Even worse, it may be going to 15% soon in a lot places. For older engines that don't have the ability to change timing for dealing with this, this will suck, not to mention the voided warranties of engines which are warranties to work with no more than 10% alcohol.
Which older engines would those be?
Unless I'm missing something (which is very likely -- I'm by no means an expert in the field), the ignition systems common gas-powered cars can be split into two different categories: Those which use a distributor, and those which do not.
The distributor-based ignitions are easily tweaked to do whatever, but it takes a set of skilled hands to do the tweaking. (This is what I think of when I hear "older engines.")
The distributorless ignition systems have a knock sensor, which is used to automagically tweak spark timing. (This is what allows my high-compression BMW engine to run on low-octane fuel, when necessary.)
I suppose it might be the case that a common distributorless ignition system might not be able to adjust its own spark timing in such a fashion that it works properly with 15% ethanol, which would be a real problem in many cases since aftermarket tools to reprogram this stuff generally don't exist for plain-old boring engines that aren't fun to hack. Or it might be the case that a knock sensor simply doesn't exist in many cases...
Counterexample: McComb, OH (population: about 1.6k) is far from being in the middle of nowhere.
It has, on a good day, extraordinarily poor cell phone coverage. If I want to talk on my Droid in the town of McComb, I must leave whatever house building I am in, head outside, and stand far away from any structures.
It has been this way for at least 12 years that I am personally aware of. Before that, even my digital pager would have severe issues working reliably there -- and it otherwise had always worked absolutely everywhere else that I tried, even inside of factories and steel buildings.
And it behaves this way for everyone who lives or travels there, even though various maps proclaim that it is just fine.
I suspect that if you step out into the real world and give it a shot, instead of postulating with Google Maps and the misinformation provided by the our corporate overlords, you'll find that cell phone coverage is far lousier than you think, and that "highways" are often little more than a 2-lane road with a stripe down the center.
And if you actually try it instead of just thinking about it, you'll find that both broken (cracked) and scratched records can behave very similarly upon playback.
I've been around long enough that I've tried both.
So, in the interest of pedantry, I'd like to say that while your new word usement does seem to be valid, its validation does not seem to in any way invalidate the validity of the previously-valid phrase.
Please feel free to use both terms interchangeably in such contexts as this, for they are synonymous.
But before I could watch (Youtube was having buffering issues on the 480p stream), I went in search of this elusive "high definition" version, and was instead finding comments from the original poster like this:
I am not sure if there is any plans to release a DVD/Blu Ray for the public, but I will see what I can find out.
I don't know about anyone else, but I don't see how "I am not sure" and "it's coming to DVD!!@!" are in any way synonymous.
More recently, there is this other comment, in response to a question about possibly making a 1080p torrent available:
working on getting a higher resolution version. only had the dvd that I got from a friend. Matt is busy with shuttle ET tanking test, but going to see what he can put together. He is just happy folks are able to finally see the video finally.
I don't doubt you could have completed the game without strafe. But I'm EXTREMELY skeptical you did it on "Ultra Violent" or "Nightmare" and/or that you could do it without dying/respawning.
OK. You got me.
I did not win the most difficult levels. In fact, I couldn't stand to play like that at all: At higher difficulties, I found the game to be untenable.
I therefore am, and provably have been since Day 1 of the genre, a lousy FPS gamer and shall never comment on this topic again as I am positively unqualified to do so. You win. Accordingly, it is decided that FPS gaming on the iPod sucks.
Gratz.:)
Meanwhile, I'm amazed that someone might actually remember Cirque. I used to have a Glidepoint-equipped Cirque keyboard with normal rectangular keyboard dimensions. It fit wonderfully into my (no longer produced, but still useful, sturdy, and used) solid steel articulated keyboard drawer. The Glidepoint bit of it neatly replaced the inverted-T arrow keys, which I didn't miss at all since I cut my teeth on an XT with an 88-key keyboard and never used the numeric keypad for numerics anyway.
It even went "click," like a proper IBM Model M or Chicony. It was the best keyboard I've ever used.
After a few happy years together with me and the keyboard, the dog at the time ate the cable and connectors for it. I've never found another keyboard like it, nor a suitable modern replacement. (Nor did I ever find the connectors after they passed through the dog, so that I might have a means of figuring out which color(s) would go to which pin(s) (and, yes, I looked (and it was gross.).)
I never played anything past the middle of the first level. It, to me, was just a tech demo, and I felt it to be a surprisingly well-executed one at that. (I lost my taste for most of the traditional, twitch-based FPS genre somewhere around the time that I gained my taste for fine Belgian ales, and saw no merit in going any further than "Wow, this is really neat. It looks better than I remember it. Next!")
But I did, once upon a time, complete Doom on a PC. Time has lost whether it was using a fast 386 or a slow 486, but the deed was done. Furthermore, at the time, I was using an Cirque (now Alps) Glidepoint touchpad exclusively instead of a mouse...which isn't all that dissimilar from the interface on the iPod.
And, in an admission of long-ago newbness, I did so without strafing. I remember learning the merits of the strafe the hard way, by playing Quake deathmatches online and puzzling over the fact that people kept killing me with such ease until I realized "Oh! That's what the strafe function is for!". It logically follows that in the days of Doom, I had no concept of the technique.
So. I still think you should try harder.
Re:I'm sticking with VGA
on
Goodbye, VGA
·
· Score: 1
My Samsung A550 LCD does just fine.
I just push the button on the remote that controls aspect ratio until the screen says "Just Scan." And then, it's 1920x1080 worth of pixel-perfect 52" fun.
There is some wizardry on this set about inputs named "PC," but such wizardry has everything to do with reducing post-processing and latency and nothing at all to do with scaling.
In fact, the only problem I've ever had with aspect ratios and PCs since I entered this modern LCD craze a few years ago, is that certain recent versions of nVidia's drivers assume the following:
If DisplayArea == 1920x1080, we must be talking to a TV. And since TV == overscan, we must pre-apply an underscan -- aka, a black border all the way around the image, and scale (not resize!) things to fit within that border.
I guess they assume that all 1920x1080 displays perform overscan. My Samsung TV, as mentioned, is adjustable for that ("16x9" mode is overscanned, "Just Scan" is not). But for my 24" 1920x1080 computer monitor (which obviously doesn't give a fuck about overscan games since it's just a monitor), it was really fucking bothersome until I figured it out.
This behavior is, of course, very wrong on a number of different levels (Hey! Let's take our 1920x1080 framebuffer, shrink it by 5%, and then output it at a blurry 1920x1080 with a black border!). But it's what they do, anyway...
Re:its about DRM and control
on
Goodbye, VGA
·
· Score: 1
The reason for this is simple: As we all plainly know, the only motivation companies have for releasing improved formats is evil.
Nevermind the brilliant pixel-perfect displays that DVI and HDMI and Displayport allow. Nevermind 8 channels of either uncompressed or losslessly-compressed audio over one cable in a consumer environment.
No, sir. The ONLY reason is evil.
Why was TOSLINK abaondoned? Was it a lousy format that suffered due to the shitty characteristics of its plastic optical conductor that barely worked even on a good day? Absolutely not! It died because it represented a weapon against EVIL.
Having played Doom 1 on my first-gen iPod Touch, I must say that it works fine. The biggest problem for basic gameplay was that my fingers were in the way all of the time, and the first-gen lacked any manner of speaker.
Back on the topic of Android and gaming: I've seen some really incredible graphics on that old iPod (and Doom wasn't it), but with my fancy-pants overclocked Droid the most impressive game I've seen is Angry Birds.
IIRC, Google Earth runs better on my iPod than on the Droid, too.
But so what?
I didn't buy a gaming device. Instead, I bought a pocket computer with a telephone built in. And for computing, it works great. It even helped me sort out the wiring on a Crown Vic today.
It gives me two phone numbers on my Droid (one for the day job, one for everything else), along with a slick voice mail system that catches everything from both, and it's free. Oh, and it's clear which number text messages are arriving at, since each number currently uses a different app for SMS.
It's also quite unlikely that anyone at Netflix is optimizing encodes any better than what has been tweaked by thousands of video rippers out there. In particular, H.264 has literally millions of combinations of settings, but not every decoder implementation can support every combination, and the embedded ones (like those used in the boxes that stream Netflix) are some of the most limited.
You suggest that the thousands (really? thousands? hundreds sounds more likely) of folks doing this stuff are doing a better job, for free, than the paid folks at Netflix who do the same thing.
Which may, or may not be, true.
It takes real people comparing like-to-like source material to make a critical differentiation as to which is actually better. I'm not aware of anyone currently doing so on any diagnostically-useful level.
I, however, am willing to try. I shall take your advice, and do some encoding, and compare the results.
Piracy is well established as to mean copyright infringement. I don't think we should confuse the issue by labeling much worse things (i.e. these hacker peoples) as piracy
Netflix looks progressively better at time goes on. I've been using it for a couple of years or so, and it is plain to me that they're getting progressively better at encoding video, as well as putting effort into re-encoding their older stuff.
I've got a wonderfully well-configured 52" Samsung LCD that I watch on with a PS3, as well as a 1920x1080 computer monitor on a Windows box. Both, generally, work great -- though I think that the PS3 does a better job of scaling than whatever method is employed when using the PC.
As another poster mentioned, I've seen far worse compression artifacts on cable or U-Verse.
The only particularly objectionable video glitches I see with streaming Netflix, lately, is that in the darkest shadows of scenes things are often very blocky. Most people wouldn't be bothered by this if they were watching the film instead of studying the video quality but I'm not so lucky as to be able to ignore it...
Lots of stuff is available with 5.1 audio these days, but I don't have any means to test it. Things sound fine on my rather decent stereo, however, with no glaring deficiencies that I hear.
In the November election in Ohio, I got to choose from a variety of different parties. There were the big two, obviously, but also a surprising number of independents and libertarians as well as (IIRC) two different Green Party candidates for some race or other. The biggest surprise was a singular showing from the Ohio Socialist Party.
It was quite a change from the usual choice between red and blue. I don't recall ever having such a broad selection of parties before.
I did what any Slashdot user named adolf would do, and voted alternate-party wherever possible without regard for the merits of the particular candidates. Some might say I threw my votes away since none of these guys actually had any meaningful chance at winning, but I believe that simply I voted to support more viable choices in the future.
Until one of them little buggers does develop cell walls that resist triclosan, anyway.
An analogy: A thousand typewriters + a thousand monkeys + an infinite amount of time == the complete work of Shakespear.
Except we don't have a thousand typewriters, or a thousand monkeys...but we do have infinite time. So, given that there's 500 kajillion bugs being treated with triclosan every day, and the new ones that grow to replace them have not lost their ability to mutate, then eventually the cell walls won't be destroyed.
They're advertised as USB devices, but they don't work with standard USB ports.
That such chicanery is extraordinarily common these days does not mean that it is the right or true thing for Apple (or any other company) to be doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Which older engines would those be?
Unless I'm missing something (which is very likely -- I'm by no means an expert in the field), the ignition systems common gas-powered cars can be split into two different categories: Those which use a distributor, and those which do not.
The distributor-based ignitions are easily tweaked to do whatever, but it takes a set of skilled hands to do the tweaking. (This is what I think of when I hear "older engines.")
The distributorless ignition systems have a knock sensor, which is used to automagically tweak spark timing. (This is what allows my high-compression BMW engine to run on low-octane fuel, when necessary.)
I suppose it might be the case that a common distributorless ignition system might not be able to adjust its own spark timing in such a fashion that it works properly with 15% ethanol, which would be a real problem in many cases since aftermarket tools to reprogram this stuff generally don't exist for plain-old boring engines that aren't fun to hack. Or it might be the case that a knock sensor simply doesn't exist in many cases...
Whatever the case, please enlighten me.
I'd like to suggest that, based on the track record of open-source stuff it sure seems like a fork will happen whenever it is deemed necessary.
Counterexample: McComb, OH (population: about 1.6k) is far from being in the middle of nowhere.
It has, on a good day, extraordinarily poor cell phone coverage. If I want to talk on my Droid in the town of McComb, I must leave whatever house building I am in, head outside, and stand far away from any structures.
It has been this way for at least 12 years that I am personally aware of. Before that, even my digital pager would have severe issues working reliably there -- and it otherwise had always worked absolutely everywhere else that I tried, even inside of factories and steel buildings.
And it behaves this way for everyone who lives or travels there, even though various maps proclaim that it is just fine.
I suspect that if you step out into the real world and give it a shot, instead of postulating with Google Maps and the misinformation provided by the our corporate overlords, you'll find that cell phone coverage is far lousier than you think, and that "highways" are often little more than a 2-lane road with a stripe down the center.
And if you actually try it instead of just thinking about it, you'll find that both broken (cracked) and scratched records can behave very similarly upon playback.
I've been around long enough that I've tried both.
So, in the interest of pedantry, I'd like to say that while your new word usement does seem to be valid, its validation does not seem to in any way invalidate the validity of the previously-valid phrase.
Please feel free to use both terms interchangeably in such contexts as this, for they are synonymous.
Thanks!
Troll? Hardly.
I did watch the video. It was great.
But before I could watch (Youtube was having buffering issues on the 480p stream), I went in search of this elusive "high definition" version, and was instead finding comments from the original poster like this:
I am not sure if there is any plans to release a DVD/Blu Ray for the public, but I will see what I can find out.
I don't know about anyone else, but I don't see how "I am not sure" and "it's coming to DVD!!@!" are in any way synonymous.
More recently, there is this other comment, in response to a question about possibly making a 1080p torrent available:
working on getting a higher resolution version. only had the dvd that I got from a friend. Matt is busy with shuttle ET tanking test, but going to see what he can put together. He is just happy folks are able to finally see the video finally.
Nonetheless, thank you for the citation, AC.
[citation needed]
I don't doubt you could have completed the game without strafe. But I'm EXTREMELY skeptical you did it on "Ultra Violent" or "Nightmare" and/or that you could do it without dying/respawning.
OK. You got me.
I did not win the most difficult levels. In fact, I couldn't stand to play like that at all: At higher difficulties, I found the game to be untenable.
I therefore am, and provably have been since Day 1 of the genre, a lousy FPS gamer and shall never comment on this topic again as I am positively unqualified to do so. You win. Accordingly, it is decided that FPS gaming on the iPod sucks.
Gratz. :)
Meanwhile, I'm amazed that someone might actually remember Cirque. I used to have a Glidepoint-equipped Cirque keyboard with normal rectangular keyboard dimensions. It fit wonderfully into my (no longer produced, but still useful, sturdy, and used) solid steel articulated keyboard drawer. The Glidepoint bit of it neatly replaced the inverted-T arrow keys, which I didn't miss at all since I cut my teeth on an XT with an 88-key keyboard and never used the numeric keypad for numerics anyway.
It even went "click," like a proper IBM Model M or Chicony. It was the best keyboard I've ever used.
After a few happy years together with me and the keyboard, the dog at the time ate the cable and connectors for it. I've never found another keyboard like it, nor a suitable modern replacement. (Nor did I ever find the connectors after they passed through the dog, so that I might have a means of figuring out which color(s) would go to which pin(s) (and, yes, I looked (and it was gross.).)
*sigh*
I was joking...but if you want to be serious:
I never played anything past the middle of the first level. It, to me, was just a tech demo, and I felt it to be a surprisingly well-executed one at that. (I lost my taste for most of the traditional, twitch-based FPS genre somewhere around the time that I gained my taste for fine Belgian ales, and saw no merit in going any further than "Wow, this is really neat. It looks better than I remember it. Next!")
But I did, once upon a time, complete Doom on a PC. Time has lost whether it was using a fast 386 or a slow 486, but the deed was done. Furthermore, at the time, I was using an Cirque (now Alps) Glidepoint touchpad exclusively instead of a mouse...which isn't all that dissimilar from the interface on the iPod.
And, in an admission of long-ago newbness, I did so without strafing. I remember learning the merits of the strafe the hard way, by playing Quake deathmatches online and puzzling over the fact that people kept killing me with such ease until I realized "Oh! That's what the strafe function is for!". It logically follows that in the days of Doom, I had no concept of the technique.
So. I still think you should try harder.
My Samsung A550 LCD does just fine.
I just push the button on the remote that controls aspect ratio until the screen says "Just Scan." And then, it's 1920x1080 worth of pixel-perfect 52" fun.
There is some wizardry on this set about inputs named "PC," but such wizardry has everything to do with reducing post-processing and latency and nothing at all to do with scaling.
In fact, the only problem I've ever had with aspect ratios and PCs since I entered this modern LCD craze a few years ago, is that certain recent versions of nVidia's drivers assume the following:
If DisplayArea == 1920x1080, we must be talking to a TV. And since TV == overscan, we must pre-apply an underscan -- aka, a black border all the way around the image, and scale (not resize!) things to fit within that border.
I guess they assume that all 1920x1080 displays perform overscan. My Samsung TV, as mentioned, is adjustable for that ("16x9" mode is overscanned, "Just Scan" is not). But for my 24" 1920x1080 computer monitor (which obviously doesn't give a fuck about overscan games since it's just a monitor), it was really fucking bothersome until I figured it out.
This behavior is, of course, very wrong on a number of different levels (Hey! Let's take our 1920x1080 framebuffer, shrink it by 5%, and then output it at a blurry 1920x1080 with a black border!). But it's what they do, anyway...
The reason for this is simple: As we all plainly know, the only motivation companies have for releasing improved formats is evil.
Nevermind the brilliant pixel-perfect displays that DVI and HDMI and Displayport allow. Nevermind 8 channels of either uncompressed or losslessly-compressed audio over one cable in a consumer environment.
No, sir. The ONLY reason is evil.
Why was TOSLINK abaondoned? Was it a lousy format that suffered due to the shitty characteristics of its plastic optical conductor that barely worked even on a good day? Absolutely not! It died because it represented a weapon against EVIL.
*sigh*
That sounds like a lot of work.
Once you've been married long enough, you ought to be able to just crawl into bed, softly say "roll over, honey," and commence with the act.
It's not great fucking, but it's fucking better than my hand. And the best part is that she's self-cleaning.
How do you hold a protest if the merchant can just ask you to leave and when you don't comply just have you hauled out by the cops for trespassing?
DDoS attacks should be opposed regardless of the target. The Internet (for better or worse) operates on the "Play Nice" principle.
Weird. I always understood that the Internet was designed to keep on going even in the event of a nuclear attack.
Perhaps we are talking about both batteries and Slashdot users simutaneously.
The later levels at advanced difficulty were not playable because the controls were too limited.
I disagree.
I think you just need to try harder.
So: Just Add more inputs.
Having played Doom 1 on my first-gen iPod Touch, I must say that it works fine. The biggest problem for basic gameplay was that my fingers were in the way all of the time, and the first-gen lacked any manner of speaker.
Back on the topic of Android and gaming: I've seen some really incredible graphics on that old iPod (and Doom wasn't it), but with my fancy-pants overclocked Droid the most impressive game I've seen is Angry Birds.
IIRC, Google Earth runs better on my iPod than on the Droid, too.
But so what?
I didn't buy a gaming device. Instead, I bought a pocket computer with a telephone built in. And for computing, it works great. It even helped me sort out the wiring on a Crown Vic today.
*shrug*
Honestly, I just use Google Voice.
It gives me two phone numbers on my Droid (one for the day job, one for everything else), along with a slick voice mail system that catches everything from both, and it's free. Oh, and it's clear which number text messages are arriving at, since each number currently uses a different app for SMS.
*shrug*
This is quite late.
It's also quite unlikely that anyone at Netflix is optimizing encodes any better than what has been tweaked by thousands of video rippers out there. In particular, H.264 has literally millions of combinations of settings, but not every decoder implementation can support every combination, and the embedded ones (like those used in the boxes that stream Netflix) are some of the most limited.
You suggest that the thousands (really? thousands? hundreds sounds more likely) of folks doing this stuff are doing a better job, for free, than the paid folks at Netflix who do the same thing.
Which may, or may not be, true.
It takes real people comparing like-to-like source material to make a critical differentiation as to which is actually better. I'm not aware of anyone currently doing so on any diagnostically-useful level.
I, however, am willing to try. I shall take your advice, and do some encoding, and compare the results.
Ob-1999: I think you misspelt "cracker."
Netflix looks progressively better at time goes on. I've been using it for a couple of years or so, and it is plain to me that they're getting progressively better at encoding video, as well as putting effort into re-encoding their older stuff.
I've got a wonderfully well-configured 52" Samsung LCD that I watch on with a PS3, as well as a 1920x1080 computer monitor on a Windows box. Both, generally, work great -- though I think that the PS3 does a better job of scaling than whatever method is employed when using the PC.
As another poster mentioned, I've seen far worse compression artifacts on cable or U-Verse.
The only particularly objectionable video glitches I see with streaming Netflix, lately, is that in the darkest shadows of scenes things are often very blocky. Most people wouldn't be bothered by this if they were watching the film instead of studying the video quality but I'm not so lucky as to be able to ignore it...
Lots of stuff is available with 5.1 audio these days, but I don't have any means to test it. Things sound fine on my rather decent stereo, however, with no glaring deficiencies that I hear.
It's getting better.
In the November election in Ohio, I got to choose from a variety of different parties. There were the big two, obviously, but also a surprising number of independents and libertarians as well as (IIRC) two different Green Party candidates for some race or other. The biggest surprise was a singular showing from the Ohio Socialist Party.
It was quite a change from the usual choice between red and blue. I don't recall ever having such a broad selection of parties before.
I did what any Slashdot user named adolf would do, and voted alternate-party wherever possible without regard for the merits of the particular candidates. Some might say I threw my votes away since none of these guys actually had any meaningful chance at winning, but I believe that simply I voted to support more viable choices in the future.
Until one of them little buggers does develop cell walls that resist triclosan, anyway.
An analogy: A thousand typewriters + a thousand monkeys + an infinite amount of time == the complete work of Shakespear.
Except we don't have a thousand typewriters, or a thousand monkeys...but we do have infinite time. So, given that there's 500 kajillion bugs being treated with triclosan every day, and the new ones that grow to replace them have not lost their ability to mutate, then eventually the cell walls won't be destroyed.
*shrug*
Penicillin used to be perfect, too.
It's a speed bump, and a whole new controller!!!
They're advertised as USB devices, but they don't work with standard USB ports.
That such chicanery is extraordinarily common these days does not mean that it is the right or true thing for Apple (or any other company) to be doing.