Re: simple list for TV makers to follow

Given that the nearest Tesco's is several thousand miles from here, I'll have to take your word for it.

Obviously, even the newest stuff isn't perfect; my ancient CRT projector smokes much of it in a few ways (on/off contrast, color accuracy, latency, ability to handle different signals well). But even mid-range TVs are being sold based on things like contrast (witness absurd contrast claims by manufacturers) and so forth.

As chance would have it, I did happen to buy six large Sony TVs based purely on their 3D capability. But that was for business, so I'll let it slide.

As for power usage, some things just flat out cost more. You want lots of effort in the design for efficiency? You want tons of testing to ensure that components running on the edge can handle it? You want excellent design and testing of heat dissipation and other such things? Money, money, money. And they're the kind of things that don't tend to commoditize well.

And put it in perspective - look at those 140 watts this way - look up in the air at a bright incandescent light bulb. There's 100 watts for you. It makes a single point source of light.

It's one color. It's blazing hot. It only lasts a few thousand hours. And it's fairly good at lighting up a room.

Now take your TV. It's fairly bad at lighting up a room on its own, if left on full white.

But it has a big panel with millions of elements that all change color dynamically, on demand, based on an electronic signal arriving at a breakneck pace. It does all that decoding, and then processes it, and performs operations to composite its menus and handle various audio decoding, HDMI protection, and so on and so forth. It has speakers. It lasts for tens of thousands of hours. It has a remote control. It can likely connect to the internet and watch videos on YouTube.

Your light bulb can do none of those things, yet it draws only 40 watts less than the TV.

I don't think 140 watts is unreasonable.

Re: Alternatively

So, you get those guys and the moon landing nutballs, and you have one group who thinks there was a conspiracy, and something that was filmed on the earth was actually filmed on the moon - and another who think there's a conspiracy, and something that was filmed on the moon was actually filmed on earth.

Gotta love it.

Re: Sir

"They're worse than... the Mafia."

Last time I checked, it's not as bad to fail to close an account as it is to shoot you in the eyeball and leave you dead at your own dinner table, surrounded by horrified family members and crying children.

I guess it depends on your priorities, but I'd rather that my social network account linger on a tape backup, than be brutally murdered in my dining room. I mean, just speaking for myself.

Maybe it's different for you and the prospect of Facebook retaining your mailing address is worse than the potential for your being the victim of a brutal, senseless homicide. Even if your account is retained in limbo, you yourself live on and on, continually reliving the horror of your physical mailing address remaining in the hands of Mr. Zuckerberg.

Whereas, after a few brief seconds of shock and terror, being strangled with piano wire in the rest room of the Olive Garden (when you're here, you're Family) is a one shot deal. After the moment of realization as the cold of the wire around your neck gives way to searing pain, after the brief and almost funny indignation at having to die with your pants down and a copy of "American Riflemen" on your lap, after the slow but rushing warmth and darkness, well - there's nothing to worry about any more, is there?

Hell, maybe you're right after all. It's a good thing I don't have a Facebook account. I don't even know how to -join- the mob.

Re: Differentiation is trivial

"Why things like "aspect ratio" need their own button I have no idea. I've had to use it maybe twice..."

Presumably you watch almost all HD content. If your HD availability is crud, and you watch a lot of NTSC, then switching between expand-to-fill so letterbox looks right, and 4:3 pillarboxed, so 'normal' 4:3 looks right, is essential. My wife and I ended up with this 32" Westinghouse thing, which has two aspect modes - normal and stretch. God knows what they were thinking. So we've got this 32" TV a hundred feet from the couch, and since 80% of stuff is letterboxed now as it's shot in 16:9, we have a tiny TV with a big bezel, and the content inside a 2" black LCD frame!

Luckily our TiVo died, and the new one will do that on its own.

With a dedicated button.

Re: I'm going to wait....

Coming from a wearer of corrective lenses, the Sony glasses aren't bad, and they're transparent enough that the world isn't black when you look away from the screen.

The only problem is that when you flip them up to the top of your head so you can do whatever else, some kind of projection on them pushes into my scalp painfully, and in a phenomenon presumably similar to acupuncture, makes me want to punch anyone I see. I smell a lawsuit.

FWIW, I have frameless lenses, which are very light and reasonably small. If you're a hipster with big honkin' black frames out of the '60s, you're probably out of luck. Luckily, you're a hipster, so I won't care.

Re: We've become innured.

"The problem with stereoscopic 3d is it gives the illusion of depth but doesn't fool the brain properly because you're not changing focus to see things further back. So while you can tell that something is in front of something else you can't really tell how far in front."

Untrue, untrue, untrue, untrue. Perhaps if you're watching some crap converted stuff, but with actual 3D source material - in my case, driving simulation - you do indeed have to alter your focus from the foreground to the background.

In fact, I use that effect to set convergence - hold a finger out at dashboard distance, defocus your eyes, and then adjust the convergence of the 3D image until you see your finger and the switch / steering wheel / whatever misconverged the same amount. Focus your eyes again, and by necessity your focus is correct for your finger and the switch / whatever - and incorrect elsewhere. If I'm driving a formula car with an antenna just in front of the cockpit, I see a double image if it when looking down the road, but I can focus on it if I want to.

The feel of focus-shifting your eyes is the same.

Saying 'while you can tell that something is in front of something else you can't really tell how far in front' is just not true - not on a fundamental level.

Converted content which makes bad cardboard cutouts of everyone? Sure, it's awful. But judging 3D as a technology on that basis is like saying stereo music is crap because all you've heard is mono sources converted to stereo with flanging and delays.

Re: Cotswolds

There's a place called 'Bushkill' whose sign I used to drive by every once in a while. From 2000 to 2008, it always gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling.

Ahem.

Re: @David W.

...and who the hell keeps asking that, anyway? I'm beginning to feel all stalkified, or whatever. It's *stalky*.

Re: @David W.

'Wobblenoggin'. Why do you ask?

Re: Just search for what I entered

The irony of your bloviating about simplicity in communication: Your post is so contorted that I can't figure out what the hell you're trying to say.

Re: win

...but not nearly as good as the 'Un-pimp ze auto' ads; I remember those *years* later. And even though I know that it's not like the Wolfsburg execs sat around and thought that up because that's how they roll, they at least approved it - which does say a little bit about the corporate culture. To the extent that a company like VW has one.

A side note: I was at a few auto shows a couple of years back, during setup, and during the last 12 hours before the show opened (or more usually, the noxious 'VIP preview', where wealth creators in tuxedos pretended to be interested in Ford Transit vans while their boozed-up trophy wives ran riot in motion simulators) it was always complete bedlam. 50 lift trucks roaring around beeping, creatives yelling about where vinyl stickers went, people adjusting lights, right up until the minute the doors opened. Panic in the streets, frayed nerves, yelling, banging, every booth a riot of panic and anger.

Except VW.

I remember looking around at the chaos - imagine a long, slow pan right-to-left, with one of those cheesy action movie 'Aiiyaagh!' falling-off-something-and-dying screams a few seconds in - and right in the center of my view was the VW booth, pristine white, complete, sparkling, with one old janitor dude sweeping away a fine coat of MDF dust, kicked up by other booths' circular saws, which had accumulated on vee-dub's shining tile floor.

It was 2008. That year, if I recall correctly, Wolfsburg were the only manufacturer to post a profit and a rise in stock price.

Re: Not accurate

Be that as it may, whether it's not implementing a feature or end-running it, geolocation is not and was not intended to be a form of content protection. Just because it -can- be used that way does not suddenly make it illegal to not use, any more than it would suddenly be illegal to turn off the GPS in your phone if I found a way to use -that- for content protection.

Which, of course, drills right down to the fundamental absurdity of anto+circumvention laws in general.

It's illegal to climb a wall to steal someone's house. It's not illegal to own a ladder.

Then how are you typing?

Re: WP7

Likewise on the playbook. I got the fade-to-black thing after the first load (when i got stuck after going to the sound menu and being unable to press escape) but furious tapping as tye main fade happened convinced it to load (!?).

I think it might have partially worked if it allowed fullscreen, but the top menu bar (even the mini one) caused touch movements to scroll instead of registering as mouse commands.

It looked crazy slow during the load slide-in, but that might have been an anomaly.

Nobody mentioned that it apparently uses webGL? At least, my browser warned me about it. I'm not too worried on my playbook though - now -there's- a case of security by obscurity for you...

Re: Groundbreaking, 20 year old game appears on web

Unless there's some arbitrary limit on execution time, I don't see why this shouldn't flyon modern hardware. It's 64000 pixels - you could damn near do it in text with a tiny block font. Hell, fullscreen it on my 30" monitor and each pixel could be an 8x6 character matrix!

Man, that puts things in perspective...

Re: I too would like to know.

Do you have any evidence, oddie, aside from a deeply ingrained cynicism that leaves your worldview as vulnerable to manipulation as that of a happy-go-lucky, overly-credulous WiReD journalist?

Starting from a position of believing that the authors are full of shit, using that to justify your judgment that they must therefore fall under the category of people who would need to / would post-edit, and therefore concluding that the authors are full of shit... You can do better than that, right?

It's easier and more productive to criticize the true morons in society rather than affecting such ego as to make the entire world and everyone in it (save your precise peers) worthless. God knows there are plenty of real morons to go around - and you're probably letting some of them get away while you're busy attacking others based on prejudice (and based on its being cool to dislike things on the internet; if you never like anything, you'll never get made fun of for accidentally liking the wrong thing).

Beat me to it.

Beat me to it.

Re: I'm sick an tired of all these mofo FTL claims on this mofo planet (gunshot)

Or roll up an orange and eat your sleeves. That works quite well if for nothing else than eating your sleeves is quite tiring, and after that and rolling up the orange it's time for a good nap. And a nap does wonders for your disposition.

Your company won't let you run a windows machine without mcafee, but they'll let you run a linux box?

Or do you run linux boxes because your company screws up windows machines with mcafee?

That would be a bizarre way to make your decisions - like only driving Mercedes because your company forces you to fill your BMW with dead fish. I mean, jeez, it's hardly MS's fault when people write horribly bloated software; what do you want the OS to do, detect whether it's a video editing program or an antivirus program that's using all the CPU, and prevent you from running the lousy one?

Wasn't there one of those at a recent RIM launch event?

Did I say I was prepared to take the article at face value? Hmm... no. What I said was that it's absurd to *confidently and quickly dismiss it based on very little information*.

I haven't got a problem with *discussing* it. I have a problem with people arrogantly and offhandedly tossing the whole thing in the bin without even bothering to understand what they're binning.

Also, science doesn't really "take something as fact" at all - not even relativity, which is, as you describe, a 'basic rule of the universe'. But basic rules of the universe are only basic rules of the universe until they aren't.

Yes, the odds are low, but that *in itself* is a very bad reason to dismiss the discussion out of hand.

I suggest reading 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' by Thomas Kuhn (IIRC). It's not perfect, as the nearly-equally-opaque Wikipedia page points out, and you'll want to shoot yourself in the head about fifty times as you slog through it - diagramming the guy's sentences would be a project akin to analyzing the US tax code longhand - but it's worth it for the perspective you gain.

Re: @David W

John H:

I'm guessing that said scientists would nonetheless not view a response consisting solely of "bollocks" as worthy of respect, despite the poster's refusal to take them at their word.

Re: Hang on a tick

The roof gardens are like those pictures you see of every new 'largest' airliner, with a bar, tasteful neon lighting, and a spiral staircase. What you actually get is another 45 economy seats and a stainless steel galley full of miniature coke cans, trays of flabby vegetables, and $9 beers.

In this case, I imagine the outcome will, if anything, be 18 acres of tar paper and those aluminum bendy straw vent things. And while the renders will show an interior lined with glass walls, thick carpet, and 15 foot ceilings sparkling with LED lighting, reality will find row upon row of off-white hallways, off-white offices, off-white suspended ceilings, and (to satisfy the rental agreement requirements) a half-broken foosball table, on its side, next to the ice machine on level C3.

Oh, and that dark brown / red speckle hard-nodule carpet that costs .35 cents per square foot and hurts if you walk on it without socks.

Re: OR

...and fifty lashes if you look at the sidewalk disrespectfully.

Re: I positively hate those loudmouth post cards

What to do with audio playing birthday cards:

- find an annoying card with a long playtime

- make sure there are at least four of them. Ten is better

- without opening them, nest them all together so you have one fat 'book' of the same card (as if you opened them flat, stacked them inside up, and folded them all again)

- open the whole bunch together

Now they'll all play at -almost- the same time and -almost- the same pitch. Congratulations, you've got "I'm lightning McQueen, world's fastest racing machine!" through the chorus filter from hell and ten times as loud as normal. The longer the sample, the crazier the pitch differences get. Find a country song lasting 30 seconds and by the time you get half way through it's as disturbing as a David Lynch movie.

People will look at you, though.

Re: @David W.

"What does the 'W' stand for by the way ...?"

A gentleman never tells.

...I'm not going to either.

Re: I'm glad...

I'm glad I wasn't reading this on my projector.