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.

A while ago, when my satellite TV provider bought several new shows, these promos for “Dollhouse” caught my interest. Fast-forward to tonight, when I had just seen Dollhouse’s 24th episode (season 2, episode 11), and I have only three words to say. Oh. My. GOD. Sorry for sounding like a pre-teen walking out of a screening of Twilight, but OH MY GOD DOLLHOUSE IS THE BEST ACTION SHOW EVAR. That episode just blew my mind wide open, making me question the show’s cancellation one more time.

With all of these unbelievable twists, brilliant plot and exquisite attention to detail, I still don’t get why Fox cancelled the show. When I heard of the news (Thanks to Twitter!) I immediately went online and read a bunch of articles on why it was cancelled, since even at the time the show was great. I read that it was placed at a crappy time slot, with “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” playing before it and “Stargate: Universe” showing on SyFy at the same time. Really, Fox - Fridays at 9pm? I don’t think any of the young audience that’s supposed to like this show would stay home on a Friday night. Plus, it’s a bad move to even try and compete with a Stargate show, or virtually any long-running shows series/format with a very large fanbase. Terminator and Dollhouse were both great shows, and look what happened - they both got axed.

Dollhouse, in my opinion, is the best action show on television these days. Really, I think it surpasses Heroes and other scifi-action shows. The twists in episode 24 actually made me take 10 minutes to digest it all and go over them again in disbelief, keeping my mouth open at the same time (post-gasping). Yes, they were that good. Without spoiling anything, the twists were better and better as they came, with Caroline’s last memory as the climax.

I really don’t get why Fox placed this show in such a bad time on a Friday night, broadcast it at the same time as a Stargate show or even cancelled it after they actually failed it! Forget about ratings - a network should not cancel a new show before giving it a decent chance, let alone one with a well-sized fanbase.

Screw you, Fox. Screw you.

About a month after I got my new PC I noticed something: the power supplier was acting odd. Sometimes, out-of-the-blue it would just restart (no Windows BSOD pun intended). About 2 months later (I couldn’t find the time earlier - go figure!) I went to my PC parts supplier and assembler and asked them to replace the power supplier. They did, but then it was another odd-acting one. This time? Whenever a component needed massive power (mainly the graphics card), it would just crash electrically and will not turn back on until I switched off the power supplier, took out the power cable, put it back in, switched it on again and pressed the power button. So I went over there again. On the spot, they replaced it with another weird one. That one would not supply enough power, so whenever I tried to play a game it would run amazingly slow. And they forgot to plug the DVD drive back in when switching the cables all over the place. So this time they sent a tech to me to make it up to me and he installed a new power supplier, this time a GOOD one, (Good as in not faulty, not as in the scale: “bad-ok-good-perfect”.) and connected the drive again. Then it was all good.

Until now.

So, guess what just happened? I’m betting you’re now thinking “Is the power supplier broken again?”. Well, no. But close enough: My DVD drive just broke. It still works electrically but will not read any CDs or DVDs. (Yes, it’s a hardware problem. I ran some tests.)

So now, I have to go all the way to their nearest store, wait in line, give them the PC and do it all over a few days later when it’s replaced. Why? Because they “have to check everything” before they replace something! Right, if you would’ve done that properly, I wouldn’t be here bitching.

If one more thing breaks, I will seriously consider suing them and getting a branded PC (E.g.: HP) or a Mac. Paying more for a computer is a lot better in the long run if I don’t have to take it in for repair every few months!

(P.S.: I had the same problems as with the power supplier but with the motherboard on my previous PC (at the start), which was also from them. It fried in 3 days, then was replaced but with one that wasn’t my previous model, then replaced with a good one that was the correct model.)