I’m the administrator of kbin.life, a general purpose/tech orientated kbin instance.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I think people’s experience with PLE will always be subjective. In the old flat we were in, where I needed it. It would drop connection all the time, it was unusable.

    But I’ve had them run totally fine in other places. Noisy power supplies that aren’t even in your place can cause problems. Any kind of impulse noise (bad contacts on an old style thermostat for example) and all kinds of other things can and will interfere with it.

    Wifi is always a compromise too. But, I guess if wiring direct is not an option, the OP needs to choose their compromise.




  • Yeah, but they’re not. That’s the modern world. But also even if it was a web server there’s usually ways to advertise the IP for the app to connect to. I’ve seen other stuff do that. So getting an IP is easy. Once the app knows the IP and if you really want to allow connections from outside to your IOT devices (I wouldn’t) it could remember the IP and allow that.

    You really don’t need to give a fixed IP to everything. I think I’ve given 1 or 2 things fixed IPv6 IPs. Everything else is fine with what it assigns itself.



  • Hah. But to be fair, ATM did have a specific use that it worked great for. That is the move to digital voice circuits. The small fixed cell size and built in QoS meant that if you had a fixed line size you could fit X voice channels, and they would all be extremely low latency and share the bandwidth fairly. You didn’t need to buffer beyond one cell of data and you didn’t need to include overhead beyond the cell headers.

    ATM was designed to handle the “future” or digital network needs. But, the immediate use was about voice frames and that likely dictated a lot of the design I’d expect.





  • I think in 99% of use cases, upgrading isn’t a problem. Most of the time new SQL versions are backward compatible. I’ve never personally had a problem upgrading a database for a product that expects an older version.

    They do have compatibility modes too, but those only go back so far too.

    But, I think companies with their production databases for perhaps older complex systems are likely very weary of upgrading their working database. This is most likely where this situation comes from. Imagine being the person responsible for IT, that upgraded the DB server and database to the latest version. Everything seemed to be working fine. Then accounts run their year-end process, it falls over and now there are months of data in the newer version that won’t work properly. It’d be an absolute pain to get things working again.

    Much safer to leave that SQL 2005 server doing what it does best. :P


  • I think most people that were gaming held onto their CRTs as long as possible. The main reason being, the first generation of LCD panels took the analogue RGB input, and had to present that onto the digital panel. They were generally ONLY 60hz, and you often had to reset their settings when you changed resolution. Even then, the picture was generally worse than a comparable, good quality CRT.

    People upgraded mainly because of the reduced space usage and that they looked aesthetically better. Where I worked, we only had an LCD panel on the reception desk, for example. Everyone else kept using CRTs for some years.

    CRTs on the other hand often had much better refresh rates available, especially at lower resolutions. This is why it was very common for competitive FPS players to use resolutions like 800x600 when their monitor supported up to 1280x960 or similar. The 800x600 resolution would often allow 120 or 150hz refresh.

    When LCD screens with a fully digital interface became common, even though they were pretty much all 60hz locked, they started to offer higher resolutions and in general comparable or better picture quality in a smaller form factor. So people moved over to the LCD screens.

    Fast-forward to today, and now we have LCD (LED/OLED/Whatever) screens that are capable of 120/144/240/360/Whatever refresh rates. And all the age-old discussions about our eyes/brain not being able to use more than x refresh rate have resurfaced.

    It’s all just a little bit of history repeating.


  • Are you sure it was CRT technology? Because bear in mind, colour CRTs had to focus the beam so accurately that it only hit the specific “pixel” for the colour being lit at that time. What there was, was blur from bad focus settings, age and phosphor persistence (which is still a thing in LCD to an extent).

    What DID cause blur was the act of merging the image, the colour and the synchronisation into a composite signal. All the mainstream systems (PAL, SECAM and NTSC) would cause a blurring effect. Games on 80s/90s consoles generally used this to their advantage, and you can see the dithering effects clearly on emulators of systems from that period. Very specifically, the colour signal sharing spectrum with the luminance signal would lead to a softening of the image which would appear like blurring. Most consoles from the time only output either an RF signal for a TV or if you were lucky a composite output.

    Good computer monitors (not TVs) of the time were extremely crisp when fed a suitable RGB signal.


  • I’d go further than that and say that deciding to leave the house or not, are both gambles.

    But in the context of spending money with the only net result being you lose money, make money or retain the same money with no other goods or services provided in return. Then gambling is the primary attribute of that spend.

    Bookmakers and investments meet that criteria, your other purchases are not.