But nobody here is proposing that your Picasso be taken from you. Some folks just want to hire a professional, at no cost to you (except, perhaps, to be a courteous host) to shoot a picture of it. They want to do this so that more of the world can see the work, not because they'd like to deprive you of your possession, which you would retain.
(Note: I'm not saying that you should let them photograph your hypothetical Picasso, nor am I casting any judgment in the matter. I'm just clarifying your analogy, which fairly reeked of the "copying == stealing" mantra, whether you intended it that way or not.)
I've got a Dell desktop driving a Panasonic plasma display over 30' of DVI cable. It works fine, and has for over a year. The cable itself more closely resembles a garden hose than something that you'd hook up a monitor with, but that's just because the conductors are bigger, and presumably also include more shielding. It is otherwise not very special (having come from Monoprice).
Meanwhile HDMI can easily, and reasonably cheaply, be repeated to absurd lengths. I, however, tend to avoid it when possible for installations, because I simply loathe the combination of big, heavy wire and friction-fit connectors.
I dislike VGA because of the difficulties of getting the pixel alignment correct and keeping it that way, and the inherent errors induced by the extra DA -> AD stages. I find it only useful in that it is universal.
So, DVI it is. Perhaps there will come a day when I get a job cursed by sparkles, but it hasn't happened yet.
My first statement was tempered by the notion that the reader would understand the context of the matter at hand. I'm not writing a thesis here, but just brief commentary on a Web forum.
In this context of Netflix streaming media, which promises "Instant Play," long buffering (which obviously may include the entire volume of the media) is not acceptable at all.
It is, instead, up to the user to ensure that sufficient bandwidth is available for the streaming content. (The emphasis there is to accentuate the idea of "steaming," instead of "download and then play whenever it gets done.")
With modern broadband connections (and again, I take certain liberties with this term, which I expect to be understood by all with a grasp of the context except for perhaps the most pedantic folk such as yourself), excessive buffering probably means that the user is doing too many other things with their connection (Bittorrent, for instance) at the same time, or that their ISP is actively fighting the usage.
If you wish to make a contextually-meaningful reply, I'll gleefully entertain it. But what you've written so far is without merit, AGAIN, simply on the basis that you've neglected to include the context of the application in your thought-process.
A guy that I work with has a theory about perfect computers, which your post reminded me of. It goes like this:
You have to inputs to this computer: "Good computer," and "Bad computer."
So, the computer does something. You decide whether it was good or bad, and press the appropriate button. The computer learns this in a Pavlovian way, and eventually little or no user input is required for the computer to tirelessly do good things.
It's always a rather curious occurrence to me when, in times when one is complaining about specific instances of text which are lacking brevity, the prose that the complainant themselves produce uses "it is" instead of "it's."
If the bandwidth available is insufficient for the task, then no amount of additional buffering will help. Bigger buffers will reduce the frequency at which the buffer empties, but will also simply take more time to fill back up. The ratio of "Buffering..." to movie watching is more-or-less constant, for a given bit of media on a given connection.
Kid to mother: Mommy, why doesn't it ever snow over by Mister Dragon's house? And why are the trees always green in the winter? How come I feel warmer when I stand on his sidewalk?
It's got little to do with the headphones. They can't do that on their own.
The demodulation is happening inside of whatever device you're using as a headphone amp, or perhaps further back in the audio chain.
All the headphones provide some inductance to a circuit, which then decides that it's an FM radio, perhaps even using the headphone wire as a convenient antenna.
It's a poor design, whatever it is -- it shouldn't do that. You could try replacing it, or supplementing it with a different headphone amp (perhaps even just wired in series with it), but that might be impractical depending on the gear you have/want.
The simplest and cheapest thing to try would be to just give the wire from the Sennheisers a few wraps around a snap-on ferrite bead at the end nearest the amp. It'll probably work fine -- in fact, if I were the gambling type, I'd wager on this curing all of your symptoms.
I believe he was referring to the old-school AT-style PC cases, which either had a large switch on the side of the computer near the back, or a remotely-located power switch (typically on the front). Unlike the front-panel switches these days (which don't actually turn anything all the way off), these things would turn off the 110/220V coming in from the power cord.
The switches typically did require some meaningful force to operate. When you turn off an AT computer, it is REALLY off. Immediately.
I haven't had that happen for a long, long time. At all. And someone around my house seems to always be streaming Netflix at all times, using either Silverlight on Windows or the official PS3 viewer.
I'm sure I'm asking obvious stuff that you've already checked, but: Is your network hosed up somehow uploading/downloading too many torrents, or something similar?
Moving my finger fast, in a straight line in any direction (using a straightedge), things look fine on my Droid.
I haven't R'd the FA, but moving my finger slowly across the Droid's screen shows a whole bunch of significant waviness that just shouldn't be there, and indeed is not there when doing the same sort of motion on my first-gen iPod Touch. (All devices running recent firmware, the Droid at 2.0.1 and the iPod at 3.1.something, IIRC.)
So, it's obviously imperfect.
Is it a problem? Not for me. I carry my laptop with me everywhere, along with a decent Bluetooth mouse, so if I really need an accurate sketch, this isn't going to affect me. I also, for now at least, carry the iPod Touch, but I've never been inclined to draw on it in any serious capacity.
In terms of how I actually use the two devices: The Droid consistently does a better job of picking out the correct link on a fine-print website than the iPod does. Typing on the touchscreen keyboard of either device feels about the same, to me, with neither one being very accurate without automatic spelling correction fixing my entries.
Like many people here, I used to carry a Palm device (first a Visor Deluxe, then a Zire 71, then back to the Visor when replacing the lithium battery on the Zire went all wrong). Unlike many people here, I'm writing this on a very nice Elo-modified NEC LCD surface acoustic wave touchscreen monitor. I am very used to having rather good accuracy in pointing with stylus- and finger-based touch devices.
But with these modern(ish) handhelds, I guess I just don't care much. Both the Droid and the iPod Touch do a perfectly OK job of the stuff that I expect them to do. Frankly, they both amaze me in their ability to determine the exact point that my blunt fingertip is pointing at.
But better service would include immediately shipping you a new drive and possibly even sending someone to install it for you, and then give you a reasonable amount of time to get the old/broken hardware back to them.
I buy computers from a company that does these things, their prices are generally very reasonable. I'd name the company, but then everyone would just laugh at me, so I'll keep my not-so-secret secret to myself.
I'm sure I'll be modded into the toilet for this, in these modern times, but:
If you don't like it, code something better. Can't code? Document it better. Can't document? Organize it better. Can't organize? Pay someone else to do it (or any of the other things, really).
There's lots of ways to help push the open-source ATI drivers along, even for a skill-less schmuck as myself. (I just don't care enough to even bother with complaining about it anymore.)
I'm amazed that anyone bothers to seriously consider an ancillary device that uses 50 Watts of energy as something which can be usefully utilized in a light-weight device powered by batteries, let alone to go all the way to designing and marketing the thing.
It's not as prevalent today as in the past, but it's still not all that infrequent that movies show up online in excellent fidelity days, weeks, or months before the home DVD release.
Sometimes, it's a screener intended only for the folks who vote on Academy Awards or whatever. Sometimes, it's a retail DVD. Sometimes, who knows where it comes from...
Whatever the case, those who just can't wait to see a new movie, often needn't even wait for release day if they know their way around the tubes.
If copyright expired with death, then I could just get a copy of it for free from Project Gutenberg and be done with it.
The publisher could, of course, continue publishing on dead trees (much as some do with Mark Twain's now public domain works), and people who prefer that format will continue to buy it that way.
If the heirs of the dead author want to continue to monetize the work that Pappy (or Grandpappy, or Great-Grandpappy, or Great-Great Grandpappy these days) made, they'll also be free to compete in the market.
Of course it's not permanent. And it's easy for them to change. But even if Verizon/MS does create such a tool:
I can remove it.
As a geek, I don't really care about default settings and programs, on any platform, anyway -- if I don't like them, I just change them -- as should anyone else.
Virgin Mobile is currently -- in the US, at least -- selling Kyocera TNT phones for about $15 on their website, and they've typically got similar deals available cash-and-carry at places like Wal-Mart. No contract, contact information, or anything else required except for a bit of cash.
I'm just a creature of the Earth, as natural as like any other. I'm smarter, better at using tools, and can communicate complex ideas better than a lot of other animals, but that doesn't mean that either my existence or my actions are somehow unnatural.
It will do multitouch just fine, just not with the included apps (which, incidentally, are not games). The hardware can do it, and the back end can do it...it's just that the default applications are purposefully crippled in the US.
For instance, the Dolphin web browser on my Motorola Droid does multitouch, although the included browser does not. Meanwhile, the European version of this phone, the Motorola Milestone, is almost exactly identical hardware and software, but the browser does multitouch out of the box.
When it comes to these modern handsets from Google, HTC and Motorola, limitations on multitouch are purely political and monetary in origin.
Slashdot Mirror
But nobody here is proposing that your Picasso be taken from you. Some folks just want to hire a professional, at no cost to you (except, perhaps, to be a courteous host) to shoot a picture of it. They want to do this so that more of the world can see the work, not because they'd like to deprive you of your possession, which you would retain.
(Note: I'm not saying that you should let them photograph your hypothetical Picasso, nor am I casting any judgment in the matter. I'm just clarifying your analogy, which fairly reeked of the "copying == stealing" mantra, whether you intended it that way or not.)
I've got a Dell desktop driving a Panasonic plasma display over 30' of DVI cable. It works fine, and has for over a year. The cable itself more closely resembles a garden hose than something that you'd hook up a monitor with, but that's just because the conductors are bigger, and presumably also include more shielding. It is otherwise not very special (having come from Monoprice).
Meanwhile HDMI can easily, and reasonably cheaply, be repeated to absurd lengths. I, however, tend to avoid it when possible for installations, because I simply loathe the combination of big, heavy wire and friction-fit connectors.
I dislike VGA because of the difficulties of getting the pixel alignment correct and keeping it that way, and the inherent errors induced by the extra DA -> AD stages. I find it only useful in that it is universal.
So, DVI it is. Perhaps there will come a day when I get a job cursed by sparkles, but it hasn't happened yet.
All of the portable devices I have which play video seem to support h.264 just fine, and it is the only format supported by at least one of them.
I used to have an old Palm Pilot that was stuck in DivX land, but it died a couple of years ago, and it was a lousy way to watch video anyway . . .
My first statement was tempered by the notion that the reader would understand the context of the matter at hand. I'm not writing a thesis here, but just brief commentary on a Web forum.
In this context of Netflix streaming media, which promises "Instant Play," long buffering (which obviously may include the entire volume of the media) is not acceptable at all.
It is, instead, up to the user to ensure that sufficient bandwidth is available for the streaming content. (The emphasis there is to accentuate the idea of "steaming," instead of "download and then play whenever it gets done.")
With modern broadband connections (and again, I take certain liberties with this term, which I expect to be understood by all with a grasp of the context except for perhaps the most pedantic folk such as yourself), excessive buffering probably means that the user is doing too many other things with their connection (Bittorrent, for instance) at the same time, or that their ISP is actively fighting the usage.
If you wish to make a contextually-meaningful reply, I'll gleefully entertain it. But what you've written so far is without merit, AGAIN, simply on the basis that you've neglected to include the context of the application in your thought-process.
A guy that I work with has a theory about perfect computers, which your post reminded me of. It goes like this:
You have to inputs to this computer: "Good computer," and "Bad computer."
So, the computer does something. You decide whether it was good or bad, and press the appropriate button. The computer learns this in a Pavlovian way, and eventually little or no user input is required for the computer to tirelessly do good things.
It's always a rather curious occurrence to me when, in times when one is complaining about specific instances of text which are lacking brevity, the prose that the complainant themselves produce uses "it is" instead of "it's."
If the bandwidth available is insufficient for the task, then no amount of additional buffering will help. Bigger buffers will reduce the frequency at which the buffer empties, but will also simply take more time to fill back up. The ratio of "Buffering..." to movie watching is more-or-less constant, for a given bit of media on a given connection.
Kid to mother: Mommy, why doesn't it ever snow over by Mister Dragon's house? And why are the trees always green in the winter? How come I feel warmer when I stand on his sidewalk?
Ugh.
That's got to be frustrating.
It's got little to do with the headphones. They can't do that on their own.
The demodulation is happening inside of whatever device you're using as a headphone amp, or perhaps further back in the audio chain.
All the headphones provide some inductance to a circuit, which then decides that it's an FM radio, perhaps even using the headphone wire as a convenient antenna.
It's a poor design, whatever it is -- it shouldn't do that. You could try replacing it, or supplementing it with a different headphone amp (perhaps even just wired in series with it), but that might be impractical depending on the gear you have/want.
The simplest and cheapest thing to try would be to just give the wire from the Sennheisers a few wraps around a snap-on ferrite bead at the end nearest the amp. It'll probably work fine -- in fact, if I were the gambling type, I'd wager on this curing all of your symptoms.
I think you missed his point.
I believe he was referring to the old-school AT-style PC cases, which either had a large switch on the side of the computer near the back, or a remotely-located power switch (typically on the front). Unlike the front-panel switches these days (which don't actually turn anything all the way off), these things would turn off the 110/220V coming in from the power cord.
The switches typically did require some meaningful force to operate. When you turn off an AT computer, it is REALLY off. Immediately.
You mean like LED tower lighting like this thing?
Netflix? Buffering?
I haven't had that happen for a long, long time. At all. And someone around my house seems to always be streaming Netflix at all times, using either Silverlight on Windows or the official PS3 viewer.
I'm sure I'm asking obvious stuff that you've already checked, but: Is your network hosed up somehow uploading/downloading too many torrents, or something similar?
I'd like to second these comments:
Moving my finger fast, in a straight line in any direction (using a straightedge), things look fine on my Droid.
I haven't R'd the FA, but moving my finger slowly across the Droid's screen shows a whole bunch of significant waviness that just shouldn't be there, and indeed is not there when doing the same sort of motion on my first-gen iPod Touch. (All devices running recent firmware, the Droid at 2.0.1 and the iPod at 3.1.something, IIRC.)
So, it's obviously imperfect.
Is it a problem? Not for me. I carry my laptop with me everywhere, along with a decent Bluetooth mouse, so if I really need an accurate sketch, this isn't going to affect me. I also, for now at least, carry the iPod Touch, but I've never been inclined to draw on it in any serious capacity.
In terms of how I actually use the two devices: The Droid consistently does a better job of picking out the correct link on a fine-print website than the iPod does. Typing on the touchscreen keyboard of either device feels about the same, to me, with neither one being very accurate without automatic spelling correction fixing my entries.
Like many people here, I used to carry a Palm device (first a Visor Deluxe, then a Zire 71, then back to the Visor when replacing the lithium battery on the Zire went all wrong). Unlike many people here, I'm writing this on a very nice Elo-modified NEC LCD surface acoustic wave touchscreen monitor. I am very used to having rather good accuracy in pointing with stylus- and finger-based touch devices.
But with these modern(ish) handhelds, I guess I just don't care much. Both the Droid and the iPod Touch do a perfectly OK job of the stuff that I expect them to do. Frankly, they both amaze me in their ability to determine the exact point that my blunt fingertip is pointing at.
Therefore, I say they both win.
Not to be snide...
But better service would include immediately shipping you a new drive and possibly even sending someone to install it for you, and then give you a reasonable amount of time to get the old/broken hardware back to them.
I buy computers from a company that does these things, their prices are generally very reasonable. I'd name the company, but then everyone would just laugh at me, so I'll keep my not-so-secret secret to myself.
Nor, does it mean that we should not "get it".
Different strokes, for different folks. Some people like demographics.
I'm sure I'll be modded into the toilet for this, in these modern times, but:
If you don't like it, code something better. Can't code? Document it better. Can't document? Organize it better. Can't organize? Pay someone else to do it (or any of the other things, really).
There's lots of ways to help push the open-source ATI drivers along, even for a skill-less schmuck as myself. (I just don't care enough to even bother with complaining about it anymore.)
I'm amazed that anyone bothers to seriously consider an ancillary device that uses 50 Watts of energy as something which can be usefully utilized in a light-weight device powered by batteries, let alone to go all the way to designing and marketing the thing.
Sometimes.
It's not as prevalent today as in the past, but it's still not all that infrequent that movies show up online in excellent fidelity days, weeks, or months before the home DVD release.
Sometimes, it's a screener intended only for the folks who vote on Academy Awards or whatever. Sometimes, it's a retail DVD. Sometimes, who knows where it comes from...
Whatever the case, those who just can't wait to see a new movie, often needn't even wait for release day if they know their way around the tubes.
It helps to look at a broader picture of things.
If copyright expired with death, then I could just get a copy of it for free from Project Gutenberg and be done with it.
The publisher could, of course, continue publishing on dead trees (much as some do with Mark Twain's now public domain works), and people who prefer that format will continue to buy it that way.
If the heirs of the dead author want to continue to monetize the work that Pappy (or Grandpappy, or Great-Grandpappy, or Great-Great Grandpappy these days) made, they'll also be free to compete in the market.
And:
Windows-Up to maximimize
Windows-Down to minimize
Windows-Left to fill the left half of a screen with a window
Windows-Right to fill the right half
(And the latter of these two even make sensible use of multiple monitors.)
Feh.
With the Internet, I don't even have to wait until release day to see it.
Of course it's not permanent. And it's easy for them to change. But even if Verizon/MS does create such a tool:
I can remove it.
As a geek, I don't really care about default settings and programs, on any platform, anyway -- if I don't like them, I just change them -- as should anyone else.
Indeed.
Virgin Mobile is currently -- in the US, at least -- selling Kyocera TNT phones for about $15 on their website, and they've typically got similar deals available cash-and-carry at places like Wal-Mart. No contract, contact information, or anything else required except for a bit of cash.
Trolling? Hardly.
I'm just a creature of the Earth, as natural as like any other. I'm smarter, better at using tools, and can communicate complex ideas better than a lot of other animals, but that doesn't mean that either my existence or my actions are somehow unnatural.
It will do multitouch just fine, just not with the included apps (which, incidentally, are not games). The hardware can do it, and the back end can do it...it's just that the default applications are purposefully crippled in the US.
For instance, the Dolphin web browser on my Motorola Droid does multitouch, although the included browser does not. Meanwhile, the European version of this phone, the Motorola Milestone, is almost exactly identical hardware and software, but the browser does multitouch out of the box.
When it comes to these modern handsets from Google, HTC and Motorola, limitations on multitouch are purely political and monetary in origin.