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bunnielab posted:The same science that said thalidomide was totally safe? Technically yes, in reality no, that was a stupid thing to say.
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Jul 17, 2013 20:45
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Penguissimo posted:But...these are exactly the kinds of things that you can compress the hell out of without ruining them. MP3 fits this thread entirely, you can get great sounding music at 96kbps with the right codec. AAC is also a poo poo load better than MP3 when made with the right encoder. Here's a 30 second sample at 64kbps: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwWJk3lK40SgZTV6ajh1MC1qbk0/edit?usp=sharing vvv Vorbis is also obsolete 
Anarchist Mae has a new favorite as of 16:54 on Mar 10, 2014 |
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Mar 10, 2014 16:45
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Music sounds noticeably like poo poo at 128 kbps, but you can get speech down to 64 without wrecking the experience.
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Let me tell you about the X Window System (just X from now on), it was created by researchers at MIT in 1984. And yes, I'm currently using software older than myself. How it works Before X and its predecessor W (yes, such a brilliant naming scheme) applications would be run on a centralised server while you sat in front of a comparatively slow text based terminal. What you typed would be sent over the network to the server, and what it output would be sent back, all the terminal had to do was keep the text in order. When they began working on X, they needed this model to keep working, graphically. Basically what that means is that your local machine now runs an X server which connects with a client on the centralised server that tells your local X server where to draw boxes, arcs and other wonderful stuff from the '80s. This feature is known as network transparency, the ability to run seamlessly over a network as though both the server and client were on the same machine. Now, X itself doesn't have a user interface, it is mearly the system responsible for telling the hardware what to draw, and the client what you've mashed on your keyboard an application. So how do we get an interface?  The '80s, teal me about it. Why, we need a window manager of course! A window manager is responsible for client applications, it allows you to focus, resize and position a particular client. The above screenshot is of twm (1987), or Tom's Window Manager, it isn't what you'd call fully featured, and it doesn't let you launch applications either, you have to do that in a script that is run when the X server starts. To complete the setup a window manager would be used in conjunction with a desktop environment:  This is CDE (1993), the Common Desktop Environment, it combines a file manager, a row of application launchers, the ability to minimise windows to the desktop and switchable workspaces. It was used in conjunction with the Motif Window Manager, but they later merged into one project. Because of the protocol based nature of X, a full 30 years after it was written software such as CDE and twm will still run just fine. How it breaks 3dfx Interactive is to blame. You see, in 1996 they revolutionised the consumer 3d card. Instead of upgrading from a 486 to a Pentium to play Quake a little bit faster you could now install a 3d card, specialised hardware for rendering 3d environments, or in other words hardware acceleration. This leaves X with a bit of a pickle, users want to be able to take advantage of this new fangled hardware acceleration, but the entire system is designed to run over a network connection meaning that there's no real way for clients to have a direct connection to the hardware even if the client and server are running on the same machine. The solution was to break X by introducing DRI (1998), the Direct Rendering Infrastructure. Applications that needed to use accelerated video hardware, for either 3d rendering or video playback would render using the hardware to a buffer that X can read.  Tuxracer was one of the only 3d Linux games for a long long time. Of course, over the years applications and window managers then entire desktop environments began to rely on hardware acceleration for everything, so much so that it's now pointless to run modern desktop environments over a network connection unless you want your 2GHz beast to feel like a 33MHz slug from 25 years ago. This leaves the X Window System with a fundamentally broken architecture that just doesn't suit modern demands. So much more There really is so much more broken, convoluted crap that I could go into, but I've already written so much. At least on it's 30th birthday its set to be replaced by Wayland. If you're interested in hearing more, I'd recommend this video: The real story behind Wayland and X. Also, apologies if your more of a geek than I am and I got any details wrong. I've told the story to the best of my ability
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Mar 20, 2014 03:51
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Platystemon posted:It’s a shame X is on the decline, because it’s so much better than having to fling bitmaps over the network with VNC. These days you're much better off flinging VP8 streams across the internet than bitmaps or X, and with VP9 about ready it's going to take about 50% less bandwidth again. Snowdens Secret posted:How is it possible to have that many screenshots of X and not a single instance of xeyes running? I even see it in your twm directory listing.  Better? Anarchist Mae has a new favorite as of 11:37 on Mar 20, 2014 |
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Mar 20, 2014 11:34
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Love working with cat6. Used to pull runs of cat5e from individual boxes, then we found a supplier that let you pre-order combined runs of cat6 at specified lengths, so you can measure your runs, order and then drag the run out and be done with 8 cables in the time it used to take you to do one. Now if only you could have also pre-label the cabel.
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Jan 15, 2018 20:47
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EoRaptor posted:What? You want to pull 8 cables down a run? Go out and buy 8 one thousand foot spools of whatever cable, number the boxes, stick a label on the ends of the cable corresponding to the box number they come from, pull them all wherever, update the labels to the actual location number the cable ended up at, pull some slack, cut the cable free of the box and punch it down. Repeat. Yes. I'm intimately familiar with running cable. You can only fit so many tools and boxes of cable in the back of a van. We'd do a first fix visit to the site and install string to pull cable through any underground/out of reach places while they are still exposed. Then we'd plan what runs we need: Got several rooms with 4 outlets inside? Then it's simple, order cable bundles of 4 of the lengths required (including slack). Pretty much any combination you need can be ordered. Once the orders arrive, we'd take the runs and pull them through the pre-arranged paths, pulling multiple cables from one box instead of a multiple cables from multiple boxes. You can mark each bundled pull however you want so that you know where it comes from when it gets to its destination. Once that is done, you then unbundle the wall outlet end of the run and thread it through and down to where the outlets will be installed. And finally for the second fix one of us would be in the server room/whatever and the other would be at the other end and we'd put heatshrink on the cable for later labeling before terminating it. Once the cable is terminated we'd test each of the cables in the run and permenantly label it. This saved a lot of time and frustration as the thicker bundled cables would not kink or get stuck, and we wouldn't have to carry multiple boxes of cable half way across a building site and then to every room as you do a run.
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Jan 16, 2018 09:37
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KozmoNaut posted:I just gave myself a lesson in how obsolete the MP3 format actually is. My music library is 17GB of Opus @ 96/128. It's awesome. I participated in a listening test back in 2014 that concluded that Opus was better than the iTunes AAC encoder, which is quite something if you consider that Opus was released less than 2 years prior giving AAC a 17 year lead. Since then the encoder has only been improved too. The live example page is worth checking out.
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Jan 24, 2018 18:25
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Dick Trauma posted:I'm not an audiophile but as I played with the settings I recognized that watery, swishy sound of over-compressed music, but my Mac was so wimpy that bumping the encoding rate to 256 took too drat long! https://i.imgur.com/wqbpj3v.mp4
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Jan 24, 2018 18:41
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Here's a clip from an Australian TV show Towards 2000 from 1982 on the Compact Disc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Tx6TYnPat8 The production company behind this later went on to give us MythBusters. And here's a video from another show Quantum from 1988 about the greenhouse effect and climate change: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1MIV4NKp3g I really need to send that to my dad since he insists global warming is something invented by the Elders of Zion/NWO during the 90s... of course he's just going to say it's part of the conspiracy and the video couldn't possibly have aired when it says it did because that'd be crazy, right. Also the moon landing was faked and did you know 911 was an inside job and Timothy McVeigh was a patsy and and and and and Hilary  I need a smilie that combines and 
Anarchist Mae has a new favorite as of 13:49 on Feb 3, 2018 |
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Feb 3, 2018 13:47
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AznYSnJEjSU Celebrate because Flash is dead, and then die a little inside because of the thousands of idiot 14 year old having their minds blown that the guy who invented it has the last name Gay.
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Feb 6, 2018 19:16
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chitoryu12 posted:Life is Strange is essentially a point-and-click in spirit, even if you're not literally clicking on everything with a cursor. Night in the Woods is better than Life is Strange. Although I guess it's not point and click since it controls more like a platformer with very little actual platforming, which is probably the weakest part of it too be honest. I'd have rather had no platforming and just point and click controls.
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Mar 2, 2018 21:44
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GRINDCORE MEGGIDO posted:Naming scheme: characters from Deus Ex. I name my computers smeg, goit and twonk. I once wrote an open source http server called twonk.
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Mar 20, 2018 13:24
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