DVD Breakfast
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Unfortunately, I didn't manage to get a photo of this, but I thought it was hilarious.
Flying from Faro (Portugal) airport this week, I went for breakfast while I waited for my plane. One of the restaurants there had a big screen with a picture of their english breakfast on it. Fair enough - that makes sense. Then I noticed something moving across the screen - the common DVD logo that is on a lot of DVD players' screensaver flying about (I'm sure that most people here have seen it at some point) mode. Huh? Wait - it's moving in the same pattern too... wait a minute... that IS the screensaver, just with a custom ba
At a guess, the source of their advertising picture is from a hacked DVD firmware with the picture set as the background for screensaver (or else one with a configurable fixed background - in which case the WTF is a "screensaver" that will burn an image into your TV) ... Certainly a "different" solution to the problem of getting an image onto a TV.
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The SETI at Home screen saver burned quite a few screens. It left up a display of the work it was doing in a blue box and never moved the box, or the graphs or anything like that.
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Wouldn't the flying DVD logo prevent burn-in?
In any case, that's great. If I ever open a restaurant, I'm going to film my (Canadian) breakfast and put it on a VHS tape, then hit pause.
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@RayS said:
Unfortunately, I didn't manage to get a photo of this, but I thought it was hilarious.
Flying from Faro (Portugal) airport this week, I went for breakfast while I waited for my plane. One of the restaurants there had a big screen with a picture of their english breakfast on it. Fair enough - that makes sense. Then I noticed something moving across the screen - the common DVD logo that is on a lot of DVD players' screensaver flying about (I'm sure that most people here have seen it at some point) mode. Huh? Wait - it's moving in the same pattern too... wait a minute... that IS the screensaver, just with a custom ba
At a guess, the source of their advertising picture is from a hacked DVD firmware with the picture set as the background for screensaver (or else one with a configurable fixed background - in which case the WTF is a "screensaver" that will burn an image into your TV) ... Certainly a "different" solution to the problem of getting an image onto a TV.
Actually some DVD players can be set to use the flying DVD over the paused image instead of a generic background.
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Hmmm. The WTForum ate some of my original post. Oh well.
Anyway, maybe it could have been a paused image, but things like paused video tend to have a certain "look" to them. Either way, it's not a big deal. The main issue is having a very unprofessional DVD logo floating about over your ad.
If only large LCD displays (that info was in the part of the orginal post that the WTForum ate) generally had some way of connecting to a PC (which would be far more suited to the task than a DVD player).
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@poochner said:
The SETI at Home screen saver burned quite a few screens. It left up a display of the work it was doing in a blue box and never moved the box, or the graphs or anything like that.
Screensavers have one purpose that involves preventing burn-in, and one purpose only: computer showrooms. For everybody else, the monitor just switches off after 15-30 minutes (even in windows, even on the default settings) and it doesn't matter what the silly animation shows. I can't imagine anybody running seti@home in a showroom, so I doubt it ever damaged anything.
(Animations on home computers accomplish nothing relating to burn-in. They're there as a feel-good factor for people who don't understand how burn-in works, but mostly just to show off, for the kind of people who think the new vista UI is actually a good idea.)
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@asuffield said:
@poochner said:
The SETI at Home screen saver burned quite a few screens. It left up a display of the work it was doing in a blue box and never moved the box, or the graphs or anything like that.
Screensavers have one purpose that involves preventing burn-in, and one purpose only: computer showrooms. For everybody else, the monitor just switches off after 15-30 minutes (even in windows, even on the default settings) and it doesn't matter what the silly animation shows. I can't imagine anybody running seti@home in a showroom, so I doubt it ever damaged anything.
(Animations on home computers accomplish nothing relating to burn-in. They're there as a feel-good factor for people who don't understand how burn-in works, but mostly just to show off, for the kind of people who think the new vista UI is actually a good idea.)
That's almost too stupid to warrant a response. NT4 or Windows 95 or 98 didn't do power management like that. Screen-savers used to serve an actual purpose, on old CRTs. I've seen monitors around the office with SETI-marks, so I know it did damage things. You should keep in mind that things posted here in the past tense didn't always happen in the last week. SETI@home is eight years old.
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@poochner said:
@asuffield said:
@poochner said:
The SETI at Home screen saver burned quite a few screens. It left up a display of the work it was doing in a blue box and never moved the box, or the graphs or anything like that.
Screensavers have one purpose that involves preventing burn-in, and one purpose only: computer showrooms. For everybody else, the monitor just switches off after 15-30 minutes (even in windows, even on the default settings) and it doesn't matter what the silly animation shows. I can't imagine anybody running seti@home in a showroom, so I doubt it ever damaged anything.
(Animations on home computers accomplish nothing relating to burn-in. They're there as a feel-good factor for people who don't understand how burn-in works, but mostly just to show off, for the kind of people who think the new vista UI is actually a good idea.)
That's almost too stupid to warrant a response. NT4 or Windows 95 or 98 didn't do power management like that.
I know for a fact that win95 and win98 both did this by default (although back in the win95 days, you had a chance of still owning a pre-1993 monitor that did not support any form of software-controlled power off, but this is no longer a real issue today). I'm not sure what the default configuration in NT4 was off the top of my head, but it did have support for display power management added in one of the service packs.
On all monitors that old, simply leaving them switched on created burn-in effects, due to limitations of the controlling electronics - they were not capable of switching the electron beam completely off for 'black', so every pixel on the screen was permanently illuminated at a low level (and unlike modern CRT coatings which are much more resilient, any activation would cause permanent damage, albeit at a slower rate for lower power levels). Since burn-in would cause a dramatic reduction in the sharpness of the image, the only acceptable solution was to turn the display off when it was not in use.
I suppose it's to be expected that some ignorant users had such displays and didn't turn them off, instead foolishly running a 'screensaver'. The point of this site is that stupidity knows no bounds, after all.
(Modern displays are a great deal tougher and will usually resist all but the most pathological damage - they've improved the chemistry and electronics a lot)
