Posts by Dimebag

Sony Bravia KDL-46Z5500 200Hz 46in LCD TV

@ Giles Jones

Hz myth? It looks like you've fallen for the Hz myth.

You've said off your own back that a 50Hz refresh "looks flickery" on a TV which suggests in the same sentence that the eye can detect more than 50Hz, it has to be able to for 50Hz to appear flickery in the first instance.

The human eye starts to interpret meaningful "fluid motion" of a sequence of frames at about 25/30 fps with clarity, but the human eye is certainly not limited to 50 frames per second (50 Hz refresh in this case), that is the wide spread ill conceived myth born from the fact the film industry set minimum fps limits on their motion pictures.

It really depends what you're looking at but remember the input to your eyes is a constant stream of light being translated into images sent to the brain. A good explanation of differening stimulus situations can be found here:

http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm

but be under no illusion at all, that the eye can differentiate light from dark quite easily at 200 fps, the article even recommends 500fps to capture all sensitive information about anything that flicker, blinks or moves. The most important fact is being able to understand and make detailed sense of what you're looking, which is why lower fps are more suitable for detailed streams.

If you can't notice a difference between 50fps and 100 fps in a game of Quake, you're either kidding yourself of you've got very poor eyes indeed. You might not interpret the difference as a lack of flicker, but you should certainly notice the smoothness of the motion increase. End of the day 200 Hz Tv's are highly beneficial over 50 or 100Hz, end of.

SMS costs more than using Hubble Space Telescope

Hang on a second Stephen...

I've gone back and read the article again, I don't actually see anywhere that suggests that mobile phone companies are firstly not in it to make money, or that they should be required or urged to provide a service such as SMS at cost price.

That would be rediculous to suggest in itself as the companies as you quite rightly point out are businesses and is in it to make money.

What does stand up though is quite clear, the sheer amount of money made and the markup on the system doing the work is quite fraknly insane. I had a thought like this years ago when I was paying 10p a text message from my provider and had just got my spanking new 1Mbit DSL installed at home. (256Kb/s upload as it was at the time).

I worked out that for the £40 I was paying over the period of the month I could potentially upload 685670400Kbits of data or 85GBytes of information (85708800KBytes) if the line was fully utilsed a max capacity.

256*60(minute)*60(Hour)*24(Days)*31(Average days in a month)

/8 to get from Kbits to KBytes.

Now I know that limitations such as outages etc would account for this being a little inaccurate but its a theoretical maximum.

This means per month, if you were to just use the line PURELY for uploading it would cost you 47p a GByte or 0.00046p per megabyte. Now I have a 1.3Mbit upload on my line instead of 256K so we can again cut that cost into a 1/5th.

See where I'm going now? Compared to the £374.49 per MB purely to send the data through the air via SMS this is amazing that it is tolerated. Also considering the fact I pay 10p for a text, that figure then doubles to £740 per MB.

This is why I use instant messengers.

Mobile phones and text messaging are an insane rip off, the price of a text message should be cut to maximum 1p or go even further and make them free for incestives on contracts, as many providers have done.

Manhunt 2 banned

Slightly missing the point

To whoever wrote: Excellent Decision by the UK Censors

The sheer fact you are missing is that everything you wrote is about how YOU FEEL about the choices made by the censor, your writings are your own opinion. You even seem to have an opinion on just how bad the game is clearly without having any exposure to it what so ever.

So you like a game with a little bit of violence, you dont mind telling everyone else exactly how you feel about the game and in this case that happens to fall in line with what the BBFC tell everyone is acceptable to be exposed to. However, a lot of other people may not be overly bothered by the level of violence in Manhunt 2 but are not free to voice their opinions to any forum of influenced and power that will listen and are denied their right of choice to this game.

And yes, it is a game, anyone who decides to re-enact their gaming experience through real life endevours clearly has a problem in the first instance, and if the game didn't trigger the reaction, something else on the market of equal disturbing value certainly would have.

The main gripe here is clearly towards the BBFC removing choice from responsible adults because of having to cater for the lowest common demoninator, shite parents. Its about unknown people who are put in a tremendously hard position making choices for an entire nation. I personally fall in line with the people who are seemingly outraged that the punishment for lacking parental skills and responsibility now affects (effects?) me as an adult. I probably would have bought Manhunt 2 if only because there isnt anything else on the Wii worth buying at the moment but the sheer fact that I am unable to now because a bunch of people decided I'm not allowed to is angering to say the least.

The new Rambo film that now has a trailor out looks more brutal than anything I've seen in ages, and hell I feel sorry for all the 16 and 17 year olds out there who have started a family but aren't actually allowed to purchase explicit sexual content on any sort of available media. I think something needs to be done to actively encourage people taking more responsibility for their kids and a review to make these censorship rules actually make some sort of sense.

I personally wouldn't go out of my way to mod-chip my machine to play this game on import (which seems less likely now its banned in the states too) but what this will have certainly done is put the game on all underaged kids wish list. Forbidden fruit.