suspend to ram, suspend to disk, suspend, sleep, hibernate, whatever you wanna call these features. On most hardware, this doesn't work as flawless as on Windows, if at all.
I use these features all the time on Windows. When I press my power button, my computer suspends to RAM. Takes a split second. When I press power again, the computer is up and working again in another split second. In the meantime, the computer says nothing. All fans and harddrives are turned off.
This is the feature that always makes me go back from any Linux distro:(
this format might seem a little too "modern" or "excessive" to you,
Quite the contrary. Not modern enough. I'm really, really hoping that 50G : 4 hours, MPEG 2 (or even h.264) doesn't somehow get established as the standard precisely because I *can* see the difference, and it's sad. It's just not quite enough. And yet you don't know if what you have seen is the difference between displays, cables, extenders, scalers etc. or the actual format itself.
I have seen blu-ray played on the screen of a huge real movie theater compared with 70mm and with D-Cinema. Blu-ray looks much better than ordinary film 35mm copies, and from the THX optimum viewing spot it looked about as good as the D-cinema. The 70mm print looked better in some respects and worse in some, the copy was not pristine.
I get the same experience at home: Blu-ray looks much better than what I can get in even good movie theaters. And miles ahead of DVD.
But what disappoints me even more is that Blu-ray and HD-DVD were always going to be transition formats: we needed a new storage medium to make the digital & HD jump, but the technology wasn't quite there to do HD full justice. Which is why I expect better formats to come out before blu-ray really takes hold. What are you missing for doing HD "full justice"?
And here's the important quote:
If you compare _good_ DVDs played with a _good_ upscaler such as the Reon chip, with blu-ray, both playing on a well calibrated system in which the above mistakes are not made, the difference between DVD and Blu-Ray is night and day. Especially on large displays.
What you're saying here is that it's nearly impossible to see a well set-up system before you buy. You have to buy the stuff sight-unseen and set it up yourself, and even then you won't really have a reference to compare your work to. Bullocks. It is the exact same thing with good dvd players, good displays etc. You cannot see their full potential in the shops you mention. At all. If you go to a shop that takes care in doing even the most basic og adjustments and calibrations (5 minutes with a calibration disc), then you can see much more of the difference. You are fooling yourself if you think that what happens to look best in the stores you mention, _is_ best.
There's no way I'm even going to buy a display under those circumstances, because I'm sure as heck not going to be able to take my "well-configured" player into the store and connect it to a few displays to see what they're supposed to look like. Same deal for DVD and for the display you are buying.
When it's easy enough for the stores that specialize in electronic equipment to set up properly, I'll think about buying one. Until then, all you early adopters can blog about how great your experience (that no one else can duplicate) is. It is easy enough. They just don't care. Most consumers don't care. Until they see the difference.
There all sorts of things that can go wrong in the signal chain. Especially when know-nothings in major stores are setting up things. White crush, black crush, multiple passes of scaling to the wrong resolutions, all sorts of crappy "enhancing" filters and "sharpness" etc. that will introduce artifact galore.
And of course, there _are_ Blu-Ray releases that are poorly done. Transfers can be bad. Mastering can be bad. And 31.87% of the current releases use MPEG2, for some tragical reason. http://www.blu-raystats.com/stats.php
If you compare _good_ DVDs played with a _good_ upscaler such as the Reon chip, with blu-ray, both playing on a well calibrated system in which the above mistakes are not made, the difference between DVD and Blu-Ray is night and day. Especially on large displays.
Most slashdotters seem to hate Blu-Ray, but it seems that none of you have seen it, at least not under the circumstances where it excels.
Remember that we're still at the beginning of Blu-Ray lifespan. This format might seem a little too "modern" or "excessive" to you, but if it is going to be the mainstream format not just for a short period of time, but for the next 10 years, why aim for less? Blu-ray will not seem like overkill in a few years. It will feel necessary and adequate.
I hope prices drop. But the video and audio quality improvement of blu-ray over DVD is obvious even on modest equipment.
It is not just a matter of resolution. It is also a matter of much more subtle compression.
If you want to experience the _best_ that blu-ray has to offer, then you will need some pretty good equipment, since blu-ray quality scales well, so to speak. Even if you own ultra high end equipment, you really will not miss anything from blu-ray.
But that does _not_ mean that you _need_ such equipment to see the difference compared with DVD. DVD is really crappy. MPEG2 sucks. Having 9GB for 2 hours of MPEG2 video and DD5.1 audio sucks. It looks awful on cheap 32" LCD screens at normal viewing distances compared to blu-ray with its 50GB and AVC/H.264 codec. Even if that 32" LCD screen has a resolution of 1366x768 and not 1920x1080. Let alone larger screens...
I have a projector and a tiny 77" screen. DVD is totally unsuited for this purpose compared to blu-ray. I am _thrilled_ that we get a new modern format worthy of 2008, instead of being stuck with crappy DVDs that remind me of VCD MPEG1 videos from the 90s.
Now, if we could just get a new uncompressed audio format on blu-ray also, and have all of Pink Floyds albums remastered for this format. Screw SACD with it's 9GB.
Or suspend to disk and suspend to RAM.
Those two features are extremely important for a laptop user. Coupled with correct detection of lid opening and closing etc.
And I have yet to find a linux distro og kernel compilation or software package (uswsusp etc.) that just works on the many laptops I have tried installing linux on.
Come on! Laptops are increasingly popular and missing those features is a dealbreaker. It literally was for me. Also for my desktop computer, where I use hibernate and suspend a lot too. I have been running linux for 13 years off and on, but in the last couple of years, I always end up switching back to Windows XP because these features are lacking.
Ubuntu (or any other distro) with at least perfect seamless no-hassle suspend to disk or RAM when I close my lid and perfect resume when I open it, would be a godsend for me.
Basically all games of the FPS type (which is a pretty important type of game in the market) are better played with a mouse and preferably close to a screen at eye level. Try competing with Quake III PC players on a PS2.../David
I am not especially fond of Java myself. In fact, my focus has been precisely with lower level languages like the ones mentioned in the summary. I would love to work with these languages, preferably with tasks that where algorithmically and mathematically challenging etc.
But I have not been able to find any such jobs. Job databases show 90%.NET or Java jobs. The summary makes it sound like there is a great demand for my skills, but where are the jobs?/David
You are right about them using DHCP etc. because it makes it easier for Joe Sixpack. But DHCP does not mean that we can't have a static address. DHCP and similar technologies can easily be set up to always assign the same address to the same customer/device/router.
I think the only reason providers differentiate between static and dynamic addresses is to make money. They can then sell static addresses for those that really need it, at a higher price. Not that it is more expensive for the provider to provide./David
If I wanted what you describe, I would pick Ada. It is much better than Pascal in all regards, and it has a good real-world implementation that uses a good back-end (gnat->gcc)./David
Your left/right anecdote is not quite true. In Denmark, we had parties called Left and Right (in Danish, of course) for a lot longer than the 1930s.
Of course, nowadays we have more than two parties (unlike the americans, for all practical purposes).
I am certainly not a libertarian. I don't know why so many nerds are. I suspect it's because, as a group, nerds are not the most empathic or socially intelligent people.
It might have to do with their own economic success, isolating them from the real problems that many real people face. But it might also run deeper than that. It is my impression that many nerds come from higher than average economical backgrounds, and as such it is not only their own economic success, but also that of their parents that is isolating them from real peoples real problems.
If you have never been poor yourself, always have been given things and opportunities and knowledge and self-esteem etc., maybe you don't understand why poor people don't just pull their act together and become rich themselves.
I think you will find that there is a million times as many records released in the last decade compared to the 70s. Even if the proportion is the same (and I doubt it), there much more bullshit.
He has created music that people like. He has sold more albums than most artists.
Now, I am not an Elton John fan, but I think he has a point. Some of the best music I know was made in the 70s. I am a huge Pink Floyd fan, and a band such as Pink Floyd (or their music) would never come out of todays music reality. The same goes for Elton John, I guess.
Of course it is subjective, a matter of taste, but far more great music and far less bad music was made in the 70s than there has been in the 90s or the 00s (I love a lot of new music too, Radiohead for instance). It has become so easy to produce music and so easy to sell it to drooling morons, compared to then. Back then, it took some skill./David
Re:Am I the only one who just doesn't care about H
on
Blue Blu-ray
·
· Score: 1
Well, if you own a large display (like a front projector and a 77" screen as I do, many own 100" or more), DVD picture quality is simply disappointing. MPEG artifacts everywhere and low resolution in general.
Now, my projector isn't even a 1920x1080 projector, only 1280x720. Still, for a 77" screen, DVD quality is too low. The jump from 720x480 (or 720x576 in the PAL case) to 1920x1080 and then downscaled to 1280x720 is considerable and important in this case. But at least equally important is the fact that there are much less compression artifacts with VC-1 HD content using 30-50GB of space than with MPEG2 using 9GB of space.
In short: With larger displays, DVD is totally insufficient, we need something better. I vote for BluRay because it has more space. Someone wrote in the thread that a HD movie (VC-1 encoded) easily fits in 30GB. Hmm. More space always means less compression. If you compare 30GB VC1-1 with uncompressed HD video (where would you get that...), I am sure you would find differences. And also, more space is always good. For storage, for the future./David
Re:Am I the only one who just doesn't care about H
on
Blue Blu-ray
·
· Score: 1
Well, if you own a large display (like a front projector and a 77" screen as I do, many own 100" or more), DVD picture quality is simply disappointing. MPEG artifacts everywhere and low resolution in general.
Now, my projector isn't even a 1920x1080 projector, only 1280x720. Still, for a 77" screen, DVD quality is too low. The jump from 720x480 (or 720x576 in the PAL case) to 1920x1080 and then downscaled to 1280x720 is considerable and important in this case. But at least equally important is the fact that there are much less compression artifacts with VC-1 HD content using 30-50GB of space than with MPEG2 using 9GB of space.
In short: With larger displays, DVD is totally insufficient, we need something better. I vote for BluRay because it has more space. Someone wrote in the thread that a HD movie (VC-1 encoded) easily fits in 30GB. Hmm. More space always means less compression. If you compare 30GB VC1-1 with uncompressed HD video (where would you get that...), I am sure you would find differences. And also, more space is always good. For storage, for the future./David
> > well, deinterlacing isn't the same as natively progressive, though. >
In the case of 24Hz film to PAL or NTSC, yes it is.
The fact that stuff is being done to the signal in both the PAL case (speeding up by 25/24) and the NTSC case (3:2 pulldown) to "convert" the signal from 24Hz to 25Hz or 30Hz, has nothing to do with the interlacing as such. It is a timing issue. Converting 24Hz (progressive) film to 48Hz interlaced film, where the union of the two interlace fields is exactly the original progressive frame, and back again to 24Hz progressive, is a trivial and non-lossy process. Basically you just merge the two fields and you're done.
The problem arises only if you're having something which is _natively_ interlaced, just as a PAL _recording_ in which the two fields in a "field pair" does not represent the same moment in tame. Basically one field (with only odd lines) was captured at one point in time, t. And the next field (with only even lines) was captured at t + 1/50 second. If you merge these two frames, you will get jaggies. This will of course not happen if you go from 24Hz progressive to 48Hz interlaced and back./David
Slashdot Mirror
Have you actually made an honest and serious attempt to tell the difference between a mid price-range audio system and a bleeding edge $50,000 system?
is what I want... My favorite game is Quake 3. I want something new!
CoreAVC is by _far_ the fastest H.264 software decoder on the planet. Something like twice as fast as the nearest competitor.
It's nice that it works for you. But I can assure you that on a lot of the different hardware I've tried, it doesn't.
suspend to ram, suspend to disk, suspend, sleep, hibernate, whatever you wanna call these features.
:(
On most hardware, this doesn't work as flawless as on Windows, if at all.
I use these features all the time on Windows. When I press my power button, my computer suspends to RAM. Takes a split second. When I press power again, the computer is up and working again in another split second. In the meantime, the computer says nothing. All fans and harddrives are turned off.
This is the feature that always makes me go back from any Linux distro
Usability testing your hairy hard-on with a girlfriend, are we?
Quite the contrary. Not modern enough. I'm really, really hoping that 50G : 4 hours, MPEG 2 (or even h.264) doesn't somehow get established as the standard precisely because I *can* see the difference, and it's sad. It's just not quite enough. And yet you don't know if what you have seen is the difference between displays, cables, extenders, scalers etc. or the actual format itself.
I have seen blu-ray played on the screen of a huge real movie theater compared with 70mm and with D-Cinema. Blu-ray looks much better than ordinary film 35mm copies, and from the THX optimum viewing spot it looked about as good as the D-cinema. The 70mm print looked better in some respects and worse in some, the copy was not pristine.
I get the same experience at home: Blu-ray looks much better than what I can get in even good movie theaters. And miles ahead of DVD. But what disappoints me even more is that Blu-ray and HD-DVD were always going to be transition formats: we needed a new storage medium to make the digital & HD jump, but the technology wasn't quite there to do HD full justice. Which is why I expect better formats to come out before blu-ray really takes hold. What are you missing for doing HD "full justice"? And here's the important quote:
What you're saying here is that it's nearly impossible to see a well set-up system before you buy. You have to buy the stuff sight-unseen and set it up yourself, and even then you won't really have a reference to compare your work to. Bullocks. It is the exact same thing with good dvd players, good displays etc. You cannot see their full potential in the shops you mention. At all. If you go to a shop that takes care in doing even the most basic og adjustments and calibrations (5 minutes with a calibration disc), then you can see much more of the difference.
You are fooling yourself if you think that what happens to look best in the stores you mention, _is_ best. There's no way I'm even going to buy a display under those circumstances, because I'm sure as heck not going to be able to take my "well-configured" player into the store and connect it to a few displays to see what they're supposed to look like. Same deal for DVD and for the display you are buying. When it's easy enough for the stores that specialize in electronic equipment to set up properly, I'll think about buying one. Until then, all you early adopters can blog about how great your experience (that no one else can duplicate) is. It is easy enough. They just don't care. Most consumers don't care. Until they see the difference.
There all sorts of things that can go wrong in the signal chain. Especially when know-nothings in major stores are setting up things. White crush, black crush, multiple passes of scaling to the wrong resolutions, all sorts of crappy "enhancing" filters and "sharpness" etc. that will introduce artifact galore.
And of course, there _are_ Blu-Ray releases that are poorly done. Transfers can be bad. Mastering can be bad. And 31.87% of the current releases use MPEG2, for some tragical reason. http://www.blu-raystats.com/stats.php
If you compare _good_ DVDs played with a _good_ upscaler such as the Reon chip, with blu-ray, both playing on a well calibrated system in which the above mistakes are not made, the difference between DVD and Blu-Ray is night and day. Especially on large displays.
Most slashdotters seem to hate Blu-Ray, but it seems that none of you have seen it, at least not under the circumstances where it excels.
Remember that we're still at the beginning of Blu-Ray lifespan. This format might seem a little too "modern" or "excessive" to you, but if it is going to be the mainstream format not just for a short period of time, but for the next 10 years, why aim for less? Blu-ray will not seem like overkill in a few years. It will feel necessary and adequate.
I hope prices drop. But the video and audio quality improvement of blu-ray over DVD is obvious even on modest equipment.
It is not just a matter of resolution. It is also a matter of much more subtle compression.
If you want to experience the _best_ that blu-ray has to offer, then you will need some pretty good equipment, since blu-ray quality scales well, so to speak. Even if you own ultra high end equipment, you really will not miss anything from blu-ray.
But that does _not_ mean that you _need_ such equipment to see the difference compared with DVD. DVD is really crappy. MPEG2 sucks. Having 9GB for 2 hours of MPEG2 video and DD5.1 audio sucks. It looks awful on cheap 32" LCD screens at normal viewing distances compared to blu-ray with its 50GB and AVC/H.264 codec. Even if that 32" LCD screen has a resolution of 1366x768 and not 1920x1080. Let alone larger screens...
I have a projector and a tiny 77" screen. DVD is totally unsuited for this purpose compared to blu-ray. I am _thrilled_ that we get a new modern format worthy of 2008, instead of being stuck with crappy DVDs that remind me of VCD MPEG1 videos from the 90s.
Now, if we could just get a new uncompressed audio format on blu-ray also, and have all of Pink Floyds albums remastered for this format. Screw SACD with it's 9GB.
Or suspend to disk and suspend to RAM. Those two features are extremely important for a laptop user. Coupled with correct detection of lid opening and closing etc. And I have yet to find a linux distro og kernel compilation or software package (uswsusp etc.) that just works on the many laptops I have tried installing linux on. Come on! Laptops are increasingly popular and missing those features is a dealbreaker. It literally was for me. Also for my desktop computer, where I use hibernate and suspend a lot too. I have been running linux for 13 years off and on, but in the last couple of years, I always end up switching back to Windows XP because these features are lacking. Ubuntu (or any other distro) with at least perfect seamless no-hassle suspend to disk or RAM when I close my lid and perfect resume when I open it, would be a godsend for me.
Basically all games of the FPS type (which is a pretty important type of game in the market) are better played with a mouse and preferably close to a screen at eye level. Try competing with Quake III PC players on a PS2... /David
I suggested Horny Horse in the official #ubuntu channel on irc.freenode.org, and got kicked... :(
I am not especially fond of Java myself. In fact, my focus has been precisely with lower level languages like the ones mentioned in the summary. I would love to work with these languages, preferably with tasks that where algorithmically and mathematically challenging etc.
.NET or Java jobs. The summary makes it sound like there is a great demand for my skills, but where are the jobs? /David
But I have not been able to find any such jobs. Job databases show 90%
You are right about them using DHCP etc. because it makes it easier for Joe Sixpack. But DHCP does not mean that we can't have a static address. DHCP and similar technologies can easily be set up to always assign the same address to the same customer/device/router.
/David
I think the only reason providers differentiate between static and dynamic addresses is to make money. They can then sell static addresses for those that really need it, at a higher price. Not that it is more expensive for the provider to provide.
You... never know.
There is A#, for example. For CLR/Mono. Maybe there are similar solutions for the JVM. /David
If I wanted what you describe, I would pick Ada. It is much better than Pascal in all regards, and it has a good real-world implementation that uses a good back-end (gnat->gcc). /David
Your left/right anecdote is not quite true. In Denmark, we had parties called Left and Right (in Danish, of course) for a lot longer than the 1930s. Of course, nowadays we have more than two parties (unlike the americans, for all practical purposes).
I am certainly not a libertarian. I don't know why so many nerds are. I suspect it's because, as a group, nerds are not the most empathic or socially intelligent people.
It might have to do with their own economic success, isolating them from the real problems that many real people face. But it might also run deeper than that. It is my impression that many nerds come from higher than average economical backgrounds, and as such it is not only their own economic success, but also that of their parents that is isolating them from real peoples real problems.
If you have never been poor yourself, always have been given things and opportunities and knowledge and self-esteem etc., maybe you don't understand why poor people don't just pull their act together and become rich themselves.
Who cares if it's capitalism? /David
I think you will find that there is a million times as many records released in the last decade compared to the 70s. Even if the proportion is the same (and I doubt it), there much more bullshit.
He has created music that people like. He has sold more albums than most artists.
/David
Now, I am not an Elton John fan, but I think he has a point. Some of the best music I know was made in the 70s. I am a huge Pink Floyd fan, and a band such as Pink Floyd (or their music) would never come out of todays music reality. The same goes for Elton John, I guess.
Of course it is subjective, a matter of taste, but far more great music and far less bad music was made in the 70s than there has been in the 90s or the 00s (I love a lot of new music too, Radiohead for instance). It has become so easy to produce music and so easy to sell it to drooling morons, compared to then. Back then, it took some skill.
Well, if you own a large display (like a front projector and a 77" screen as I do, many own 100" or more), DVD picture quality is simply disappointing. MPEG artifacts everywhere and low resolution in general.
/David
Now, my projector isn't even a 1920x1080 projector, only 1280x720. Still, for a 77" screen, DVD quality is too low. The jump from 720x480 (or 720x576 in the PAL case) to 1920x1080 and then downscaled to 1280x720 is considerable and important in this case. But at least equally important is the fact that there are much less compression artifacts with VC-1 HD content using 30-50GB of space than with MPEG2 using 9GB of space.
In short: With larger displays, DVD is totally insufficient, we need something better. I vote for BluRay because it has more space. Someone wrote in the thread that a HD movie (VC-1 encoded) easily fits in 30GB. Hmm. More space always means less compression. If you compare 30GB VC1-1 with uncompressed HD video (where would you get that...), I am sure you would find differences. And also, more space is always good. For storage, for the future.
Well, if you own a large display (like a front projector and a 77" screen as I do, many own 100" or more), DVD picture quality is simply disappointing. MPEG artifacts everywhere and low resolution in general. Now, my projector isn't even a 1920x1080 projector, only 1280x720. Still, for a 77" screen, DVD quality is too low. The jump from 720x480 (or 720x576 in the PAL case) to 1920x1080 and then downscaled to 1280x720 is considerable and important in this case. But at least equally important is the fact that there are much less compression artifacts with VC-1 HD content using 30-50GB of space than with MPEG2 using 9GB of space. In short: With larger displays, DVD is totally insufficient, we need something better. I vote for BluRay because it has more space. Someone wrote in the thread that a HD movie (VC-1 encoded) easily fits in 30GB. Hmm. More space always means less compression. If you compare 30GB VC1-1 with uncompressed HD video (where would you get that...), I am sure you would find differences. And also, more space is always good. For storage, for the future. /David
>
/David
> well, deinterlacing isn't the same as natively progressive, though.
>
In the case of 24Hz film to PAL or NTSC, yes it is.
The fact that stuff is being done to the signal in both the PAL case (speeding up by 25/24) and the NTSC case (3:2 pulldown) to "convert" the signal from 24Hz to 25Hz or 30Hz, has nothing to do with the interlacing as such. It is a timing issue.
Converting 24Hz (progressive) film to 48Hz interlaced film, where the union of the two interlace fields is exactly the original progressive frame, and back again to 24Hz progressive, is a trivial and non-lossy process. Basically you just merge the two fields and you're done.
The problem arises only if you're having something which is _natively_ interlaced, just as a PAL _recording_ in which the two fields in a "field pair" does not represent the same moment in tame. Basically one field (with only odd lines) was captured at one point in time, t. And the next field (with only even lines) was captured at t + 1/50 second. If you merge these two frames, you will get jaggies. This will of course not happen if you go from 24Hz progressive to 48Hz interlaced and back.