Curved TVs

Consider yourself fortunate that you live in one the few places in this country where you can get a truly high-speed internet connection.

Supposedly Centurylink is working on fiber-to-the-home, with true gigabit access.
https://www.centurylink.com/fiber/plans-and-pricing/seattle-washington/

Who needs gigabit access to the internet from home? Seriously. I would kill for 25Mb.

You use what you can get.  I never used to be able to stream, now I can and do.  I'd find a use for gigabit.

The house up in the San Juans is little better than dial up. 8 megabit tops. Drives me crazy now.

Only 8 Mb. Oh, poor baby. I have never seen more than 4.5 Mb. My normal speed is between 1 and 2 Mb. A lot of the time is only a few hundred Kb. And the service continues to get worse.

So I spent about an hour on the phone with AT&T's so-called tech support. Bunch of worthless fucking idiots. Tomorrow afternoon a tech will come to the house. And just like every other time a tech has come to the house, he will check my wiring and equipment and find nothing wrong. Then he will get on the phone and call around to various departments trying to get someone to fix the damned connection. If I'm lucky, the speed will increase for a short time before falling back to the almost unusable crap to which I have become accustomed.

I do enjoy embarrassing the tech guy ("Johnathon" from somewhere in India). He won't take my word for the speed at which the connection is running, so he has me go to their web site to run a speed test. The speed was so slow that their speed test site timed out. Shit!

" The speed was so slow that their speed test site timed out. Shit!"

Now THAT is funny, I don't care who you are.

It's not funny if you're ME!

Took about a minute from the time I clicked "Post a Reply" until the reply page loaded. That ain't funny.

I think it's hilarious!

Of course you do - you're a very cruel man.

No I'm not. I use WARM water to drown my kittens!

(Thanks to Vivian Stanshall for that line...)

I have finally had it confirmed that the internet service I've been paying for is not available. Had a tech out yesterday to find out why my connection was so incredibly slow. Turns out he and I have an acquaintance in common. Said acquaintance is a retired AT&T technician. So the tech was completely forthcoming with me.

When the DSL installation was created for the area in which I live, it was designed to have a maximum speed of 1.5 Mbps. There are only eight T-1 lines feeding us (about 125 customers). Yes, it's all copper; not a fiber optic cable in sight. It was decided to sell 3 Mbps connections, even though that would be problematic. I had a 3 Mbps connection, and I did have problems.

Several years ago the area was flagged, meaning no more connections were to be made here. Well, somebody fucked up and rather than stopping installations,  they started selling 6 Mbps service. I got an email about it and upgraded to the 6 Mbps service, hoping that I would at least get the 3 Mbps I had been paying for. It went the other way, however, and the service became slower and more troublesome.

It got so bad that the policy was that service techs were not to be sent out here for internet speed problems, as there was nothing they could do about it. The tech called me and told me there was nothing he could do for me, but I got him to come out and verify that everything on-site was fine and all the problems I reported were at their end. He was more than happy to do so.

Years ago, the bean counters were told of the problem and told that the solution was to run about two miles of fiber, rather than the copper T-1 lines. The company decided that the expense was too great for the pittance of customers, so the decision was made to just continue  collecting our money and ignoring our complaints and service requests.

Amercia! Gotta love it! Exceptionalism up the old wazoo!
In South Korea, the norm for internet is 1 Gbps. They are on the verge of rolling out 10 Gigabit service. And in wonderful old exceptional America, I cannot depend on getting 1/10,000 of that, even though I pay far more for the opportunity to try to connect.

<end of rant>

That sounds like class-action lawsuit material.

One would think so. But that would be a lot more hassle than it's worth. How many attorneys does AT&T have? I don't know but I'm sure it's more than I have.
Fuck it. It would be less of a problem to just buy a new house somewhere else.

I'd offer you Friday Harbor but it's not much better.

This is what happens when monopolies aren't regulated by the FCC. I agree a lawsuit would be more trouble than it's worth, but a letter to the FCC with copies to AT&T, your city councilmen, congressman and the newspaper might be worth a shot.

I'm on Comcast, which is shared bandwidth coming in over co-ax. Theoretically the speed is only limited by what they put at their end -- and last year they doubled everybody's speed unilaterally. However, as "shared bandwidth" speeds can vary wildly depending on how many other people on my block are using it. I've gotten at much as 125 mbps and as little as 31 mbps.

But this still compares favorably to my old DSL line, which topped out at 21 mbps, or dial-up, which averaged 1.66 mbps.

I can stream 4k video, that's all that matters to me.

I have had it with AT&T. They have now decided the way to fix my problem with the speed sometimes dropping below 100 Kbps is to reduce my maximum allowable speed from 6 to 1.5 Mbps. I guess Ernestine took the call. "One ringy dingy. Two ringy dingies."

Fucking idiots. I came really close to just cancelling everything associated with AT&T. I can fucking well live without the internet.

By the way: Where did you get a 1.66 Mbps modem? Isn't the V92 56 kbps the fastest dial-up modem?

Yeah you're probably right. It might've been my first DSL speed test. It's not labeled.

Well this is somewhat disappointing.

I ran across a used copy of "Grand Canyon Adventure," a 3-D IMAX movie that was included in the demo movie pack I didn't get with my TV. I have a set of polarized 3D glasses left over from the showing of Avatar.

But my Blu-ray player apparently isn't 3-D capable -- when I throw the disc in it tells me my setup won't play it.

I can still play the 2-D hi-def version, but I was really hoping the 3-D would be encoded on the disc and not require any special hardware.

Check for a firmware update for your BluRay player. A few more-recent models can be updated to handle 3D.

Hold on. Didn't you get a model 7250 Samsung? According to their website, the 7250 does not do 3D.

Meh, maybe not. Oh well.

I have played several IMAX Blu-rays, and streamed 4k content from Netflix, and they all look great, but...

The most amazing scenes on the TV aren't those. They're everyday HD scenes where the lighting is subtle, particularly reflected light like late afternoon sun or dawn's first light, where everything is kind of lit from the side. Hard to describe. There's almost an inner glow to everything. Diffuse light where reflections -- maybe some kind of polarization of the light -- makes everything look luminous.

I've never seen that on a TV before. In real life I've seen this "magical light" time frequently (photographers know the term), but seeing it on TV for the first time is revelatory.

I wonder if that lighting effect you are seeing could be a byproduct of the area backlighting used in LED televisions.

I don't think so. It's something you see in real life but not on TV.

This seemed like a good thread for this.

Our youngest daughter wants a new television for Xmas.

While scrounging around the net, I discovered that OLED displays have come way down in price. I was disappointed to see than Samsung does not yet offer an OLED TV.

Several review sites I looked at showed the LG 55C7P as their top pick. LG doesn't offer 3D or curved televisions; they say there hasn't been enough  demand for them.

So I think I will get her the LG. Any comments?