Robin88

I absolutely can compare Nazi Germany to our government, the Nazis got into power through democracy, and once there they set about completely destroying democracy and making it so that they couldn't be removed, and that can and still does happen today. You get to where the Nazi's did by starting with demonising the poor, the destitute and the disabled, the foreigners and protesters, then you start labeling them as dangerous and a threat to freedom and economic stability, then you bring in legislation that removes their rights and turn a blind eye to violence against them, then once you have the support of the people, you start changing laws, allowing mass surveillance and detaining without trial, and so on. Does any of this sound familiar? It should do, because take a look at what the tories have been doing in the last few years and you'll find that it is exactly what they've been doing, and that is exactly how the Nazis got to where they did, one little bit at a time. If you think that mass surveillance isn't an issue then you're part of the problem, and if you can't join the dots and see where the potential for abuse lies then you need to wake up, this is a road to hell and it's paved by egregious acts like this and they're masked as a way to protect you from the baddies. You'll probably claim I'm a tin foil nutjob, and you're probably right, but then again, they said that the NSA wasn't spying on us and hey, would you look at that, as it turns out, us tin foil hatters were right all along.

Have you ever paid attention in history at school? Did you ever hear about how Nazi Germany made Jewish people register as Jewish on their passports and documentation? Do you recall how that turned out? Those people had nothing to hide and look what happened to them, now you can argue all you like about how that won't happen with this, but that is exactly what everyone said about what the Nazi's were doing. No government should be trusted with this kind of access, even if they aren't doing anything with the data now doesn't mean that they won't in the future, the 2 British people killed in drone strikes were killed on this kind of intelligence without being given a fair trial, how long before that becomes the norm for any kind of political dissident? Sure, they probably deserved to die, and we probably were right in killing them, but we can't claim to be a democracy without democratic processes, and killing someone without proper judicial process goes against everything that democracy stands for, surely that should be enough to make you consider just how dangerous mass surveillance actually is. Oh yeah, that's right, it doesn't affect you in your mind, so we shouldn't worry about it at all. "If you tolerate this, then your children will be next" Manic Street Preachers

It says in the OP it would power a house, so I would hazard a guess at a low power fridge freezer, television and at least 3 or 4 other wall sockets. Or like you say, just a phone, but hell, even if it can provide enough power for just one phone, that's a communication device, a GPS, entertainment device and even basic health monitoring in some cases, so way more than enough for emergencies. Still, for you and me it simply wouldn't be enough, but for places like countries in Africa, and for the poor in India? It would be enough to give them greater social mobility and enable them to have basic electricity, even if we can't see the utility, it doesn't mean it doesn't have any use at all, and that's not even considering disaster hit areas, get a couple of these and you could power a basic hospital or get phone lines back online for relief coordination.

Huh, the UK is about halfway up the list, and yet the only place I can get 4G within 50 miles of my home is a small 400 yard strip of road about a mile outside of Truro, where there is literally nothing of interest except a small pokey roundabout that gets clogged with traffic as soon as more than 2 cars attempt to navigate it. Even 3G is almost nonexistant in my area, and in some areas even a basic network connection for phone calls isn't even available. It's not as bad as say India, but hell I'd take a decent 3G connection right now, one that worked at even just 3Mb/s, never mind the 100+Mb/s some of you are getting. Oh and that 4G connection, I would say it reaches about 8Mb/s, I'm not sure though because I'm never there long enough to test it, but if I get the chance I'll definitely do that, cause I'm curious as to how fast so-called 4G actually is there.

It would enable UEFI setup and management using a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, making it so that you don't need physically wired devices to navigate the UEFI, but unless the drivers are included in the OS installer it wouldn't change anything when installing an OS. Which sucks, but how do you include drivers for every single OS in use and for every single device available inside a EEPROM flash chip of less than 8MB? It just can't be done so the bluetooth stack included in the UEFI from AMI is about as generic as it gets while still allowing basic functionality for most devices, which as you would expect, stops those drivers from being used for an OS.

I reran the tests with a "uncompressed" DVD rip (uncompressed is a misnomer tbh, all DVD and Blu-Ray video is compressed) and there's some noticeable differences in files sizes at the same settings as before, but bear in mind this is a different file, so the results cannot be compared to before. The source video was a exact copy of a episode from a store bought DVD of Through the Wormhole sitting at 2.18GB, and from that I took a 2 minute sample and ran the exact same section through H264 and H265 at 3 compression levels (CQ20, CQ30 and CQ45 using the medium preset for all 6 versions) The original video is an MPEG2 video at 720x576i at 23.97FPS The file sizes are; H264 Medium CQ20 = 26.5MB H265 Medium CQ20 = 17.5MB H265 scores a major win here, identical image quality but with a much smaller file size, it must be pointed out that CQ20 is imo not great, and I would say it'd be better to go with CQ18 for DVD rips, CQ20 is passable for image quality but sharp eyed people will notice artifacts very easily at any distance from the screen, so I don't particularly consider any of these images to be usable. H264 Medium CQ30 = 6.60MB H265 Medium CQ30 = 5.25MB H264 is a bigger file, but the image quality for H265 is slightly worse, making this one imo a draw and what you should use really depends on your needs. H264 Medium CQ45 = 3.14MB H265 Medium CQ45 = 2.85MB H264 wins outright here, the file size difference is negligible but the image quality is far superior in H264's case, even if it's still awful and completely unwatchable. Thanks for pointing that detail out, I wasn't really expecting much of a difference, but as it turns out there is one, even though it still isn't enough to make me change to H265. But there is still the Elephant in the room we haven't discussed yet, and that is time, H264 loses in 1 of 3 tests here, and draws in another, but the time to convert from MPEG2 to H264 is about 1 third as long as it is for MPEG2 to H265, and the space savings aren't worth that extra time, storage is cheap, but time isn't and while transcoding 1 film isn't too bad and the time difference wouldn't really matter, once you consider the time difference for transcoding 100+ films or more, that time saving really adds up and in when you consider that aspect, H264 currently wins outright and will do for the foreseeable future.

You didn't compare the same file twice, so your comparison is void, if you're gonna test variation between two codecs, you ought to do it with the same sample file, but that's not quite the point. h265 is harder to decode and encode now because most hardware doesn't natively support it, most decoders in GPUs only support h264 and other older codecs so of course it used more CPU time during playback, and h265 is only in the same situation that h264 was in just a few years ago. h264 used to take forever compared to mpeg4, but now with hardware and software support h264 is nearly as fast as mpeg4, and the same is true of h265, it'll take longer now but once the support is in place it should be just as fast if not faster than h264. I'll get handbrake installed and run some encode tests and see what the numbers give, also remember that the advantage of h265 is not really speed, it's compression and the resulting file sizes, h265 allows for a file about half the size of h264 for the same quality, and that's the important part, which if you only compare similar settings for h264 vs. h265, h264 wins nearly every time, but start compressing h264 more and more and watch as the quality tanks, whereas h265 holds the same quality but at greater compression ratios. Edit: This is my results for h264 vs h265. CAUTION LARGE IMAGES! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! The same sample video was used every time, the original video is a 1minute 36 second video recording of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 at 1920x1080p resolution and is a h264 file with a CQ value of 16 using the fast preset. Original file size is 75.5MB, image quality is excellent with zero visible artifacts and no detail loss. The first comparison set was run at 1920x1080p with a CQ value of 20 with the medium preset for both h264 and h265. File size is 52.6MB for h264, and 53.4MB for h265. Image quality is identical for both, artifacts are present, but essentially unnoticeable unless pixel spotting, h264 wins by a small margin due to the slightly smaller file size and identical quality. The second comparison set was again 1920x1080p with a CQ value of 30 with the medium preset for both. The file sizes are 26.5MB for h264, and 24.9MB for h265. h265 has better image quality, but details are lost in both and artifacts are clearly visible in both without the need to resort to pixel spotting. h265 wins here by a small margin, it isn't enough to convince me to switch now, but maybe as time goes on it'll get better. The third set was the most surprising, it was also run at 1920x1080p, but with a completely unrealistic CQ of 45 and the medium preset for both h264 and h265. The file sizes are 13.8MB for h264 and 10.1MB for h265. H264 is terrible, major detail loss, blurry image and prominent artifacting across the entire image, h265 is even worse though, it is absolutely atrocious, entire blocks of video are completely messed up and details are almost nonexistent, it's blurry and just awful, but this comparison is completely unrealistic, anyone using these settings needs taking out behind the barn and put out of their misery cause no one could watch a video this bad. I'm glad I ran this comaprison tbh, I've found that although h265 can produce smaller files, it isn't actually as much as we've been led to believe, but we need to wait and see if the h265 codec gets better in the future, but as it stands right now, it's not quite ready for use as a replacement for h264.

I'm not quite sure what you mean, could you clarify what you said please? But if I remember rightly Nintendo lost third party dev support because of draconian rights agreements that gave Nintendo exclusive rights to games and a large chunk of the profits from the games, not necessarily because the games came on cartridges, which only caused issues because of the lack of space compared to the CD's on the PlayStation. Correct me if I'm wrong but that is how I remember it. Nintendo have made a success of the DS family despite the cartridge based tech, so it isn't really that there is any kind of inherent problem with cartridges, it's just that they're expensive compared to discs. Cartridges are also by and large more secure compared to discs, so that would play into publishers best interests because it makes it harder, not impossible mind you, but harder nonetheless to pirate the games and publishers would love that, but only if Nintendo can bring the price down enough to make it viable.

I thought this meant digital download only, but if you look at the patent carefully, it mentions a memory card, and that means that Nintendo is thinking of using flash based storage instead of discs, kind of like how Sony did with the Vita, which if they can make it cheap enough would be a genius move, getting rid of discs altogether but still allowing for physical copies of games. I'm okay with this as long as it's cheap enough, but if it ends up in the same situation as with the Vita then Nintendo can go scratch their fanny with a cactus.

Only a complete idiot like Camoron or IDS (Idiot Dickhead Smith) or Captain Cocaine formally-known-as-George-Osbourne could come up with an idea this completely braindead. This is a hackers wet dream laid with its legs spread out on the dining room table. If they go through with this then god help all of us, it'll only be a matter of time before someone finds a weakness, and as they proved with Universal Credit, they couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery, let alone manage an entire nations financial data. Who'll oversee access to it? The banks? we saw what happened in 2008 how good they are at managing anything. Capt. Cocaine? He can only just manage to not piss himself while he's walking, never mind the entire nations personal information. I hope that this is just another thinktank idea that will get shot down before it even gets past planning stages.

Yeah I might take closer look into HTML and CSS and learn it myself, it's something that I'd like to learn but never committed to it even though it'd be advantageous to me if I did ^__^ It looks really good and it almost passes off as a real thing in some areas, and even though it's in Romanian I can navigate it really easily and I understand what it says and I don't know any Romanian at all Nice use of Ubuntu's logo btw I also added in Terry's contact details to his website, I can rearrange it easily enough if needs be, but at the moment I'm happy with how it's laid out, but I'm open to further suggestions

Thank you so much, that makes it look even better, I've updated the website with your code and it looks great.

Yeah, I'm kinda inclined to agree with you, but I don't really want to clutter it too much, keeping it simple and minimalist is what we're after, I'll see if I can add more to it without making it messy. Thanks for the comment and rating, and even an 8/10 is better than the clusterfuck that is his old website

He doesn't even know what those things are, let alone how to use them, even I couldn't make this website by coding it manually, so Squarespace is ideal for that, and we looked into a professional to make the website and he was looking at a minimum of £800 if I remember rightly, with this it's cost him about a fifth of that. And by workflow I mean the commisions for Aliens replica armour and film and television work amongst other things. His job is amazing, he has worked with some of my favourite actors and on some of my all time favourite films and being able to get a glimpse into this world is a huge honour, there's stuff in his personal pictures, and in the stories he can tell that would make for an amazing book to read. Thank you for the comments, at least I know we're on the right track Yep, it's awful, and it makes a total mockery of the incredible work he's created in his career, and he didn't even know what it looked like until he asked me to show it to him, and when I did the look of sheer embarrassment and shame on his face was just awful to see. Do you mean the layout of the contact page itself? Or did you mean to make the link for the contact page more noticable in the links? I'll look into making it more prominent and rearrange that page if I can. Thanks for the comments, getting it right is important, and every suggestion is welcomed

Hmm, I've never really thought of contact forms as being annoying, I'll have a think about that, I was contemplating whether or not to have his contact details in there anyway, but decided against it for the time being, but then again Terry does prefer contact via phone or letter so yeah, I'll put it to him and see what he thinks. Cheers And yes they do, they made him a custom email address when they made his old website, but tied it to the same hosting as the company that hosts his old website, and that is gonna be a major pain because I need to keep his email going but remove the old website. I need to do this because he has a lot of business contacts who only have that email and removing that email would immediately stop any and all work currently coming in. The website was taken over by someone else on Terry's behalf a few years back, and after then it went massively downhill and ended up in the piss poor state it's in now.

So earlier on this year I was asked by a family friend to create him a website for his business and I decided to give Squarespace a go, and this is what I've created for him. http://terry-english-iqhl.squarespace.com/ Don't mind the Squarespace domain, that will be changed over to his own domain in the coming days, we're both really happy with how it looks, but I figured it'd be a good idea to get some critique in the meantime. Terry is an armourer who has worked for the entertainment industry for over 50 years and if you've seen a film, advert or stage production with armour in it in that time, chances are you'll have seen some of his work. Unfortunately he has never really paid much attention to his online presence, and has left the management of his website and email to others who claimed they knew better but in reality knew absolutely nothing and therefore have caused his work flow to suffer as more and more work comes from people searching for him on the internet, to give you an idea of how bad they were at their job, here is his old website, which will be going down and removed permanently in the next few days. http://www.terryenglisharmourer.co.uk/ I'm waiting on a few more photo's from Terry to add to the new website, but in the meantime I'm pretty much done with the main bulk of the work until then. Thank you @LinusTech for the heads up regarding Squarespace, it's been awesome and super simple to use.

Holy cow, that's nuts, it makes zero financial sense to use this tech, even though NAND is cheaper than DRAM it's gonna cost a fortune to power it if those numbers are correct, it's gonna cost a fortune to cool, and then with the low long term reliability of NAND compared to DRAM it'll need to be replaced in a couple of months making it cost significantly more than an equivalent DRAM system over the lifetime of the system. Yeah I'm sure that there are use cases where this might make sense, but I honestly cannot think of any, if you need that kind of capacity, you're using it to service millions if not billions of reads and writes per day, which NAND simply cannot cope with, and if you need performance then DRAM is still the better option cause it's orders of magnitude faster than even the fastest NAND, no matter which way you look at it, it makes about as much sense as Boris Johnson would if he was high on meth. Although, seeing Boris Johnson on meth would be the funniest thing ever, the guy talks total shite anyway, imagine what he would be like on drugs

Clearly you didn't read my post then either, I said "at least for my GPU" and "I'm not saying that ASIC quality doesn't have an impact, but I'm not convinced it's worth the price premium over the R.R.P." I know they say it's only for Maxwell, but if ASIC quality has any merit then it should have some influence on any GPU, not just Maxwell, but I'll wait and see if it does when more data is available.

I'm not convinced about this ASIC quality thing correlating to overclocking ability, at least for my GPU, GPU-z claims mine is a 80.1% ASIC quality GPU, but I only got to 850MHz on mine, it's stock is 732MHz and I've heard of quite a few people getting 900+ on the same core so at least in my experience ASIC scores don't seem to correlate to anything meaningful. Maybe we'll see what ASIC quality means for overclocking ability as more and more people start using the ASIC scoring system for newer GPU's, and we'll see whether it's worth the extra cost over just trying your luck in the silicon lottery. I'm not saying that ASIC quality doesn't have an impact, but I'm not convinced it's worth the price premium over the R.R.P.

I am not really the kind of person to answer that cause I'm not all that knowledgeable on the subject, but it's like anything really, a Red Epic is a better camera than a smart phone, even though both can record video, and I would imagine that it's the same for a synthesiser, you might be able to make music using a PC, and it'll probably sound good, and definitely final mastering and post-production will be done on one, but actual composing and performing the music will need proper equipment if he wants it to sound as good as he can. This is all conjecture of course, like I say, I'm no expert when it comes to music production, so I could be totally wrong, I'm just going on the fact that even a basic mixing desk and speaker setup can set you back several thousand, and he'll want the best he can get his hands on. I would say though that most of the money will be spent on legal stuff, even though he wrote the music, the rights still exist with the publisher of the game, so he'll have an uphill battle just getting permission to rewrite his own music. But I would say it's absolutely worth it, imagine Robocop 3 theme rewritten and performed with modern instruments, it's gonna sound epic

I think he needs the money for the instruments and equipment, a lot more goes into digital music than you realise, and even just a synthesiser is really expensive for a good one, and then he needs to deal with the lawyers and rights to the music, and then he needs a publisher, and if he's making CD copies he'll need to pay for that too, 38K doesn't go very far when you think about it. But yeah, why can't music be that amazing today, the best music definitely came about in the 8bit and 16bit eras, for all the high quality audio we can make, the quality of the music writing hasn't really kept up with it.

Holy cow that's incredible, best 4 minutes of video game music I've heard in a long time. This guy was a genius with the C64 sound processor, brb I'm gonna go and listen to more of his stuff Also, watching the oscilloscope output is mesmerising, I could watch that all day

Oh dear, I seem to have hit a nerve haven't I? Could you try being a bit more upset, I'm afraid you're not pissed off enough for my tastes. And just in case I didn't make myself clear, I don't like DLC, I don't like DRM, I don't like being screwed over by poor quality releases or being treat as a second class citizen by publishers, but you know what, I also don't like devs of any kind getting screwed over by entitled little brats like yourself or Bethesda or Valve for that matter who think they deserve a free ride because it's always been that way. If you don't like it, don't pay for it, I like free, of course I do, but if paid mods are the future then I want it to at least be fair for everyone, not just myself as a consumer, but for the devs of the mods, I want there to be a proper vetting process for mods so that high quality mods are the only ones available, I want there to be a strong refund system in place for when mods don't work as intended or that are just shit, I want mod devs to get a decent slice of the money made and I think that entitled children such as yourself need to take a chill pill and consider that you're not the centre of the universe and that the world shouldn't just bow down to your every whim just cause you got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning.

You're quite the salty one aren't you? Yep, you're right, it isn't a job, but why shouldn't it be? What if people want to make a living off of developing mods, people make a living off of streaming games, are you this butt hurt over them making money? Yeah because nobody should make a living doing a hobby they love right? Everyone should only work as part of the machine amirite? And if they didn't make all those mods, where would all those lovely fixes for Bethesda games come from? Bethesda? I don't think so. You're right, life isn't fair, but that doesn't mean we should screw over those with a real talent for creation that are getting started by using modding tools, and I don't need to get over anything, I'm perfectly happy for developers of mods to make money from their creations as long as the pricing system is fair to both the modders and the consumers and that proper protections are in place for both, and if mods are going to be paid for content, then practice what you preach, and get over it. Maybe they do have a job, maybe they work weekends on mods and a full time job during the week, and maybe it would be nice to earn something from their hobby, but maybe, just maybe earning money from modding would help them pay for the college tuition to get them a job in game development, or pay their medical bills, or build a nest egg for their family, or a million other things that money can be used for, have you considered that? Then don't buy a mod, don't buy the game, and deal with it, everyone else will enjoy the game, and if we feel mods are worth paying for, then we will pay for them, while you can sit and bitch and moan in your little corner.

It's an awesome idea, and one that I'll find actually useful, but I agree that there's too much risk involved, MS need to have some seriously beefy security around this to protect privacy, and it should definitely be possible to disable it for business users. But having said that, is it any more risky than having remote desktop or remote registry enabled? Those two things are the biggest security holes in Windows bar none, they give admin access to the computer being controlled and the computer is locked when it's being used, and when you gain access to a system, you can change everything, and on every Windows installation I've ever used it's enabled by default, so I think that Remote Desktop and Remote Registry are a bigger concern than screen recording is.