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Current technology does not do a good job of properly showing all the possible colors. Though it's not really a problem of throwing more bits at it, it's a problem of the way it works. Your monitor is only capable of displaying 3 colors - a specific shade of each red, blue, and green (well, 4 if you want to count black). To make another color, your monitor mixes these three colors together to fool your eye into thinking it sees the color you want to display. But it's not the same thing. Your monitor cannot display the same color that a sodium light puts out, for example, as it cannot create light in the proper wavelength - it can only approximate it.

This webpage does a pretty good job of showing how bad most monitors are at the color green:
http://www.skytopia.com/project/light/light.html#5

You're absolutely right that warm light is overrated. After all, typical 60-100 watt bulbs use light in these proportions:

50% red
33% green
17% blue

That's almost 3 times as much red light as blue! See here or here for details.

Basically, we're not getting the full range of colours we would otherwise because of the heavy bias towards orange. It's a pain, and I hate it. I also wish they'd make these flourescent bulbs in 40 watt (200 watt equivalent), so we get more light. You'd think that'd be the first thing they'd do now that the power consumption has gone down.

Quite timely this, as I've just finished my own energy page, testing loads of appliances. If there's one thing I've found above all else though, it's this one thing:

Heat swamps Light swamps Sound
(here's the article I did on it)

Anything which involves heat (washing machine, heater, cooker, microwave, kettle etc.) will eat an order of magnitude more power than anything involving light (monitor/TV, light bulb, lamp), which itself will eat up (by an order of magnitude) anything involving sound, which you practically get for free.

That's okay though, because if you spend $3,500,000 on space-age aerogel insulation for your home, then practically no heat will be lost, and your energy bills will plummet.

The other thing I learnt is that standby power consumption vastly varies from device to device (and even from manufacturer), which is why ideas such as the "One Watt Plan" are a Good Thing.

http://www.skytopia.com/project/articles/notation. html

this should do it

Here you go. That's for iTunes 4.7.x in Windows.

In the version that I have (6.0.1 for Mac) the Mini Player is 2 pixels taller but 30 pixels "thinner". The little display now has three lines (title, album/artist, and a usable scroll bar with elapsed and total/remaining times in the ends). As you can see, it has buttons for previous and next tracks, pause/play and volume. (There is no stop button in iTunes).

You can make the window smaller (to, as I said, 130 x 64), but then you lose the right part (the display) and are left with the buttons and the volume slider.

Anyway, I see that iTunes just isn't your cup of tea and I, of course, respect that.

The sooner this (or another) technology comes along the better. Standard incandescent bulbs have a terrible colour balance (48% red, 33% green, and only 19% blue!). This distorts surroundings away from their natural hue.

What keeps people away from 'white' flourescents is how they buzz, flicker, and also spike in the green range (giving a sickly green hue to many surfaces).

It's true, The graphics don't need to be photorealistic to look good. I often find that texture mapped graphics actually /spoil/ the look of the graphics. The night time demo shown reminds of the kind of surreal graphics you might expect from a game like Outrun; nice & clear colours, lines and vectors.

Take a look at the "TwistTube" animation at my site for another example of simple but really effective gfx.

I agree that the relational filesystem (synonym with a metadata filesystem presumably) would be the way to go. The increase in speed and power would be phenomenal. If we take the paradigm to its logical conclusion, then only one 'folder' would be needed for all files, though of course, there's no reason to prevent the two models existing together.

You may be interested to read the following article from my site:
Towards a single folder metadata (database) filesystem

It's a good thing. The last thing we need is something like this. Worse than doomsday!

For a taste of true cyan (which like you imply, one probably can't see in real life, let alone on your monitor), try the Eclipse of Mars optical illusion on my site.

Yes, that is my permanent sig below :)

To be honest, I think a lot of the open-source faithful have gotten so caught up in the philosophy that they've forgotten the pragmatism. Open source isn't important, open formats are.

I think rather that you may not understand how some of us feel about open source. It's not the pragmatism of the always availability of my data that makes me use open source. Not by a long shot. It's simply that the software is better.

And after a while, you start to think that so much closed source software has a better, free, open source counterpart. And this evolves into the belief that all code should be open. Many sets of eyes and many people collaberating can make software better.

The one trap of open source is the deisre to be too many things to too many people. There are a handfull of opensource projects out there that have pretty much peaked with a perfect or near-perfect product, and then gone back and started adding everything that anyone and everyone suggests. This leads to bloated software.

But, hey, Opera is already there, and it costs $39 and isn't free. Plus not enough people are using it to justify serious security audits, and since it's closed, who knows what's wrong with it. Firefox is open and has millions of users, so people are constantly looking at it's code and finding / fixing problems. IE at least has 86% of the internet's users using it, so the holes in it eventually come out by sheer dumb luck. But, I wonder how many holes go unpatched in Opera?

Also, aside from the philosophy of open-ness, there is my version of pragmatism. The time for paying for browsers has come and past. Oh, wait. That time was never. From gopher to lynx to mosaic to netscape to IE to mozilla to firefox, web browsers have always been free.

And the ad-supported version that you can get... does not have "text based, unobtrusive ads". Here's a screenshot from a fellow slashdotter. Here are the facts about the ads:

1.) not text based. That's an image up there.
Text based would be like google i-frame ads.
2.) the full size of that browser window is 800x535 pixles. The ad is 312x60 pixels. Thus -
full browser = 428000 pixles
ad in browser = 18720 pixles

Percentage of ad as part of browser window = 4.37%.
BUT WAIT, when you add in the portion of the browser window that is now unusable because of the ad's existance (the blank spot to the left)...
Unusable space: 488x29 = 14152 pixles.

So. Unusable space + ad space = 32872 pixles
Percentage of opera wasted with ad? 7.68%

I'm not going to give up 7.68% of my browser to an ad! And I'm damn sure not going to pay $40 for a browser.

There's your answer on Opera.

~Will

Exactly, and you can even 'move' the advert so that it appears similar to the way it was in Opera 7.2 (i.e. at the top right). Simply select View > Toolbars > Main bar, and viola (see a PNG shot here). That screenshot is from 7.5, but I assume you can do the same with 8.

One of things I love about Opera is how configurable its interface is. For example, Explorer could learn a thing or two from the way Opera allows buttons to be easily dropped onto toolbars.

Plus the email client (M2) rules.

I love SNES music.. I've got a few OSTs (original soundtracks) dumped to mp3, but they just don't sound the same as the original. Zophar.net has a good archive of SPCs and links to plugins for winamp, etc. Very cool stuff. Also, Skytopia has a lot of interesting and relevant info. Axelay will always be my favorite!

The most interesting question that I've always wanted to know is this; what would happen if one were to separately stimulate the colour cones of our eyes?

Fundamentally, I believe that every colour can be represented by red, green and blue. It's just in the real world, our eyes see a bit of red pollution when we see green and vice versa. In fact, we even see a tiny bit of red pollution in blue! This is due to the fact that our red cones are slightly stimulated when our eyes are hit by blue wavelength light.

See this diagram for spectrum response.

I'm glad to see they're upgrading the colour on displays, as I've always hated the weak saturation of the cyan/green colour in particular (much closer than you'd think to pale grey than actual cyan).

For those that want to cyan should look, try the 'Eclipse of Mars' illusion at this site.