Never in my 42 years have I heard anyone explain siphons working from atmospheric pressure. Obviously it is gravity. The same atmospheric pressure exists at both ends of the hose.
Only they're also known targets, and should be able to be easily programmed for, as a result. Performance for 1920x1080 shouldn't be an issue for any title on the hardware available. It boggles the mind at how poor these developers must be if they can't even target known hardware, console-style, and get good performance out of the thing. Average PC game devs don't seem to have any problem doing so on the PC, and that's a moving target. Why would any competent devs have a problem with a fixed target? They've got decent CPUs. They've got decent GPUs. They've got a decent amount of RAM. Yet they found a way to get horrible performance out of it. Send in the firing squad.
Plenty of 'iRacers' have multiple 3D monitors. It works fine.
I have no doubt that your 'sense of presence' might be better with a VR headset, but to say I will not get a sense of presence with three monitors in front of me is ridiculous. You say don't discount VR's VRness. I say don't discount wide FOV for vastly improving the immersiveness factor, too. My view of the race track in this particular sim (thanks to its display calculator in the graphics options) gives me a 1:1 view of the sim world. It would look exactly the same to me if I were in that car at that track in the real world, save for the fact that I would have a full FOV in all directions rather than just the monitors in front of me.
Believe me, once the racing starts I am in that world. I completely lose the fact that I'm looking at monitors because of how much of my FOV it is taking up. The bezel gaps disappear. I fail to notice anything beyond the monitors' display area. A good VR headset *with* as much or greater FOV would be even better, yes. But I would not want a VR headset with less FOV than I have now, no matter what else the headset brings to the table in terms of immersiveness. FOV is too important, and trumps all the other headset pluses, for me, with this usage.
A larger field of view by turning your head is not the same thing as a larger field of view at once. If I can't have both, I choose larger field of view at once. And, btw, you can do 3D with monitors. And I don't notice the bezel gaps while I'm racing on iRacing. I notice the track in front of me and the large FOV means I can see the cars beside me. It would be great to be able to turn my head to see even better beside me, but most of the time peripheral vision is enough for that use. But that absolutely requires a large FOV. In that use, a smaller FOV with head-tracking is still going to be a disadvantage compared to the larger FOV. The larger FOV will still be greatly preferable.
The resolution of these types of devices is a huge factor in whether or not I would find them acceptable to use, but the field of view they have is an even bigger factor. With very inexpensive monitors I can have a combined display that takes up a very large portion of my horizontal vision. I currently have three 24" monitors that give me a combined field of view of 123 degrees in their current configuration, with a 5760x1080 resolution also being a plus. Going to a VR headset with a FOV of only 90 degrees would be a step down as far as I'm concerned, and I would not take that step. The VR aspect of it, while cool in and of itself, would be a non-starter for me if the FOV was well below what I can do with monitors. Getting slightly bigger monitors, like 27" ones, would give me an even larger FOV, and alterations to their physical configuration can also change that FOV value and give me close to 180 degrees if I want.
As far as I'm concerned, if a VR headset isn't giving me something near/beyond a 180 degree FOV I really couldn't care less. I'd rather keep my head stationary and look at a display setup that does give me a larger FOV. Hopefully they get there soon, because everything else that goes along with the idea is pretty damn cool. But I don't want to look at an image where only a small portion of my vision is taken up. The immersiveness of a large horizontal FOV (vertical is less important to our vision, but would still be desirable) is too much to give up. I've lived with this setup for a couple years now, and wouldn't want to go without something similar/greater in FOV capability.
Somehow I doubt that all would be required to make you forget you're squeezing a baby out is Google Glass. I'm fairly confident in saying nothing would do that, actually.
I said this in the last 4k TV discussion. I have a 60" 1080P set, and my couch is 8 feet from it, or 96 inches. According to http://isthisretina.com/ 60" 1920x1080 pixels should only be visible to the average retina up to 94". That 8 foot distance is about as close as I would want to sit to a TV that size anyway, so I lucked out there. If I got a 60" 4k TV it WOULD NOT LOOK ANY DIFFERENT at that distance. The 1920x1080 pixels are already just small enough to not see.
Now, go back to isthisretina and punch in 3840x2160 and 60" and what do you get? Yep, 47". Do you want to sit 47" from a 60" TV? Pretty sure you don't. I know I don't. You need to double the size to 120" in order to make the 8-foot viewing distance happen. But, again, do you want to sit 8 feet from a 120" TV? I don't think I would want to. Nevermind that an 85" 4k TV is something like $40,000! haha. How much would a 120" one be? Pff, yeah. That'll happen.
Also nevermind the fact that the last time you were in a movie theater with that big screen you were looking at a 4k picture. Did you see pixels during the movie? No. (And you were probably looking at a lot of 2k content during that movie anyway.)
TLDR: 4k is useless for the home, and always will be.
I have a 60" 1080P set that is 8 feet from my couch, or 96 inches. I actually fluked out, without knowing this in advance or even thinking about it at the time, in that a 60" 1080P image only has visible pixels at up to 94 inches away, beyond which point you're past the average retina capability. Punch in 1920 x 1080 and 60" at this site. http://isthisretina.com/
Not only that, but I don't think I would want to sit closer than 8 feet from a set that big, anyway. It's a pretty big image from that far away. Now, if you go back to http://isthisretina.com/ and punch in 3840 x 2160 and 60" and what do you get? Half of what you did before, or 47"! Sorry, but I do not want to sit 47" away from a 60" TV in order to appreciate all the pixels I would have paid for.
Now, extrapolate. If I wanted to continue to sit 8 feet from my TV, but I wanted a 4K TV that I could actually see (or nearly see) the pixels I paid for, knowing the information from above, how big would it need to be? That's right, 120" is what it would need to be. So we get back to the same problem again. I don't think I would want to sit 8 feet away from a 120" TV. But that's exactly what I would need to do in order to make use of 3840 x 2160 at that distance.
Maybe that wouldn't be too bad for watching movies, actually, but I doubt I would want to carry out my regular TV watching at that size/distance. I wouldn't mind trying it, but I am not confident that I would actually like it. Again, maybe for movies. Maybe.
They couldn't test for dropped and runt frames, and said so. So, the tests tell me nothing I want to know, other than I'll still be sticking with NVidia.;)
"That leaves us with Fraps. And of course, there’s no way for us to pick up dropped and runt frame using Fraps. So, we immediately shed the dual-GPU solutions from our charts."
Do they actually draw every frame yet? Can't exactly call it the fastest if they're still cheating. I'm looking forward to the pcper dot com review to see if they're actually doing what they're supposed to be doing yet. But only out of curiosity, as their track record means I'll continue buying NVidia. Go to the pcper website and look for the "Frame Rating: Eyefinity vs Surround in Single and Multi-GPU Configurations" article.
I don't know why anyone would use anything other than gmail, but I guess some people have their uses. I'll cast another vote for popfile, as I used that before gmail, but I don't really know how it might perform with a large volume of email. It was awesome for just my own personal mail while I was using it.
I've always wondered why companies making computing devices that run off batteries continually made things smaller and smaller, with the goal of also keeping the same (poor) battery life, rather than realizing that after a certain point these devices are small enough and they should instead start cramming ever bigger batteries into the same form factor.
Take an iPhone 4 and 5 as a recent example. The size of an iPhone 4 is just fine. I wouldn't want something smaller, in fact. Yet, with the iPhone 5 they had as one of their goals the idea to make the thing thinner in order to make it smaller. And while they made the power usage of the device better than the older device, they also made the battery smaller, relatively speaking. So in the end, the battery life isn't dramatically better than before. It is merely about the same, while you do get better performance from the device than you do the older one. I'd much rather have a device that was still the same thickness as before, with all the components inside still having undergone the size reduction they did, and with all the same power usage advances, but a much larger battery taking up all the saved space. This would give you a much better usable battery life. The device was already small enough. Making it smaller wasn't much of a gain.
Laptops have been the same story ever since there were laptops. It would be nicer if they lasted longer while running on the battery. They were pretty bulky in the beginning, but after a few years they got to a certain size that was most certainly small enough. And as time marched on, everything inside them got smaller and smaller, and we got smaller and smaller machines. And power usage for them kept getting better and better, but they kept putting smaller and smaller batteries in them as the overall device got smaller, too. And so, battery life was never improving. It was still being built to a certain battery life goal, which is all well and good, unless that goal is too short.
By this time, with all the power usage improvements that we've seen, and battery design improvements that we've seen, we should have had laptops that lasted 24-48 hours on a single charge many years ago. This story about Sony's device getting 24 hours of usable life out of a charge, with an external add-on battery for crying out loud, shouldn't be something to salivate over. This should've been the norm many years ago. With a battery inside the thing that is already capable of such usable life per charge. After a certain point, small is small enough, and we should be putting that space to use for more usable life out of those suckers.
It's probably my favourite movie. Unfortunately the definitive version doesn't exist. At least, the best version isn't the best it could have been, for they inexplicably changed one word in a key scene that completely changed the tone of that scene. The Final Cut is the best one to see. Even better if you could see my copy where I've replaced the audio data for that line with the data that contains the original line.;)
I bought three monitors a couple years ago for iRacing, as it is almost a requirement in that sim for a good view. (They even have a built-in FOV calculator to give you a 1:1 life-size view.) I wouldn't want to race without it. I had not given any thought at all to how it would be in anything else, but I've found it's quite nice to have in all kinds of games. I've got an older system, an AMD Phenom II running at 3.8 GHz and a pair of GTX 480 cards in SLI, and for most things it is fast enough, but not everything. I'd definitely like to upgrade to one of the recent Intel CPUs and perhaps 680 cards.
I think a big bottleneck with triple screens is how much RAM they put on the video cards. It doesn't seem to be as much of an issue with single screen setups, but once you triple the resolution you require that much more for the framebuffer data, and that obviously takes away from storage for all the other data. It definitely takes its toll. Not to mention the horsepower required to crunch all the extra pixels. It is definitely worth it, in my opinion.
Why is that movie theaters seem to be about the only business that not only doesn't understand or even attempt to follow supply and demand with their pricing of both the attractions and the food, but seem to publicly admit that they don't think supply/demand makes sense? If nobody wants to buy something I'm selling, the price is too high. Any sane person in the world would lower their price. That's the whole idea behind supply and demand. But what do movie theaters do? Jack up the price even more, and claim that they need to do so to survive. On what crazy planet does that even begin to make sense?
Popcorn is CHEAP. Why would you charge $7 for it and then complain that nobody buys it?
Sodas are CHEAP. Why would you charge $5 for it and then complain that nobody buys it?
I don't know about theaters around the country, but where I live we have "cheap nights" on Tuesdays, where movie tickets are a good deal cheaper than usual. And typically the theaters are packed full on that night. Every other night? You could count patrons in a given theater without running out of digits on your hands/feet. And even *THAT* doesn't tell theater owners that their regular prices are too high?! Your theaters are packed full on cheap nights because the price is easier to swallow. It shouldn't cost a family of four over $80 to go have a movie night, yet that's exactly what it cost a friend of mine to take his family to a movie on the weekend. Hell, it cost me and a friend, just two of us, almost $50 to go see 48 fps Hobbits a couple weeks ago. Almost $50 for two tickets and one popcorn/drink/chocolate combo. That's way too much money, and that is exactly the reason movie theaters are struggling, yet they just don't get it.
Supply and demand. This is an insanely old concept that pretty much everyone seems to understand. Except movie theater owners. WHY?!
Look at video games, and Valve's Steam store in particular. They've publicly discussed a few times over the past few years how they have seen insane increases in revenue whenever they have big sales on games, on the order or 40x increase in revenue in one case! Here's what I think was the first article discussing it back in 2009: http://www.edge-online.com/features/valve-are-games-too-expensive/
Movie theaters' own cheap nights prove that supply and demand is warranted in their market, just like any other. If they would lower prices of everything, tickets and refreshments/food, they'd see way more people, and way more money, come their way. If only they'd take their heads out of their asses.
iRacing is practically all I have time for, as it eats a LOT of time. But even if that didn't exist, practically every other game that exists is for Windows anyways. I'm fine sticking with Windows until every single game is available for Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Never in my 42 years have I heard anyone explain siphons working from atmospheric pressure. Obviously it is gravity. The same atmospheric pressure exists at both ends of the hose.
Only they're also known targets, and should be able to be easily programmed for, as a result. Performance for 1920x1080 shouldn't be an issue for any title on the hardware available. It boggles the mind at how poor these developers must be if they can't even target known hardware, console-style, and get good performance out of the thing. Average PC game devs don't seem to have any problem doing so on the PC, and that's a moving target. Why would any competent devs have a problem with a fixed target? They've got decent CPUs. They've got decent GPUs. They've got a decent amount of RAM. Yet they found a way to get horrible performance out of it. Send in the firing squad.
Plenty of 'iRacers' have multiple 3D monitors. It works fine.
I have no doubt that your 'sense of presence' might be better with a VR headset, but to say I will not get a sense of presence with three monitors in front of me is ridiculous. You say don't discount VR's VRness. I say don't discount wide FOV for vastly improving the immersiveness factor, too. My view of the race track in this particular sim (thanks to its display calculator in the graphics options) gives me a 1:1 view of the sim world. It would look exactly the same to me if I were in that car at that track in the real world, save for the fact that I would have a full FOV in all directions rather than just the monitors in front of me.
Believe me, once the racing starts I am in that world. I completely lose the fact that I'm looking at monitors because of how much of my FOV it is taking up. The bezel gaps disappear. I fail to notice anything beyond the monitors' display area. A good VR headset *with* as much or greater FOV would be even better, yes. But I would not want a VR headset with less FOV than I have now, no matter what else the headset brings to the table in terms of immersiveness. FOV is too important, and trumps all the other headset pluses, for me, with this usage.
A larger field of view by turning your head is not the same thing as a larger field of view at once. If I can't have both, I choose larger field of view at once. And, btw, you can do 3D with monitors. And I don't notice the bezel gaps while I'm racing on iRacing. I notice the track in front of me and the large FOV means I can see the cars beside me. It would be great to be able to turn my head to see even better beside me, but most of the time peripheral vision is enough for that use. But that absolutely requires a large FOV. In that use, a smaller FOV with head-tracking is still going to be a disadvantage compared to the larger FOV. The larger FOV will still be greatly preferable.
The resolution of these types of devices is a huge factor in whether or not I would find them acceptable to use, but the field of view they have is an even bigger factor. With very inexpensive monitors I can have a combined display that takes up a very large portion of my horizontal vision. I currently have three 24" monitors that give me a combined field of view of 123 degrees in their current configuration, with a 5760x1080 resolution also being a plus. Going to a VR headset with a FOV of only 90 degrees would be a step down as far as I'm concerned, and I would not take that step. The VR aspect of it, while cool in and of itself, would be a non-starter for me if the FOV was well below what I can do with monitors. Getting slightly bigger monitors, like 27" ones, would give me an even larger FOV, and alterations to their physical configuration can also change that FOV value and give me close to 180 degrees if I want.
As far as I'm concerned, if a VR headset isn't giving me something near/beyond a 180 degree FOV I really couldn't care less. I'd rather keep my head stationary and look at a display setup that does give me a larger FOV. Hopefully they get there soon, because everything else that goes along with the idea is pretty damn cool. But I don't want to look at an image where only a small portion of my vision is taken up. The immersiveness of a large horizontal FOV (vertical is less important to our vision, but would still be desirable) is too much to give up. I've lived with this setup for a couple years now, and wouldn't want to go without something similar/greater in FOV capability.
But what about cassettes?
It's still non-ionizing radiation. Be as skeptical as you want. The rest of us will just point and laugh.
I might actually buy it now. That was a ridiculous policy.
Somehow I doubt that all would be required to make you forget you're squeezing a baby out is Google Glass. I'm fairly confident in saying nothing would do that, actually.
I said this in the last 4k TV discussion. I have a 60" 1080P set, and my couch is 8 feet from it, or 96 inches. According to http://isthisretina.com/ 60" 1920x1080 pixels should only be visible to the average retina up to 94". That 8 foot distance is about as close as I would want to sit to a TV that size anyway, so I lucked out there. If I got a 60" 4k TV it WOULD NOT LOOK ANY DIFFERENT at that distance. The 1920x1080 pixels are already just small enough to not see.
Now, go back to isthisretina and punch in 3840x2160 and 60" and what do you get? Yep, 47". Do you want to sit 47" from a 60" TV? Pretty sure you don't. I know I don't. You need to double the size to 120" in order to make the 8-foot viewing distance happen. But, again, do you want to sit 8 feet from a 120" TV? I don't think I would want to. Nevermind that an 85" 4k TV is something like $40,000! haha. How much would a 120" one be? Pff, yeah. That'll happen.
Also nevermind the fact that the last time you were in a movie theater with that big screen you were looking at a 4k picture. Did you see pixels during the movie? No. (And you were probably looking at a lot of 2k content during that movie anyway.)
TLDR: 4k is useless for the home, and always will be.
Not to mention, how much is a 120" 4K TV going to be?! 85" ones are over $40,000! haha. Yeah, that'll happen.
I have a 60" 1080P set that is 8 feet from my couch, or 96 inches. I actually fluked out, without knowing this in advance or even thinking about it at the time, in that a 60" 1080P image only has visible pixels at up to 94 inches away, beyond which point you're past the average retina capability. Punch in 1920 x 1080 and 60" at this site. http://isthisretina.com/
Not only that, but I don't think I would want to sit closer than 8 feet from a set that big, anyway. It's a pretty big image from that far away. Now, if you go back to http://isthisretina.com/ and punch in 3840 x 2160 and 60" and what do you get? Half of what you did before, or 47"! Sorry, but I do not want to sit 47" away from a 60" TV in order to appreciate all the pixels I would have paid for.
Now, extrapolate. If I wanted to continue to sit 8 feet from my TV, but I wanted a 4K TV that I could actually see (or nearly see) the pixels I paid for, knowing the information from above, how big would it need to be? That's right, 120" is what it would need to be. So we get back to the same problem again. I don't think I would want to sit 8 feet away from a 120" TV. But that's exactly what I would need to do in order to make use of 3840 x 2160 at that distance.
Maybe that wouldn't be too bad for watching movies, actually, but I doubt I would want to carry out my regular TV watching at that size/distance. I wouldn't mind trying it, but I am not confident that I would actually like it. Again, maybe for movies. Maybe.
They couldn't test for dropped and runt frames, and said so. So, the tests tell me nothing I want to know, other than I'll still be sticking with NVidia. ;)
"That leaves us with Fraps. And of course, there’s no way for us to pick up dropped and runt frame using Fraps. So, we immediately shed the dual-GPU solutions from our charts."
Do they actually draw every frame yet? Can't exactly call it the fastest if they're still cheating. I'm looking forward to the pcper dot com review to see if they're actually doing what they're supposed to be doing yet. But only out of curiosity, as their track record means I'll continue buying NVidia. Go to the pcper website and look for the "Frame Rating: Eyefinity vs Surround in Single and Multi-GPU Configurations" article.
Any quality is better than no quality.
I don't know why anyone would use anything other than gmail, but I guess some people have their uses. I'll cast another vote for popfile, as I used that before gmail, but I don't really know how it might perform with a large volume of email. It was awesome for just my own personal mail while I was using it.
I've always wondered why companies making computing devices that run off batteries continually made things smaller and smaller, with the goal of also keeping the same (poor) battery life, rather than realizing that after a certain point these devices are small enough and they should instead start cramming ever bigger batteries into the same form factor.
Take an iPhone 4 and 5 as a recent example. The size of an iPhone 4 is just fine. I wouldn't want something smaller, in fact. Yet, with the iPhone 5 they had as one of their goals the idea to make the thing thinner in order to make it smaller. And while they made the power usage of the device better than the older device, they also made the battery smaller, relatively speaking. So in the end, the battery life isn't dramatically better than before. It is merely about the same, while you do get better performance from the device than you do the older one. I'd much rather have a device that was still the same thickness as before, with all the components inside still having undergone the size reduction they did, and with all the same power usage advances, but a much larger battery taking up all the saved space. This would give you a much better usable battery life. The device was already small enough. Making it smaller wasn't much of a gain.
Laptops have been the same story ever since there were laptops. It would be nicer if they lasted longer while running on the battery. They were pretty bulky in the beginning, but after a few years they got to a certain size that was most certainly small enough. And as time marched on, everything inside them got smaller and smaller, and we got smaller and smaller machines. And power usage for them kept getting better and better, but they kept putting smaller and smaller batteries in them as the overall device got smaller, too. And so, battery life was never improving. It was still being built to a certain battery life goal, which is all well and good, unless that goal is too short.
By this time, with all the power usage improvements that we've seen, and battery design improvements that we've seen, we should have had laptops that lasted 24-48 hours on a single charge many years ago. This story about Sony's device getting 24 hours of usable life out of a charge, with an external add-on battery for crying out loud, shouldn't be something to salivate over. This should've been the norm many years ago. With a battery inside the thing that is already capable of such usable life per charge. After a certain point, small is small enough, and we should be putting that space to use for more usable life out of those suckers.
It's probably my favourite movie. Unfortunately the definitive version doesn't exist. At least, the best version isn't the best it could have been, for they inexplicably changed one word in a key scene that completely changed the tone of that scene. The Final Cut is the best one to see. Even better if you could see my copy where I've replaced the audio data for that line with the data that contains the original line. ;)
The rapper from Poor Righteous Teachers has his own day now?! I didn't think that many people even knew about them. ;)
5 O'clock Charlie ain't scared of no invisible planes.
Also, gmail exists.
I bought three monitors a couple years ago for iRacing, as it is almost a requirement in that sim for a good view. (They even have a built-in FOV calculator to give you a 1:1 life-size view.) I wouldn't want to race without it. I had not given any thought at all to how it would be in anything else, but I've found it's quite nice to have in all kinds of games. I've got an older system, an AMD Phenom II running at 3.8 GHz and a pair of GTX 480 cards in SLI, and for most things it is fast enough, but not everything. I'd definitely like to upgrade to one of the recent Intel CPUs and perhaps 680 cards.
I think a big bottleneck with triple screens is how much RAM they put on the video cards. It doesn't seem to be as much of an issue with single screen setups, but once you triple the resolution you require that much more for the framebuffer data, and that obviously takes away from storage for all the other data. It definitely takes its toll. Not to mention the horsepower required to crunch all the extra pixels. It is definitely worth it, in my opinion.
This is not new research. Pretty sure this was all covered in a 2010 episode of NOVA called Dogs Decoded.
Why is that movie theaters seem to be about the only business that not only doesn't understand or even attempt to follow supply and demand with their pricing of both the attractions and the food, but seem to publicly admit that they don't think supply/demand makes sense? If nobody wants to buy something I'm selling, the price is too high. Any sane person in the world would lower their price. That's the whole idea behind supply and demand. But what do movie theaters do? Jack up the price even more, and claim that they need to do so to survive. On what crazy planet does that even begin to make sense?
Popcorn is CHEAP. Why would you charge $7 for it and then complain that nobody buys it?
Sodas are CHEAP. Why would you charge $5 for it and then complain that nobody buys it?
I don't know about theaters around the country, but where I live we have "cheap nights" on Tuesdays, where movie tickets are a good deal cheaper than usual. And typically the theaters are packed full on that night. Every other night? You could count patrons in a given theater without running out of digits on your hands/feet. And even *THAT* doesn't tell theater owners that their regular prices are too high?! Your theaters are packed full on cheap nights because the price is easier to swallow. It shouldn't cost a family of four over $80 to go have a movie night, yet that's exactly what it cost a friend of mine to take his family to a movie on the weekend. Hell, it cost me and a friend, just two of us, almost $50 to go see 48 fps Hobbits a couple weeks ago. Almost $50 for two tickets and one popcorn/drink/chocolate combo. That's way too much money, and that is exactly the reason movie theaters are struggling, yet they just don't get it.
Supply and demand. This is an insanely old concept that pretty much everyone seems to understand. Except movie theater owners. WHY?!
Look at video games, and Valve's Steam store in particular. They've publicly discussed a few times over the past few years how they have seen insane increases in revenue whenever they have big sales on games, on the order or 40x increase in revenue in one case! Here's what I think was the first article discussing it back in 2009: http://www.edge-online.com/features/valve-are-games-too-expensive/
Movie theaters' own cheap nights prove that supply and demand is warranted in their market, just like any other. If they would lower prices of everything, tickets and refreshments/food, they'd see way more people, and way more money, come their way. If only they'd take their heads out of their asses.
iRacing is practically all I have time for, as it eats a LOT of time. But even if that didn't exist, practically every other game that exists is for Windows anyways. I'm fine sticking with Windows until every single game is available for Linux.