on, I'd have no guilt over turning it off.
Slashdot Mirror
If you'd read the article, you'd know what he was talking about.
He means burning a picture onto the unused space on a CD - not writing data - all burners can do that!
Nick...
They're bringing out 100Hz televisions (UK) because 50Hz TVs flicker. Even at 50Hz, your eye still sees seperate frames. 24FPS is regarded as the MINIMUM framerate required for humans to percieve something as fluid motion instead of individual frames, but realisticly, unless you get up to about 70-90Hz most people will still be able to see either a flicker or seperate frames - especially on a large screen such as a cinema (your peripheral vision is quicker to sense changes in light than the center of your eye - this is because the center of the eye is mainly concerned with accurate focus and colour and contains less of the more light sensitive 'rod' cells).
So basically, you probably need about 70FPS (preferably 90) and a refresh rate that matches in order to percieve real-life type movement with absolutely no flicker. Obviously your monitor only draws frames up to the value of it's own refresh rate (a 70Hz non-interlaced monitor can obviously only render 70 frames) so there is no reason to ever require more frames than this in a game - your monitor won't draw, your eye can't see them and your brain won't percieve them. People who spend money to try and get 200FPS instead of 120FPS are really quite stupid. They're better off spending their money on a decent sound system or a better screen.
If cards can shove out 100FPS+ by default these days, then it's a sign that the games developers aren't making the most of the hardware and should shove out more detail/more polygons/bigger textures/better lighting etc to make the scenes look better, while keeping the framerate around 70-90fps.
Nick...
Possibly... but the trailers on BBC don't normally jump on to your video without you asking... It's something you're getting given without having asked for it - like a junk mail though the door or a telephone sales call (obviously less instrusive than either of these which is why it doesn't really bother me).
Nick...
... gives a whole new meaning to the term "Cluster Bomb".
One link from slashdot and your cluster is totally wasted.
Don't be fooled by the supposedly massive power output of this system. I've heard such systems many times, and pumping that much power (probably 1000W PMPO ~= 500W RMS?) into tiny plastic housed speakers really sounds quite crap.
I've got VASTLY better sound by connecting the audio output (headphone socket) from my old Soundblaster AWE 32 (ISA) straight to some Mission bookshelf speakers using a custom cable (3.5mm stereo jack to twin speaker cable!). That sounds card had a reasonable 12W RMS power amp on board that most new sound cards don't have (only line out or 4W headphone). I was surprised at how good this set up actually sounded. It lacked in the old bass department if you turned the sound the right up, but it was fine for normal listening levels or watching films.
A cheap (and VERY old Yamaha amp from eBay) made this set up even better (and provided me with a tuner!). All this for much less money and WAY more sound quality.
If you don't believe me, try it yourself. Get a really cheap old amp, and use your real hi-fi speakers - I can guarantee it will sound better than any plastic computer speakers ever will.
You don't need 5 channels - this just makes music sound crap and is just a gimmick for gamers. It's far better to get a decent stereo set up working first and if you really want 5 channel audio - then an old dolby digital amp off e-bay will definitely sound better than a package like this Logitech system.
The "1000W" figure is a complete joke! My £1000(GBP = $1500USD) NAD system is only 65W per channel and sounds stunningly good even using bookshelf speakers. Never EVER be tempted to equate output power to sound quality (especically if the power is measured PMPO rather than RMS) and never underestimate how bad small speakers sound compared to larger ones. Two tiny (10cm drivers) speakers + subwoofer does not in any way equate to the quality obtained by two half decent mid-sized bookshelf hi-fi speakers.
Nick...
I've not been tempted by Sky+ myself, purely because whenever I've seen it in a shop, the quality looks awful. It always seems to have very visible compression artifacts which I think would annoy me. It looks more like it's come from the Internet than a dedicated satellite feed. The digital stream that comes off my cable box (NTL) seems much higher quality and in the vast majority of cases, there is no visible compression at all. It's pretty much DVD quality on every channel (when not sat 2feet from the screen anyway!).
Nick...
All current PVR/DVR systems are quite restricted in their capability because they only have analog inputs/outputs.
It's a great shame that people like Sky and NTL (digital satellite and cable operators in the UK) don't put IEEE1394 firewire connectiors (in and out) on all their equipement, so that instead of getting a nice digital signal in MPEG 2 format - converting it to analog, then reencoding it back to MPEG 2 when it would be so easy for the box to just stream out MPEG 2 so that the original source could be recorded unaltered. I can't believe that some enterprising hacker hasn't made an add on board for DVB or digital cable that you can shove inside your box so you can stream the MPEG 2 stream to a PC for digital recording.
One day all video recorders will be firewire only, record digitally, have access to the program guide and have a built in DVD writer for making recorded shows 'portable'. The thing is, due to lack of innovation, it'll probably take 5-10 years, even though all the technology to do this exists now.
Nick...
God I hate slashdot sometimes.
The posts below the one referenced indicate this is a hoax. If you read the FAQ it contains the following question:
"I just read TiVo is going to pull out of the UK - is this true? Where can I get a new TiVo box from?
TiVo are not pulling out of the UK. Read the real truth here."
I can't believe that story actually made it on to slashdot.
Has it got so bad that now even the admins don't read the article?!
Nick...
The TIVO units have a facility for manadory recordings. It's not a hack - it's a feature :) The TIVO people can update the boxes at the time they download the new programme information with instructions to record one or more shows (unless the user is wants to record another show at the same time).
The BBC probably paid TIVO to cause this to happen as a promotion for the comedy programme concerned. So it's not a hack or anything - they're just exploiting the services TIVO provides anyway.
What's odd is the BBC channels aren't supposed to contain any advertising (all UK people who own a device capabile of recieving the terrestrial signals must buy a TV licence, which covers the cost of the BBC channels) but this move strikes me as an advert in it's own right.
Nick...
It is *NOT* an offense if you can't produce your licence on the spot (in the UK). In fact the police advise you not to leave your licence in the car (for identity theft reasons). The law states that you must provide your driving licence, insurance and MOT documentation to your local police station *within 7 days* if requested to do so by a police officer.
Nick
I agree - seems that these people only want the support of US citizens. The whole site seems to be US biassed even though it claims to be international.
. shtml
I'm not going to support it... Neither should anyone else.
Why is that site so incredibly biassed towards US? It's supposed to be international.
> Ever bought a foreign DVD only to discover it
> won't play on your American DVD player?
I leave you with this classic article:
http://www.satirewire.com/news/0010/international
It doesn't have a PentiumIII 700 - it has a lower spec Celeron-like processor running at 733 on a 133MHz bus. The other components you mention are hardly expensive... A DVD drive sells for about $12 when bought by the palette. A 5.1 audio chipset probably costs just a few dollars. They're not buying this stuff from their local PC World - they're importing it en masse at a fraction of it's retail price.
Dell sell some of the most expensive computers available - of course they're not going to be as cheap as an XBox.
Nick...
I don't understand... Why do locks have/need master keys? I though you could only have one lock tied to a specific key. Are we talking about "Yale" type cylinder locks here?
Why would someone produce a lock for which a master key could be made anyway? Surely crimials would just steal or make a master key and they'd be laughing...
Is a master key an accidental side effect of the way a lock works, or are most locks intended to have a master key?
Nick...
> The Xbox itself is sold at a loss
No no no! Why do people always believe what they want to belive.
This is an urban myth. MS does *not* lose money on the sale of an XBox. It has lost money *so far* when incorporating all the development costs, but it doesn't lose more money each time someone buys one - it makes a small amount of the already lost/spent money back. The cost of the box easily covers the production cost of the unit and also incorporates a small profit for both MS and the retailer/distributor. Admittedly it probably makes more money out of the games, but buying loads of XBoxen will not send MS off into Chapter 11.
I have no problem with disk speed or memory - my point was regarding CPU utilisation which adding faster disks and more RAM doesn't fix.
You probably have a faster processor or you're happy to put up with lower video quality.
Nick...
Err, this may be a silly question, but where are you going to get the CPU power from to encode 4 video streams?
My 1Ghz Athlon is at 80% encoding HALF-frame video into MPEG4 and it drops seriously large numbers of frames if I try and encode at the native resolution (720x576 for UK PAL).
I tried using MPEG2 but that uses up seriously massive amounts of hard disk space, just to get it up to VHS standard.
Unless someone makes a hardware MPEG4 encoder, I can't see how you can easily encode 4 video streams at once unless they're done in a fairly low quality/resolution.
Nick...
> you're kidding me, right? Get UT2003 in
> 1600x1200 with everything maxed out and even
> on a 9700pro you won't see more than 30 or
> so fps
So what's the problem? Your eye can only see about 30fps anyway - so your proving the point that existing hardware is fast enough.
Nobody needs any more than 30fps - even your monitor can only draw about 85fps max at that resolution - and even if it could do more, the phosphors don't fade enough to actually show you all the frames anyway.
People that sit there for hours trying to get an extra 10fps when they're already getting 120fps (on a 70Hz monitor) are really quite sad.
Unless you can upgrade your eyes to see more than about 30fps, there really is no point. Games designers should be trying to improve the quality of the picture so it draws the best possible image at 30fps, rather than simply trying to dump out as many frames as possible to look good in the reviews.
Nick...
That doesn't get around European law - it just gets around prosecution :)
:)
How can they target every single user of the product in their prosecution case?
Nick...
> A few more and a correction.
> SATA 1.5 Gbps (not 1.2)
No - I was correct! Please actually read the specification yourself if you don't believe me! It's here - look in section 2.2 on page 12(13 in acrobat).
It's definitely 1.2Gbps which equates to 150MB/sec.
1.5Gbps would be 187.5MB/sec which is wrong.
Unless of course you think there are 10 bits in a byte which of course there aren't - there are 8. Always.
Nick...
> And that's not even mentioning that WD
> probably has the most unreliable, loudest
> drives on the market.
I strongly disagree with this statement. Unlike Fujitsu and IBM, Western Digital do not have the reputation of making unreliable drives.
Their new drives feature Fluid Dynamic Bearings and make almost no noise whatsoever (I have 80Gig ones in my computer). You can just hear it spinning up if you put your ear to the case, but I promise you it's silent from then on - even while it's moving the heads.
Nick...
Except it's half the speed of a SerialATA drive and twice the price. That makes it 4 times worse in my book :)
Hardly perfect.
Nick...
> SerialATA 1.0 - 1.2Gbps (150Mb/sec)
Sorry that's 150Mbytes/sec (MBps?) not Mbits/sec, to avoid confusion...
Nick...
What are you talking about? USB is slower than SerialATA not faster... Much much slower in fact.
Here's a quick comparison
SerialATA 1.0 - 1.2Gbps (150Mb/sec)
USB 2.0 - 480 Mbps
USB 1.1 - 12 Mbps
Firewire (IEEE1394) - 400 Mbps
Parallel Port - 1 Mbps
Serial Port - 0.115 Mbps
Figures taken from the actual spec on serialata.org and from here.
Nick...
Buy a domain name for your e-mail (or whatever) and then when asked for your e-mail address, use something like: realplayer@myname.com or amazon@myname.com etc. That way - when you get spammed, you have a rough idea of who to blame and a fairly straightforward way of filtering out the spam (simply shove all mail from realplayer@myname.com in /dev/null and most of it should go away.
:)
The address will be valid enough to allow you to receive your validation key/password/order confirmation, yet fairly disposable as it's unique to the site/company that's trying to spam you.
I've always done this - and the only address that gets loads of spam is newsgroups@.com
Some mail filters even let you 'bounce' the mail back as though it's undelivered. This tends to cause most corporate senders to remove you from their lists (sometimes this process is automated)!
Nick...
This is getting a little silly, but the diseased guy knows where you live and is standing in your doorway with an infected needle. Are you really going let him keep stabbing you with it, even if you know you are immune to his disease?
I get your point and respect your opinion but I think I would still want to prevent someone from using up my DSL line to try and hurt my machine and if the guy upstairs left his tap on, I'd have no guilt over turning it off.
Nick...