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I think the hardest thing for us is realising that sometimes we shouldn't write an app or dive into the technology 'just because we can'.
What I should have done is looked for an online service that does this and just used that instead. I'd be done 4 days ago.
We had a big meeting this afternoon about this: balance the ease and fun - and fairly hefty price tag - of writing solutions ourselves, vs paying the money and using something pre built that, if you actually do the suns, will be way way WAY cheaper in the long run.
But coding is a drug.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Yeah, I've just written VBA code to validate "date ranges" in Excel, i.e. a range with year, month, and day cells. It also has to identify date ranges based on the year cell containing a validation list.
It's an unholy, un-OOP, mess, and working in that bloody VBA IDE is really a big step down from VS 2019.
"'Do what thou wilt...' is to bid Stars to shine, Vines to bear grapes, Water to seek its level; man is the only being in Nature that has striven to set himself at odds with himself."
—Aleister Crowley
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I'm upgrading my handset, as I mentioned before.
So the first thing I do it connect it to my WiFi ... and shortly after it starts telling me I'm low on PAYG - because it's updating itself and USING MOBILE DATA INSTEAD OF WiFi!
So that's fixed, and a new PAYG with data, minutes, and text added ... sodding thing.
The fingerprint unlock is good though - really quick!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I have a LG / Android. I can disable data over mobile connection. I only allow data over WiFi. But admittedly, I don't use it much outside the house.
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So do I - but this grabbed 11MB of data before I got a chance to turn it off - which all went at the "expensive rate" since I normally use WiFi data only ...
Glad I spotted it - it just downloaded 3.93GB of Android 10 ... all by WiFi, thankfully!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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OriginalGriff wrote: So do I - but this grabbed 11MB of data before I got a chance to turn it off - which all went at the "expensive rate" since I normally use WiFi data only ...
AUD$40.00 per month gets me unlimited calls, text and streaming services and 30GB of data, plus with the Missus on the same account her 30GB of data is pooled so we have 60GB to share. Haven't looked at the usage but if we hit 10GB in a month even when I have to tether client laptops off the phone I would be shocked.
OriginalGriff wrote: Glad I spotted it - it just downloaded 3.93GB of Android 10 ... all by WiFi, thankfully!
I've got a Pixel 2XL that I've had for a couple of years now, it's also running Android 10. At a customers the other week and wanted to test/checkthe WiFi. Fired up WiFi Analyser and WiFi Overview 360 Pro and they both require Location to be on to work, reckon this has been required since Android 6.
Do you have anything else that you use or do you have your Location stuff on? I've got nothing to hide but Google can faarrrkkkk off cause they ain't tracking me, at least not as easily as if I had Location on.
Michael Martin
Australia
"I controlled my laughter and simple said "No,I am very busy,so I can't write any code for you". The moment they heard this all the smiling face turned into a sad looking face and one of them farted. So I had to leave the place as soon as possible."
- Mr.Prakash One Fine Saturday. 24/04/2004
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I hated the idea of the fingerprint unlock, but I have to admit that once I started using it (Huawei phone) I found it extremely convenient.
My plan is to live forever ... so far so good
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When two cats end a fight do they hiss and make up?
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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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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