Smiley's Life

EDIT #2: You know how Adobe touted this update as “groundbreaking” (or some other fancy word) for using hardware acceleration? Well, ironically, disabling hardware acceleration makes playing content smoother. 720p runs at one frame more and 1080p runs at two frames more. Wow.

EDIT: After discovering YouTube’s new diagnostics tool, I was able to test this with Lady Gaga’s Alejandro music video (which is a good test candidate - scenes and camera angles keep changing, putting Flash to work) and it got 10-12 frames per second, when sometimes it jumped to 7 and 8. Testing it in 720p resulted in a maximum of 25 frames, when it ran at 23 frames most of the time. Info corrected. (1080p proof (TinyPic resized it to 1600x900), 720p proof)

As of this writing, trying to use the newest version of Flash to play full 1080p HD content from YouTube results in 7-12 frames per second. When the Flash Player 10.1 beta only started, full 1080p HD video worked flawlessly. As it progressed, performance was awfully degraded with every version. Even 720p doesn’t run flawlessly. I mean, it comes close to 30 but it doesn’t actually reach 30, but 23-25 instead. (Not as bad, but this still shouldn’t be happening with 720p video.) I guess I’ll be using Chrome’s native video player for YouTube from now on.

This is occuring on a PC with a Intel Core 2 Duo 2.8Ghz (3MB L2 Cache) processor, 4GB of DDR II 800Mhz RAM, a Nvidia 9600GT GPU and Windows XP. In plain English, this computer is strong enough to play full HD at a smooth 30 frames per second by just using the CPU. The irony is that 10.1 added GPU acceleration support.

Bravo, Adobe. You managed to screw up Flash again.

one800higgins:

(o)(o)    Perfect breasts

( + )( + )    Fake silicone breasts

(*)(*)    Perky breasts

(@)(@)    Big nipple breasts

oo    A cups

{ O }{ O }    D cups

( ^ )( ^ )    Cold breasts

(o)(O)    Lopsided breasts

(Q)(O)    Pierced Breasts

(p)(p)    Hanging Tassels Breasts

\ o /\ o/    Grandma’s Breasts

( – )( – )    Against The Shower Door Breasts

| o | | o |    Android Breasts

($)($)    Martha Stewart’s Breasts

(oYo)    Wonderbra breasts.

(via YesButNoButYes, click through for Assicons, Dickicons, and Vagicons)

I’ve been using a troublesome ISP for over 6 years. Now, after so many technical issues, so much frustration and a couple months of some new issues, like failed connections and having certain ports blocked, I’ve finally moved to the best ISP (Internet Service Provider) around: 013 NetVision.

My parents are divorced (and it’s perfectly fine) and each use a different ISP: my mom uses 012 Smile and my dad uses 013 NetVision. Using both ISPs over the years made me see how one works very well while the other does not. For as far as I can remember, I’ve used NetVision without any issues at all and don’t recall making any calls to their technical support line. (There was one last week, but that turned out to be the server’s fault - it was busy - and my own, not opening certain ports after reconfiguring my router) However, I do recall making countless calls to 012 and Bezeq (my infrastructure company) to solve technical issues, only calling Bezeq because 012 simply didn’t fix it and I thought it may not be their issue. This made me realize we should switch, and after postponing it for so long - I realized this almost 2 years ago - I finally did it, after new problems popped up with 012. Many connections just failed or froze, mainly on Google. Yes, Google. It took me loads of stops and reloads to get just one search done, which defeated the purpose of Google: Speedy searches. After that, I finally snapped and switched.

Long story short, I’ve had various deals offered to me and ended up picking this one: a combined plan consisting of internet service at 10Mbit/s (1.25MB/s)and getting the infrastructure at the same speed through the same ISP, for just ₪150/month. (Though, my infrastructure provider would still be Bezeq. However, that’s just fine.) Seeing as the infrastructure alone was offered for ₪100/month through Bezeq, and the other deals cost about ₪65-75/month, I figured it was the best one.

And now, after finishing it up and configuring my network, I’ve finally left that bad, old ISP and my connection is already better. Raptr, which was for some reason blocked on 012, now works flawlessly and server connections no longer fail. So now, I’m happy. :-)