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User: FredMcGriff

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Comments · 15

  1. Re:I don't know about you on Palm Reveals New Name · · Score: 1


    yeah right, pa1mOne will work well... and whats so amazing is that 6 years after removing the "Pilot" name, most people still refer to their pda as a "Palm Pilot".

  2. component & s-video & composite on Forty-two Inch Plasma Monitor · · Score: 5, Informative

    The composite video inputs offered the best overall picture which is to be expected, followed by the RCA video connection and S-Video in a distant last place.

    This statement worries me, here's why (excerpt from a cnet article):

    Composite video

    Although the composite-video system was developed for color-TV signals, it doesn't give you a very sharp picture. Composite video was created as a backward-compatible solution for television's transition from black and white to color. It was a fairly clever solution to the problem of how to continue to send the same black-and-white picture to all the old sets and layer color information on top--a composite of those two picture components. The black-and-white sets ignored the color component, while the newer sets separated out the color information and displayed it with the black-and-white picture. This made for a smooth TV transition in the 1950s with low-resolution color TVs. Today, though, sophisticated high-resolution displays show all of the compression artifacts and cross-color (or moiré) blurring that comes with a composite video connection. It's simply impossible to perfectly separate the color and picture information of a composite-video signal. So, if your TV picture isn't sharp enough or the colors blur together, the likely culprit is a composite output signal.

    S-Video

    S-Video, which was introduced in the 1980s, solved some of the problems that came with composite video. It provides better color separation and a much cleaner signal. S-Video does so by keeping separate the color and picture parts of a composite-video signal. You'll find S-Video ports on most TVs for sale today, but not many people are really taking advantage of them yet. Why is that? Well, take a look at Direct Broadcast Satellite, for example. It starts broadcasting in the composite-video domain, and even though it is a component-video format, the artifacts associated with composite video still show up in the picture.

    Component video

    Component video improves the picture quality even more by not only separating the color from the black-and-white portions of the picture but by further splitting the color information into two color-difference signals. When the picture signal is split up in this way, you get an unfiltered, uninterrupted image, with better resolution and greatly improved color saturation. And this is why component video is the predominant method of hookup from HDTV set-top decoders to HDTVs.

  3. Re:Futurama on Slashback: ClonesMAX, Animation, Dislaimers · · Score: 1

    that's what tivo is for.

  4. Re:Let's tell them what we think! on San Diego Company Owns E-Commerce · · Score: 1

    if they are paying for metered bandwidth, they will have significantly fewer funds after today.

  5. Re:Cars? on When Alcohol And Airplanes Make A Good Mix · · Score: 1

    In Brazil, most alcohol burnining cars have a small resevoir for gasoline. If the car is cold, pressing a button on the dashboard will inject a small amount of gasoline into the engine to help get it started.

  6. Re:Refresh is evil on Declaring The Death of Metatags · · Score: 1

    google news uses it to keep headlines up to date...oh no, have they switched to the darkside????

  7. Re:We need web caches on Where The Bandwidth Goes · · Score: 1

    in the mp3 world it was called napster.

  8. Re:Can you say class action lawsuit... on Palm Ships With 12-bit Screen, Says 16-Bit On Box · · Score: 1
    filing a class-action lawsuit makes you look like an ambulance chaser.

    we like palm. we like their os. their office is full of idiots - we don't need a lawsuit to prove it.

    "fixing the problem" will most likely involve slapping stickers on the boxes of m130s with the revised bit-depth.

  9. Re:Excuse me? on Palm Ships With 12-bit Screen, Says 16-Bit On Box · · Score: 1
    As silly as it sounds, people look at the box and buy the product because it says 16 bit while the other says 12 bit. Sorta like Nigel saying "Well, this one goes to eleven"

    Palm even had Handspring believing them:

    Handspring Comparison

  10. hmmm... on Watercooling Made Easy · · Score: 1
    Installation

    Included in the box, was some very bad instructions. These instructions had no real pictures only diagrams, and the instructions were very hard to follow because the grammar was horrible. I do understand that these instructions were written by someone in Korea, but geez get someone better to translate it :/ Luckily I figured out what goes where, by trial and error.

  11. Re:OMG?.. Selfish waste of resources. on Convert a PC Drive Bay to a Docking Station · · Score: 1

    Seems like an answer to a question that no one asked.

    Did anyone notice his other drive bay was converted to a bagel toaster?

  12. Re:why? on Suggestions for Home PBX/Key System? · · Score: 1

    A PBX can provide features that simple voicemail cannot. Some examples:
    1. Each handset can have it's own extension, and therefore can call other extensions - very handy for upstairs/downstairs.
    2. DID (direct-incoming-dial). This allows a public phone number to ring a single handset inside the house.
    3. Voicemail (PBX based) can utilize these features to allow for personalized messaging, and with a simple press of the button, all calls can go direct to voicemail (no ringing phones!!!).
    PBX's can be inexpensive when purchased used.

  13. Re:If USPS did email... on How The Postman Almost Owned E-Mail · · Score: 2, Funny

    And I'd get all of my neighbor's printouts... and all of the printouts for the previous owners.

  14. Re:tabs on Ars Technica Reviews Mozilla · · Score: 1

    My favorite reason for using Mozilla is that with the right settings you can prevent a website from hijacking your browser. No more unwanted windows spawning and trying to hide. I appreciate being able to close or extract frames. The ctrl+click links for tabbed windows loading in the background is one of my favorite features.

  15. Re:Wow this is stupid. on Sysadmin Day. Yay. · · Score: 1

    stop forwarding around 3meg powerpoint attachments No kidding. My favorite was an employee who was attempting to send a co-worker a 28MB powerpoint presentation. It got cued up in their outlook outbox folder and attempted to resend the email every 10 min after being rejected by the mail server. This was one of those times I wished I could find that box of bullets and put and end to the nonsense.