When we venture into the realm of 4k2k 3D 120FPS video (or any combination of them), if HDMI is still standard, then we'll be able to have a meaningful discussion about this topic.
Until then, you're right. And you might be right later.
Or, you might be wrong later. Who knows what the future has in store?
Myself, I'd rather install cabling that I think will continue to be useful into the future, instead of cabling that I know will not be.
It's all nice that you can approach this as a minimalist engineer. I'd do the same thing if I had my own engineer's hat on. But I'm not wearing it as I write this, as at the moment I'm just a homeowner who is looking not for minimal cost, but minimal pain in the ass.
HDTV's with built in tuners will only output surround sound when the built in tuner is the source of the video. Otherwise, that wonderful specification states that analog outputs should be down mixed to stereo.
What? I'm not aware of an HDTV that has more analog audio output jacks than a stereo pair of RCAs. What the hell are you going on about? Of course the stereo pair of RCA jacks is limited to stereo! (And, no, Dolby Pro Logic does not count. We've moved on from the quad era, thanks.)
Basically, the optical out is only good for determining sync when using an external receiver. Modern sets actually do so much post processing they cause a good deal of video delay and if you do not route your audio through the set it will not be synced.
What? Surely, you're aware that all forms of S/PDIF (including the ubiquitous TOSLINK plastic-fiber optical format) are only one-way. There is no way for the set to determineanything about what's plugged into such an output -- it's an output. It is whatever it is, and the source (in this case, the TV) has no idea what's going on at the other end of the wire/cable/plastic widget.
Part of the 1.4 spec is to create a return audio path so that the post processed video and audio are in sync. For now if you are using external speakers and anything other then the television as an output source you need a bit of a fancy receiver.
What? What return path? Back to the source component?
Why?
I actually don't have a fancy receiver, but just a simple 15-year-old stereo Rotel preamp which doesn't even know what a video signal is, let alone anything beyond simple analog stereo. Some of my sources have audio switched by the TV, while some others are switched by the preamp and at no time have their audio signals pass through the TV. I notice absolutely zero difference in terms of audio/video sync between the two methods.
Perhaps my TV is simply faster than some others, but who knows.
Any number that exceeds the bandwidth actually used by HDMI is meaningless, but manufacturers still stick crazy numbers on their cables anyway.
I cabled my house with Cat5e, even though I don't need more than Cat5 for what I'm doing today. I use RG-6 coax, even though RG-59 is perfectly fine for my current applications. Even my telephones use Cat5e, when cheap 2-pair Cat3 would already be overkill.
Currently, all of my DVI, HDMI, and VGA stuff is easily accessible. But if I ever put any of it behind a wall or under a floor somewhere, it's going to be Good Cable*.
Why do I do these things? Because I want to put off recabling things for as long as possible, and I don't know what the future has in store for my in-house cable plant.
*: And by Good, I don't mean expensive or well-packaged. I mean cable that measures well, tests well in the field, and is not overpriced.
My Samsung A550 has an optical audio output, but it can only output stereo, regardless of the fact that there is often uncompressed 7.1 channel PCM audio available to it over HDMI.
Why does my TV do this, you might ask? Because its built-in own speakers (which I've never actually used) are stereo, so the TV has no reason to ever negotiate a better format from the source device.
So it doesn't matter what the source is capable of doing: If the TV is in charge of switching HDMI audio stuff, everything is reduced to 2-channel stereo.
It's stupid and insipid, but that's how it is. This is why televisions should not be in charge of audio, or alternatively, why HDMI should not deal with audio at all.
Currently this isn't a big deal for me, because all of my source devices that sport an HDMI output are capable of sending audio over one or more traditional outputs at the same time. But it will be a bigger deal as HDMI continues its proliferation, and source devices begin to appear which only have HDMI outputs.
Easier to live in a decent neighborhood where you don't have to worry about stuff like that.
For instance: I don't lock up my garden hose. I have electrical outlets on the outside of my house. I don't worry about whether or not my cars have locking gas caps. Nobody runs away with my lawnmower. I can leave a expensive ladder outside, and it's not touched.
Why are folks talking about a garage as if it is a necessary thing for recharging an EV? Does the car sound an alarm, and loudly yell "OMG! You can't charge me without a roof over my head! Buy yourself a garage! Pwn!"
Is there some compelling reason why I could not simply park the car in my own driveway, and plug it in there?
There is absolutely nothing you would gain from deleting a slashdot account.
Your posts would not be deleted, as no other post is ever deleted without a grounded Cease&Desist or similar legal reason, your journal is public info as well. The only removable thing is your user description, which can be replaced with an empty string at a whim.
Thank you for the detailed opinion as to why you, personally, would have nothing to gain by deleting your own account on Slashdot.
But please realize that the fact that it's always been that way on Slashdot does not mean that it should be that way, and that others may have a different opinion than you.
I've been here a long time. There is far more personal detail about me on Slashdot than my Facebook page is likely ever to contain. Mostly, this is because I'm pseudo-anonymous here. I don't think I have enough publicly-available information on Slashdot that someone can pin my pseudonym down to who I really am, but it would doubtlessly be rather easy to do given access to Slashdot's non-public data.
Thankfully, Rob Malda, along with his handlers and peons, have over the years earned my trust that they will treat my non-public data with a reasonable amount of respect.
When the day comes that I feel like my trust has the potential to be violated, I want a button that says "Delete this account and everything associated with it," and I want it to work, at least within the confines of Slashdot. I expect this, in particular, from an organization such as Slashdot which has sometimes daily postings about privacy and abuses thereof.
I don't care if such a button is rendered somewhat meaningless by other web sites. I just want Slashdot to do the right thing and nuke my stuff on request, just like the editors here clearly expect everyone else to do.
Meanwhile, look down at the bottom of this very page. See the line that says Comments are owned by the Poster? That, too.
I don't count rain as being adverse. The particular tires, weight distribution, suspension, and general handling of my car mean that it can stop, turn, and accelerate better in a proper downpour than most cars can in the dry.
But even then, the leather is well-conditioned and doesn't mind being a lot wet. The door panels are covered in a rather impervious layer of vinyl with nothing soft or furry to mold or stink. The speakers are plastic and could care less. The electronic gadgetry mounted to the driver's side door is minimal and inconsequential if it fails (a mirror switch, nothing else). And nor do I mind being wet: After all, I got wet today in the shower.
That all said: Snow and ice are my enemies. And for that, the window tends to be down.
Indeed. I can understand (maybe past-tense) having an IBM shop. Or an Apple shop. Or, perhaps back in the day, a DEC shop, an SGI shop, or a Sun shop. Maybe even a Novell shop.
These are/were descriptive of unique ways of doing things.
But having a Dell shop? Feh. It's a fucking PC.
(Incidentally, at my day job we almost always buy Dell machines. Some of which are SFF. We experienced a couple of power supply issues on some Dimension 4600-ish P4 boxes that were already a few years old, but things have been clucking along nicely since then. Why Dell? Simply: Machines get retired when they're old-and-useless, not old-and-busted (which almost never happens), so we keep buying Dell. I would never characterize us as being a "Dell shop," however -- they're just fucking computers.)
I, for one, tend to drive with my window down in the winter when the roads are ugly.
Why?
First, it doesn't get covered in condensation if it's down. I can see through a window that's not present a lot better than one which is covered in a film of water that is rapidly becoming ice. Keeping one window down also clears up the inside of all of the other windows far faster than running the AC compressor to dehumidify things, since the outside air is very dry.
Second, I can hear what my own car is doing. Listening to my own tire and engine noise gives me a lot of information about the road surface, and allows me to better predict how things will behave.
Third, I can hear what's going on around me.
(And, no, I don't get cold. Partly because on these occasions I'm never driving very fast. But more importantly, the car's heater produces an abundance of heat, and I'm already dressed for cold weather. I really don't want to warm the car up to a balmy 72 degrees when I'm dressed for weather that is sixty degrees colder than that.)
It's interesting enough getting VMWare to play nice with USB widgets on a consistent basis.
These days, folks would probably do everything over IP and Ethernet, which (for now!) is reasonably emulation-proof. But back in 2000, this wouldn't have been happening. Custom-ish hardware (probably on an ISA bus) or funnily-connected (RS-485-ish) hardware would've ruled the day.
Emulation would not have worked at all, without a whole lot more work than maintaining an NT4 box, and would have introduced huge new layers of complexity where none is needed even if it were practical.
Remember, the G5 already exists. It is, therefore, free. And it may be quite fast enough for the non-specified purpose that the asker was asking about.
Meanwhile, the Dell box (while probably faster) is not free.
How long does it take the power savings of a $300 Dell T110 to break even?
It can tell whether one has been entered at all. It could also read dates from all files on the card and if any are newer than the camera date then ask the user if the date is correct, but that might be above and beyond the call.
And then what?
A date, even if it's wrong, can still useful as long as it's from a running clock. I work with a lot of communications gear which operates without network access, GPS clocks, or battery backups, and the dates all get reset to something arbitrary whenever they lose power for whatever reason.
Which is, operationally, just fine. These particular widgets don't care what day it is.
But even a wrong date is better than none when looking through the logs for troubleshooting. With a wrong date, I can discern the order in which things occurred, and can easily extrapolate an exact date (if for some reason that is important) simply by knowing what day it currently is, and what day the device thinks it is. With no date, I cannot do these things.
I can't imagine that the same methodology could not apply to camera dates that are wrong.
But even then, I think folks are reading far too much into the EXIF data. It's not like it's set in stone. Rather, it's easily changed. So, much like an ID3 tag, it just says whatever someone wants it to say.
I'm pretty picky about things, too. I've seen the effects you're talking about. The 15.4" 1920x1200 display on my old Dell laptop has some issues like that. But, you know, it's a laptop: I can be pretty forgiving of things of that form factor.
However, I've simply used so many matte LCDs that do not experience any noticeable, static color issues across the display area that I can't accept that the problem is endemic.
The usual problem I see with cheaper, big displays these days is related to viewing angle. The TN panel Asus I have has some real issues at my viewing distance with colors shifting as I move my head up and down, for instance, but that is not a static problem...
I like when they position the super-bright-blue-LED's-that-can-illuminate-the-whole-room right next to the screen.
Thank god for electrical tape!
Yes, indeed.
At least on my Samsung TV, I can set the horrible blue LED to be off.
And on my favorite monitor (a nice NEC IPS LCD), there's an option buried in the menu where the LED can be changed from blue to green and then turned way, way down in brightness.
On other things that have the horrible blue lights, I find that electrical tape works fine. In instances where the lights actually have purpose, I use red vinyl electrical tape instead of black, so that a little bit of blue light can actually shine through. Other colors of tape, presumably, would also work to various degrees...
It's all very annoying, though. Just because blue LEDs are now cheap, and can be very bright, does not mean that they should always be as bright as possible.
[sarcasm] Of course, it's plain to anyone that all of the problems you experience with color purity on your HP ZR24w are completely and totally caused by the fact that the outer-most surface of the screen is not shiny. Everyone knows that matte displays have always had these problems. [/sarcasm]
Which is strange because, you know, I'm writing this in front of an non-glossy 24" Asus VW246, and it exhibits very consistent colors and whites across its entire display area. It's got a whole slew of issues that I'm not happy about (many of which are properly exposed in these LCD monitor test images), but color purity and blotchy white aren't among them at all.
So while you might conclude that matte displays cause color issues, I must only conclude that you got ripped off.
It happens to everyone from time to time. Send it back if you still can.
Slashdot Mirror
It might mean something. Just not yet.
When we venture into the realm of 4k2k 3D 120FPS video (or any combination of them), if HDMI is still standard, then we'll be able to have a meaningful discussion about this topic.
Until then, you're right. And you might be right later.
Or, you might be wrong later. Who knows what the future has in store?
Myself, I'd rather install cabling that I think will continue to be useful into the future, instead of cabling that I know will not be.
It's all nice that you can approach this as a minimalist engineer. I'd do the same thing if I had my own engineer's hat on. But I'm not wearing it as I write this, as at the moment I'm just a homeowner who is looking not for minimal cost, but minimal pain in the ass.
I want to agree with you. I really, really, do.
But:
What? I'm not aware of an HDTV that has more analog audio output jacks than a stereo pair of RCAs. What the hell are you going on about? Of course the stereo pair of RCA jacks is limited to stereo! (And, no, Dolby Pro Logic does not count. We've moved on from the quad era, thanks.)
What? Surely, you're aware that all forms of S/PDIF (including the ubiquitous TOSLINK plastic-fiber optical format) are only one-way. There is no way for the set to determine anything about what's plugged into such an output -- it's an output. It is whatever it is, and the source (in this case, the TV) has no idea what's going on at the other end of the wire/cable/plastic widget.
What? What return path? Back to the source component?
Why?
I actually don't have a fancy receiver, but just a simple 15-year-old stereo Rotel preamp which doesn't even know what a video signal is, let alone anything beyond simple analog stereo. Some of my sources have audio switched by the TV, while some others are switched by the preamp and at no time have their audio signals pass through the TV. I notice absolutely zero difference in terms of audio/video sync between the two methods.
Perhaps my TV is simply faster than some others, but who knows.
Any number that exceeds the bandwidth actually used by HDMI is meaningless, but manufacturers still stick crazy numbers on their cables anyway.
I cabled my house with Cat5e, even though I don't need more than Cat5 for what I'm doing today. I use RG-6 coax, even though RG-59 is perfectly fine for my current applications. Even my telephones use Cat5e, when cheap 2-pair Cat3 would already be overkill.
Currently, all of my DVI, HDMI, and VGA stuff is easily accessible. But if I ever put any of it behind a wall or under a floor somewhere, it's going to be Good Cable*.
Why do I do these things? Because I want to put off recabling things for as long as possible, and I don't know what the future has in store for my in-house cable plant.
*: And by Good, I don't mean expensive or well-packaged. I mean cable that measures well, tests well in the field, and is not overpriced.
Mirrors. Learn to use them (they let you see around corners!).
Manuals. Learn to use them (they show you a map of the back side of the component!).
Flashlights. Learn to use them (they let you see things which otherwise would escape illumination!).
Fingers. Learn to use them (they let you feel things that your eyes cannot see!).
I could go on.
Depends on the TV.
My Samsung A550 has an optical audio output, but it can only output stereo, regardless of the fact that there is often uncompressed 7.1 channel PCM audio available to it over HDMI.
Why does my TV do this, you might ask? Because its built-in own speakers (which I've never actually used) are stereo, so the TV has no reason to ever negotiate a better format from the source device.
So it doesn't matter what the source is capable of doing: If the TV is in charge of switching HDMI audio stuff, everything is reduced to 2-channel stereo.
It's stupid and insipid, but that's how it is. This is why televisions should not be in charge of audio, or alternatively, why HDMI should not deal with audio at all.
Currently this isn't a big deal for me, because all of my source devices that sport an HDMI output are capable of sending audio over one or more traditional outputs at the same time. But it will be a bigger deal as HDMI continues its proliferation, and source devices begin to appear which only have HDMI outputs.
Vector graphics emulation doesn't seem to be that difficult anymore, since it's already being done.
With Java and OpenGL, even, for cross-platform goodness.
I think it works well enough.
Far too complicated.
Easier to live in a decent neighborhood where you don't have to worry about stuff like that.
For instance: I don't lock up my garden hose. I have electrical outlets on the outside of my house. I don't worry about whether or not my cars have locking gas caps. Nobody runs away with my lawnmower. I can leave a expensive ladder outside, and it's not touched.
No big deal.
YMMV, I guess.
Sometimes. For some people.
Some folks are ridiculously good at one thing, while being totally unable to get their head around some other thing.
Other folks may be consistently mediocre across the board.
There's lots of people in the world. High school isn't ridiculously easy for all of them.
Um.
Maybe I'm missing something important here, but:
Why are folks talking about a garage as if it is a necessary thing for recharging an EV? Does the car sound an alarm, and loudly yell "OMG! You can't charge me without a roof over my head! Buy yourself a garage! Pwn!"
Is there some compelling reason why I could not simply park the car in my own driveway, and plug it in there?
Sweet! So, I'm wrong. The comments are mine, while they have permission to use them forever (which is fine).
Good enough.
I still want to be able to delete my stuff though.
Look down: Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2010 Geeknet, Inc.
I gave them to nobody.
Please rephrase your point to include this simple truth.
Thank you for the detailed opinion as to why you, personally, would have nothing to gain by deleting your own account on Slashdot.
But please realize that the fact that it's always been that way on Slashdot does not mean that it should be that way, and that others may have a different opinion than you.
I've been here a long time. There is far more personal detail about me on Slashdot than my Facebook page is likely ever to contain. Mostly, this is because I'm pseudo-anonymous here. I don't think I have enough publicly-available information on Slashdot that someone can pin my pseudonym down to who I really am, but it would doubtlessly be rather easy to do given access to Slashdot's non-public data.
Thankfully, Rob Malda, along with his handlers and peons, have over the years earned my trust that they will treat my non-public data with a reasonable amount of respect.
When the day comes that I feel like my trust has the potential to be violated, I want a button that says "Delete this account and everything associated with it," and I want it to work, at least within the confines of Slashdot. I expect this, in particular, from an organization such as Slashdot which has sometimes daily postings about privacy and abuses thereof.
I don't care if such a button is rendered somewhat meaningless by other web sites. I just want Slashdot to do the right thing and nuke my stuff on request, just like the editors here clearly expect everyone else to do.
Meanwhile, look down at the bottom of this very page. See the line that says Comments are owned by the Poster? That, too.
I don't count rain as being adverse. The particular tires, weight distribution, suspension, and general handling of my car mean that it can stop, turn, and accelerate better in a proper downpour than most cars can in the dry.
But even then, the leather is well-conditioned and doesn't mind being a lot wet. The door panels are covered in a rather impervious layer of vinyl with nothing soft or furry to mold or stink. The speakers are plastic and could care less. The electronic gadgetry mounted to the driver's side door is minimal and inconsequential if it fails (a mirror switch, nothing else). And nor do I mind being wet: After all, I got wet today in the shower.
That all said: Snow and ice are my enemies. And for that, the window tends to be down.
YMMV.
Just curious:
"It lets us safe the legal expense of prosecuting."
Is your use of "safe" some sort of typo, or an attempt at loosing the English language even further?
Indeed. I can understand (maybe past-tense) having an IBM shop. Or an Apple shop. Or, perhaps back in the day, a DEC shop, an SGI shop, or a Sun shop. Maybe even a Novell shop.
These are/were descriptive of unique ways of doing things.
But having a Dell shop? Feh. It's a fucking PC.
(Incidentally, at my day job we almost always buy Dell machines. Some of which are SFF. We experienced a couple of power supply issues on some Dimension 4600-ish P4 boxes that were already a few years old, but things have been clucking along nicely since then. Why Dell? Simply: Machines get retired when they're old-and-useless, not old-and-busted (which almost never happens), so we keep buying Dell. I would never characterize us as being a "Dell shop," however -- they're just fucking computers.)
I, for one, tend to drive with my window down in the winter when the roads are ugly.
Why?
First, it doesn't get covered in condensation if it's down. I can see through a window that's not present a lot better than one which is covered in a film of water that is rapidly becoming ice. Keeping one window down also clears up the inside of all of the other windows far faster than running the AC compressor to dehumidify things, since the outside air is very dry.
Second, I can hear what my own car is doing. Listening to my own tire and engine noise gives me a lot of information about the road surface, and allows me to better predict how things will behave.
Third, I can hear what's going on around me.
(And, no, I don't get cold. Partly because on these occasions I'm never driving very fast. But more importantly, the car's heater produces an abundance of heat, and I'm already dressed for cold weather. I really don't want to warm the car up to a balmy 72 degrees when I'm dressed for weather that is sixty degrees colder than that.)
s/likely//
It's interesting enough getting VMWare to play nice with USB widgets on a consistent basis.
These days, folks would probably do everything over IP and Ethernet, which (for now!) is reasonably emulation-proof. But back in 2000, this wouldn't have been happening. Custom-ish hardware (probably on an ISA bus) or funnily-connected (RS-485-ish) hardware would've ruled the day.
Emulation would not have worked at all, without a whole lot more work than maintaining an NT4 box, and would have introduced huge new layers of complexity where none is needed even if it were practical.
Remember, the G5 already exists. It is, therefore, free. And it may be quite fast enough for the non-specified purpose that the asker was asking about.
Meanwhile, the Dell box (while probably faster) is not free.
How long does it take the power savings of a $300 Dell T110 to break even?
It can tell whether one has been entered at all. It could also read dates from all files on the card and if any are newer than the camera date then ask the user if the date is correct, but that might be above and beyond the call.
And then what?
A date, even if it's wrong, can still useful as long as it's from a running clock. I work with a lot of communications gear which operates without network access, GPS clocks, or battery backups, and the dates all get reset to something arbitrary whenever they lose power for whatever reason.
Which is, operationally, just fine. These particular widgets don't care what day it is.
But even a wrong date is better than none when looking through the logs for troubleshooting. With a wrong date, I can discern the order in which things occurred, and can easily extrapolate an exact date (if for some reason that is important) simply by knowing what day it currently is, and what day the device thinks it is. With no date, I cannot do these things.
I can't imagine that the same methodology could not apply to camera dates that are wrong.
But even then, I think folks are reading far too much into the EXIF data. It's not like it's set in stone. Rather, it's easily changed. So, much like an ID3 tag, it just says whatever someone wants it to say.
*shrug*
I'm pretty picky about things, too. I've seen the effects you're talking about. The 15.4" 1920x1200 display on my old Dell laptop has some issues like that. But, you know, it's a laptop: I can be pretty forgiving of things of that form factor.
However, I've simply used so many matte LCDs that do not experience any noticeable, static color issues across the display area that I can't accept that the problem is endemic.
The usual problem I see with cheaper, big displays these days is related to viewing angle. The TN panel Asus I have has some real issues at my viewing distance with colors shifting as I move my head up and down, for instance, but that is not a static problem...
Technically, it's not the job of congress or the senate to enforce laws.
I'm just sayin'...
Yes, indeed.
At least on my Samsung TV, I can set the horrible blue LED to be off.
And on my favorite monitor (a nice NEC IPS LCD), there's an option buried in the menu where the LED can be changed from blue to green and then turned way, way down in brightness.
On other things that have the horrible blue lights, I find that electrical tape works fine. In instances where the lights actually have purpose, I use red vinyl electrical tape instead of black, so that a little bit of blue light can actually shine through. Other colors of tape, presumably, would also work to various degrees...
It's all very annoying, though. Just because blue LEDs are now cheap, and can be very bright, does not mean that they should always be as bright as possible.
[sarcasm]
Of course, it's plain to anyone that all of the problems you experience with color purity on your HP ZR24w are completely and totally caused by the fact that the outer-most surface of the screen is not shiny. Everyone knows that matte displays have always had these problems.
[/sarcasm]
Which is strange because, you know, I'm writing this in front of an non-glossy 24" Asus VW246, and it exhibits very consistent colors and whites across its entire display area. It's got a whole slew of issues that I'm not happy about (many of which are properly exposed in these LCD monitor test images), but color purity and blotchy white aren't among them at all.
So while you might conclude that matte displays cause color issues, I must only conclude that you got ripped off.
It happens to everyone from time to time. Send it back if you still can.
"Should be," sure. Here in reality, it doesn't work that way, and RAM upgrades are often the best thing performance boost for an office-oriented PC.
And RAM is cheap. Cheaper than CPU and motherboard upgrades, cheaper than SSD, cheaper than anything for the amount of performance increase.
(I used to get a lot done with 640k, but it's not 1991 anymore...)
Indeed.
I've submitted a few updates and fixes to Google Maps, and they're generally pretty responsive about fixing things.