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Comment Re:OLED exists (Score 1) 28

CRT phosphors don't stay lit very long.

No shit...
How did you not get that from my reply to the following dumbfuckery:

Are you serious? Did nobody tell you that CRTs have phosphors for persistence?

CRT phosphors are in fact lit for so little time, that at any point in time, your CRT is between 90-94% black, depending on the refresh rate.
The difference between 60 and 100Hz is microscopic is the difference between 10% of your screen being lit at any time, and 6% of your screen being lit at any time.

because 60Hz refresh often produced annoying levels of flicker (even worse in PAL countries where they have 50Hz).

And yet the entire world had no problem with it...

Good computer displays often refreshed at 72Hz or more to prevent flicker.

Not really. High refresh rates did become important to prevent flicker, but only because resolutions kept going higher, and only because you sat very close to that high resolution image. It made the eye particularly sensitive to it. This wasn't a problem for consoles because 1) they had low resolution, 2) you sat further away from them.
A high resolution image at low refresh looked icky. For the same reason interlacted signals did. Very small features were less likely to register for your eye while they were lit. A low resolution image at low resolution looked fantastic.

So they're great for fast changing content because they don't stay lit very long, but as a side effect, you have to refresh them more because otherwise you're subjected to flicker. And you then run into either monitor limits or RAMDAC limits that limit your refresh rates - for the longest time I had to have a 17" CRT running at 800x600 because that was the highest bandwidth it had to refresh at 85Hz (I could perceive 75Hz flicker). At 85Hz, there was only enough analog bandwidth in the monitor to do 800x600.

Man, TVs must have just caused you physical pain /s

I'll grant you that on interlaced signals- 60Hz was pretty fucking painful. Progressive scan? Na. Looked great.

Also, as an aside- your monitor sucked.

Comment Re:OLED exists (Score 1) 28

CRT motion is clear, motion on modern displays is not.
That's why they like them.

This is because CRT displays are basically stop motion.
Only a very tiny fraction of them are lit at any time (you can check YouTube for a slow motion capture of a CRT if you want to know just how insanely little is lit).
This makes their motion crystal clear, while a modern flat-panel displays and imagine and holds it until the next refresh. This makes your eyes interpret it as blur.

That being said- I, personally, agree 100%. I won't abandon the contrast and color of an OLED.... and hey, at ~300Hz, or lower with BFI, you can get the same crystal clarity you get from a CRT.

The Pulsar shit being described in the article basically emulates the sequential scan brightening of a CRT so that it's stop-motiony as well. OLEDs do this via BFI (though it's rare on computer monitors- more common on TVs)
Every digital cinema in the world uses BFI.

Comment Re:OLED exists (Score 1) 28

I know there's some demand from the retro gaming community, since most games from that era just don't look right on a modern LCD, but I've never heard of anyone willingly playing modern games on such a relic.

The reason they don't look right, is they're a smudgy mess. That's because modern displays are display-and-hold for the entire duration of the frame. To your eye, that's motion blur.
Why would someone be willing to take the trade-offs? Because it looks better.

The main issues with CRTs is that the viewable display area is now considered too small by modern standards, and while some of the pricier models were capable of what would be considered high resolution, the resulting picture was nowhere near as sharp as fixed pixel technology. I'm also not sure why you're remembering 60Hz as anything other than the flickery eyestrain inducing mess that it was. Once CRTs became available that could run at higher refresh rates, nobody would tolerate running a refresh rate that low.

It's very true that the sharpness is higher on displays with actual pixels, but that's often considered a downside, even by non-retro enthusiasts, when they're forced to choose between visible fixed pixels vs. visible CRT "pixels" side-by-side.

I'm also not sure why you're remembering 60Hz as anything other than the flickery eyestrain inducing mess that it was.

60Hz looks fine. Hell, 50Hz looks fine. It was literally the standard for TVs for fucking ever.
Regardless, whether we're talking about 60Hz or 100Hz, it's not comparable to a modern displays frame that is held for that long, since phosphor persistence is a fraction of a frame (and in fact, is only for a few lines). At 100Hz, 90% of your CRT is black at any point in time.

But since we're talking about motion blur, that really hinged on the type of phosphors used. CRT TVs tended to use rather slow phosphors on purpose, because the interlaced scan patten would've been very noticeable otherwise (it took two passes of the electron beams to draw a single frame). PC monitors scanned in a progressive pattern and technically could get away with faster phosphors, but like so many things in tech, YMMV.

Both color TVs and computer monitors use P22 phosphors.
There's no increased need for persistence for interlaced vs. non- you can't see it either way.
Remember, with a standard P22 phosphor CRT, at any point in time, at 100Hz refresh, 90% of your CRT is black.

At any rate, it's a moot point because CRTs aren't produced anymore, and vintage gear tends to get temperamental as capacitors dry up and resistors drift.

They actually are, but that doesn't really invalidate your point.

It also doesn't change the fact that they draw motion clearer than modern displays.

Comment Re:OLED exists (Score 1) 28

Kids at my work are fucking crazy about them, so there probably is some market for them still.. also probably the same group that is buying most of the records these days.

I've got 16 of them in storage (CRTs, not kids) and I've been offered $500 a piece for my old ViewSonics.
Having seen the difference, though, I get where they're coming from.

Sure, the color and resolution of a CRT is nowhere near what a modern display is- but motion looks absurdly better. A 120Hz OLED looks flat out sloppy compared to a 60Hz CRT when you have high contrast motion.

Comment Re:OLED exists (Score 1) 28

Do you imagine that the phosphor stays lit for an entire scanout? lol

At 60Hz, you have a frame hold time of 16 2/3rd ms.
A good gaming CRT has a phosphor persistence time of ~3ms, which if we turn into FPS for the image hold time, is about 333.

Smart move staying anonymous for that dumbfuck comment, AC.

Comment Re:Sounds like too much guessing (Score 2) 16

Maybe.

Europa is tidally locked. It's not clear that its ocean contributes to much erosion at all.
Also, the oceans of Earth have also had eons to erode minerals from their rocky substrate, yet life doesn't appear to have leaped forth from the abyssal plains, but rather concentrates around geothermal vents.

I suspect if we do a bit of math, we'll see that the maximum amount of possible minerals eroded from the lithosphere turns into vanishingly small trace amounts across the entire volume of its ocean, which is, if I remember correctly, like 3x the volume of Earth's ocean.

Comment Re:Sounds like too much guessing (Score 1) 16

Io and Europa are geologically very different bodies, though.
You may as well say, "But Earth has liquid oceans!"

Io is a terrestrial planet. Europa is an ice ball with considerably less rock to absorb energy. It's probably telling that there is no evidence whatsoever of non-ice tectonics, while it's neighbor, as you pointed out, looks like Vulcan's forge.

That all being said, one thing Europa is known to do, is circulate shit that lands on its surface into its subsurface ocean, and while it probably doesn't have any volcanic activity, as you pointed out- its neighbor is spewing its innards all over the inner Jovian system.

Comment Re:Pointless. (Score 1) 28

It would be harder for the average person to reliably tell the difference between 120Hz and 360Hz.

Actually pretty easy, if you know what to look for.
Things like Pulsar, BFI, and backlight strobing exist to change that, though.

At 120Hz, motion blur is still acutely visible. At 300, It looks nice and clean.
That's not a reasonable game framerate target though, so that's why we have articles like this and teh relevant mitigating technologies.

Comment Re:OLED exists (Score 2) 28

You're fundamentally misunderstanding the problem.
The problem is exacerbated by LCDs because their actual pixel change time is so utterly abysmal, but it exists for any display-and-hold display with long pixel display times. OLED + 300+hz does get pretty close to CRT levels of motion- but for the people who care about that, and want to have crisp motion at more reasonable frame rates, there is black-frame-injection. For LCDs, there is Pulsar, which improves upon backlight strobing.

Comment Re: Way worse "accident" issues that need fixing (Score 1) 99

You really are too stupid to be having this conversation.

This is a bug, specific to a compositor. It has nothing to do with Wayland whatsoever, except that the compositor implements Wayland for its client/server communications (which aren't even fucking at play here)

Go cook me some fries, fuckwit.

Comment Re: Way worse "accident" issues that need fixing (Score 1) 99

That sounds like a very major compositor bug. If you don't want to file a bug- let me know what compositor you're using, and I'll see if I can replicate and file.
Alt-Tab should be entirely synchronized, since it's managed by the one thing in the system that can control focus. If it's not, that's bad, and a bug.

Comment Re: Way worse "accident" issues that need fixing (Score 2) 99

Wayland absolutely does not allow this kind of stealing of focus. Something else funky is going on.

The only way an application has to take focus, or put itself on top, or anything like that is via the XDG Activation Protocol
Different compositors have different levels of ...protection... from applications doing this, but importantly- it's up to the compositor.
In X, your compositor/decorator have no say over this whatsofucking ever, and any application can do it- or more importantly, just swipe your keypresses from the background.
Wayland does not have an "X compatibility layer", per se, it has XWayland, which is a regular Wayland client, and an X server.
As a regular Wayland client, it does not have magical abilities to steal focus- it's as limited as your calculator app. Whether or not XWayland allows focus stealing between X clients (as any X server would do), I can't tell you, but something about your characterization is pretty fishy.

Comment Re:This is NOT NORMAL (Score 1) 205

Eyeroll.

When you fantasize about all kinds of unrealistic shit, well ya, everything makes sense, now doesn't it?
Increased cost of goods? Clearly that's just the Government trying to make us poorer so that we're easier to control!

As far as we can call this kind of behavior an extension of the Monroe doctrine, then I think we can agree that basically both US parties "want to control the Western Hemisphere", and frankly, do.

Fact is- I sincerely doubt that we're going to "run the country".
There isn't the political will for it.

One thing I think that everyone can agree on, is that this went a lot cleaner than the standard way of knocking over a South American regime, which is to send in the CIA to fund rebels who may or may not also murder entire villages for their chickens.

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