Halt and Catch Fire

[plainnash]

I figure the new AMC show should be good for keyboard spotting, I've just finished the first episode and there's a plethora or terminals in it so far!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_C ... TV_series)

[dvjz.dh]

Come on guys this is a real cult serie !!!
I'm addicted to Halt and Catch Fire.
Garage homebrew computer making ,online textual games , modems , BBS , a lot of beautiful beige boxes and a great soundtrack
https://youtu.be/vG5Q8ei3PBg

[amospalla]

Saw both seasons, one of the best tech series I've ever seen. I am more sure that lot of members of Deskthority will more than enjoy the serie.

[dvjz.dh]

It's a must-see if you are a Deskthority member

[fohat]

I saw the first season and it was mostly good and interesting, but the random insane ending was just too far-fetched for me to swallow.

[HzFaq]

I just binge watched the first 3 episodes, seems pretty good so far. Shame there's only 1 series on Netflix...

[dvjz.dh]

The first season seems to be inspired by the story of compaq http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2 ... an-empire/

[dvjz.dh]

One thing that i like is that Cameron and the other guys types with 2 fingers .In every series i've watched there is people that touch type at 100 word per minute .

[jacobolus]

I couldn’t make it past the first two episodes. The writing made me cringe.

Much better ongoing shows: Silicon Valley, Mr. Robot.

[002]

I didn't mind the first season. The second season has been boring as hell. I stopped watching it after 3rd or 4th ep
Silicon Valley is definitely more entertaining even if incredibly childish.

[sth]

I didn't mind the first season. The second season has been boring as hell. I stopped watching it after 3rd or 4th ep
Silicon Valley is definitely more entertaining even if incredibly childish.

hmm thanks for the heads up.
i thought the characters were pretty 1 dimensional (especially the sales guy, is he supposed to be like jobs? no charisma, no compelling history, just mystery...) but i like scoot mcnairy. speaking of - Monsters is a really good flick, check it out if you have not

[dvjz.dh]

Maybe HCF has more appeal with people who was child in the 80's . Silicon Valley is funny but more geek nerd oriented .
The "jerk off algorithm" brainstorming scene is awesome .

[Mr.Nobody]

I didn't mind the first season. The second season has been boring as hell. I stopped watching it after 3rd or 4th ep
Silicon Valley is definitely more entertaining even if incredibly childish.

Spending my entire day watching the first season and epsode 1 of season 2. Indeed, there is a lapse in season 2. Silicon Valley is halarious like hell to me, I love it.

[zslane]

I watch it for two things: the vintage tech and Kerry Bishé.

[Mr.Nobody]

It seems I can't finish the second season, shitty plot...and Cameron is such a wayward conceited spoiled bitch, she thinks she's so special but she can't prove it in anyway, in fact she can't do anything by herself,and she's just as promiscuous as other bitches,just like those rock stars in 80s, they thought the world owes them, and the earth should revolve around them...fucking ridiculous...This sort of people have the mentality: "I want that,and somebody has to make that happen for me." Well you want it, then make it happen yourself bitch... call me a sexist or even misogynist...

EDIT:

And I wonder how many old-generation programmers got brain tumors or inferior sperm due to facing CRT monitors all day long for years. Is the hazardous effect of electromagnetic radiation exaggerated or not?

[Daniel Beardsmore]

I do recall one of my father's stories about someone whose radiation detecting badge showed that he'd been subjected to far higher x-ray levels than expected (this may have been at EMI Medical during the development of the brain scanner) and the cause wasn't radiation from the machine but x-rays from his television, as he'd hung up his lab coat by the TV at home.

For all of what people wrote last week about old picture tube displays in the retro hardware topic, I don't miss CRTs. At university I was always recalibrating displays (using the front panel controls) as the picture was so often misshapen or the wrong colour. The worst batch of displays by far was when they bought a batch of brand new G4 towers with those weird exobot CRTs, which relied on Mac OS 9's display control panel to calibrate them. From new, the picture on many of them was so warped that there was no way to get it square from the calibration controls.

TFT LCD reached a point years ago that the refresh rate and viewing angle is more than sufficient for most purposes. My screen at home (LG Flatron L2000CP) is over eight years old, and that's 8 ms GTG IPS and for real world purposes it's vastly better than any CRT I have ever seen in my entire life. LCD is meant to have a poor gamut, but the difference in colour saturation from CRT to LCD was staggering — LCD colour is so much more vibrant, and you have better gamma too (Windows never applied gamma correction, unlike Mac OS). The only down side is backlight bleed.

While it's true that I've never owned a brand new CRT in my life, this LCD is older than most CRTs I've owned, and a CRT this age would often be in a poor state. CRTs this age would need recalibrating (convergence and focus) and the one that this replaced was so dark and fuzzy it was becoming unreadable. CRTs also had poor resolution: I wanted 1280×1024 out of 17" at a full flicker-free 75 Hz — my Mac's 17" only managed 1280×960.

I still have various CRTs — one is connected to my BBC Micro (one of my two Microvitec Cubs), and it's still bright and colourful but very fuzzy.

Modern TFT LCD displays are for the most part garbage, but there's a very slow but heartwarming trend towards IPS and similar high-end technologies finally becoming a de facto standard. The sad thing is that TN really isn't that bad if it's done properly (Dell's E176FP was very good for TN) — I've said this before, but there seems to be a relationship between energy consumption and viewing angle within a single panel, having observed the viewing angle go from abysmal to excellent on a Panasonic Lumix camera LCD simply by adjusting the power setting for the display. I've never seen any explanation for this, but I guess it's Energy Star == rubbish picture.

Now, laptop TFTs … they just suck. Terrible colour. I don't know why. Laptop displays will suck until they go OLED.

[ohaimark]

Generalizing: AMVA+ and similar technologies are where it's at right now in terms of contrast. IPS has the best gamut. TN has a fast response and sucks at everything else. I still want OLED monitors, assuming that burn-in is mitigated somehow.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

Older VA isn't as bad as was made out to be. We had a Formac Gallery 1900 in the office (Fujitsu P-MVA supposedly) and that had a superb picture until it sadly died. Also, a Dell VA display that disappeared during an office move. We now have one left, a 2007FP (S-PVA) — the colour seems iffy (accuracy, not saturation) but it's a good picture. The rest are TN or IPS.

Dell E176FP has a band maybe 1–1.5" across the top where the colour/contrast is messed up, and the rest of the picture is decent. One TN panel test is to put a white cursor with a drop shadow (standard Windows cursor) over a white background, and stand up and look down at the screen. Most TN screens show the shadow as a bright glow around the cursor from a high angle, but the E176FP retained monotonic contrast from a high angle. TN can be implemented in different ways, some reasonable, and some really terrible. Good old school TN isn't perfect, but it's vastly better than modern TN. E176FP was slow though.

[ohaimark]

This is what I'm running.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ben ... ,4499.html

Troubleshooting poor contrast on a monitor that should have been 3000:1 native led me to the default Limited RGB debacle. Intel and NVIDIA GPUs don't default to Full RGB over HDMI.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

The only nasty display problem I've seen lately is where simply switching off (not unplugging) a monitor causes Windows to rip the monitor completely out of the desktop and dump everything onto the other monitor. Whether you're saved from this by locking the PC prior to switching off the display, I have no idea (since the lock screen is a different session), but it's completely insane, and the fixes are even more insane. Once you've switched off the first monitor, you presumably have a desktop with zero monitors! (You get the hardware unplugged sound with both; I think this PC had one HDMI and one DisplayPort connector, and it and both screens were all brand new. What's more disturbing is that this bug in Windows 10 has remained unresolved since Windows 7!)

I've never bought into any claims of high contrast on LCD. I always run at low levels anyway. The default levels on an LCD are so bright they're unpleasant to look at for an extended period, and allegedly (so I read once) shorten the backlight life. I'm using brightness 24% and contrast 70% on this display. Higher contrast just makes the picture horribly washed out.

I didn't realise OLED had burn-in — that's a bit of bummer.

[ohaimark]

Contrast ratings really do mean something on LCDs, especially when it's quantifiable via excellent measurement equipment. Black levels are, perhaps, more important -- IPS glow drives me up a wall, which is why I switched to VA variants.

I can't express how much of a difference it makes when shadows and darkness are actually... Dark. Not glowy and iridescent.

I calibrate IPS displays to 120 cd/m^2 and VA displays to 200 cd/m^2; for some reason I perceive the white light output differently on each technology. Default LCD levels are like looking into the sun's corona, I agree. Those brightness levels only exist to sell floor models in brightly lit stores, imo.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

That's a level of perfection well above anything I desire. So long as I have both screens the same colour, that's good enough for me. I switched my screens around at work due to strange problems with DVI signal interference glitches on what was the right-hand screen, although when I replaced the PC, that screen is now on VGA so I guess I could swap them back, as the degraded colour and uniformity suits the other arrangement. (They're old screens but it's the only way to get usable dual displays, as dual 24" 1200 px high widescreens would be insane.) It's too much of pain trying to get them straight and level to bother swapping them again!

Since all my screens are medium school IPS, I get the bruise glow (purple and orange) instead of the white glow — plus I get short-term burn in, in addition to occasional flickering and shimmering that seems to be inherent in the panel (different monitors, same LG.display 20.1" S-IPS panel). It's not perfect, by any means, but since the only alternatives are widescreen or some stupidly expensive 1600×1200 professional display from NEC, I accept the trade-offs!

The fun part will be what I do if the controller in my Poker II really is dying. Funny — the backlit keycaps are holding up perfectly at three years, the one thing that's supposed to be a failure! No sign of paint wear at all.

[ohaimark]

I do some color critical photo editing, so it's important for me to have things calibrated.

Keeping the resolution down makes perfect sense. The only other alternative I know of would be upscaling on 1920x1200 monitors. Seems like prices on those have come down slightly.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

24" 1920×1200 × 2 is just too wide! I like my height — same reason I love the display on my old Thinkpad T43 (14" 1400×1050) — small screen but plenty of height! Perfect resolution for a laptop!

[fohat]

I have never understood the love for wide rectangular screens, "squarish" seems ideal.

I scroll up and down at least as much as I scroll left to right.

[zslane]

I know this is the off-topic forum, but really...

[Daniel Beardsmore]

YA RLY

[Halvar]

HCF is now included in Amazon Prime Video here in Germany (don't know where else), so we poorer folk can watch it.

Loved the first season. Second season is a bit boring so far, I'm in the middle of it.