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Comment Re:Fiber (Score 2) 237

There's this new technology that's been around since the 1800's. It's called running a ground wire. You're supposed to connect it to ANY conductive cable that spans the distance between buildings.

When it was first implemented in the 1800's, it was considered demonic, since the wrath of God was no longer taking out church steeples.

If you're doing this sort of stuff without following code, you shouldn't be doing it.

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Comment Re:How nice (Score 1) 409

A .22 LR frequently doesn't do enough damage to actually kill. The bullet's too small and moving at too high of a velocity to get stopped by anything inside your skull.

Usually, it just ricochets around inside your skull, moving the grey matter around, but not causing actual death. The condition of the victims after this varies, from being relatively unaffected, to severe brain damage.

If you want to do it that way, you need a much bigger gauge weapon. Or a shotgun. Just make sure you point it in the right direction. It's quite common to miss. Especially with people that have never fired guns before.

-RT

Yahoo!

Submission + - Yahoo cans CEO then puts itself up for sale (businessinsider.com)

Reeses writes: Fare thee well, Yahoo:

In addition to firing CEO Carol Bartz, Yahoo's board has now put the company up for sale.
The person who briefed the Wall Street Journal on the Bartz firing also told the paper that "Yahoo is open to selling itself to the right bidder."

Comment Re:Putting the cart before the horse. (Score 1) 201

It could be argued that in the days of "wooden ships and men" the men were less expendable than they are now.

We're nearing a world population of 7 billion. If you think a few thousand of those aren't "expendable" as long as they enter into the deal knowing all the risks, then you need to do some math.

They're far more "expendable" than they were back when the world population was only a few tens of millions.

We're becoming progressively more worthless.

And the "Wooden ships" part being more expensive is because we've placed opportunity costs on the materials needed to build ships. We can build one rocket out of aluminum, or we can build another million iPhones. Sadly these days, we're choosing the iPhone.

Comment Because we're cheap. (Score 1) 1162

DVDs cost between $1 and $15.

Most Blu-Rays cost around $24 to $30.

The picture quality isn't worth the doubling in price. Especially when for $9 a month, I can stream Netflix to my TV in better than DVD resolution.

I was hoping the price of BluRay would drop as fast as the price on DVDs has, but it hasn't happened.

Comment Re:100hz Source? (Score 1) 423

We are analog machines. It varies.

Some people are color blind. Some people see 4 colors (tetrachromat).

Professional baseball players can see the stitches on a ball when it's coming at them, and see which way they're turning. Odds are you probably cant. Some people see 15 fps as persistent vision, almost everyone else needs 24 fps.

They test pilots by showing a silhouette of a plane on a screen for 1/220th of a second. The ones that can see it, and identify the plane become pilots. The ones that can't see it and/or can't identify it don't. Many people can't.

Read up on it. There's been a LOT of testing on it. Especially around the time of the creation of films and automobiles.

Taillights are red because it doesn't destroy our night vision once we've adapted to the dark. Blue and green light does. Lots of research into how much color we can see, and which ones work well next to each other and don't. It's fund stuff to read up on.

Comment Re:Finally (Score 1) 423

Because, unlike the eye, your Samsung isn't a constant display device.

Your eye captures a stream of video information with no frames. It's just a persistent sine wave. There's no "blanking interval" like there is in TVs (I know LCDs don't have a blanking interva, but there's still an equivalent where a pixel isn't being addressed and is sitting idle, slowly dimming), they constantly send a sine wave. Similar to how the difference between an original analog music waveform (our eyes) and the cd sampling rate (digital displays) work. Each rod and cone has it's own nerve signaling path to send down the optic nerve. (it's about 1.2 million nerve fibers.)

Sadly, your TVs pixels are not persistently individually addressed. They have a refresh rate as the system walks through each pixel in the grid. The key is to do the pixel update before it fades so much that we notice it. On larger LCDs, the panels are broken up into multiple panels, so it does multiple panels at once. Our eyes on the other hand, each cone/rod is constantly sending information. Somehow our brain stitches it into our perception of the world around us.

You will also note that the Samsung site says this:

The 2233RZ starts with a 120 Hz signal to create 3D with two fully 60 Hz images.

You're not really seeing 120 Hz. And you have processing circuitry in there to deal with that mucking with it all. If the LCD runs at 60 Hz, and you feed it a 100 Hz signal, that's not an even multiplier of 60, so the panel circuitry has to do some sort of pulldown to sync it with the display. Pull-down circuitry frequently leads to visible judder in images, that's why DVDs mastered at 24 fps don't look right if your TV doesn't have good 3:2 pulldown software. 120Hz is very easily mapped to a 60Hz panel (it just drops every other frame). Since it's a consistent drop-frame effect, your eye smooths it out easily. If it dropped every other frame for 10 frames, then dropped two frames for the next two frames, then back to 1 in 10, etc, your eye would see that. It may even be what's happening.

Comment Re:Finally (Score 1) 423

I've heard how many can tell the difference between 100 and say, 160fps on CRT monitors. Do you have a reference?

Here's the best reference I can find to date:

http://books.google.com/books?id=-e9PqP8_CA0C&pg=PA213&lpg=PA213&dq=data+rate+of+optic+nerve&source=bl&ots=8SxM6u24BQ&sig=G_KBapsdppnZSRFAKxj8JKylzwY&hl=en&ei=7R2lTeWeNOa_0QGRhtDwCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CCsQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=data%20rate%20of%20optic%20nerve&f=false

Sorry it's google books. I remember reading the statistic somewhere during the refresh rate wars on monitors during the early 2000's. I had a 17" Monitor, and anything less than 75 Hz gave me massive headaches. So I started doing research and found out the optic nerve can only handle about 100 Hz. It varies by person a little up and down. We are analog machines after all.

It may be higher, the linked book mentions a consistent rate of 200 pulses per second. Which might give rise to a 200 fps measurement, depending on if a "pulse" is both the top and bottom half of the sine wave. The book also states that it can max out at 1000 pulses per second, but it can't maintain it before nerve degradation happens.

I bet if you saw a very fast motion scene, you'd be able to tell the difference between 100 and 200fps, and even between 200 and 500fps.

I've heard just once in my life that about 500fps is the true perceptible limit. I think that figure is more realistic.

It varies from person to person. There are people who see 15 fps as continuous. There are those who have to cross the 24 fps threshold. 500 fps may be perceivable with a burst of adrenaline. The human visual cortex is still largely a mystery to scientists.

Comment Re:Finally (Score 2) 423

24 fps isn't arbitrary. It's the result of a lot of research.

It's the minimum number of frames that trick 99.9% of people into seeing a constant image on screen.

Slower rates result in flicker.

Higher rates, on 1920's technology, were progressively prohibitively expensive.

48 Fps is great. It's roughly half the maximum frame rate of we can see (the optic nerve refreshes at approximately 100Hz).

We'll get too 100fps soon. Anything over that isn't worth it.

This doesn't apply to LCD TVs and what not.

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