What would you consider a better quality representation of a song, the whole song in near-CD quality or a short snippet in CD quality?
But that's not what I'm getting at. My point is that with lossy compression, it's possible to have a smaller or equal size file with the whole song in *better* than CD quality if you compress it down from a high quality source. (say, the original 96KHz/24bit studio file)
Compression doesn't always mean producing the same or lower quality at a lower bitrate. It can also be used to produce *higher* quality at the *same* bitrate.
For whatever given bitrate you're willing to deal with, it _always_ makes sense to perform lossy compression. A good compression system running at 700kb/s (1/2 CD audio's bitrate) could have quality far superior to CD.
Sorry, you caught me in beligerent mode. I figured you were accusing one browser or the other of being broken because the images were different.
when i look at some website, i'd like too see it just the same no matter what browser i am using. Pictures included.
You'll never ever fix pathological cases like this one, unless every browser uses the _same_ rendering code. (On the same hardware, for that matter...) You can always exploit differences in implementation.
are there still standards?
Sure! If you use conservative HTML 3.2, or even most of 4.0, you can show a page that looks nearly identical on most every browser. Oh, you want to use your new Java-Flash-PNG-Javascript-whizbang navigation system? Sorry. If you want nonstandard functionality, you have to take advantage of nonstandard features.
What people seem to have trouble understanding is that most sites that are "incompatible" with one browser or another are that way because of a _conscious decision_ on the part of the authors!
And I saw the elephant. Does that mean my browser "lost"?:)
And, by the way, check out this page, try to see it from both Netscape and MSIE and let's talk about 'malformed content' after, ok?
Oh, for heaven's sake. You're bitching because there's no "standard" for image resampling on the web?
It's a 300x150 image, and the IMG tag says to display it at 150x150. If your browser uses nearest-neighbor resampling, you get a different image depending on how the algorithm chooses the samples. It's got absolutely nothing to do with malformed content.
Of course, they all should be using bicubic resmapling, but that's beside the point.
Reading over that list, the only W3C standard I see that Mozilla dosen't support is PICS
What list of W3 standards were you consulting that did not include any XML? It's the biggie for me. XML DOM, XSLT, XPath, XML Schema, XML Namespaces. It's all there, and it's fast.
True, it's not a packaged part of the browser yet, but it's a fully supported release.
I started using it for XML editing, and it's turned out to be a decent HTML editor for me. Still just a text editor, but with validation on save, close tag insertion when you enter a tag, and some other niceties.
This would be a biting and insightful comment if Internet Explorer didn't have the most comprehensive support for W3C standards of any browser in existence.
How about not refusing to draw anything because an element isn't closed?
This is part of the reason that web browsers suck: because people demand that they render broken content "nicely". I would much rather they render correct content properly, than do a half-assed job of rendering everything. "Best guessing" is precisely what leads to the non-deterministic behaviour the original poster complained of.
If malformed content doesn't show up correctly, it's the author's fault, not the browser's.
Design a client that improves your skill at "Go". Or at a Role-Playing game which requires Role-playing (as opposed to roll-playing i.e. hack and slash).
Okay, so what you're saying is that you're ok with the idea that these are the ONLY games we should ever play. Have fun in your teeny-tiny little world!
2) Designing the interface between the client and server so that the server implements the "laws of nature", and the client implements the "human intelligence."
Most definitely. Game designers learned this a while back, and have been pretty good about designing client-server games this way.
It's not that simple. The trouble with making the server "god" is that it dramatically increases the amount of data that you have to send over the network. If you can't trust the client to do or infer anything for itself, you have to send it a complete state refresh with every update. This effectively makes real-time internet games impossible.
The correct approach is to make the client as smart as possible -- so that improving the client becomes a genuine challenge. Then, if improvements are made to the client that create an "unfair" advantage, those improvements can be rolled into the next version of the client, not banned. Sure, it becomes an "arms race", but eventually everyone is going to run into the same walls, and the game remains fair.
Fairness is not the ultimate objective. Fun is. Giving everybody the same cheats makes for a lousy game, no matter how "fair".
In a well-designed client/server game, a "smartened up" client with a human controlling it should, in general, be able to defeat a "smartened up" client that is running on autopilot. [...] If not, then your game suffers from a defect -- it doesn't require human-level intelligence to win.
You haven't solved any problems here, you've simply narrowed the scope of what you consider "legitimate" games to some arcane variant of Core Wars, where you're no longer playing a game directly, but rather trying to program and drive the smartest robot. This could be fun, but surely there's more to life than this one kind of game!
I wonder if the only solution to the cheating problem is simply to start establishing the trustworthiness of individuals, and allowing only them to have access to the game. I don't know if we can ever solve an ethics problem with technology.
Hopefully this is something that will be solved in time, as USB becomes the default connection for keyboards and mice, as it should be. Then, like Apple figured out ages ago, you can put hubs in your monitor & keyboard, so you've always got some handy ports.
My monitor has an embedded USB hub in the base, it's a really nice convenience.
The latitute/longitude values can be mapped against a database of road segments--and that's where the problem begins.
There are probably smarter ways to accomplish the goal. A fairly simple area-based system would probably be just as useful, and be much simpler to implement. (i.e. limit is 50kph within the city limits, expect for 100kph along these freeway vectors, and 30kph on these vectors in front of schools) There's no need to map every last mall entrance.
...Which means that you can't leverage your already existing tools (e.g. grep) to extract data.
Actually, what it means is that you can use a high-performance, industry standard query language like SQL to extract data, instead of having to kluge together a patchwork of file and stream manipulation tools.
If you've got the cash to pick up a new XBR Wega, then you're probably aiming a bit higher than this, but I'm very happy with my Creative Labs (Cambridge Soundworks) DTT2500 setup. It was orginally intended to be a speaker setup for my computer, but quickly found a better place framing my TV.
For CAN$350 (I think that's in the "bus fare" range in US currency), I got a complete 6 channel Dolby Digital speaker setup, with decoder. It's perfect for those that are simply interested in getting decent digital audio for DVD, as opposed to a general purpose sound system.
The main weakness of the system is the power. It's not very loud, the sub in particular. But it's fine for a small room, if you're not commited to seeing ripples in your own drinks while watching Jurassic Park. It does have an output to which you can connect a proper powered subwoofer, and I may invest in that someday soon.
The quality is good though, to my decidedly non-audiophile ears. Certainly it's a decent system if you want digital DVD audio without having to invest in a full stereo system.
3dfx basically took a Voodoo 2 and added the Banshee extentions to it, which NO ONE used, so it's now basically an overpriced Voodoo 2.
It's not even that. It only has a single TMU, so performance in multitexturing games (i.e. all of them) is worse than V2.
The Banshee was yet another product showcasing 3dfx's utter lack of desire to improve their technology. They stunned the world with their amazing original Voodoo Graphics chipset, and then coasted right up 'till today. They incrementally improved the original (adding 2D, adding 32 bit color) ONLY long after the rest of the industry forced them to realize that these features were required.
3dfx arguably gave birth to the consumer 3D industry. But after delivery, they sure did a lousy job of rearing their child.
Slashdot Mirror
Check the updates. They've had D3D and OGL support for Unreal 1 for some time.
But that's not what I'm getting at. My point is that with lossy compression, it's possible to have a smaller or equal size file with the whole song in *better* than CD quality if you compress it down from a high quality source. (say, the original 96KHz/24bit studio file)
Compression doesn't always mean producing the same or lower quality at a lower bitrate. It can also be used to produce *higher* quality at the *same* bitrate.
For whatever given bitrate you're willing to deal with, it _always_ makes sense to perform lossy compression. A good compression system running at 700kb/s (1/2 CD audio's bitrate) could have quality far superior to CD.
when i look at some website, i'd like too see it just the same no matter what browser i am using. Pictures included.
You'll never ever fix pathological cases like this one, unless every browser uses the _same_ rendering code. (On the same hardware, for that matter...) You can always exploit differences in implementation.
are there still standards?
Sure! If you use conservative HTML 3.2, or even most of 4.0, you can show a page that looks nearly identical on most every browser. Oh, you want to use your new Java-Flash-PNG-Javascript-whizbang navigation system? Sorry. If you want nonstandard functionality, you have to take advantage of nonstandard features.
What people seem to have trouble understanding is that most sites that are "incompatible" with one browser or another are that way because of a _conscious decision_ on the part of the authors!
And I saw the elephant. Does that mean my browser "lost"? :)
Oh, for heaven's sake. You're bitching because there's no "standard" for image resampling on the web?
It's a 300x150 image, and the IMG tag says to display it at 150x150. If your browser uses nearest-neighbor resampling, you get a different image depending on how the algorithm chooses the samples. It's got absolutely nothing to do with malformed content.
Of course, they all should be using bicubic resmapling, but that's beside the point.
What list of W3 standards were you consulting that did not include any XML? It's the biggie for me. XML DOM, XSLT, XPath, XML Schema, XML Namespaces. It's all there, and it's fast.
True, it's not a packaged part of the browser yet, but it's a fully supported release.
I started using it for XML editing, and it's turned out to be a decent HTML editor for me. Still just a text editor, but with validation on save, close tag insertion when you enter a tag, and some other niceties.
Er, that was me, not Alan.
And I do regret it -- if I could edit the original, I'd change "most comprehensive of any browser" to "...very comprehensive support...".
vs.
I'm impressed that Mozilla has come so far in it's ability to render HTML, but that's only a small subset of the W3C stuff.
But now I'm confused. IE is better than most browsers as displaying broken HTML -- why is he mad at MS?
I use an editor that forces XML compliance when I write HTML. So no, I never get bit by that. :)
This would be a biting and insightful comment if Internet Explorer didn't have the most comprehensive support for W3C standards of any browser in existence.
This is part of the reason that web browsers suck: because people demand that they render broken content "nicely". I would much rather they render correct content properly, than do a half-assed job of rendering everything. "Best guessing" is precisely what leads to the non-deterministic behaviour the original poster complained of.
If malformed content doesn't show up correctly, it's the author's fault, not the browser's.
Okay, so what you're saying is that you're ok with the idea that these are the ONLY games we should ever play. Have fun in your teeny-tiny little world!
Most definitely. Game designers learned this a while back, and have been pretty good about designing client-server games this way.
It's not that simple. The trouble with making the server "god" is that it dramatically increases the amount of data that you have to send over the network. If you can't trust the client to do or infer anything for itself, you have to send it a complete state refresh with every update. This effectively makes real-time internet games impossible.
Fairness is not the ultimate objective. Fun is. Giving everybody the same cheats makes for a lousy game, no matter how "fair".
In a well-designed client/server game, a "smartened up" client with a human controlling it should, in general, be able to defeat a "smartened up" client that is running on autopilot. [...] If not, then your game suffers from a defect -- it doesn't require human-level intelligence to win.
You haven't solved any problems here, you've simply narrowed the scope of what you consider "legitimate" games to some arcane variant of Core Wars, where you're no longer playing a game directly, but rather trying to program and drive the smartest robot. This could be fun, but surely there's more to life than this one kind of game!
I wonder if the only solution to the cheating problem is simply to start establishing the trustworthiness of individuals, and allowing only them to have access to the game. I don't know if we can ever solve an ethics problem with technology.
If only that mattered.
Yeah, eventually it'll end up like those fistfights we see every year between the Nobel candidates.
Hopefully this is something that will be solved in time, as USB becomes the default connection for keyboards and mice, as it should be. Then, like Apple figured out ages ago, you can put hubs in your monitor & keyboard, so you've always got some handy ports.
My monitor has an embedded USB hub in the base, it's a really nice convenience.
<squeaky voice>"Put down your weapon. You have twenty seconds to comply."</squeaky voice>
There are probably smarter ways to accomplish the goal. A fairly simple area-based system would probably be just as useful, and be much simpler to implement. (i.e. limit is 50kph within the city limits, expect for 100kph along these freeway vectors, and 30kph on these vectors in front of schools) There's no need to map every last mall entrance.
Actually, what it means is that you can use a high-performance, industry standard query language like SQL to extract data, instead of having to kluge together a patchwork of file and stream manipulation tools.
Re:Budweiser, Pepsi
That subject is proof positive that the advertisers have accomplished exactly what they were trying to do.
For CAN$350 (I think that's in the "bus fare" range in US currency), I got a complete 6 channel Dolby Digital speaker setup, with decoder. It's perfect for those that are simply interested in getting decent digital audio for DVD, as opposed to a general purpose sound system.
The main weakness of the system is the power. It's not very loud, the sub in particular. But it's fine for a small room, if you're not commited to seeing ripples in your own drinks while watching Jurassic Park. It does have an output to which you can connect a proper powered subwoofer, and I may invest in that someday soon.
The quality is good though, to my decidedly non-audiophile ears. Certainly it's a decent system if you want digital DVD audio without having to invest in a full stereo system.
It's not even that. It only has a single TMU, so performance in multitexturing games (i.e. all of them) is worse than V2.
The Banshee was yet another product showcasing 3dfx's utter lack of desire to improve their technology. They stunned the world with their amazing original Voodoo Graphics chipset, and then coasted right up 'till today. They incrementally improved the original (adding 2D, adding 32 bit color) ONLY long after the rest of the industry forced them to realize that these features were required.
3dfx arguably gave birth to the consumer 3D industry. But after delivery, they sure did a lousy job of rearing their child.