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Comment Do not want (Score 1) 167

When I use a SNES emulator, I jump through hoops to make it look like it did when I was growing up, simulating a CRT television and the artifacts of composite video. Why would I want to take my SNES and try to make it look like an unmodified emulator? That's the exact opposite of what I want. These games were never meant to be hyper-sharp and pixelated. In fact, some games rely on composite artifacting to make certain effects work.

In fact, I want an upscaler that I can plug my SNES into that will simulate a CRT. When I emulate, I combine a CRT simulation filter (which gives me a simulation of CRT scanlines and subpixel geometry while simulating the curve of a CRT) with a composite video simulator (which simulates the artifacts of composite video), and the results is very pleasing, looking much like I remember things from back in the day. With a real SNES, I don't need the composite simulator, because I can just use the real SNES composite output, but having a hardware device that does the CRT simulation (perhaps doing the CRT simulation shaders on an FPGA?) would make it look much better on an LCD or projector.

I realize that you can get partway there by running the SNES signal through a scaler to get to 480p and then running it through a scanline generator, but that's not simulating the physical properties of a CRT (like how a bright scanline appears thicker than a thin one), you're only getting partway there.

Comment Re: maybe (Score 1) 355

Except it's not irreducible, it's an explicit choice to use ATM. Many variants of DSL (such as the VDSL2 that is all companies like Bell Canada deploy these says) don't require ATM. Of course, replacing outdated hardware with VDSL2 hardware has a cost too, but the companies should be (and are) doing that anyhow.

Comment Dropbox brought it on themselves (Score 1) 275

Unless I'm mistaken, Dropbox has never invested in infrastructure. They rely on S3 for storage, which is extremely expensive. If they had invested in their own infrastructure, they wouldn't be in this mess... or at least they wouldn't be quite so deep in it.

BackBlaze faced a similar challenge, and decided to build their own infrastructure, going so far as to build their own custom server chassis. They rely on consumer drives with redundancy to reduce costs. The result? Their one-time up-front storage cost is $0.05 per gigabyte, meaning that it's economically feasible for them to offer their customers unlimited storage for five bucks a month. Amazon, for their part, charges $0.33 per gigabyte per year (in bulk).

Their infrastructure isn't quite exactly what Dropbox would need, but it's not that far off, and their costs drop based on ever-decreasing storage prices, rather than when a cloud provider feels like lowering sky-high storage costs.

Comment Re:Picking nits.. (Score 2) 341

When I "Uber" a ride, I get a regular taxi. They call it "uberTAXI", and it's the only service available in the second largest city in Canada. A regular taxi shows up, and you get billed the regulated meter rate.

About the only advantage is that Uber's app is probably more reliable/better than the very similar apps used by existing taxi companies in Montreal. I've had Diamond Taxi's app crap out on me after ordering a few times, and the GPS on the taxi only updates infrequently.

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