Although the motion blur does help things
look better, this is not a perfect fix
for low framerates.
If you track a moving object with your
eye in reality then the object is
not blurred.
Thus the motion blur helps things look
more realistic when you are not following
them closely.
This limitation is very noticable on panning
shots across scenery. In an ideal display
system these should appear to the eye exactly
as sharp as a still shot. In current movies
this is not the case.
It is not true that the eye can
only see 30fps. At 30fps you do get the
illusion of motion, but there are various
display artifacts which distinguish different
frame rates.
There are many reasons why you might want
more than 30fps. These include (but are
not limited to):
Matching monitor rate: Eyes (particularly
in peripheral vision) can easily detect flicker
up to around 85Hz. If you want to avoid tearing
and other nasty artifacts, it helps having the
frame rate matched to your monitor sync.
Tracking fast moving objects: This is the
main reason. Eyes are very good at tracking
moving objects. If you are only displaying
at 30Hz then the object may move a significant
distance between each frame. As the eye is
continuously moving between each frame this
will cause the object to look blurred when it
shouldn't. This can be very obvious in cinemas
during tracking shots.
Faster response to game events: The faster
your framerate, the lower the lag between input
actions and the display. Of course this has
diminishing returns, but for FPS games can
be a serious problem.
I certainly hope that the DVD release is
better that the terrible Fox DVD release of
My Neighbor Totoro, which was a
pan-and-scan version with no Japanese
language track or extras.
If Disney are releasing it directly, then
there is some chance they might do a good
job, but I'm certainly not preordering anything
until the details are clear...
For those who are confused by this behaviour
of WinXP (as I was), you need to select "Tools", "Folder Options", "View" and in the "Advanced settings" unselect "Use simple file sharing".
At least on XP Professional, this will
give you the security tab back again. If
I recall correctly on XP Home you are out
of luck.
Normal VHS VCRs have poor image quality, as
the colours are encoded in a very similar way
to the composite signal. Thus, for output from
a VCR, the type of cable you use isn't going
to make much of a difference.
SVHS video recorders are significantly better,
and you will see an improvement with S-Video
connectors.
However, with digital sources such as consoles,
DVDs and digital set-top-boxes you may be able
to see further improvement with a component
(Y/Cb/Cr or RGB) connection.
With my current systems (to a UK widescreen
TV), the connection to my VCR doesn't make
much difference. However, the difference between
RGB SCART and composite for the consoles is
enormous.
I found the Gamecube almost physically
unpleasant to play using the in-pack composite
connection. Once I finally managed to get
an RGB SCART for it (these have been strangely
hard to come by in the UK), it is wonderfully
sharp.
This is also my experience for the Xbox and
PS2, though I bought the RGB cables at the
same time as the console for those.;)
To get around the 'I need the version from
two days ago' problem, what I would like to
see is moving to filesystems with full audit
trails of all changes.
There are high-end systems that can do this,
but the size of the disks available should make
it possible for normal desktop users.
An office user will generate a relatively
small amount of actual data, so with these new huge
disks there is no excuse for not keeping all
changes.
Does anyone know what is available for destop
use? I've see something called 'GoBack' which
seemed to do this for windows.
The statement that real-life visual input always gets motion blur is not even remotely true. If you watch a moving item, then your eye will track it so that it is effectively stationary. Thus, there will be no motion blur.
If you watch a panning shot in the cinema,
the motion-blur is VERY noticable if you are
looking for it. A real object in constant motion will stay perfectly
sharp, but the cinema object will be blurred.
Motion-blur is an approximation. To get
proper display of motion, you need far far more
frames per second than 24.
For the motion of an object to remain
perfectly sharp when tracked by an eye, then
the amount the object moves by in one frame
must be smaller than the resolution that
the eye can resolve.
If you have an object that moves across
the screen in one second, and wanted a
resolution of 1000 pixels, then you would
need 1000fps for a human not to be able to
detect the effects of motion blur.
Admittedly, there are some other tricks
you could use to trick the eye (such as using
ultra-short strobes on the frames so that the
eye motion does not cause any blurring), but
these are difficult to do.
I'm not sure that they really did get the hardware right. There are some significant
problems. It doesn't play DVDs out of the box.
The audio player is pitifully bad (for
instance you can't fast forward within a track, and it has trouble with long playlists).
It is quite nice for playing games though,
and the built-in hard disk does make saving
a lot easier.
I have read the linked to treaty, and am now
baffled as to why this leads to the provisions
that are in the DMCA.
The only relevant Articles seem to be Article 10: "Obligations concerning Technological Measures" and Article 11: "Obligations concerning Rights Management Information".
Article 10 calls for legal remedies against "circumvention of effective technological measures", but does not
say anything about facilitating such acts
or discussing details of the technological
measures.
Article 11 seems only to apply to
"Rights Management Information", in
stopping the alteration or removal of
information regarding the author of
the work and so on. It doesn't say
anything about preventing access to
the work.
Why does the DMCA need all
the objectionable provisions that have
lead to the DeCSS and SDMI troubles?
Any modern OS should be fairly good at analysing usage and keeping the important things in memory. You're almost always better of just tossing in more RAM and letting it run.
The problem is, in most cases at the moment
you CAN'T toss in more RAM. Most current
motherboards only have 2 or 3 DIMM slots,
so if you are using cheap 256MB modules
you can't get more than 768MB in a system.
Most of the systems I use are already
maxed out in memory.
The current limit is the motherboards
rather than the memory. A separate RAM
disk would be one way around this.
Of course a better solution would be
64 bit processors with dozens of memory
slots, but this isn't going to happen
at the consumer level anytime soon...
The problem with this is that with 32
bit processors, motherbaords can't
support more than 4GB of RAM. Thus,
if you use system memory for the RAM
disk, you are limiting the available
RAM to the rest of the system.
With RAM so cheap, it would be
nice to have a separate piece of
hardware that can support more than
4GB in a RAM disk.
Unfortunately, the Cenatek ones seem to
be WAY too expensive.
I couldn't find any prices on their
site, but another article claimed prices
in the region of $3000. As far as I
am concerned this is about two orders
of magnitude more expensive than it
should be.
If someone could produce a simple
PCI card with say a dozen DIMM slots
for under $100, I'd buy several.
Surely a card with a memory controller
and a PCI interface can't cost
much to manufacture.
What this post (and the article) seem
to not grasp is that the simple 2 byte
encoding is not the only way to
encode the unicode character set. It is
not even a particularly good way of
encoding the character set.;)
Other encodings give you far more
than 2^16 characters.
In fact, using the surrogate system
you can get over a million characters into
even the common 2-byte encoding. (I'm assuming
this has not changed in the later specs,
I've only got the Unicode 2.0 spec to
hand.)
Unicode does seem to have been well
thought out, and these sort of problems
have been anticipated.
There does seem to be a huge amount of
misinformation and misunderstanding in the
article and this discussion. However, this
is probably not helped by the Unicode
standard not being freely available (as
far as I can tell).
Well, there is the slight problem that
if the application just uses the prices from
the database together with the item numbers
and quantities from the client then if the
price gets changed while the user submits the
form, the application may charge the user
a price they did not agree to.
This is admittedly quite unlikely, but
the consequences could be quite serious.
Thus you do need to take precautions that
the price the customer is agreeing to does
match the price you think you are selling
for.
There was also a really nasty software
hack that could be done on the original
ST that sort of enabled hardware scrolling.
With this hack you could place the place
the start address of the framebuffer
anywhere, so you could do vertical scrolling
to a pixel, and horizontal scrolling
to 16 pixels.
Unfortunately, the STE came along which
had this kind of thing officially supported,
but wasn't entirely backwards compatible.
It is also a misconception that motion blur is an ideal solution for smooth displays.
In real life if you see a fast moving object then your eyes can track it, and the object does not ppear blurred at all. However if your eyes follow a fast moving object on a cinema display then it will appear blurred.
Thus, as the previous poster showed, if you want accurate representation of fast moving objects then high frame rates are a must. There are cinema systems around that use much higher frame rates than the usual 24FPS.
I'm just waiting for a video card and monitor that can do 1600*1200 at 150FPS.;)
Re:More than just a fancy dress...
on
Boo No More
·
· Score: 1
I don't think there is that much of a difference in delivery time expectations between traditional mail order and e-commerce.
I've been buying mail order for many years, and the good mail order companies have always managed to deliver items rapidly. Many of the others are no longer around.
It comes as no surprise to me that many of the current e-commerce companies that are doing well are actually the same old mail order companies with a new web front end. Experience in distribution and customer service counts for a lot.
A slick web interface alone does not make for a successful company.
The remap can be very confusing though. Once someone using my keyboard got it jammed under the monitor which pressed the remap button. They were then baffled why many of the keys didn't work anymore.
Gateway was obviously aware of this problem, as the keyboard shipped with a big sticker telling you how to reset the keyboard.
The only real irritation with the AnyKey is that the configuration software only worked under DOS (it would crash in windows).
2) You (at least in the US) revoke your US citizenship (you can't have dual citizenship in the US past the age of 18) and you learn REAL fast what a plus it really is in the world to be a US citizen.
At the moment RAM is so cheap that you can get 256MB of RAM for the price of fairly low end HD. I would have thought that with current systems, virtual memory is largely obsolete.
Most people seem to be considering diskless systems as slow dumb terminals, but this doesn't need to be the case. Todays low end systems (Celeron or K6-2) cost very little and can act as extremely fast network computers. I've actually been considering building a dual PIII diskless system...;)
I've also seen for sale a diskless server, which gets it's data from a separate RAID array.
Slashdot Mirror
With USB readers and PC card adapters being cheap and highly compatible, CF cards are pretty easy to read on most PCs.
CF cards are also much smaller than CDs and floppy disks, and can be used for data transfer with many PDAs and digital cameras.
They are still rather expensive for the storage you get, but can be worth it for the convenience.
If you track a moving object with your eye in reality then the object is not blurred.
Thus the motion blur helps things look more realistic when you are not following them closely.
This limitation is very noticable on panning shots across scenery. In an ideal display system these should appear to the eye exactly as sharp as a still shot. In current movies this is not the case.
There are many reasons why you might want more than 30fps. These include (but are not limited to):
I certainly hope that the DVD release is better that the terrible Fox DVD release of My Neighbor Totoro, which was a pan-and-scan version with no Japanese language track or extras.
If Disney are releasing it directly, then there is some chance they might do a good job, but I'm certainly not preordering anything until the details are clear...
They also stated that the recording sometimes stuttered when under heavy load.
This does seem to rather ruin the whole point, if you have to restrict you usage of the pc to avoid damaging the recording.
At least on XP Professional, this will give you the security tab back again. If I recall correctly on XP Home you are out of luck.
Normal VHS VCRs have poor image quality, as the colours are encoded in a very similar way to the composite signal. Thus, for output from a VCR, the type of cable you use isn't going to make much of a difference.
SVHS video recorders are significantly better, and you will see an improvement with S-Video connectors.
However, with digital sources such as consoles, DVDs and digital set-top-boxes you may be able to see further improvement with a component (Y/Cb/Cr or RGB) connection.
With my current systems (to a UK widescreen TV), the connection to my VCR doesn't make much difference. However, the difference between RGB SCART and composite for the consoles is enormous.
I found the Gamecube almost physically unpleasant to play using the in-pack composite connection. Once I finally managed to get an RGB SCART for it (these have been strangely hard to come by in the UK), it is wonderfully sharp.
This is also my experience for the Xbox and PS2, though I bought the RGB cables at the same time as the console for those. ;)
To get around the 'I need the version from two days ago' problem, what I would like to see is moving to filesystems with full audit trails of all changes.
There are high-end systems that can do this, but the size of the disks available should make it possible for normal desktop users.
An office user will generate a relatively small amount of actual data, so with these new huge disks there is no excuse for not keeping all changes.
Does anyone know what is available for destop use? I've see something called 'GoBack' which seemed to do this for windows.
The statement that real-life visual input always gets motion blur is not even remotely true. If you watch a moving item, then your eye will track it so that it is effectively stationary. Thus, there will be no motion blur.
If you watch a panning shot in the cinema, the motion-blur is VERY noticable if you are looking for it. A real object in constant motion will stay perfectly sharp, but the cinema object will be blurred.
Motion-blur is an approximation. To get proper display of motion, you need far far more frames per second than 24.
For the motion of an object to remain perfectly sharp when tracked by an eye, then the amount the object moves by in one frame must be smaller than the resolution that the eye can resolve.
If you have an object that moves across the screen in one second, and wanted a resolution of 1000 pixels, then you would need 1000fps for a human not to be able to detect the effects of motion blur.
Admittedly, there are some other tricks you could use to trick the eye (such as using ultra-short strobes on the frames so that the eye motion does not cause any blurring), but these are difficult to do.
According to the article, each server has 4GB of RAM. Considering the model detail, they may well need this.
Memory may be cheap at the moment, but the base cost for the platform (including ram, motherboard, case, PSU etc.) is going to be WAY more than $400.
Given this cost, you might as well put the fastest processor you can get into it.
I'm not sure that they really did get the hardware right. There are some significant problems. It doesn't play DVDs out of the box. The audio player is pitifully bad (for instance you can't fast forward within a track, and it has trouble with long playlists).
It is quite nice for playing games though, and the built-in hard disk does make saving a lot easier.
I have read the linked to treaty, and am now baffled as to why this leads to the provisions that are in the DMCA.
The only relevant Articles seem to be Article 10: "Obligations concerning Technological Measures" and Article 11: "Obligations concerning Rights Management Information".
Article 10 calls for legal remedies against "circumvention of effective technological measures", but does not say anything about facilitating such acts or discussing details of the technological measures.
Article 11 seems only to apply to "Rights Management Information", in stopping the alteration or removal of information regarding the author of the work and so on. It doesn't say anything about preventing access to the work.
Why does the DMCA need all the objectionable provisions that have lead to the DeCSS and SDMI troubles?
Any modern OS should be fairly good at analysing usage and keeping the important things in memory. You're almost always better of just tossing in more RAM and letting it run.
The problem is, in most cases at the moment you CAN'T toss in more RAM. Most current motherboards only have 2 or 3 DIMM slots, so if you are using cheap 256MB modules you can't get more than 768MB in a system.
Most of the systems I use are already maxed out in memory.
The current limit is the motherboards rather than the memory. A separate RAM disk would be one way around this.
Of course a better solution would be 64 bit processors with dozens of memory slots, but this isn't going to happen at the consumer level anytime soon...
The problem with this is that with 32 bit processors, motherbaords can't support more than 4GB of RAM. Thus, if you use system memory for the RAM disk, you are limiting the available RAM to the rest of the system.
With RAM so cheap, it would be nice to have a separate piece of hardware that can support more than 4GB in a RAM disk.
Unfortunately, the Cenatek ones seem to be WAY too expensive.
I couldn't find any prices on their site, but another article claimed prices in the region of $3000. As far as I am concerned this is about two orders of magnitude more expensive than it should be.
If someone could produce a simple PCI card with say a dozen DIMM slots for under $100, I'd buy several. Surely a card with a memory controller and a PCI interface can't cost much to manufacture.
What this post (and the article) seem to not grasp is that the simple 2 byte encoding is not the only way to encode the unicode character set. It is not even a particularly good way of encoding the character set. ;)
Other encodings give you far more than 2^16 characters.
In fact, using the surrogate system you can get over a million characters into even the common 2-byte encoding. (I'm assuming this has not changed in the later specs, I've only got the Unicode 2.0 spec to hand.)
Unicode does seem to have been well thought out, and these sort of problems have been anticipated.
There does seem to be a huge amount of misinformation and misunderstanding in the article and this discussion. However, this is probably not helped by the Unicode standard not being freely available (as far as I can tell).
Well, there is the slight problem that if the application just uses the prices from the database together with the item numbers and quantities from the client then if the price gets changed while the user submits the form, the application may charge the user a price they did not agree to.
This is admittedly quite unlikely, but the consequences could be quite serious.
Thus you do need to take precautions that the price the customer is agreeing to does match the price you think you are selling for.
There was also a really nasty software
hack that could be done on the original
ST that sort of enabled hardware scrolling.
With this hack you could place the place
the start address of the framebuffer
anywhere, so you could do vertical scrolling
to a pixel, and horizontal scrolling
to 16 pixels.
Unfortunately, the STE came along which
had this kind of thing officially supported,
but wasn't entirely backwards compatible.
RoboSmurf
(who used to be an ST demo coder...)
It is also a misconception that motion blur is an ideal solution for smooth displays.
;)
In real life if you see a fast moving object then your eyes can track it, and the object does not ppear blurred at all. However if your eyes follow a fast moving object on a cinema display then it will appear blurred.
Thus, as the previous poster showed, if you want accurate representation of fast moving objects then high frame rates are a must. There are cinema systems around that use much higher frame rates than the usual 24FPS.
I'm just waiting for a video card and monitor that can do 1600*1200 at 150FPS.
I don't think there is that much of a difference
in delivery time expectations between traditional
mail order and e-commerce.
I've been buying mail order for many years,
and the good mail order companies have always
managed to deliver items rapidly. Many of the
others are no longer around.
It comes as no surprise to me that many of
the current e-commerce companies that are
doing well are actually the same old mail order
companies with a new web front end. Experience
in distribution and customer service counts
for a lot.
A slick web interface alone does not make
for a successful company.
I also use one of the AnyKey keyboards.
The remap can be very confusing though.
Once someone using my keyboard got it
jammed under the monitor which pressed
the remap button. They were then baffled
why many of the keys didn't work anymore.
Gateway was obviously aware of this problem,
as the keyboard shipped with a big sticker
telling you how to reset the keyboard.
The only real irritation with the AnyKey
is that the configuration software only
worked under DOS (it would crash in windows).
I also saw it in Reading.
One really neat effect was that leaves
of trees effectively produced hundreds
of pinhole cameras, causing lots of bright crescents in the shadow.
2) You (at least in the US) revoke your US citizenship (you can't have dual citizenship in the US past the age of 18) and you learn REAL fast what a plus it really is in the world to be a US citizen.
Not quite true, see:
http://www.webcom.com/richw/dualcit/
for a dual citizenship FAQ.
Why is a swap file needed?
;)
At the moment RAM is so cheap that you can
get 256MB of RAM for the price of fairly low
end HD. I would have thought that with current systems, virtual memory is largely obsolete.
Most people seem to be considering diskless
systems as slow dumb terminals, but this doesn't
need to be the case. Todays low end systems
(Celeron or K6-2) cost very little and can
act as extremely fast network computers.
I've actually been considering building a
dual PIII diskless system...
I've also seen for sale a diskless server,
which gets it's data from a separate RAID
array.