Re: xkcd: CrowdStrike

On Thu, 8 Aug 2024 11:44:43 +1200, Your Name <YourName@YourISP.com>
wrote:

On 2024-08-07 15:46:58 +0000, Paul S Person said:

On Wed, 7 Aug 2024 09:22:33 +1200, Your Name <YourName@YourISP.com>
wrote:

On 2024-08-06 16:18:38 +0000, Paul S Person said:

On Tue, 6 Aug 2024 13:27:49 +1200, Your Name <YourName@YourISP.com>
wrote:

On 2024-08-05 16:19:41 +0000, Paul S Person said:

On Mon, 5 Aug 2024 09:02:17 +1200, Your Name <YourName@YourISP.com>
wrote:

On 2024-08-04 15:54:51 +0000, Paul S Person said:

On Sun, 4 Aug 2024 18:14:35 +1200, Your Name <YourName@YourISP.com>
wrote:

On 2024-08-04 03:14:42 +0000, Lynn McGuire said:

<snip>

 
Much of the blame also should go to the moron Elon Muskrat, who>>>>>>>>
keeps>telling everyone it is "self-driving" when it is definitely>>>>>
NOT!>>> Even>his own Tesla emplyees tell him it's crap. He also
insists>>>>> that>>> the>Tesla cars only use cameras while every other
company is>>>>> using>>> things>like lidar too (not that it makes their
self-driving>>>>> any better>>> either).

 
The same could be said of using "3D" for "stereoscopy" when they are
clearly distinguishable.
I realize that the terminology here is very confused: I am using "3D"
here to refer to what we (well, most of us) see with our own eyes when
we look around as opposed to stereoscopy and also to 3D animation
which produces some fine effects but is not stereoscopy. My favorite
illustration of the difference is this:
 
if you watch a stereoscopic film in which, say, a paddle-ball ball is
sent directly into your face "out of the screen", it will be aimed at
your face no matter where you are sitting
 
if a /real/ paddle-ball ball were sent out to the audience, some would
see it coming at them, others along side them, and some above (or,
when balconies existed, below) them -- you would see different things
depending on where you are sitting

 
That is partly done on purpose to make *you* feel you're in the>>>
film,>rather than the cinema, but of course technical limitations
play>>> the>biggest part ... currently.
 
No doubt some cinema will use AR/VR-style headsets to give the>>>
audience>different viewpoints depending on where they are sitting.>>>
Could be good>for those watching something like a sports event or
music>>> concert, but>it doesn't really work for a normal movie since
it is>>> irrelevant where>you are in relation to others watching.
 
 
 

Another difference, of course, is that just seeing the world in 3D
doesn't make most people throw up. Sterescopic films are known the do
that. Although, to be some Cinerama/Cinemiracle films did as well, at
least when projected so that all you saw was the film (no screen
boundaries visible).

 
I can only play 3D computer games for a few minutes before I>>>
start>getting motion sick. If I continue to play, I end up with an>>>
extremely>bad headache and bad nausea. Even just watching gameplay>>>
trailers>starts making me feeling sick too.
 
Same if I try to read books or maps (as a passenger of course) in a moving car.
 
I've never bothered trying to watch a 3D movie.

 
Neither have I ... in the sense I suspect you intended: as a 3D movie.
 
I've seen (and own) several that were released as "3D" movies.
/Creature from the Black Lagoon/ comes with a trailer proudly
proclaiming it as the first 3D movie to be filmed underwater. /Dial
"M" for Murder/ is (AFAIK) Hitchcock's one and only forey into"3D">>
(that's why the image has the woman's hand pointing at you: it no
doubt extends from the screen in "3D"). /Coraline/ is not only "3D";
the DVD comes with a packet of "red/blue" paper eyeglasses and has two
sides: one "3D" and the other the side I watch. And of course
Argento's /Dracula/ and /Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2/
are "3D". And there are many many others.
 
But I watch none of them in 3D. I have my own glasses and don't need a
second pair to fix the blurriness of the film. (I am relying here on a
scene in /The A-Team/ which depicts what a "3D" film looks like
without the glasses.)
 
/Coraline/ is interesting because it points out the /real/ purpose of
"home 3D": to make money by requiring a new, special BD player and a
new, special TV set -- neither of which was necessary, just a
properly-prepared disk. But that's just how it goes nowadays.

 
Our main TV does have a setting for 3D (despite being too small
a>screen size for it to be remotely useful), but I've never even
bothered>to look at what it does, let alone use it. It probably uses
some>gimmickry to turn normal 2D shows / movies into pseudo-3D, which
would>be even worse than those filmed as 3D.

 
Or it allows you to feed it a "3D" signal and have it display as "2D"
(I prefer "flat" for this myself). The manual might tell you [1].

>
I vaguely remember accidentally going into 3D mode via the remote, and
the screen went into the "fuzzy" look you see when watching 3D movies
without glasses. But I really can't be bothered with 3D nonsense - it's
always been nothing more than a pointless gimmick.

The last time I accidently did something tomy TV with the remote, it
appeared to stop working and I bought one of these
<https://www.amazon.com/dp/B076DVVBNR?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details>
(which I had been thinking about for some time) so fast it was here
the next day. Yes, I am on Prime. Of course, this depends on their
having one locally and a strong delivery presence, but I'm in Seattle,
so they do.

I managed to recover the TV set by figuring out what I had pressed.
The Naviskauto has been very useful when the weather gets up into the
80s, now that my laptop has reached a state where signing in locally
is not advisable (it still works as a file server over the WiFi,
however) and so is no longer available as a hot-weather player.

Since I don't watch films in "3D", I can't say if they are pointless
or not, but I would not be surprised if they were. There was one film
Ebert praised in a way that might suggest that, for that film, it was
not. I have no doubt that, in general, "pointless gimmick" is an
excellent description.

I feel the same way about those advanced sound systems ("pointless
gimmick") in theaters. I didn't hear the song Gandalf (I had, of
course, a pretty good idea of what it was) was singing to himself at
the start of the PJ /FOTR/ until I saw it in an auditorium with a
boring old-fashioned stereo system. There are other films were
especially cute things were done with the vocal track which obscured
them.

But there was one exception: when I saw /Kung Fu Panda 2/ in the
theater (did I mention recently that I really like animated films?).
There is a scene where our hero is saying goodbye to his father and a
team-mate speaks from behind. And from /behind/ the words came,
clearly and plainly from behind, in the theater! So those advanced
sound systems are not entirely pointless, just mostly so. IMHO, of
course.

>

An early review in /Consumer Reports/ when "3D" TVs first came out
talked about a system where the two images were interlaced on the same
screen. Which, of course, halves the vertical resolution. I don't
recall them mentioning glasses, and, since this reads a lot like
interlacing, perhaps not.
 
The review had something to say about the glasses that came with most
of those sets -- the ones costing $150 or so 24 years or so ago,
exactly one of which came with each set. In addition to the cost and
the need to buy more if you wanted to share the experience, they noted
that the little flaps that moved up and down to control which eye
could see the screen sometimes froze, producing imperfections.
 
This was /not/, apparently, what was used in theaters; there,
polarized glasses were used. But those cost a lot less than the
"flicker glasses" (my name, I don't recall what the official name was)
and would work with any "3D" TV, not just the one it came with. So
those were clearly out as far as home use was concerned.
 
Add to those the red/green glasses DVD version, and we have no less
than /3/ ways to see "3D" movies -- and the only one that is the same
in the home as it is in the theater is the red/green version from the
50s [2]. This is progress?
 
[1] Or not. My current TV (a digital Toshiba from 20+ years ago with
one tube: the picture tube) has a "DTV" option and the manual defines
it as "Digital TV" but says nothing else about it, so I have no idea
at all what it is supposed to connect to despite reading the manual.
 
[2] Unless, of course, current "3D" TVs are using polarized glasses.
Or other changes have occurred that I am happily ignorant of.

>
There were TVs that had a no-glasses 3D feature, but like all 3D, it's
become a fad that has pretty much disappeared for watching and has now
shifted to 3D audio instead.

Well, they tried anyway. It occurred to me eventually that, while
doing that with a 1920x1080 signal would produce a vertical resolution
of 540 [1], doing it with 4K (3840 × 2160) would produce a vertical
resolution of 1080, which might be more acceptable.

4K appears to be the new fad -- historically speaking, of course. I
couple of nights ago I watched a "trailer" at the start of a DVD
(probably a good 10 years old now) that compared a normal BD image
with a 4K image to show how much better (the number of colors
available was particularly stressed) the latter was. Of course, since
this was on a /DVD/ the alleged 4K image was, at best, at maximal DVD
resolution/number of colors, and the so-called "normal BD" image was
simply the same image degraded. Why they would expect anyone to be
impressed by this I have no idea.

Of course, when the the same thing was done to show the superiority of
digital scanning, /that/ could well have been real (that is, had two
different images, one scanned one way, one another) because the
difference was in how the source was scanned, not what was displaying
it. OTOH, the VHS trailers touting the superiority of DVD were just as
unimpressive as the BD/4K one referred to above.

I do not see anything intrinsically wrong with a player being able to
handle "3D" discs (either as "3D" or as flat or either at the user's
option) or a TV being able to process "3D" input as a change in how
things are made over time. Progress is one thing; nonsense is another.

[1] As usual, I can find info in the format desired by the author but
not by me. I am taking it for granted that, since 16:9, like 4:3,
specifies the width first and height second, that the smaller figure
is vertical (so that 1920x1080 has 1080 vertical lines).
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"