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would be purrfect if it were true
after many otherwise intelligent sounding suggestions that achieved nothing the nice folks at Technet said the only solution was to low level format my hard disk then reinstall my signature. Sadly, this still didn't fix the issue!
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It depends upon what claws they had to fight. Usually the purr-pose is an available female.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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They don't fight, they pussy-foot around the issues.
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Unless there is one clear winner, then it is a catastrophe
“The palest ink is better than the best memory.” - Chinese Proverb
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I thought the fight had been scratched!
If you can't laugh at yourself - ask me and I will do it for you.
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We live in a era of 21st Century Snake Oil.
Some are in the form of prescription drugs, usually very new and far beyond even very expensive.
The others are in the form of "dietary supplements" - which due to the way the laws in the US are written, have to show themselves to be neither safe nor effective (and yes, you read the first word correctly). As long as they somehow mention that their claims are not FDA tested and it's not claiming to do anything (innuendos should count but don't). Same with a lot of insurance ads, especially those targeting seniors.
What does this have to do with higher and higher resolution TV?
In the first case, side effects (often worse than the malady they treat) and in the second case, that it has no valid proof that it works or has ever worked (or is even safe*) beyond the placebo effect.
The higher the resolution, the smaller the font and the more impossible to read text they cans squeeze into the bottom edge of your screen.
So, improved picture resolution is, when it comes down to it, an aid to fraud. Also, it encourages these commercials (adverts) and even with the sound turned off they are annoying.
* if somehow show to be unsafe its sale can be halted.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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One thing you have to remember is that you don't see with your eyes, you see with your brain, and an image doesn't have to be perfect for your brain to interpret it perfectly.
Another thing is that a high-res picture won't stop cr@p content being cr@p content.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I think you got my thought backwards - I don't want more resolution and thus finer print.
Indeed, to your first point, your eyes and brain process the image quite a bit before you are conscious of it - an example from when I used to hand-color photos (with a water based color - not the usual oil-over): if you had a portrait and colored the eyes, alone, it seemed to come to life. If you colored the entire face it was perceived as a full-color image although the background was in B&W.
The audio for these - that is your basic rhetoric with implied statement not actually made. A well orchestrated and often used dance to the brink of lying without quite doing it. "Mislead" in the most literal sense
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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W∴ Balboos wrote: I think you got my thought backwards - I don't want more resolution and thus finer print.
Nope, I got that. I was just adding more ammo.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Watching television is by its very nature the act of voluntarily allowing oneself to be deceived. The higher the resolution, the better the deception. 
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W∴ Balboos wrote: The higher the resolution, the smaller the font and the more impossible to read text they cans squeeze into the bottom edge of your screen.
If you go back far enough the opposite is also true. I remember the transition from SD to HD. Suddenly text at the bottom of the screen (especially car ads) became readable, whereas it used to be a blurry mess.
You just need a larger display for stupid-high resolution. I find my 4K monitor (actually a TV) is a bit too small at 40"--to match the font size of the 27" 1080p monitor sitting next to it, my 4K display would probably need to be around 48".
People "complain" about 8K and the fact that there's "no content". I don't care about content. I wanna hook up an 8K display to my computer and code with that. But I figure, to run at the native resolution, it would need to be spread across at least 80 inches.
Beyond that I'll agree it's all snake oil, at least in the sense that you'd need something so big to make good use of it that it becomes impractical. But I haven't (yet) read much about proposals going beyond 8K.
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Several years ago, at work I was given a choice between a single 27" or two 24" monitors. I chose the single 27" - today it would have been a single 30" like the one I got at home.
Since then, new employees have been equipped with three, in some cases four, monitors. I see them constantly searching for where that f* window went... searching behind other windows on three or four screens. I do not envy them. I know where I have got my things, and windows.
If I had an 80" screen, then either I would lean back and enlarge everything so that it would hold about the same information as my current home 30" screen. Or I would be flipping my head constantly from one side to the other, my neck wearing out long before the rest of my body 
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How high resolution do you need? You certainly need nothing better than your eyes can see!
In the days of analog silver photography, it was established that a normal eye could distinguish line pairs - one black, one white line - 1/1500 of the viewing distance. At 3m, you could distinguish lines 1mm white and 1mm black. So with perfectly centered lines, pixels of 1mm square would do. A 4K (3840 pixels) screen of 3.84 m width would have pixels at the limit of the resolution of your eyes.
If the line pattern was not perfectly aligned and centered on the pixels, you would not see them as sharp lines. At half a pixel displacement everything would be 50% grey! In the early days, it was customary to assume that a line pair on the average required 3 (rather than 2) scan lines to be properly displayed.
On the other hand: For moving object (including moving line patterns), when a white point moves gradually out of a pixel, over to the neighbour pixel, the original pixel gets gradually darker, the new one brighter. The brain interprets this as a more or less continuous movement between the two neighbour pixes, "emulating" a higher resolution. If you freeze a video at a single frame, the resolution always appears much lower than when the image is moving. For practical purposes, this more than makes up for the 3-scanlines-per-line-pair.
In a still picture, silver grains were irregularly located, so identifying specific grains at the edge of your eye's resolution was sort of random. With LCD screens, pixels have fixed poisitions and are aligned in regular rows, so they are more visible. But again: With moving images, where one pixel fades out, the neighbouring one fades in, you won't have a white pixes snapping over in a single jump; the sliding motion covers up the strict alignment of strictly square pixel.
There are other sides, though. At 3m viewing distance, a 4K screen no wider than 3.84 m has a resolution matching your eyes. If you move in to a 1m viewing distance, then a 4K screen may have a poorer resolution than your eyes if it is less than 1.28 m wide. Today we sit a lot closer to the screen than we did a generation ago (and movies are shot with wide-angle lenses to match it, for perspective). Yet... a 1.28 m (4 ft wide) 4K screen at 1m (40 in) distance - that matches the resolution of the eyes of a "standard" (young adult) person. I think we are close enough...
What about resampling? Scaling up plain HD material to 4K, when you've got a 4K screen?
First: If any part of the image is an even, same color/brightness, it doesn't matter if it is a single pixel, four quarter size pixels of the same color, or nine ninth size pixels of the same color. For smooth surfaces, resampling to higher resolution is not a big issue.
Modern video compressing methods are sort of analog, not digital . They do not compress pixel values, but see them as point of curves, or rather 3D surfaces, trying to do a cuve/surface fitting to those points. When you do this on small tiles of the imgage, it is surprisingly successful! What is compressed, is the coefficients to the mathematical (continous) functions to generate these surfaces. When unpakcing, you in principle generate the continous surface from the coefficients, and samlple it with whatever resolution you require. If the surface perfectly matches the original (analog) image, any display resolution is valid. If there are slight variations across the tile, those 2x2 or 3x3 pixels you generate for the single original one will vary slightly, according to the mathematical function, giving a smoother surface with the neighbouring pixels.
For the surface to be reasonably "correct" you may need many coefficients for a high-degree mathematical function, in particular if the tile covers a sharp edge. Good encoders know to manage their "bit budget" so that few bits are wasted on even surfaces, allowing more for sharp edges etc. For the curve/surface fitting to be able to match the raw image samples properly to coefficients, a sufficiently high resolution is required in the raw image, but with the encoded data being coefficients for continous functions, this doesn't dictate the resolution after unpacking.
So, with properly encoded material, even though presented as plain HD material, can, if done properly, be resampled to 4K with an image quality very close to what 4K material would provide. In principle, the (continous) mathematical functions (re)generating the surface should be the same. If the display unit samples it at 2K or 4K should be rather irrelevant.
If the encoder needs a 4K raw image to generate the high order coefficients for the surface functions: Go ahead with it! If that leads to a TV signal pretending to be a 2K image, but if a 4K decoder looks at the high order coefficients and decides to make slight differences between each of the 2x2 pixels that would have been a single one i a 2K image, that is just the way it should be. "2K should be enough for anybody". Or, at least 4K, with high quality encoding. 8K is just a showoff, it goes way beyond your eye's resolution.
And then look at those smartphone screens, do they go way beyond your eye's resolution!
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All very nice - much more than I knew.
However,
My point is that I'm against higher-resolution screens because of what they will be used for: tinier fonts of sleazy disclaimers that you were not supposed to pay attention to and could never read in the short time span allowed for it.
On the other end, all the quality in the world doesn't make up for crappy content - and the current state of affairs (remakes and generally relying upon special effects instead of an interesting plot). I grew up with B&W TV with roughly 320 lines/resolution. "Not knowing any better", I was busy watching the content and not analyzing the image. No fine print to worry about during Ads.
Then, of course, there were books . . .
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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W∴ Balboos wrote: My point is that I'm against higher-resolution screens because of what they will be used for: tinier fonts of sleazy disclaimers that you were not supposed to pay attention to and could never read in the short time span allowed for it.
Don't blame the technology for how it's being applied misused.
Besides, why should you care so much about the tiny fonts used in a TV ad? You should care instead about the tiny fonts used in the warranty papers that came with the product you actually purchased, or the contract you're about to sign...no?
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Not only warranty papers, but "manuals" (I'd rather call them instruction sheets) in 5-6 pt size to save paper...
I handle those by putting them on the flatbed scanner at 1200 dpi. Then I can read it on the screen, or print it out enlarged by a factor of 2-4.
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I'm one of those types who reads "terms of service", user's manuals and such.
So - I take off my glasses and read the fine print. Print that stays there until I'm finished with it . . . unlike on the screen where you're given no time (or contrast, in many cases).
You're right in part, about a cause for concern. The thing about the ones you mention is that at least they're accessible in human real time. Not bothering to read them? That's "on your own head".
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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I guess we agree on a lot. My way to escape it is not owning a TV set, not subscribing to streaming services. I buy movies on BD/DVD, or to some degree: Download from the (non-commercial) Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) archives. No ads, older quality productions. In the US, maybe PBS has some similar service, I guess with much focus on documentaries. (NRK also provide great documentaries of their own make, but carry documentaries / movies licensed from other sources as well, although sometimes only available for a few weeks, months, or years.)
My taste in movies is focused on the pre-special-effects area. A surprising number of older movies are available on DVD or even BD quality, at a moderate price. If you pick movies worth watching twice+, worth showing to your (grand)children and share with your friends, then the cost per seating is just small change. Small print disclaimers and ads have no place on the DVD (but for TV shows, you may have to explain to the youngsters why that host every now and then says "We'll be right back after this", before he goes on  )
One issue related to small print: High resolution screens allow the web designers to create web pages with text in typefaces almost exclusives using hairlines, single-pixel wide. Often they also choose the text foreground color to be silvery grey - and sometimes, the background isn't white but with a light grey or other color tint. I am so happy that I can use the thumb scroll wheel of my mouse to enlarge such text to become big enough to read, even drawn in low-contrast hairlines. Web designers should be required by law to test out all the functions of the pages they create when wearing glasses smeared with a thin layer of Vaseline, and with the display set to zero color saturation, i.e. pure greyscale
When HTML was introduced, one heavily touted feature was that any user could just replace the default style sheet with another, suiting his requirements better: Different colors, for colorblind or otherwise visually challenged users, larger fonts, higher contrast, ... I haven't seen a single web page suitable for such customization the last fifteen years! They all insist on using their specific fonts, explicitly identified in the Javascript code, so even if you manage to sneak in your own stype sheet, the settings are immediately overridden. Last time someone tried to convince me that it was possible to change the style, he worked for several hours to make CSS that was tailored to this one specific web page, useless on other pages (even from the same web side) - and it still failed on several points.
My solution, if the information is essential to me, and worth saving, is to copy/paste the entire web page into MS Word. Often it fails or creates crazy style definitions, but when it succeeds, you can often replace those hairline typefaces with something readable, change the foreground color to black and remove that disturbing background, before saving it.
Which addresses another point common to streaming and web pages: Whenever I see in some streaming service "No longer available", and I can say: But it is! Over there in my bookshelf you'll find it! Or when I have saved a URL but get a 404, and say to myself: I also saved a copy of that page/document on my hard disk, didn't I? ... That gives me a good feeling of satisfaction.
(In fact, this started with books: When I want to buy a copy of a book to give as a gift to a friend or relative, and the bookseller says "Who is that author you are talking about?" The books were in stock from my early childhood, reprinted five years ago - today they are not even listed as "out of stock" in the bookseller's catalogs! For a few of my favorite "gift" books, you can now see three or four copies in my shelves, just in case they are out of print when I want to give away a copy - which has happened several times!)
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Member 7989122 wrote: I guess we agree on a lot. My way to escape it is not owning a TV set, not subscribing to streaming services. I buy movies on BD/DVD,
I'm not saying you fall into the category, but I often found people who "don't even own a TV Set" as using that as some sort of badge of elitism.
You do address it further down - but buying a BD/DVD? It's extremely rare I'd find one worth watching twice. Of the literally handful I do re-watch now and then, I can take them out of the local library for free. There are very few.
The whole family reads. I got them addicted at an early age. I read Hobbit and the entire Lord of the Rings aloud to my son as his bed-time stories (for about a year).
All you've written applies well, in a way, to video games. There's the Japanese style - the same thing over and over again as you perfect the trip and 'win'. The one I like (in various forms for scores of years, the Rogue-like game, Dungeon Crawl). It's different every time you play. No fancy effects. Just strategy in the face of random events with only statistical probabilities. More than anything else, playing is absorbing and ultimately relaxing. It's also open source/free.
Telephones are for making/receiving calls - not mobile entertainment centers. I prefer to live life out in the air instead of on the small-screen
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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W∴ Balboos wrote: I often found people who "don't even own a TV Set" as using that as some sort of badge of elitism.
Not so in Norway, nowadays. If you are at all concerned about "linear TV", as the swear word goes, people will start looking for moss that is growing over you. You must be coming from some distant path.
Same with "linear radio": A regular radio program that doesn't provide their productions in podcast form, won't live long. Two years ago, all radio brodcasts (public as well as commercial) switched to digital DAB technology. Now people ask, what was the use of it, it is like giving oats to a dying horse. Printed news media - newspapers and all sorts of magazines - go the same way: Their circulation is a small fraction of what it was ten or twenty years ago.
Streaming is the one and only socially acceptable way to enjoy movies, music, talks, read news etc. Even books: I have had friends who really wanted to read one book I recommended, but turned down my offer to lend them my copy: Only if I had the book in PDF (or other electronic) format would they read it. Anything but streaming, online access, is old-fashioned. You do streaming to your PC or your smartphone. If you have one of these "smart TVs", it will connect to your WiFi to act as PC. There is no need to connect it to an old-style TV cable or an antenna.
Many people still have traditional TV sets, but mainly for displaying streamed media. Up until last newyear, if you owned TV receiving equipment, you had to pay a license fee whether you use it or not. So people might turn them on for watching news or the weather forecasts. But it is years since I read in "printed" media (that is, eletronic newspapers nowadays) any preview or review of a linear TV show or other production: There are lots of reviews, but they are all for the streaming services.
If we have anything like "elitism" in Norway (but I doubt it), it would rather be to tell that you don't care for Netflix or couldn't care less about Disney+.
"Narrow" movies and "narrow" music (for either: Typically "non-Western" or "artsy") you often won't find on streaming services; the only way to get access to them is by buying a disc (and you won't find them in your local video shop, but in some strange web shop). Then you could find some "elitism". I certainly do not consider myself "elite" just because I watch a lot of non-Hollywood-movies, more like "curious". But if some of those who like to label others flipped through my DVD/BD shelves, they might see a lot of unknown foreign, non-Hollywood movies, and therefore label me "elitist" even without a clue about what those movies really are about. The funny thing is that quite a few of them were mainstream and not at all elitist movies when I saw them decennies ago. The elitist part is caused by me not rejecting them as new mainstream movies came in.
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First, take what I wrote as I wrote it! I didn't say what one put on the TV - just a matter of ownership. I don't have cable. I stream - and now I also have a digital antenna and can watch broadcasts, too.
Fortunately, the US has never had that obscene tax on ownership of a TV. I thought it was a weird UK think but I guess Euro-thing might be more suitable. A tax that's particularly regressive.
From your description, it sounds like the whole of Norway is walking around with their noses in the air. A statement validated by your own text:Member 7989122 wrote: If we have anything like "elitism" in Norway (but I doubt it),
My hope is that your post reflects your particular view and your perceived view of your own social circles, and not he rest of the country.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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W∴ Balboos wrote: I'm not saying you fall into the category, but I often found people who "don't even own a TV Set" as using that as some sort of badge of elitism.
There's a "spot the vegan" equivalent to TV ownership (the "joke" being, you don't have to ask them, they'll tell you). No offense to the original poster - I'm mostly in that category myself. But, I'll only make the claim I haven't sit down to watch live broadcast TV in decades. I'm amazed people still put up with commercial breaks (seriously, a one-hour show can be watched in 40 minutes) or worse, what essentially amounts to banner ads on top of the program's own picture. I don't know about the US networks, but here in Canada, any channel owned by Bell is horrendous in this respect--and it's generally Bell itself trying to sell its own products. Has anyone watching network TV seen actual end-of-show credits at any point over the past decade? No, gotta make more room for more ads...
And before anyone asks, since I apparently know all of this, I can only cite these examples because the TV happens to be on when I'm visiting friends/relatives. Not because I pay attention to it in my own time.
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Part of what you say is true, here, in the USA. For example, the amount of time spent on commercials vs. programming. It used to have a legal limit but that was trashed by Ronald Reagan. There used to also be a limit as to how much media a single corporation could own in any particular market. Also trashed.
A few times, over the years, hideous things appeared on some broadcasts - animations plugging other shows on their own network. It's gone away. The main things that is plastered over the actual programming are alerts of various kinds (weather, mass shootings, &etc.). Here, I'm talking about broadcast. Streaming might do it, too, but often they hide their sleazy commercials. E.g., the English version of EuroNews will often have items that are presented intermixed with on-demand news items and turn out to be PR for Kuwait, Qatar, the Emirates. Long PR. It's audience targeted. I haven't seen them on the German language version - which is also usually much more up-to-date and has many more items (and I'm including major events in German and not in English). Actually, much of the streaming news network of news networks are for chuckle-headed millennial.
Cutting to the chase (now that the Preacher series is over), we'd be better off watching fruit ripen. None the less, we watch.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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W∴ Balboos wrote:
A few times, over the years, hideous things appeared on some broadcasts - animations plugging other shows on their own network. It's gone away
That's exactly what I was talking about - here in Canada, the networks haven't got that memo. I still see those all the time, and it's annoying as hell (not to mention that every once in a while, someone will speak in a foreign language, they'll have some translated captions at the bottom of the screen...and that's when they'll decide to display those ads, which can completely cover the captions--there's some geniuses over at those networks/TV stations).
Downloads/streaming services/DVDs are bliss in comparison.
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