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User: Ed+Avis

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  1. Re:Regardless go 16:10 on Ask Slashdot: What Is Your Favorite Monitor For Programming? · · Score: 1

    I have 1920x1440 in a 19" screen.

    Sounds lovely - is it a CRT? If not what's it called? (A few years back you could get 1600x1200 LCDs but everything has become letterbox since then.)

  2. Re:Why does anyone use dual monitors anymore? on Ask Slashdot: What Is Your Favorite Monitor For Programming? · · Score: 1

    It depends which monitor you have. A good monitor will have a wide viewing angle along both axes, but it's true that many cheaper ones are not usable in portrait format.

  3. Re:Mint a good alternative for traditionalists on Fedora 18 Installer: Counterintuitive and Confusing? · · Score: 1

    Get one of these and you'll be OK up to F24: http://www.ebay.com/itm/110693794545

  4. Learn French on Ask Slashdot: 2nd Spoken/Written Language For Software Developer? · · Score: 5, Funny

    French is the language of love!

  5. Sounds reasonable on Text Message Spammer Wants FCC To Declare Spam Filters Illegal · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This sounds reasonable to me - the telephone company has no business filtering phone calls, so it should not filter text messages either. Subscribers may choose to employ a spam-blocking service, which could be provided by other people than the phone company.

  6. Re:Nothing new here on Windows 8 PCs Still Throttled By Crapware · · Score: 1

    You can Frankenstein your laptop too... I bought a Dell and replaced the motherboard, processor and heatsink, memory, hard disk, wireless card, and part of the case. I have a replacement video card and keyboard waiting to be installed. But admittedly you cannot simply build a laptop from scratch.

  7. Re:Still no Retina support for OS X on Firefox 17 Launches With Click-to-Play Plugin Blocks · · Score: 1

    Can't you just zoom in the website with Ctrl-+ and get the same effect? That's what I do on Windows with a 3840x2400 display. Admittedly some websites specify fixed pixel sizes for things so they appear scrunched into the top left corner, or in a thin dribble down the middle, but I don't see how you can fix that without violating web standards. Does the 'Retina' mode render something that says 100 pixels as 200 pixels instead?

  8. Re:That doesn't really show anything. on Boeing 787 Makes US Debut · · Score: 1

    I don't believe those airlines are subsidized directly by their respective governments. Certainly BA is a private company and is no longer particularly British (it merged with the also-privatized Iberia). It's true that national airlines or 'flag carriers' have often enjoyed special privileges, but those are usually of the kind which tend to *increase* ticket prices, not reduce them.

  9. Re:While you're at it... on Linus Torvalds Advocates For 2560x1600 Standard Laptop Displays · · Score: 1

    Also, you should know that your claims about driving 3840x2160 are a bit misleading. You may be able to do it over a single HDMI link, but you're not getting full 60 Hz progressive refresh. HDMI doesn't have enough bandwidth to support that. You're probably dropping down to ~30 or even ~15 Hz refresh.

    That's what I suspected too. Usually there is an on-screen display which shows you the refresh rate you're using.

  10. Re:While you're at it... on Linus Torvalds Advocates For 2560x1600 Standard Laptop Displays · · Score: 1

    I wonder, Wikipedia isn't usually wrong on this stuff (and with T221 monitors the DVI bandwidth restrictions are all too real) but you have a clear counterexample. But if there is no problem driving 2560x1440 over plain DVI, why was dual link DVI invented? Hardware manufacturers wouldn't spend the money to provide the extra pins if they didn't do anything. There must be something we are missing.

  11. Re:While you're at it... on Linus Torvalds Advocates For 2560x1600 Standard Laptop Displays · · Score: 1

    Cool. I have monitors with a similar resolution but only 22 inches - so I have to set the font size to extra large in every application. I imagine that you can keep fonts at 'normal' size and just have a super huge desktop. Here's a photo of my setup: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7145/6851350945_e582af1ed5_o.jpg (it's a big image but I guess you will have no problem displaying it!) Do you have a photo of yours?

  12. Re:While you're at it... on Linus Torvalds Advocates For 2560x1600 Standard Laptop Displays · · Score: 1

    According to Wikipedia that display, the Toshiba Regza 55X3 or 55ZL2G, is driven by four HDMI inputs. Are you really getting a 3840x2160 desktop just using one of them?

  13. Re:While you're at it... on Linus Torvalds Advocates For 2560x1600 Standard Laptop Displays · · Score: 1

    I was wondering what the model of the 3840x2160 display is.

  14. Re:While you're at it... on Linus Torvalds Advocates For 2560x1600 Standard Laptop Displays · · Score: 1

    That's really interesting - so you can get a 3840x2160 desktop on it, at 60Hz refresh, with only a single-link DVI connection. Can you share some more details about your setup?

  15. Re:While you're at it... on Linus Torvalds Advocates For 2560x1600 Standard Laptop Displays · · Score: 1

    You have a 3840x2160 television? Wow. And the pictures you are displaying on it are that resolution too - not just normal HDTV 1920x1080?

  16. Re:While you're at it... on Linus Torvalds Advocates For 2560x1600 Standard Laptop Displays · · Score: 1

    I don't watch movies or play games on my work PC, so 24Hz is fine.

  17. Re:While you're at it... on Linus Torvalds Advocates For 2560x1600 Standard Laptop Displays · · Score: 1

    Sorry I meant Displayport 1.2 not "2.0".

  18. Re:While you're at it... on Linus Torvalds Advocates For 2560x1600 Standard Laptop Displays · · Score: 1
    Nope, DVI won't cope with 4000x4000 resolution at any refresh rate you'd want to use. The bandwidth on a DVI link is relatively limited. From Wikipedia:

    The DVI specification mandates a maximum pixel clock frequency of 165 MHz when running in single-link mode. With a single DVI link, the highest supported standard resolution is 2.75 megapixels (including blanking interval) at 60 Hz refresh.

    Dual-link DVI is twice the bandwidth but that is still not nearly enough for a 4k*4k display at 60Hz.

    I have first-hand experience of this driving T221 monitors (which are less than ten megapixels). Over a dual-link DVI connection only about 30Hz refresh is possible, even if you overclock the DVI link beyond the spec.

    As for analogue VGA connectors, there is no defined limit, but basic signal processing laws limit the pixels you can push down the wire. In practice, even with a very short 0.5 metre cable of the highest quality I could find, the picture quality at a mere 1920x1080 resolution is noticeably worse with analogue cabling than with DVI. That might be due to the A-to-D converter in the monitor rather than to a limitation of the cable or graphics card, but making A-to-D converters capable of handling this large bandwidth, together with the higher-spec cabling required, would be very expensive. Much more so than using a digital interface such as Displayport 2.0.

  19. Re:While you're at it... on Linus Torvalds Advocates For 2560x1600 Standard Laptop Displays · · Score: 2

    I drive a T221 at 3840x2400 resolution over dual-link DVI - but it has to be at a reduced refresh rate of 24Hz. (Actually I have two monitors with this setup, each in portrait rotation, so the total desktop is 4800x3840.)

  20. Re:While you're at it... on Linus Torvalds Advocates For 2560x1600 Standard Laptop Displays · · Score: 1

    I should clarify - the GPU is certainly capable of rendering a 4000-by-4000 frame buffer, it's still only a hundred megs or so of memory. Sending those pixels to the monitor may require something beefier than a standard DVI link. Even dual-link DVI is not enough for high resolutions at a decent refresh rate. The new Displayport 2.0 standard has four times the bandwidth of DVI, which is getting there. So what's needed is for onboard graphics to move to Displayport 2.0 outputs; but the GPUs are already fast enough, if you're talking about text-based uses, static images like photo editing, or relatively low-resolution video like playing DVDs or Youtube.

  21. Re:While you're at it... on Linus Torvalds Advocates For 2560x1600 Standard Laptop Displays · · Score: 1

    Can your average onboard video card drive monitors at that resolution?

    Yes, without any difficulty. It's 2012. Unless you want to play 3D games - in that case, just drop down to a lower resolution to play your game fullscreen, and go back to normal res when you exit.

    Obsessive 'gamers' who want to play the latest titles at maximum resolution and maximum refresh are very much in the minority, and they have always tended to buy separate video cards anyway.

  22. Re:Complainer on Linus Torvalds Advocates For 2560x1600 Standard Laptop Displays · · Score: 2

    Uh... where can I buy a 'cheap Chinese tablet' with a 15-inch 2800x1800 display?

  23. Re:Bandwidth no longer unlimited? on EFF And Others Push For Open Wifi APs Everywhere · · Score: 1

    Yes, the problem is that most consumer devices don't offer a way to limit the bandwidth for anonymous users. I'm happy for my neighbours to share my connection for web browsing and email - a drop in the ocean compared to a typical download limit - but I get pissed off if they use it up downloading movies. (On the two occasions this happened with two different people, they were both apologetic and paid for the extra download allowance I bought. So it turned out okay.)

  24. Re:ARM64 is a mess on ARM Announces 64-Bit Cortex-A50 Architecture · · Score: 1

    Conditional execution is nice, but it really interferes with modern architectures. The ARMv8 core is a fully speculative, out-of-order with register renaming implementation.

    Conditional execution lets you avoid a test and jump. If you rewrite code to have conditional jumps instead of conditional execution, there are still just as many code paths for the speculative execution to worry about. But I am not a chip designer so there may be some reason why it's easier.

    I do wonder whether speculative out-of-order execution is truly the 'modern' way, though. For single-threaded code, certainly. But if your system is going to be multicore anyway, it might be better to spend the silicon on having two simpler, non-speculative cores rather than one more complex one.

  25. Re:Here's a free best practice for them on Apple, Microsoft, Google, Others Join Hands To Form WebPlatform.org · · Score: 1

    CSS was designed to let you specify a user stylesheet with 'important' properties which override the site. So you could force links to always be underlined if you want. It's a pity that mainstream browsers do not provide a simple way to configure this.