I would think it would be fairly limited. The benefit would really only be felt by programs where a large percentage of the total used memory was pointers... so perhaps large graph-analysis applications? Perhaps neural networks, where it could reduce the size of an individual "synapse" from 96 bits (64 bit pointer + 32 bit weight) to 64 bits (32bit pointer+32 bit weight), saving roughly 1/3rd of the total program memory without resorting to index-based access and the associated overhead of pointer addition (though x32 may still incur that overhead behind the scenes - I don't know).
Offhand I can't think of anything else that's going to have a pointer/data ratio high enough for the size of pointers to make much difference.
Hmm, though the other factor is cache page size - you can fit twice as many 32 bit pointers in the same cache page - so for traversing large data trees you could potentially get a significant performance boost by using smaller pointers. Provided of course that you never wanted to deal with more than 4GB of total data.
Oh, I agree. But in that case you would be the victim of your own foolishness - it's not the SSD manufacturer's fault that you didn't consider the impact of your program on the well-stated limitations of their hardware. And nobody was blaming the actual victim - the company - for the programmer's stupidity.
As a non-coding example - if I build a shoddy set of stairs that collapse on me so I break my leg, telling me it's my own damned fault isn't really victim blaming, is it? It *is* absolutely and wholly my own fault. Not in any way like the quintessential blaming of a rape victim for the actions of their rapist.
Okay, I got a lot of great answers as to things to watch out for when using a TV as a monitor, but is there anything specific to HDR that's a problem?
Assume I'm only looking at 4K TVs that use standard monitor-style RGB/BGR/etc subpixel layouts, has a good latency and response time, and accurate color reproduction after calibration.
Is there anything specific to HDR that's a potential problem?
The only thing I can think of is brightness, as it seems most HDR sets have a much greater maximum brightness than SDR sets, and SDR sets are already too bright to use as a monitor without having the brightness cranked way down. And unfortunately it seems like most LED backlit monitors don't actually dim the backlight but instead use pulse-width modulated flickering at 120Hz or (occasionally) 240 Hz, which can cause eye strain and other problems in some people, which presumably gets worse the dimmer they're set. On the plus side, it sounds like that also reduces the ghosting due to relatively poor monitor response times.
Shipped, yes - it's widely known among enthusiasts that the default settings on most TVs are designed for brightly lit showroom floors so that the demo units look good, and the first thing you should do upon getting one home is to switch to a more standard mode. And then adjust brightness, contrast, white balance, and other calibration settings if you actually care, which I think you absolutely should, for use as a monitor.
The question is, once you get the brightness and colors calibrated for use as a monitor, is there still a problem?
Definitely something to watch out for that I hadn't really paid much attention to, thank you. I can see how lots of those non-rectangular layouts could cause issues as a monitor that assumes rectilinear pixel layouts. And that's even before you get into subpixel rendering like ClearType, which probably doesn't support any of the more "exotic" layouts.
I think I see my confusion - apparently there's at least three different "Bayer" layouts - one which uses four square subpixels rather than three parallel stripes - a red, a blue, and two green in opposite corners, and Bayer Filter, which uses staggered rows and doesn't seem to have really well defined pixels. https://geometrian.com/program...
I'm not sure an actual triangular 3-subpixels-per-pixel layout similar to CRT monitors would have the same issues, but it seems that most of the staggered layouts don't actually do it that way, instead using various interleaved color patterns that rather destroy the concept of consistent, distinct pixels.
Right. And nothing has fundamentally changed, except that flash drive technology got fast and reliable enough that now we stick them inside our computers and call them SSDs.
I should clarify, when I say "the only areas that seriously concern me are...", I mean the only areas that have aroused serious concern, not that those are the only areas that concern (interest) me.
Would you care to elaborate? I have done a fair bit of research on the subject, and the only areas that seriously concern me are:
brightness - TVs are generally far too bright to use as a monitor, and apparently LED backlit sets mostly use PWM for "dimming", with the resultant flickering potentially causing eye strain and other problems. and response time - it seems that most decent VA TV panels have a response time roughly double that of VA monitors, so you'll get some ghosting in high-speeed games. There's lag issues as well, but sub-15ms is not hard to find, even on budget TVs, at which point it's not much of an issue except for extremely reflex-sensitive games.
I can see how white balance would be an issue for doing professional print work, but does it really matter for anything else? It's not like an image is going to look the same on any two monitors it's displayed on anyway.
Dot pitch is indeed the biggest failing I have with my 40" TV/monitor, but it seems to me a 40" 4k TV would have exactly the same dot pitch as a 20" 1920x1080 monitor. Not spectacular, but decent, and probably better than most considering how long we were stuck with 1080p being the maximum resolution available for affordable monitors of any size (the great LCD monitor-quality-apocalypse). I think it's still the most common monitor resolution out there.
There's also the counterpoint, that with a much larger screen you have less need to display fine lines or text - with twice the screen size you can display things 41% larger, while still fitting 41% more data on screen in either direction, and reduce eye strain considerably.
As for display processing... *what* processing? A monitor receives a 2840x2160 image, and displays it on screen exactly as received, does it not? And a TV in PC mode does the same thing, if generally a several milliseconds more slowly. There's some question as to actual subpixel bit depth, but 10-bit or better color seems pretty standard on any halfway decent SDR TV these days, and HDR should improve things further, should it not?
I think you're mistaken, at least in your terminology, and probably in over-generalizing. A standard 16:9, TV (1080p or 4k) has a physical size ratio of 16/9 =~1.78, exactly the same as the pixel count ratio of 1920/1080. The pixels are geometrically square, unlike, for example, most pre-SVGA computer resolutions (where 320x240 and 640x480 were the only common ones with square pixels).
Now, when you get into subpixels things may get more complicated, but browsing rtings, which includes magnified views of the subpixels, it appears that many/most large LCD TVs use the same adjacent rectangle RGB subpixel patterns common in LCD monitors. Bayer patterns are relatively uncommon, though perhaps they are more common among cut-rate TV brands.
Perhaps you misread my original comment - As I said, the strategy *will* work reliably for "one-path" mazes. So long as you ignore the exit and continue until you reach the start again, you will visit every location in the maze. As soon as you have two paths in a maze reconnect to create a loop though, then the "keep one hand on the wall" strategy can no longer be counted on to give you total coverage, though I *think* it will still find the exit, provided you start at the entrance and not at some random point in the maze where it may trap you in a loop.
As they said - it can't be built, the technology just doesn't work that way. Flash memory cells wear out with usage. And the write-cycle limitation is generally displayed prominently on the packaging and marketing literature, as there is a large amount of variation depending on the exact technology, scale, and storage strategy used.
How is it victim blaming - other than being able to tell if the victim actually *is* to blame? Unlike HDDs, SSDs wear out with use, and nobody on the planet sells an "unlimited use SSD".
Well,to be fair you *didn't* fix it - you just worked around it. Almost as good in many settings. I've "fixed" several hard drives in a similar manner - one section of the drive is clearly bad, and spreading when used? Fine, re-partition it so that that section, and a generous buffer zone, are never used. They typically work fine for years after that.
Certainly not something I'd generally recommend given the nature of such HDD failures, but perhaps justifiable if you just want to buy some more time before an upgrade, or until a kid destroys the thing more permanently.
True. However, in 30-odd years of computing I've had several hard rives fail for mechanical reasons - almost always spreading surface failure, and also a couple head crashes. And only one drive that suffered a sudden catastrophic failure that might have been a controller failure.
Anecdotal evidence to be sure, but in my experience mechanical failures are far more likely than controller failures on HDDs. From what I can tell, SSDs are the opposite, probably due in large part to the much more complex (and less mature) software they run.
Quite so. As it happens I was just fixing a dentist's office computer yesterday, and used the dental air blower to get the dust-bison out of the heat sinks since I didn't have any compressed air on hand. Let me tell you I was *really* careful not to touch the water jet button. Clearly whoever designed the "two small identical buttons side by side" interface never intended it to be used in a setting where a stray jet of water could be a major problem.
In addition to the survivor bias mentioned by Junta, there's also transistor size to consider. The smaller a transistor is made, the more sensitive it is to any manufacturing imperfections, and the faster electromigration and other forms of normal wear and tear take their toll. Squeeze a billion of them on to a postage stamp, and even the most reliable one won't compare to the reliability of a well made canister transistor from the 70s.
I believe Intel SSDs are programmed to "self brick" when they fail, or at least they used to be. I remember thinking that was a spectacularly stupid way to fail, and the read-only mode would be much preferable. Yes, your computer will likely crash hard in short order either way, but at least with read-only mode you could get (most of) your most recent data off it
I think we agree on general life philosophy on this (though I'm unconvinced that the Protestants did) .
However, consider this - while enjoying yourself is important, any specific activity that contributes to that goal is not - it could be readily replaced with some other enjoyable activity. Contrast that with farming, blacksmithing, and most other "productive" activity, where the end product of that specific activity *is* important.
Agreed - that's a large part of why I'm a fan of frivolous pursuits. It doesn't make them any less frivolous though. If a frivolous pursuit had *no* value, nobody would waste their time on them, and we wouldn't have a word for it.
Definition of frivolous
1a : of little weight or importance She thinks window shopping is a frivolous activity. b : having no sound basis (as in fact or law) a frivolous lawsuit 2a : lacking in seriousness a frivolous conversation b : marked by unbecoming levity was criticized for his frivolous behavior in court
Slashdot Mirror
I would think it would be fairly limited. The benefit would really only be felt by programs where a large percentage of the total used memory was pointers... so perhaps large graph-analysis applications? Perhaps neural networks, where it could reduce the size of an individual "synapse" from 96 bits (64 bit pointer + 32 bit weight) to 64 bits (32bit pointer+32 bit weight), saving roughly 1/3rd of the total program memory without resorting to index-based access and the associated overhead of pointer addition (though x32 may still incur that overhead behind the scenes - I don't know).
Offhand I can't think of anything else that's going to have a pointer/data ratio high enough for the size of pointers to make much difference.
Hmm, though the other factor is cache page size - you can fit twice as many 32 bit pointers in the same cache page - so for traversing large data trees you could potentially get a significant performance boost by using smaller pointers. Provided of course that you never wanted to deal with more than 4GB of total data.
Why so verbose? Less is usually more:
>...began supporting the x32 ABI(which allows 64-bit code to use 32-bit pointers to reduce overhead), but already kernel developers...
Oh, I agree. But in that case you would be the victim of your own foolishness - it's not the SSD manufacturer's fault that you didn't consider the impact of your program on the well-stated limitations of their hardware. And nobody was blaming the actual victim - the company - for the programmer's stupidity.
As a non-coding example - if I build a shoddy set of stairs that collapse on me so I break my leg, telling me it's my own damned fault isn't really victim blaming, is it? It *is* absolutely and wholly my own fault. Not in any way like the quintessential blaming of a rape victim for the actions of their rapist.
Okay, but you get to pay for building, cleaning, and maintaining the required powerfully magnetic roads.
Okay, I got a lot of great answers as to things to watch out for when using a TV as a monitor, but is there anything specific to HDR that's a problem?
Assume I'm only looking at 4K TVs that use standard monitor-style RGB/BGR/etc subpixel layouts, has a good latency and response time, and accurate color reproduction after calibration.
Is there anything specific to HDR that's a potential problem?
The only thing I can think of is brightness, as it seems most HDR sets have a much greater maximum brightness than SDR sets, and SDR sets are already too bright to use as a monitor without having the brightness cranked way down. And unfortunately it seems like most LED backlit monitors don't actually dim the backlight but instead use pulse-width modulated flickering at 120Hz or (occasionally) 240 Hz, which can cause eye strain and other problems in some people, which presumably gets worse the dimmer they're set. On the plus side, it sounds like that also reduces the ghosting due to relatively poor monitor response times.
Shipped, yes - it's widely known among enthusiasts that the default settings on most TVs are designed for brightly lit showroom floors so that the demo units look good, and the first thing you should do upon getting one home is to switch to a more standard mode. And then adjust brightness, contrast, white balance, and other calibration settings if you actually care, which I think you absolutely should, for use as a monitor.
The question is, once you get the brightness and colors calibrated for use as a monitor, is there still a problem?
Definitely something to watch out for that I hadn't really paid much attention to, thank you. I can see how lots of those non-rectangular layouts could cause issues as a monitor that assumes rectilinear pixel layouts. And that's even before you get into subpixel rendering like ClearType, which probably doesn't support any of the more "exotic" layouts.
I think I see my confusion - apparently there's at least three different "Bayer" layouts - one which uses four square subpixels rather than three parallel stripes - a red, a blue, and two green in opposite corners, and Bayer Filter, which uses staggered rows and doesn't seem to have really well defined pixels.
https://geometrian.com/program...
I'm not sure an actual triangular 3-subpixels-per-pixel layout similar to CRT monitors would have the same issues, but it seems that most of the staggered layouts don't actually do it that way, instead using various interleaved color patterns that rather destroy the concept of consistent, distinct pixels.
Right. And nothing has fundamentally changed, except that flash drive technology got fast and reliable enough that now we stick them inside our computers and call them SSDs.
So where does the victim blaming come in?
So does the relevance to myself and any other being that doesn't exist on a cosmic scale of space and time.
I should clarify, when I say "the only areas that seriously concern me are...", I mean the only areas that have aroused serious concern, not that those are the only areas that concern (interest) me.
Would you care to elaborate? I have done a fair bit of research on the subject, and the only areas that seriously concern me are:
brightness - TVs are generally far too bright to use as a monitor, and apparently LED backlit sets mostly use PWM for "dimming", with the resultant flickering potentially causing eye strain and other problems.
and
response time - it seems that most decent VA TV panels have a response time roughly double that of VA monitors, so you'll get some ghosting in high-speeed games. There's lag issues as well, but sub-15ms is not hard to find, even on budget TVs, at which point it's not much of an issue except for extremely reflex-sensitive games.
I can see how white balance would be an issue for doing professional print work, but does it really matter for anything else? It's not like an image is going to look the same on any two monitors it's displayed on anyway.
Dot pitch is indeed the biggest failing I have with my 40" TV/monitor, but it seems to me a 40" 4k TV would have exactly the same dot pitch as a 20" 1920x1080 monitor. Not spectacular, but decent, and probably better than most considering how long we were stuck with 1080p being the maximum resolution available for affordable monitors of any size (the great LCD monitor-quality-apocalypse). I think it's still the most common monitor resolution out there.
There's also the counterpoint, that with a much larger screen you have less need to display fine lines or text - with twice the screen size you can display things 41% larger, while still fitting 41% more data on screen in either direction, and reduce eye strain considerably.
As for display processing... *what* processing? A monitor receives a 2840x2160 image, and displays it on screen exactly as received, does it not? And a TV in PC mode does the same thing, if generally a several milliseconds more slowly. There's some question as to actual subpixel bit depth, but 10-bit or better color seems pretty standard on any halfway decent SDR TV these days, and HDR should improve things further, should it not?
I think you're mistaken, at least in your terminology, and probably in over-generalizing. A standard 16:9, TV (1080p or 4k) has a physical size ratio of 16/9 =~1.78, exactly the same as the pixel count ratio of 1920/1080. The pixels are geometrically square, unlike, for example, most pre-SVGA computer resolutions (where 320x240 and 640x480 were the only common ones with square pixels).
Now, when you get into subpixels things may get more complicated, but browsing rtings, which includes magnified views of the subpixels, it appears that many/most large LCD TVs use the same adjacent rectangle RGB subpixel patterns common in LCD monitors. Bayer patterns are relatively uncommon, though perhaps they are more common among cut-rate TV brands.
Perhaps you misread my original comment - As I said, the strategy *will* work reliably for "one-path" mazes. So long as you ignore the exit and continue until you reach the start again, you will visit every location in the maze. As soon as you have two paths in a maze reconnect to create a loop though, then the "keep one hand on the wall" strategy can no longer be counted on to give you total coverage, though I *think* it will still find the exit, provided you start at the entrance and not at some random point in the maze where it may trap you in a loop.
As they said - it can't be built, the technology just doesn't work that way. Flash memory cells wear out with usage. And the write-cycle limitation is generally displayed prominently on the packaging and marketing literature, as there is a large amount of variation depending on the exact technology, scale, and storage strategy used.
>You really don't want an "HDR TV" as a monitor and vice versa, hence the ratings are pointless.
Why not?
I ask as someone who has been fairly happy using a 1080pTV as a monitor for 10+ years, and am thinking it's about time to upgrade to a 4k TV.
How is it victim blaming - other than being able to tell if the victim actually *is* to blame? Unlike HDDs, SSDs wear out with use, and nobody on the planet sells an "unlimited use SSD".
Well,to be fair you *didn't* fix it - you just worked around it. Almost as good in many settings. I've "fixed" several hard drives in a similar manner - one section of the drive is clearly bad, and spreading when used? Fine, re-partition it so that that section, and a generous buffer zone, are never used. They typically work fine for years after that.
Certainly not something I'd generally recommend given the nature of such HDD failures, but perhaps justifiable if you just want to buy some more time before an upgrade, or until a kid destroys the thing more permanently.
True. However, in 30-odd years of computing I've had several hard rives fail for mechanical reasons - almost always spreading surface failure, and also a couple head crashes. And only one drive that suffered a sudden catastrophic failure that might have been a controller failure.
Anecdotal evidence to be sure, but in my experience mechanical failures are far more likely than controller failures on HDDs. From what I can tell, SSDs are the opposite, probably due in large part to the much more complex (and less mature) software they run.
Quite so. As it happens I was just fixing a dentist's office computer yesterday, and used the dental air blower to get the dust-bison out of the heat sinks since I didn't have any compressed air on hand. Let me tell you I was *really* careful not to touch the water jet button. Clearly whoever designed the "two small identical buttons side by side" interface never intended it to be used in a setting where a stray jet of water could be a major problem.
In addition to the survivor bias mentioned by Junta, there's also transistor size to consider. The smaller a transistor is made, the more sensitive it is to any manufacturing imperfections, and the faster electromigration and other forms of normal wear and tear take their toll. Squeeze a billion of them on to a postage stamp, and even the most reliable one won't compare to the reliability of a well made canister transistor from the 70s.
I believe Intel SSDs are programmed to "self brick" when they fail, or at least they used to be. I remember thinking that was a spectacularly stupid way to fail, and the read-only mode would be much preferable. Yes, your computer will likely crash hard in short order either way, but at least with read-only mode you could get (most of) your most recent data off it
I think we agree on general life philosophy on this (though I'm unconvinced that the Protestants did) .
However, consider this - while enjoying yourself is important, any specific activity that contributes to that goal is not - it could be readily replaced with some other enjoyable activity. Contrast that with farming, blacksmithing, and most other "productive" activity, where the end product of that specific activity *is* important.
Frivolous doesn't mean valueless though - it just means unimportant and/or lacking in seriousness.
Agreed - that's a large part of why I'm a fan of frivolous pursuits. It doesn't make them any less frivolous though. If a frivolous pursuit had *no* value, nobody would waste their time on them, and we wouldn't have a word for it.
Definition of frivolous
1a : of little weight or importance She thinks window shopping is a frivolous activity.
b : having no sound basis (as in fact or law) a frivolous lawsuit
2a : lacking in seriousness a frivolous conversation
b : marked by unbecoming levity was criticized for his frivolous behavior in court