No, it's still a yawn as there's nothing here to make an OpenSource player with. All that's been done is to hack WinDVD to save the stream to disk as it's played back. No breaking of the encryption, nothing to base an OpenSource player on.
You're right on all counts, except that analog makes no difference to the LCD. Yes, it refreshes the picture just like a CRT, top to bottom and all, but since the pixels stay on and don't repeatedly fade out like phosphor, you don't have the flicker problem. The only reason to have refresh rates above 60Hz is to eliminate the flicker. Without the flicker, the 60Hz refresh really means 60fps of motion, which is plenty fast enough for smooth animation. Even movies transferred to DVD are only 24fps, which isn't great but it's enough that your eyes can't usually detect the dicontinuities in the motion. At 60fps the motion will be very smooth and you won't easily see any artifacts. Again, the high refresh rates, whether analog or digital signal, are really only there to alleviate flicker on CRTs -- they don't mean much to LCDs and a 60Hz refresh on an LCD is just fine.
I agree, but would caution against using framerate as an important measure on something like an LCD, which doesn't repaint the screen the way a CRT does.
On an LCD the framerate really is a measure of motion and your eyes/brain don't need a very high rate to perceive smooth motion -- 60fps is plenty fast enough for motion to look buttery smooth.
On a CRT the framerate not only measures motion but also how quickly the gun sweeps from the top to the bottom. Too low a framerate can result in flicker because the phosphors of a CRT are excited only when the gun strikes them, then they begin to fade back to black until the gun sweeps back around and hits them again. LCDs don't do this and therefore don't need the high framerates of a CRT.
Stretching of lower resolutions is a different story, though a good graphics card or good monitor can do a very good job at this. Most, however, do not while even a cheap CRT looks fine at low resolutions.
"not no way, not no how"? You are an amazing sayer of sooth. I agree that CRTs are still better in several ways (and worse in others), but I certainly don't believe that LCDs will never improve and become better than CRTs. Making such a grossly broad statement will only guarantee that you'll be proven wrong in the future....
You should check out the Apple Cinema displays. They have a great picture and are 1920x1200. The newest one is even higher res, but I'm not sure if a PC can drive it. Regardless, they look great and have very high resolutions. Mine also has no dead or stuck pixels and I don't know if the "10 or less" policy can be said of the industry as a whole or only of a few manufacturers. I don't think the Apple displays generally suffer from this problem though.
Of course, if you really want your CRT for the "shelf space" then this isn't going to help you, but I would hope that's one of your lesser gripes about an LCD.
I love LCDs myself and have replaced all of my monitors with LCD displays, but even to me this 'comparison' reads more like a fanboy article than an objective comparison.
CRTs certainly win out when it comes to contrast, yet the article only begrudgingly says that CRTs "may still have the edge". "May"? They absolutely do rule for contrast. When the electron gun turns off on a CRT the screen is black. On an LCD it's dark gray.
I believe CRTs also win for refresh/framerate. The 'reviewer' relies on manufacturer specs to evaluate transition times. Are these the same manufacturers who used to tell us that their 15" monitors were 17"? Or the same ones who would use inappropriate contrast tests in order to claim huge ratios? It's true that LCDs don't flicker, but a fast refresh CRT doesn't flicker either and the CRT can switch images very quickly. The best LCDs that I've seen are still inferior in this regard. I'd prefer to see independent testing to validate these claims of 16ms switching times.
Again, I love my LCDs and wouldn't trade them even though Doom III does smear a bit when I pan around. I love the low power consumption and I love the ease on my eyes, but it still doesn't change the fact that this article is just some fanboy fluff piece.
That is true -- I've gone back to try to pick up faction reputation points by completing lower level quests and you get very little xp for the quest and your reputation in that faction only "very slightly increased". I can understand the low xp, but not getting much reputation boost sucks.
For those who don't know, reputation determines things like how much you pay for goods in stores run by a particular faction. I think it may also determine whether the guards for that faction will protect you if you're attacked (if the faction is neutral to you initially), though I haven't achieved 'friendly' status with Booty Bay or other neutral factions so I'm not sure about that part.
I think any company who would expose their entire corporate network directly to the internet would be a very foolish company, regardless of what OS their machines are running. Windows has plenty of vulnerabilities, but so does MacOS, so does Linux and so does every other OS. Windows is just a very attractive and large target (as is Microsoft's corporate network). If you believe that your particular OS choice is inherently secure from attacks and can be safely exposed to the entire world without any sort of protection then you are a fool.
I'm a former MS developer/employee and we could install anything we wanted period. There were never any restrictions other than the stuff you'd expect such as no pirated software, etc. There were login scripts which ran every time you signed into corpnet and you were required to run anti-virus software (eTrust). Bridging to the public internet from corpnet was also prohibited for obvious reasons. Beyond that, it was a very trusting environment. Even WiFi was deployed many years ago on campus, something a friend at Oracle says they aren't allowed to have to this day.
Neither our admin. assistants or QA people had any restrictions either, but I don't know about the receptionists. They sure seemed to play a lot of those boring built-in Windows games, so maybe they weren't allowed to install other software. I never asked them.
Still makes me wonder if it was some sort of ionization strike. I know they said that it wasn't lightning, but can you have the ionized air form without having an actual strike occur? If so, then the gray column could be caused by the ionized air column and the flash is the bulb being energized and burning itself out from the charged strike. Those tall voluminous clouds sure look like the sort that could build up a nice charge. A strike would probably be very quick and not show up in the before and after photos. Again, I'm no meteorologist and don't know if the ionization could develop without being followed by an actual spark. Also, lightning follows an erratic path but does the ionized air which preceeds it, or could the ionization follow a straight line consistent with the gray streak in the photo?
I wonder if it's some sort of lightning strike. Not one with a spark (not in the photo anyhow), but simply the column of ionized air terminating (and destroying) the street light. There are a lot of clouds in the sky so maybe there's a sizable charge built up and it's discharging to the streetlight, which is a tall, metal, grounded object.
I've never experienced lighting directly, but I recall something about the air ionizing before the strike, which is what creates the path for the electricity to follow.
This photo is part of an automated sequence, so perhaps the electrical strike happened just a moment before the image was taken, or perhaps the ionized air was enough to destroy the light without an actual 'spark'. Without witnesses it's hard to say whether it was lighting and, as many have questioned, what's the condition of the streetlight now?
Try lining up your bike tires with one of the edges of the sensor when you pull up. Once I learned to do this I was able to reliably trip the sensor and get the light to change.
The sensors work off of magnetic induction (like a metal detector) and your bike just doesn't have that much metal to be detected. Positioning yourself along the edge of the road's sensor should trigger the light.
Is there an equivalent of RTFA for somebody who didn't even read the headline? RTFH perhaps? You just rotate the thing "one hour" in the correct direction to adjust for DST or Summer Time or whatever your country might call it.
I don't believe he suggested not dimming them, but that you can still click them if they're dimmed and they'll explain why they're dimmed. The issue isn't that dimming is useless (it's quite useful), but that it's sometimes a complete mystery as to why it is dimmed. Help files rarely address these issues too -- they explain what the menu item does when it's available but they often neglect to tell you why it might not be available to you right now.
Long ago, Balloon Help on the Mac did something like what he's suggesting. When you'd hover over a menu item it would pop up a balloon (tooltip) explaining what the item did. If you hovered over a dimmed item, it explained what the item did and also went on to explain why it was not available at the moment.
I don't believe that dimmed items are inherently confusing -- I know perfectly well why Firefox has dimmed my Cut and Copy commands right now -- it's because I don't have anything selected. On the other hand, I have no idea why Outlook Express has "Block Sender" (under the Message menu) dimmed while I've got a message selected in my Inbox. It'd be nice if I could easily find out ("This command is disabled because you don't have message filtering enabled" or "You must read the message first" or whatever the reason may be).
I believe the point is that you can quickly refill the cell and you're off on the road again. You're right that you can already simply plug in, but you'll be tethered for a while until your battery is charged again.
"I guess the RIAA and similar organisations mean more to Comcast then some little girl being abused."
I think it's very likely and not suprising that Comcast would be more concerned about pleasing the RIAA/MPAA/etc. than they would about volunterring assistance to law enforcment with tangential issues like trading child porn. Comcast's big business isn't law enforcement, it's providing entertainment programming to its cable subscribers. If they compromise their relationship with the studios then they may have trouble negotiating for better rates or even whole blocks of channels for their cable channels.
I used to work for a company which produced boxes for DirecTV and many of the most restrictive rules about the design were all about pleasing Hollywood. One of the first consideration for feature proposals (behind security of the DTV network) was how Hollywood would react to it. Those relationships are extremely important to cable/satellite operators and I think they're willing to do a lot to protect them.
It's unfortunate in some ways, but it certainly doesn't suprise me.
I wonder the same thing of the other side -- what's the evidence that MS is still practicing this behavior? There's nothing in the article which substantiates Real's claim that MS is still doing exclusive OEM agreements. I'd like to see a quote from the OEM agreement or even an OEM representative saying that this is true. In fact it's pretty easy to read the complaints described by the article as historical: that MS *was* doing this in the past and therefore Real wants to get paid.
How can you be so arrogant? These are modified tropical fish, not ordinary tropical fish. I don't have anything in particular against genetic engineering, but I think it's foolish to use the technology carelessly and especially for something so trite as an aquarium pet. Our history is littered with examples of species being released into new environments, either deliberately or accidentally, and screwing up the ecosystem in that area. What's so ignorant about believing that letting engineered species run loose in the wild might be foolish? And make no mistake -- they *will* find their way into the wild, though whether or not they'll survive remains to be seen. Maybe most of them will die, but the problem is that you just don't know what's going to happen. I favor genetic engineering, but I also favor tight controls over how engineered species are kept, and letting some snot-nosed kid play with them as pets and then dump them into rivers and lakes is something I think borders on stupidity.
Actually, I'd rather they didn't try it anywhere -- not my backyard or somebody else's. But so many people seem to feel that California is just being stupid and having "knee-jerk" reactions about this that I feel like "fuck it - let them destroy their property." Maybe they'll be right and nothing bad will happen, so in ten years I'll be satisfied and think that the fish are ok. Or maybe the fish will cause the demise of their precious Bass or Bluegill or some whatever population and I'll be glad that California restricted their sale. The problem with this whole issue is that nobody really knows what will happen. Maybe nothing, maybe something terrible. Is it worth the risk just to have some stupid flourescent fish?
I think you're subscribing to the 'flushing' principle which believe that all fish are discarded via the sewers. Sometimes stupid little kids (or their parents) put them into ponds or streams where they can "be free".
The fish don't really glow (they're not luminescent), they're flourescent which means that they only light up when ultraviolet light hits them. Flourescent fish can survive just fine and I don't think they're especially easy targets. I'd be willing to bet that some predators would even be turned off by the color.
As a Californian, I'm glad we won't have them here. Let them experiment on the ecosystem somewhere else and then, in ten or twenty years, allow them in if there hasven't been any problems. There have just been way too many environmental disasters caused by introducing species (engineered or not) into new environments. If you want colorful fish, buy some Neon Tetras or a Jack Dempsey or just go saltwater where there are plenty of flourescent fish to choose from.
I agree that the risk is small, but it's there none-the-less. My point is mainly that people tend to downplay local exploits without recognizing that wireless networking is changing the meaning of local. It sort of reminds me of how people (myself included) used to dismiss stack overflow exploits as unlikely due to the difficulty of engineering one.
In many discussions, people downplay the importance of exploits like these because the attacker has to be on your local network to take advantage of the security hole. What about all of the mis-configured (or deliberately) open wi-fi networks out there? I think that wireless networking has changed the importance of "local exploits" by allowing somebody passing by to become a local entity on an open wi-fi network.
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No, it's still a yawn as there's nothing here to make an OpenSource player with. All that's been done is to hack WinDVD to save the stream to disk as it's played back. No breaking of the encryption, nothing to base an OpenSource player on.
You're right on all counts, except that analog makes no difference to the LCD. Yes, it refreshes the picture just like a CRT, top to bottom and all, but since the pixels stay on and don't repeatedly fade out like phosphor, you don't have the flicker problem. The only reason to have refresh rates above 60Hz is to eliminate the flicker. Without the flicker, the 60Hz refresh really means 60fps of motion, which is plenty fast enough for smooth animation. Even movies transferred to DVD are only 24fps, which isn't great but it's enough that your eyes can't usually detect the dicontinuities in the motion. At 60fps the motion will be very smooth and you won't easily see any artifacts. Again, the high refresh rates, whether analog or digital signal, are really only there to alleviate flicker on CRTs -- they don't mean much to LCDs and a 60Hz refresh on an LCD is just fine.
I agree, but would caution against using framerate as an important measure on something like an LCD, which doesn't repaint the screen the way a CRT does.
On an LCD the framerate really is a measure of motion and your eyes/brain don't need a very high rate to perceive smooth motion -- 60fps is plenty fast enough for motion to look buttery smooth.
On a CRT the framerate not only measures motion but also how quickly the gun sweeps from the top to the bottom. Too low a framerate can result in flicker because the phosphors of a CRT are excited only when the gun strikes them, then they begin to fade back to black until the gun sweeps back around and hits them again. LCDs don't do this and therefore don't need the high framerates of a CRT.
Stretching of lower resolutions is a different story, though a good graphics card or good monitor can do a very good job at this. Most, however, do not while even a cheap CRT looks fine at low resolutions.
"not no way, not no how"? You are an amazing sayer of sooth. I agree that CRTs are still better in several ways (and worse in others), but I certainly don't believe that LCDs will never improve and become better than CRTs. Making such a grossly broad statement will only guarantee that you'll be proven wrong in the future....
You should check out the Apple Cinema displays. They have a great picture and are 1920x1200. The newest one is even higher res, but I'm not sure if a PC can drive it. Regardless, they look great and have very high resolutions. Mine also has no dead or stuck pixels and I don't know if the "10 or less" policy can be said of the industry as a whole or only of a few manufacturers. I don't think the Apple displays generally suffer from this problem though.
Of course, if you really want your CRT for the "shelf space" then this isn't going to help you, but I would hope that's one of your lesser gripes about an LCD.
I love LCDs myself and have replaced all of my monitors with LCD displays, but even to me this 'comparison' reads more like a fanboy article than an objective comparison.
CRTs certainly win out when it comes to contrast, yet the article only begrudgingly says that CRTs "may still have the edge". "May"? They absolutely do rule for contrast. When the electron gun turns off on a CRT the screen is black. On an LCD it's dark gray.
I believe CRTs also win for refresh/framerate. The 'reviewer' relies on manufacturer specs to evaluate transition times. Are these the same manufacturers who used to tell us that their 15" monitors were 17"? Or the same ones who would use inappropriate contrast tests in order to claim huge ratios? It's true that LCDs don't flicker, but a fast refresh CRT doesn't flicker either and the CRT can switch images very quickly. The best LCDs that I've seen are still inferior in this regard. I'd prefer to see independent testing to validate these claims of 16ms switching times.
Again, I love my LCDs and wouldn't trade them even though Doom III does smear a bit when I pan around. I love the low power consumption and I love the ease on my eyes, but it still doesn't change the fact that this article is just some fanboy fluff piece.
That is true -- I've gone back to try to pick up faction reputation points by completing lower level quests and you get very little xp for the quest and your reputation in that faction only "very slightly increased". I can understand the low xp, but not getting much reputation boost sucks.
For those who don't know, reputation determines things like how much you pay for goods in stores run by a particular faction. I think it may also determine whether the guards for that faction will protect you if you're attacked (if the faction is neutral to you initially), though I haven't achieved 'friendly' status with Booty Bay or other neutral factions so I'm not sure about that part.
I think any company who would expose their entire corporate network directly to the internet would be a very foolish company, regardless of what OS their machines are running. Windows has plenty of vulnerabilities, but so does MacOS, so does Linux and so does every other OS. Windows is just a very attractive and large target (as is Microsoft's corporate network). If you believe that your particular OS choice is inherently secure from attacks and can be safely exposed to the entire world without any sort of protection then you are a fool.
I'm a former MS developer/employee and we could install anything we wanted period. There were never any restrictions other than the stuff you'd expect such as no pirated software, etc. There were login scripts which ran every time you signed into corpnet and you were required to run anti-virus software (eTrust). Bridging to the public internet from corpnet was also prohibited for obvious reasons. Beyond that, it was a very trusting environment. Even WiFi was deployed many years ago on campus, something a friend at Oracle says they aren't allowed to have to this day.
Neither our admin. assistants or QA people had any restrictions either, but I don't know about the receptionists. They sure seemed to play a lot of those boring built-in Windows games, so maybe they weren't allowed to install other software. I never asked them.
Still makes me wonder if it was some sort of ionization strike. I know they said that it wasn't lightning, but can you have the ionized air form without having an actual strike occur? If so, then the gray column could be caused by the ionized air column and the flash is the bulb being energized and burning itself out from the charged strike. Those tall voluminous clouds sure look like the sort that could build up a nice charge. A strike would probably be very quick and not show up in the before and after photos. Again, I'm no meteorologist and don't know if the ionization could develop without being followed by an actual spark. Also, lightning follows an erratic path but does the ionized air which preceeds it, or could the ionization follow a straight line consistent with the gray streak in the photo?
I wonder if it's some sort of lightning strike. Not one with a spark (not in the photo anyhow), but simply the column of ionized air terminating (and destroying) the street light. There are a lot of clouds in the sky so maybe there's a sizable charge built up and it's discharging to the streetlight, which is a tall, metal, grounded object.
I've never experienced lighting directly, but I recall something about the air ionizing before the strike, which is what creates the path for the electricity to follow.
This photo is part of an automated sequence, so perhaps the electrical strike happened just a moment before the image was taken, or perhaps the ionized air was enough to destroy the light without an actual 'spark'. Without witnesses it's hard to say whether it was lighting and, as many have questioned, what's the condition of the streetlight now?
Try lining up your bike tires with one of the edges of the sensor when you pull up. Once I learned to do this I was able to reliably trip the sensor and get the light to change.
The sensors work off of magnetic induction (like a metal detector) and your bike just doesn't have that much metal to be detected. Positioning yourself along the edge of the road's sensor should trigger the light.
Is there an equivalent of RTFA for somebody who didn't even read the headline? RTFH perhaps? You just rotate the thing "one hour" in the correct direction to adjust for DST or Summer Time or whatever your country might call it.
I don't believe he suggested not dimming them, but that you can still click them if they're dimmed and they'll explain why they're dimmed. The issue isn't that dimming is useless (it's quite useful), but that it's sometimes a complete mystery as to why it is dimmed. Help files rarely address these issues too -- they explain what the menu item does when it's available but they often neglect to tell you why it might not be available to you right now.
Long ago, Balloon Help on the Mac did something like what he's suggesting. When you'd hover over a menu item it would pop up a balloon (tooltip) explaining what the item did. If you hovered over a dimmed item, it explained what the item did and also went on to explain why it was not available at the moment.
I don't believe that dimmed items are inherently confusing -- I know perfectly well why Firefox has dimmed my Cut and Copy commands right now -- it's because I don't have anything selected. On the other hand, I have no idea why Outlook Express has "Block Sender" (under the Message menu) dimmed while I've got a message selected in my Inbox. It'd be nice if I could easily find out ("This command is disabled because you don't have message filtering enabled" or "You must read the message first" or whatever the reason may be).
> This is why I'm not a lawyer. It seems like they're all schmucks.
:-)
I think that viewing everybody as schmucks might be just what's needed to be a great lawyer
I believe the point is that you can quickly refill the cell and you're off on the road again. You're right that you can already simply plug in, but you'll be tethered for a while until your battery is charged again.
"I guess the RIAA and similar organisations mean more to Comcast then some little girl being abused."
I think it's very likely and not suprising that Comcast would be more concerned about pleasing the RIAA/MPAA/etc. than they would about volunterring assistance to law enforcment with tangential issues like trading child porn. Comcast's big business isn't law enforcement, it's providing entertainment programming to its cable subscribers. If they compromise their relationship with the studios then they may have trouble negotiating for better rates or even whole blocks of channels for their cable channels.
I used to work for a company which produced boxes for DirecTV and many of the most restrictive rules about the design were all about pleasing Hollywood. One of the first consideration for feature proposals (behind security of the DTV network) was how Hollywood would react to it. Those relationships are extremely important to cable/satellite operators and I think they're willing to do a lot to protect them.
It's unfortunate in some ways, but it certainly doesn't suprise me.
The site is still Slashdotted this morning and nobody seems to have posted a link for the original joke, so here's the link to the Google cache.
I wonder the same thing of the other side -- what's the evidence that MS is still practicing this behavior? There's nothing in the article which substantiates Real's claim that MS is still doing exclusive OEM agreements. I'd like to see a quote from the OEM agreement or even an OEM representative saying that this is true. In fact it's pretty easy to read the complaints described by the article as historical: that MS *was* doing this in the past and therefore Real wants to get paid.
How can you be so arrogant? These are modified tropical fish, not ordinary tropical fish. I don't have anything in particular against genetic engineering, but I think it's foolish to use the technology carelessly and especially for something so trite as an aquarium pet. Our history is littered with examples of species being released into new environments, either deliberately or accidentally, and screwing up the ecosystem in that area. What's so ignorant about believing that letting engineered species run loose in the wild might be foolish? And make no mistake -- they *will* find their way into the wild, though whether or not they'll survive remains to be seen. Maybe most of them will die, but the problem is that you just don't know what's going to happen. I favor genetic engineering, but I also favor tight controls over how engineered species are kept, and letting some snot-nosed kid play with them as pets and then dump them into rivers and lakes is something I think borders on stupidity.
Actually, I'd rather they didn't try it anywhere -- not my backyard or somebody else's. But so many people seem to feel that California is just being stupid and having "knee-jerk" reactions about this that I feel like "fuck it - let them destroy their property." Maybe they'll be right and nothing bad will happen, so in ten years I'll be satisfied and think that the fish are ok. Or maybe the fish will cause the demise of their precious Bass or Bluegill or some whatever population and I'll be glad that California restricted their sale. The problem with this whole issue is that nobody really knows what will happen. Maybe nothing, maybe something terrible. Is it worth the risk just to have some stupid flourescent fish?
I think you're subscribing to the 'flushing' principle which believe that all fish are discarded via the sewers. Sometimes stupid little kids (or their parents) put them into ponds or streams where they can "be free".
The fish don't really glow (they're not luminescent), they're flourescent which means that they only light up when ultraviolet light hits them. Flourescent fish can survive just fine and I don't think they're especially easy targets. I'd be willing to bet that some predators would even be turned off by the color.
As a Californian, I'm glad we won't have them here. Let them experiment on the ecosystem somewhere else and then, in ten or twenty years, allow them in if there hasven't been any problems. There have just been way too many environmental disasters caused by introducing species (engineered or not) into new environments. If you want colorful fish, buy some Neon Tetras or a Jack Dempsey or just go saltwater where there are plenty of flourescent fish to choose from.
I agree that the risk is small, but it's there none-the-less. My point is mainly that people tend to downplay local exploits without recognizing that wireless networking is changing the meaning of local. It sort of reminds me of how people (myself included) used to dismiss stack overflow exploits as unlikely due to the difficulty of engineering one.
In many discussions, people downplay the importance of exploits like these because the attacker has to be on your local network to take advantage of the security hole. What about all of the mis-configured (or deliberately) open wi-fi networks out there? I think that wireless networking has changed the importance of "local exploits" by allowing somebody passing by to become a local entity on an open wi-fi network.