We're no longer bound to PAL standards like we were - the MPEG decoders in whatever you're using nowadays can handle any framerate you would find, but yes, a lot of content is still in legacy formats and used without changes.

But there's no REASON to any more. Any display device you find will do 50 or 60, whichever you throw at it.

That just proves (poorly) that the boundary lies somewhere between 24 and 60. Not that 60 is required.

And, to be honest, a lot of things affect it - hell, even the local mains frequency can affect what hardware does and how it reacts at 50 or 60Hz.

You could have just used a codec that's not designed with 24fps in mind, or a poor implementation of that codec.

But, that said, the difference is minor, and on an animated "slew" rather than real-world video (YouTube isn't going to be showing much left-right 3D animation, more likely home video and recorded gameplay). Certainly for a web video, 24fps is good enough. Otherwise YouTube would have been overtaken by a competitor by now. The artifact you've got there (possibly exaggerated by other factors) is not something you often see on YouTube videos, for instance. Even animated ones. And they AREN'T running at 24 fps.

And even if you're right, the argument doesn't necessarily hold past 60. In fact, it quite likely stops dead at that point. And for some people it will stop dead long before 60 (British TV was only ever 50Hz, with sometimes 25fps, until digitisation).

Fact is, it's subjective and subject to bell-curve. The sweet-spot of storage versus optimal number of people seeing it is likely below 60. Certainly there's little point moving towards 100-200Hz like some claim for monitors. And for the vast majority of the bell-curve, 60 is higher than necessary.

By all means do it. But, outside of announcement videos, if YouTube were to just randomly make half of the videos 60fps and the rest 30fps, the chances that there would be any kind of detectable "preference" for the 60fps one is slim.

That's alright. It'll just point out those people who think they can see a difference on their PC screen anyway - when they all start yelling baout "how much better" it looks, and then are told that it was only 30fps because of the Flash issue, we can just write them off as idiots anyway.

Definitely feel a Peter Molyneaux coming on - before you know it the hype will go so mad, you won't even notice that the game's actually been released, and then we'll find out it's as dull as hell as a game.

But aside from that, a team of 10 isn't exactly tiny. A lot better games have been written with a lot less people.

And front-page of Slashdot before release? I'm guessing at least one of those people works in marketing...

- Cookies aren't remembered properly.
- The font cache corrupts and requires restart of the browser at regular interval (unless you like Chinese Unicode squiggles taking the place of your normal page text).

The original coding team were ditched, the replacements were all new - the forums/blogs describing this were purged but you can still find them if you try really hard.

People who start on new versions? If there are less of those than your ENTIRE existing customer base, you're losing out. See replies to this post - a lot of old-time supporters, people who were buyers of the software over a decade ago and still using it, have left it behind.

Bug reports used to be answered. Your snarky answer is precisely the problem - nobody cares about replying to them now. And most of them are literally WILLNOTFIX.

They removed the entire mail and chat clients, the integrated Bittorrent download, the bookmarks, the entire UI customisability (the strongest point of Opera), the kiosk modes, all the stuff that made them unique. Go download a 12.16 and look how many features there are that just aren't there. Nobody uses them? The bug reports, the cries for their return, and the fleeing users suggest otherwise. Don't say they didn't remove features.

Nobody knows that the Desktop version grew. The only numbers you have are from Opera themselves. It was already a niche player.

The dev team CHANGED. It was announced several times on the forums. The old ones were shown the door, the new ones only broke the old codebase and couldn't advance it. It was part of the reason they "started again" - they didn't know how to do anything else (and Linux, etc. clients were left in the wake of the change).

Breaking it? See bugs at top of page - not present in 12.13 (before the dev change), present after and getting worse until 12.x branch was abandoned.

And I used Opera since before 3.6. The number of bugs that weren't replied to, fixed in the next minor and never affected much (except the occasional rendering bug) were few and far between... or I wouldn't have paid for it, wouldn't have used it, wouldn't have fought for it, wouldn't still be mourning the loss of it.

Opera dev team were shown the door, new dev team can't get close to replicating their functionality even after - what - a year or so with NO HTML engine to worry about (Chrome handles all that now)?

If you don't know this stuff, you probably weren't using old Opera or weren't on the forums at the time all this was announced (before the new versions even existed).

Tiny market share?

You mean the Wii Channel?

Or the Opera Mini which sold in millions on app stores and tablets?

Not to mention thousand of no-name kiosks (Opera has a /kiosk switch on it).

It may have be MORE niche than their competitors but their biggest selling point was that they weren't those competitors, they had the smallest, faster, most portable, most customisable browser which was *sold* as part of the Nintendo Wii launch (you call it The Internet Channel...).

I'm suggesting that a company that makes MONEY by having users use it, should strive to keep those users. Rather than become yet-another-Chrome that even less people use.

What is their revenue stream now? They are just making a browser. With no-one to use it, they don't even get the Google Search premium. And, in case you missed it, at one point they were a profitable company selling a product so good that people bought it rather than use the free competitors.

They got bought out, they shipped off the developers that knew how to program, they ended up with a Windows-only Chrome frontend dependent on someone else to do the hard work of making them money. And in the process lost a LOT of users, who are really their only revenue stream now that they DON'T pump out versions for other platforms like the Wii any more...

"like what Unity has"

And... I stopped reading.

Honestly, as a life-long Opera user and supporter, Opera is dead on all platforms. They refuse to make it work like it used to (or are incapable of that), and there hasn't been an update since the 15 series that actually did anything, and most of those updates broke stuff.

They are trying to play catch-up from an unnecessary code-base change to what they used to have. The coding team has changed. The company has changed. There is no interest in preserving users any more. Bug reports get answered with "We haven't got around to that yet" or "We never intend to put that functionality back in.

I was there in the pay-for days. I was there in the ad-supported days. I was there right up until last year, when the company that I defended against others changed and the software I used everyday became unusable. They removed every major feature that did something useful, so it's now a very, very poor Chrome clone.

Opera supporters will tell you to stay on the old codebase. We hoped the company would see sense and start re-using that codebase after they realised their catastrophic mistake. It never happened. The only patches they ever put out to the "real" Opera codebase broke it along the way, presumably because they just don't understand the code at all.

Save yourself the effort - find another browser. There's even a "Let's rebuild Opera as it was" open-source effort doing what Opera SHOULD have done if they wanted a Chrome renderer in there. But, sorry, despite my best attempts to resuscitate it and even exhume it, it's dead.

"with an aim of better securing networks and facilitating better use of finite broadband resources"

If we have finite broadband resources, and they are already scarce enough that customers are demanding more from their connections that can be given to them, why will allowing random passing strangers to decrease the amount of available bandwidth to everyone else help?

Sorry, it's just an open wifi hotspot. We don't want really them in our homes. We certainly don't want random passing strangers to have them on our connection and traceable only to ourselves, for the hassle if nothing else.

Surely my freedom of using my own computing resources trumps anyone else's?

The only thing I can see them useful for is hacking their firmware. Otherwise, I could just switch back on the various options my ISP tries to force onto my router to share with random strangers that I turned off in the first place.

Please don't lose sight of the real problem:

If nVidia just pulled their finger out and gave these guys proper documentation, or at least a hint, or a hand, or maybe even some damn code, things would have moved HUNDREDS OF TIMES FASTER.

These people are finding out how to do this stuff by probing the card, listening to what the driver does, and that's all extremely low-level stuff on undocumented chips.

The fact it works AT ALL is because these guys are fucking good at what they do and are trying extremely hard. It's not just a case of slapping a debugger on a low-level driver like this, as the interaction with system buses and the entirely unknown instruction sets and memory maps make ANY probing and testing extremely time-consuming and liable to damage stuff.

Or nVidia could just say "Here you go, guys, the reason you couldn't do this before is X and you just need to initiliase Y before you probe Z..."

There are 21 comments.

I don't think a Slashdotting is anywhere near what it used to be. In fact, it's a while since I heard of one.

You can teach your own children what you like. However, the real news here is:

"The Government is just not funding .... state funded schools."

Someone will explain how, if you want to be a state-funded school, you intend to get state-funding while teaching creationism. You won't, is the answer.

It's a block to government funding. As you might imagine, the government funding of schools (even "free" schools - notice they are not INDEPENDENT schools which receive no government funding and are often called "private schools" [and confusingly in the UK "public schools" but that's another matter]. They are state-funded. And the government will not fund you if you're teaching creationism.

Hence why words like "banned", "prevent" etc. appeared in the summary.

You can do it, but the government won't help you do it. And if you go "independent", then you could have always done that anyway - and you have to ask the PARENTS to fund your school, not the government.

But any school that you might be sent to as part of your legal requirement for education? They won't be able to teach creationism.

So you can do it yourself, or you can spend lots of money to fund a school that will do it for you. But what won't happen is the blanket, free, state education in the UK covering creationism.

You always have a choice. The question is how much is that choice worth to you? Are your religious beliefs worth paying for? This isn't impinging on anyone's freedom of religion. You can BE any religion you like. You just won't get taught it in school science lessons (RE, that's another matter entirely), nor will we exclude "non-believers" from the same lessons that you are in. If you want that kind of exclusive, "cult"-ish, blinkered education, you're free to choose it and fund it.

But don't make the state cater for every crackpot religion out there out of its own pocket.

You could just read TFA:

"[A]ny doctrine or theory which holds that natural biological processes cannot account for the history, diversity, and complexity of life on earth and therefore rejects the scientific theory of evolution."

Basically, if you claim that anything other than simple biology was at work in creating animals, then you lose your funding (and possibly right to call yourselves a school).

You can claim that God made biology possible by creating a universe in which biology could make them exist, but you can't claim that God "created" animals at all.

Because sometimes, just sometimes, we actually have a brain.

So you've managed to kill off Freshmeat (first with a stupidly unnecessary name-change, then allowing crappy "Download Button" ads on a download site, now by removing it's only purpose).

What the hell do you have planned for Slashdot next?

How about, rather than destroying these venerable brands, you actually try and USE THEM rather than let them slide into obscurity?

It's not a question of it being soft or not. It was a question of getting it out when the machine crashed. The models in question would not let you eject the discs even on boot-up (unlike every other CD drive I've ever seen - supply power, push button, out comes CD - worst that happens is you have be quick before the OS sucks the drive tray back in, or press Pause/Break on the BIOS to give yourself time).

That's not even counting the fact that ALL non-Mac CD drives have a MANUAL emergency eject hole. Paperclip to the rescue.

There were numerous incidents with many models of Mac where people basically had to have the machine physically repaired to get their CD back out because there was no way to open it.

And, as pointed out, a read-only medium? Who gives a shit. Even read-write, sometimes you still need to tug it and the OS should know that. That's what the write-cache options are FOR and why they're disabled for removable media (even though that's a huge performance drag).