It has some small amount of bearing---the output (DVI or VGA, doesn't matter) on your video card doesn't know it has an LCD connected, so it just sends the whole image 60 times a second. With an LCD the previous refresh remains on the display until the next one gets painted in, unlike a CRT which is completely blank for most of the time in between refreshes.
That means when a program draws something on the screen it can take anywhere up to 1/60 of a second to show up on the display even if it's an LCD (and that's before we get into things like LCD response times.) In practice it doesn't amount to much.
Even at high refresh rates, CRT refresh seems to be reflected in visual cortex. In some cells you can see entrainment at well above 100 Hz. It's unclear whether this has any adverse effect however.
One thing that is often overlooked is saccades. Ordinarily your eyes make sudden movements from one point of fixation to the next as you inspect the objects in a scene. When viewing a CRT, which is black most of the time, you have to wait for the next refresh after every eye movement, so that you can register what you were trying to look at. Additionally, your fast eye movements are not always accurate--thy are usually followed by small corrective movements, based on visual feedback, that zero in on the target. With a mostly-black CRT you have to wait for the next refresh cycle to acquire the feedback needed to find the target.
In two studies (1, 2) lower refresh rates caused slower performance at reading and target location. These effects were present at well above "flicker fusion" rates where the image appears to be solid to most people.
An LCD display is "always-on" if it has a good backlight, so it suffers from none of these issues.
Sir, perhaps you are not aware of how those of us in scientific professions approach the acquisition of knowledge. Suffice it to say that if I let a hypothesis or statement go unchallenged, you can be sure that I have discarded it as not worth my time even considering.
You can see for yourself that this is manifestly not the case here. To wit: I note a statement from you which is linked to a reference. I read the reference, and find that it does not support your statement. I do further research, and find further inconsistencies between reality and what you claim. I ask you for clarification, and I have yet to hear anything from you more substantive than "you're wrong!"
I am forced to conclude that either you are not interested in sharing your knowledge, or that you do not posess any.
If by "good digging" you mean "typing the word into oed.com and copying and pasting." Such is not indicative of real world knowledge.
All sources seem to agree that the term originated at MIT in the early '60s. Were you around then? If you were then I bet you could provide some evidence of your real world knowledge.
p.s. a Freak and vindictive moderation! Someone's getting their panties in a twist!
In the same way that creationists prove that evolution is wrong, by saying exactly the opposite?
Face it, I've got documentation: the 20 November 1963 issue of MIT's The Tech. Wikipedia has some vague generalities, text copied verbatim from ESR's jargon file, and no references that anyone can fact-check. Find a use of "hacker" before 1963. Put up or shut up.
It's a well known fact [wikipedia.org] that the term "hacker" did not originally apply to the people that media now calls hackers....And just in case you all are too lazy to read the links.....[blah blah blah]
There isn't anything on that Wikipedia page about the original use of the word. Perhaps you yourself should read your links?
It's well known that the very first use of the term "hacker" in the context of IT referred to people who destructively abused computer networks.
Diesel versus gasoline isn't really a fair comparison; the only regular production diesel bike I know of is the one the Marines ride in Iraq and it gets around 100 mpg.
A motorcycle (even a sleek looking sport bike) has all the aerodynamics of a brick shithouse. Pretty much unavoidable when you have the rider outside the vehicle.
Most bikes nowadays have a ludicrous power/weight ratio compared to a car, so the engine normally runs at low load (so low efficiency.)
Bike engines are also more primitive and tend to be engineered for weight savings rather than fuel efficiency. Only high-end bikes have fuel injection, while it's been at least a decade since you could even get a new car (in the US) that wasn't fuel injected.
I've toured several labs and met several animals used in neuroscience research--owls, rats, cats, monkeys, bats, etc. I've never got the impression that they experienced a substantial amount of pain. They all seemed perfectly normal except for the odd bit of metal sticking out of their heads.
This kind of research takes a lot of time investment in individual animals--training takes a lot of one-on-one involvement, and scientists are no less likely than anyone else to form bonds with creatures they care for.
Hi, this is off topic but you mentioned on one of your earlier posts that cells in the thalamus (and higher areas?) responded synchronously to CRT flicker. Do you know if this has been studied in detail, and can you provide any paper references?
Well just read the article summary--they propose potentially using 25% of available wave energy (to equal merely 7% of our present electricity usage). That's a huge percentage and it's hard to believe that it wouldn't have a substantial impact.
Compare this to wind power--100% of the present energy needs of the planet (including heating and transportation, not just electricity) could be met by taking somewhere around 0.02% of the planet's wind energy. (Wind is powered by solar heating causing convection and is slowed by surface drag and viscosity; this figure is based on the additional surface drag that would be required.)
You argue about comparing the effect to the negative effects from coal and oil systems that it would replace. This is the right idea to begin with, and you go on to conjecture that one set of efffects would be smaller than the other. However you do not seem to have anything to back up your conjecture. As a believer in evidence-based politics, I cannot accept "probably."
A rocket/shuttle/anything uses up pretty much ALL of its fuel just to get off the ground.
True. Every X pounds of cargo you get off of Earth's surface takes N*X pounds of fuel.
But it does not follow that it would be easier to launch off the moon. How would you get rocket fuel, spaceship components, etc. up to the moon? Unless the moon has vast rocket fuel reserves, factories and a moon-based aerospace industrial complex we don't yet know about, you get it there by launching it from Earth. Every pound of fuel you have in the tank of a Moon-based ship actually costs more than N times as much when you include the cost of getting it to the moon to begin with. There is no net savings here.
If we could land on the moon, not only could we go faster (full fuel + no air + moon swinging around)
it would be safer because the mission would have spare fuel to use on the way to Mars. Plus you have enough fuel to get back since you would be using a capapult+rockets to get on your way.
Or, using an even smaller amount of fuel, we could NOT land on the moon, just go around it and use the slingshot effect anyway. You don't need to land on the moon to do that.
Having a "staging area" makes some amount of sense, if we want a Mars craft to be larger than what we can launch from Earth in one piece. But the correct location for a "staging area" is in orbit, not in yet another gravity well.
If you have the entire contents in memory you can be assured of not skipping if there becomes contention for the disk. iTunes on the mac is famous for not skipping no matter the system load, guess why?
All I have to do is try to run Eclipse and play iTunes at the same time on a 600MHz g3 iBook. Skips like crazy.
You can buy a license to thw WMA DRM format and build a player that supports it. There are several players on the market, from different manufacturers, that support protected WMA.
On the other hand, all the players that support FairPlay come from one manufacturer, and this manufacturer actively refuses to license FairPlay and combats all attempts to build interoperable devices.
Several digital media players support AAC--this is not a problem. The problem is no digital media players other than iPod support fairPlay DRM, and Apple has actively denied all requests to license FairPlay.
Slashdot Mirror
It has some small amount of bearing---the output (DVI or VGA, doesn't matter) on your video card doesn't know it has an LCD connected, so it just sends the whole image 60 times a second. With an LCD the previous refresh remains on the display until the next one gets painted in, unlike a CRT which is completely blank for most of the time in between refreshes.
That means when a program draws something on the screen it can take anywhere up to 1/60 of a second to show up on the display even if it's an LCD (and that's before we get into things like LCD response times.) In practice it doesn't amount to much.
Even at high refresh rates, CRT refresh seems to be reflected in visual cortex. In some cells you can see entrainment at well above 100 Hz. It's unclear whether this has any adverse effect however.
One thing that is often overlooked is saccades. Ordinarily your eyes make sudden movements from one point of fixation to the next as you inspect the objects in a scene. When viewing a CRT, which is black most of the time, you have to wait for the next refresh after every eye movement, so that you can register what you were trying to look at. Additionally, your fast eye movements are not always accurate--thy are usually followed by small corrective movements, based on visual feedback, that zero in on the target. With a mostly-black CRT you have to wait for the next refresh cycle to acquire the feedback needed to find the target.
In two studies (1, 2) lower refresh rates caused slower performance at reading and target location. These effects were present at well above "flicker fusion" rates where the image appears to be solid to most people.
An LCD display is "always-on" if it has a good backlight, so it suffers from none of these issues.
Sir, perhaps you are not aware of how those of us in scientific professions approach the acquisition of knowledge. Suffice it to say that if I let a hypothesis or statement go unchallenged, you can be sure that I have discarded it as not worth my time even considering.
You can see for yourself that this is manifestly not the case here. To wit: I note a statement from you which is linked to a reference. I read the reference, and find that it does not support your statement. I do further research, and find further inconsistencies between reality and what you claim. I ask you for clarification, and I have yet to hear anything from you more substantive than "you're wrong!"
I am forced to conclude that either you are not interested in sharing your knowledge, or that you do not posess any.
If by "good digging" you mean "typing the word into oed.com and copying and pasting." Such is not indicative of real world knowledge.
All sources seem to agree that the term originated at MIT in the early '60s. Were you around then? If you were then I bet you could provide some evidence of your real world knowledge.
p.s. a Freak and vindictive moderation! Someone's getting their panties in a twist!
No, English as it is used is the definitive authority on the English language. OED just tries to document English usage, incompletely at best.
Hasn't anyone ever taught you about the difference betwen primary and secondary sources?
In the same way that creationists prove that evolution is wrong, by saying exactly the opposite?
Face it, I've got documentation: the 20 November 1963 issue of MIT's The Tech. Wikipedia has some vague generalities, text copied verbatim from ESR's jargon file, and no references that anyone can fact-check. Find a use of "hacker" before 1963. Put up or shut up.
1976 vs. 1983... neither one of them is before 1963, so what's your point?
It's a well known fact [wikipedia.org] that the term "hacker" did not originally apply to the people that media now calls hackers....And just in case you all are too lazy to read the links.....[blah blah blah]
There isn't anything on that Wikipedia page about the original use of the word. Perhaps you yourself should read your links?
It's well known that the very first use of the term "hacker" in the context of IT referred to people who destructively abused computer networks.
Heh, just to clarify, "weight, there's more" was actually a typo and not an intentional bad pun.
Yep, and a school bus will get 2.8 km/l while massing 10,000 kg....
8 times the mass of your car for only 4 times the fuel (and it's all stop-and-go!)
A semi-tractor can get the same km/l on the highway pulling 36,000 kg. Three times better than the bus.
But weight, there's more, the typical freight train gets twice as many kg*km/l as a semi.
what are you going to use for your daily driver?
Diesel versus gasoline isn't really a fair comparison; the only regular production diesel bike I know of is the one the Marines ride in Iraq and it gets around 100 mpg.
Some explanations:
A motorcycle (even a sleek looking sport bike) has all the aerodynamics of a brick shithouse. Pretty much unavoidable when you have the rider outside the vehicle.
Most bikes nowadays have a ludicrous power/weight ratio compared to a car, so the engine normally runs at low load (so low efficiency.)
Bike engines are also more primitive and tend to be engineered for weight savings rather than fuel efficiency. Only high-end bikes have fuel injection, while it's been at least a decade since you could even get a new car (in the US) that wasn't fuel injected.
I'd love to have a fuel cell trail bike, no emissions and no scaring off the wildlife.
Not in my experience... I have an ancient 120Mhz box I use for downloads. It can run ten instances of btdownloadcurses, no problem.
Azureus, on the other hand, will bring my 600mhz laptop to its knees, just by being open.
Spare a nickel? I'd like go buy myself a real computer...
I've toured several labs and met several animals used in neuroscience research--owls, rats, cats, monkeys, bats, etc. I've never got the impression that they experienced a substantial amount of pain. They all seemed perfectly normal except for the odd bit of metal sticking out of their heads.
This kind of research takes a lot of time investment in individual animals--training takes a lot of one-on-one involvement, and scientists are no less likely than anyone else to form bonds with creatures they care for.
Hi, this is off topic but you mentioned on one of your earlier posts that cells in the thalamus (and higher areas?) responded synchronously to CRT flicker. Do you know if this has been studied in detail, and can you provide any paper references?
Well just read the article summary--they propose potentially using 25% of available wave energy (to equal merely 7% of our present electricity usage). That's a huge percentage and it's hard to believe that it wouldn't have a substantial impact.
Compare this to wind power--100% of the present energy needs of the planet (including heating and transportation, not just electricity) could be met by taking somewhere around 0.02% of the planet's wind energy. (Wind is powered by solar heating causing convection and is slowed by surface drag and viscosity; this figure is based on the additional surface drag that would be required.)
You argue about comparing the effect to the negative effects from coal and oil systems that it would replace. This is the right idea to begin with, and you go on to conjecture that one set of efffects would be smaller than the other. However you do not seem to have anything to back up your conjecture. As a believer in evidence-based politics, I cannot accept "probably."
A rocket/shuttle/anything uses up pretty much ALL of its fuel just to get off the ground.
True. Every X pounds of cargo you get off of Earth's surface takes N*X pounds of fuel.
But it does not follow that it would be easier to launch off the moon. How would you get rocket fuel, spaceship components, etc. up to the moon? Unless the moon has vast rocket fuel reserves, factories and a moon-based aerospace industrial complex we don't yet know about, you get it there by launching it from Earth. Every pound of fuel you have in the tank of a Moon-based ship actually costs more than N times as much when you include the cost of getting it to the moon to begin with. There is no net savings here.
If we could land on the moon, not only could we go faster (full fuel + no air + moon swinging around)
it would be safer because the mission would have spare fuel to use on the way to Mars. Plus you have enough fuel to get back since you would be using a capapult+rockets to get on your way.
Or, using an even smaller amount of fuel, we could NOT land on the moon, just go around it and use the slingshot effect anyway. You don't need to land on the moon to do that.
Having a "staging area" makes some amount of sense, if we want a Mars craft to be larger than what we can launch from Earth in one piece. But the correct location for a "staging area" is in orbit, not in yet another gravity well.
All I have to do is try to run Eclipse and play iTunes at the same time on a 600MHz g3 iBook. Skips like crazy.
Graphviz
Ports on three of its four sides? What were they thinking?
If by "smaller and lighter" you mean "50% wider, 70% heavier and twice as thick." Try again dude.
You can buy a license to thw WMA DRM format and build a player that supports it. There are several players on the market, from different manufacturers, that support protected WMA.
On the other hand, all the players that support FairPlay come from one manufacturer, and this manufacturer actively refuses to license FairPlay and combats all attempts to build interoperable devices.
Several digital media players support AAC--this is not a problem. The problem is no digital media players other than iPod support fairPlay DRM, and Apple has actively denied all requests to license FairPlay.
It isn't as often done for displays, but the "megapixel" ratings on cameras almost always count red, green, and blue elements separately.