One dirty but fairly open secret of HD On Demand services is that the providers compress the hell out of the stream to save on bandwidth costs. What you noticed were edge cases where this practice aggressively breaks down. It's proof that high-resolution doesn't mean much if the actual bitrate is too low to take advantage of it. You're unlikely to notice this on a Blu-Ray disc unless it's been horrifically mastered - I'd go far enough to say that a Blu-Ray disc exhibiting this kind of visual anomaly would probably be subject to a recall. That is, unless it's a $6 bootleg advertising "THREE NEW HOLLYWOOD MOVIES ON ONE DISC"...
It's actually one of my least favorite of his strips.
Consider, to start, that most of the people excited by HDTV are not of the same technological background as most Slashdotters. We're used to the benefits of higher resolution, have known for years that broadcast TV looked like crap compared to even an entry-level CRT from the mid-90s, and screamed and railed at broadcast companies and manufacturers for taking so long to standardize and implement HDTV tech in the first place. But the average American consumer was living with what amounted to a 640x240* display for a really large proportion of his media viewing. What's more, this was the dominant standard for over half of a century. It's natural to be stoked that you could replace such entrenched technology with an HDTV, even if it's "only" running at 1280x720!
The tagline bitching about how he "hates" what he perceives as low refresh rates flies in the face of a century of film tradition. Sometimes it's good to maintain a tie to an artistic medium's history, instead of trendwhoring and screaming that everything must be modernized for no clear benefit. That said, I'd like to see more films take advantage of high refresh rates, especially action flicks and documentaries... but I've never found that a 24Hz - 30Hz refresh rate kept me from being immersed in a good film, and I've never found myself lamenting a lack of smoothness.
* Thanks to interlacing - whee.
The washed-out fuzzy audio suffused with brown noise, the tracking glitches over tracking glitches that made it seem like the bottom 15-20% of the screen was being devoured by frantically malignant analog snow, the random color changes from frame-to-frame, all combined with the low production values... As formative experiences go, it was both sensual and deeply strange.
That'd be Bobby Prince. Search Youtube for Doom music, and you'll inevitably stumble upon several videos showing how much of Doom (and Doom II) was heavily influenced by metal and alternative from that time period... some of the songs are flat-out ripoffs. That said, he was good, no question - Wolfenstein 3D, Rise of the Triad, and Duke Nukem 3D were also mostly his handiwork.
I remember a night spent playing Doom and Quake on a friend's 10base2 network, back around 1999. My Intel NIC was actually too new to participate, so he fished an ISA NE2000 out of his bin of parts... only for us to discover that we were short a terminator. Luckily we found one behind the couch (he blamed his cat), tightened everything up, and played until the sun came up. Thanks for bringing that memory back for me.:)
I realize it offers a lot of functionality, but there's still a part of me that bristles at the idea of an e-mail client eating 368 MB of RAM. Granted, relative to your total system memory it's pretty menial, but it still floors me.
Ah, memories.:) I gave my Athlon 500 with 512 MB RAM and a Voodoo4 to a friend years ago, which he used as a domain controller for his home network. It was more upsetting than I would have guessed when he threw it away without asking me first.
True, but I was referring to the tech aside from the CPU itself. The rest of the system's very much in line with a high-end rig from when UT2003 walked the earth.:)
The Netburst Celerons varied in terms of overall shittiness: Willamette anything was an abortive mess, but the Northwood Celerons ran fairly cool by the standards of the time and overclocked well. Both of the latter had hatefully crippled L2 cache implementations to boot. Prescott Celerons were sort of better, with doubled cache (and associativity), but most ran almost as hot as their non-hobbled cousins. As a result of the cache crippling, all of the Netburst Celerons positively stutter-stepped in games, some worse than others. Half-Life 2 should not lag on a 2.53 GHz CPU with a GeForce 7800GT and 2 gigs of RAM, but it did on those chips...
I'm self-respecting, but my HTPC features a Celeron e1500 living in an i865G motherboard with 2 gigs of DDR400 and integrated video.:P That's 2003 tech - the almighty fury of its DirectX 7 graphics even predates that - but for 720p playback, general web browsing, and all things Netflix it's been completely fine. The allure of a PCIe/DDR2 motherboard's finally getting too hard to resist), but I still plan to use the old hardware for a spare system and occasional dedicated server afterward.
That's the second time in as many weeks that I've failed to pick up on the joke. They call me Hurf-Durf, down at the local bar. Throw me pennies, I'll dance.
And in your "deduction" you've engaged in the same kind of reductive judgment-passing of which the grandparent is guilty. Some people will vocally dislike things you enjoy. Their vitriol doesn't validate conducting yourself as a prick.
Look, every new programming language / productivity suite / IT product is ostensibly about "getting shit done for your client." But if you don't see the connection in Microsoft providing a useful tool that's bound to its own operating systems, then it's a case of not seeing the forest for all those damned trees. If it helps people to move away from that wascally Java, then even better, in Microsoft's eyes.
The Athlon II also lets you use an AM2+ board, which is nice for those of us who bought a lot of DDR2 and don't want to see it go to waste. Never dismiss the value of hardware reuse in a down economy.
A quick visit to Mini-Microsoft yields a lot of insight, especially in the comments thread. The management system's apparently poisonous and horrifically bloated, leading to lots of in-fighting and internecine political battles between rival divisions within the same company. Most employees also languish under a tiered review system that is overtly strict in its implementation and prone to misuse by the aforementioned management. I'm inclined to believe that a lot of promising developments are being sacrificed at the altar of upward career mobility for a largely administrative segment of the company, and that everyone else basically suffers and watches the rest of the world pull ahead.
If I remember correctly the Mobility 7500 was never supported by the fglrx driver. It's a mobile derivative of the original Radeon core, so you're probably stuck with using the 'radeon' driver in X.org. Adding the PCI ID to the source, recompiling, and keeping two fingers crossed should do the trick; if it doesn't, get in touch with the developers. Good luck!
I think there's a market for a cheap Atom-based Linux box used for internet browsing, but the Athlon II X2 245 is literally at least four times faster at everything. The prices for dual Atom-based boards are also a little bit high for what you get, so from a value proposition what they've done makes sense.
For what it's worth, I upgraded my CPU about two months ago - from a 2.6 GHz Athlon64 X2 to a 3 GHz Athlon II X2 - and it's been decently peppy. More importantly, it let me take the old CPU and pop it into a cheap Linux box of my own.:)
Eek. My sleep deprivation's catching up to me again - even coffee didn't help me to see you were kidding today. Thanks for explaining your point of view!
Or scrape it off an FTP server with a shovel and plop it onto a disc, as was the fashion of hundreds of "Over 3,000 levels for DOOM" CDs in the mid- to late '90s.
This is the most glaring non sequitur I've seen on Slashdot in months, and that's saying something. Just to make sure I wasn't missing the boat, I skimmed through rinoid's posts for the last two months, and nothing in there even remotely suggests that this is true. In the future, consider using a response like, "I respectfully disagree, and here is why," rather than dismissing someone by citing unrelated criteria in a vaguely insulting, sulky way.
And in the future, could you lay off the M$ thing? That was an eyeroller a decade ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Er, that's "entry-level CRT monitor." Careless me.
One dirty but fairly open secret of HD On Demand services is that the providers compress the hell out of the stream to save on bandwidth costs. What you noticed were edge cases where this practice aggressively breaks down. It's proof that high-resolution doesn't mean much if the actual bitrate is too low to take advantage of it. You're unlikely to notice this on a Blu-Ray disc unless it's been horrifically mastered - I'd go far enough to say that a Blu-Ray disc exhibiting this kind of visual anomaly would probably be subject to a recall. That is, unless it's a $6 bootleg advertising "THREE NEW HOLLYWOOD MOVIES ON ONE DISC"...
It's actually one of my least favorite of his strips.
Consider, to start, that most of the people excited by HDTV are not of the same technological background as most Slashdotters. We're used to the benefits of higher resolution, have known for years that broadcast TV looked like crap compared to even an entry-level CRT from the mid-90s, and screamed and railed at broadcast companies and manufacturers for taking so long to standardize and implement HDTV tech in the first place. But the average American consumer was living with what amounted to a 640x240* display for a really large proportion of his media viewing. What's more, this was the dominant standard for over half of a century. It's natural to be stoked that you could replace such entrenched technology with an HDTV, even if it's "only" running at 1280x720!
The tagline bitching about how he "hates" what he perceives as low refresh rates flies in the face of a century of film tradition. Sometimes it's good to maintain a tie to an artistic medium's history, instead of trendwhoring and screaming that everything must be modernized for no clear benefit. That said, I'd like to see more films take advantage of high refresh rates, especially action flicks and documentaries... but I've never found that a 24Hz - 30Hz refresh rate kept me from being immersed in a good film, and I've never found myself lamenting a lack of smoothness. * Thanks to interlacing - whee.
The washed-out fuzzy audio suffused with brown noise, the tracking glitches over tracking glitches that made it seem like the bottom 15-20% of the screen was being devoured by frantically malignant analog snow, the random color changes from frame-to-frame, all combined with the low production values... As formative experiences go, it was both sensual and deeply strange.
That'd be Bobby Prince. Search Youtube for Doom music, and you'll inevitably stumble upon several videos showing how much of Doom (and Doom II) was heavily influenced by metal and alternative from that time period... some of the songs are flat-out ripoffs. That said, he was good, no question - Wolfenstein 3D, Rise of the Triad, and Duke Nukem 3D were also mostly his handiwork.
I remember a night spent playing Doom and Quake on a friend's 10base2 network, back around 1999. My Intel NIC was actually too new to participate, so he fished an ISA NE2000 out of his bin of parts... only for us to discover that we were short a terminator. Luckily we found one behind the couch (he blamed his cat), tightened everything up, and played until the sun came up. Thanks for bringing that memory back for me. :)
I wish you'd posted with your handle, so I could put a name to such an interesting post. :)
I realize it offers a lot of functionality, but there's still a part of me that bristles at the idea of an e-mail client eating 368 MB of RAM. Granted, relative to your total system memory it's pretty menial, but it still floors me.
Ah, memories. :) I gave my Athlon 500 with 512 MB RAM and a Voodoo4 to a friend years ago, which he used as a domain controller for his home network. It was more upsetting than I would have guessed when he threw it away without asking me first.
True, but I was referring to the tech aside from the CPU itself. The rest of the system's very much in line with a high-end rig from when UT2003 walked the earth. :)
The Netburst Celerons varied in terms of overall shittiness: Willamette anything was an abortive mess, but the Northwood Celerons ran fairly cool by the standards of the time and overclocked well. Both of the latter had hatefully crippled L2 cache implementations to boot. Prescott Celerons were sort of better, with doubled cache (and associativity), but most ran almost as hot as their non-hobbled cousins. As a result of the cache crippling, all of the Netburst Celerons positively stutter-stepped in games, some worse than others. Half-Life 2 should not lag on a 2.53 GHz CPU with a GeForce 7800GT and 2 gigs of RAM, but it did on those chips...
I'm self-respecting, but my HTPC features a Celeron e1500 living in an i865G motherboard with 2 gigs of DDR400 and integrated video. :P That's 2003 tech - the almighty fury of its DirectX 7 graphics even predates that - but for 720p playback, general web browsing, and all things Netflix it's been completely fine. The allure of a PCIe/DDR2 motherboard's finally getting too hard to resist), but I still plan to use the old hardware for a spare system and occasional dedicated server afterward.
That's the second time in as many weeks that I've failed to pick up on the joke. They call me Hurf-Durf, down at the local bar. Throw me pennies, I'll dance.
And in your "deduction" you've engaged in the same kind of reductive judgment-passing of which the grandparent is guilty. Some people will vocally dislike things you enjoy. Their vitriol doesn't validate conducting yourself as a prick.
Look, every new programming language / productivity suite / IT product is ostensibly about "getting shit done for your client." But if you don't see the connection in Microsoft providing a useful tool that's bound to its own operating systems, then it's a case of not seeing the forest for all those damned trees. If it helps people to move away from that wascally Java, then even better, in Microsoft's eyes.
The Athlon II also lets you use an AM2+ board, which is nice for those of us who bought a lot of DDR2 and don't want to see it go to waste. Never dismiss the value of hardware reuse in a down economy.
A quick visit to Mini-Microsoft yields a lot of insight, especially in the comments thread. The management system's apparently poisonous and horrifically bloated, leading to lots of in-fighting and internecine political battles between rival divisions within the same company. Most employees also languish under a tiered review system that is overtly strict in its implementation and prone to misuse by the aforementioned management. I'm inclined to believe that a lot of promising developments are being sacrificed at the altar of upward career mobility for a largely administrative segment of the company, and that everyone else basically suffers and watches the rest of the world pull ahead.
Newer Atoms fully support x86_64, but will not be quick.
If I remember correctly the Mobility 7500 was never supported by the fglrx driver. It's a mobile derivative of the original Radeon core, so you're probably stuck with using the 'radeon' driver in X.org. Adding the PCI ID to the source, recompiling, and keeping two fingers crossed should do the trick; if it doesn't, get in touch with the developers. Good luck!
For what it's worth, I upgraded my CPU about two months ago - from a 2.6 GHz Athlon64 X2 to a 3 GHz Athlon II X2 - and it's been decently peppy. More importantly, it let me take the old CPU and pop it into a cheap Linux box of my own. :)
"OW, OW! OH GOD, IT'S BOTH!"
In before the "What's that giant thing in your pocket?" "That's what she said!" engine gets warm.
Eek. My sleep deprivation's catching up to me again - even coffee didn't help me to see you were kidding today. Thanks for explaining your point of view!
Or scrape it off an FTP server with a shovel and plop it onto a disc, as was the fashion of hundreds of "Over 3,000 levels for DOOM" CDs in the mid- to late '90s.
This is the most glaring non sequitur I've seen on Slashdot in months, and that's saying something. Just to make sure I wasn't missing the boat, I skimmed through rinoid's posts for the last two months, and nothing in there even remotely suggests that this is true. In the future, consider using a response like, "I respectfully disagree, and here is why," rather than dismissing someone by citing unrelated criteria in a vaguely insulting, sulky way.
And in the future, could you lay off the M$ thing? That was an eyeroller a decade ago.
I'm glad it's self-cleaning, what with the perpetually regenerating supply of kitty nuggets it's bound to produce...