User behaviour Flaws, Software cannot fix all
on
Moderation Ideas
·
· Score: 1
When I am meta moderating, the intuitive thing to do is to glance at the comment, read the first line, and then check fair if the comment has been moderated up for 'interesting' or 'informative'. Sometimes when large amounts of text is being read on subjects that people aren't particularly interestd in, they try to skim. I don't curretly have an answer to this problem. I'm also not too sure this is a bad thing, as everything I've marked as one of the two I's has actually BEEN interesting when I read down further. My intuitions were right.
Is the voting question comments included in meta moderation? I have yet to see one.
The idea of the different reasons for marking up and marking down is interesting. Articles are posted for different reasons. For example, when Stanley Kubrick died, there may have been a funny comment posted about him, and it may have been moderated up for such, but a funny comment is not necessarily the thing people would want to see moderated up to 5. However, it may deserve a 5.
One solution to this problem would be drop down boxes next to all the moderation types for the poster of the news article. The poster would select a priority from 1 to the number of moderation reasons. When the user reads the messages, a '3' that is informative would be read before a '3' that is funny.
This could be prioritized at the user level, but I think it would be more appropriate for the article poster to decide which the priorities should be.
When The Autism Article's comments were read by me, I was dismayed to find a humour post being moderated to the top of the posts, when this was a potentially sensitive and touching issue. (Although there is a place for humour, even there.)
I theorise no consperacies here. Although I acknowledge that games for console systems aren't developed on the consoles, bugs may arise at a later date.
I am willing to bet that the telnet entrance gives the user read-only access to registers, and maybe even snapshots of memory. Such tools could be useful to have memory snapshots show up in a web browser on the same PC as the development going on.
Unfortunately, I haven't followed the specs of the system, but I'll assume also, that Sega may exploit open ports with later addon products.
I did this sort of thing with Babelfish manually months ago. I handed in an essay to my AP Literature 12 teacher with a sense of humour that had been translated to french and back, with an explatation.
I recommend this language scrambling to anyone who picks up on near nonexistant sexual innuendos.:)
I'm not quite sure about some of these mass data storage devices- having 50 megs of data the size of the dust landing on your storage medium would be catastrophic.
Granted, this is a hard drive and operates in a sealed environment, but still, corruption would be so much more absolute, pending there was a failure at all.
Whenever I purchase something online, or enter my name into a computer, I always embellish. Instead of plain "Michael Labbe", I enter something such as "Michael 'The Ninja In The Mist' Labbe". It's interesting to see when these things come back to me.
Such a case of information that I never leaked getting out is my E-Mail address. I'm an at home customer, and I've been getting spammed in a CC list of @home customers whose E-Mail addresses start with 's'. I've never given out my at home email address, as I prefer AtDot.
While something like this can't be expected to work in realtime on every home computer, it may be able to be calculated on the developer's machine, and a memory (brain) dump of the resulting, evolved AI could be used. The pre-rendered aspect comes into play here.
The datafile of the AI that would be passed along to the home user would be unreadable, perhaps, even to the developers.
rtfm.mit.edu contains some very good FAQs from Usenet on Genetic AI.
When Id Software ported Doom to SGI, they made an option for dual CPU owners to use their second CPU for enhanced AI.
I would have liked to have seen that, as well as Doom's v1.1 networked support for three views. If you had a three computer network, you could place a monitor to the left and right and get a very wide view.
The article which was linked from / that was called a counterpoint misses the point of video game AI. While serious AI research includes making robots respond intelligently, most video game AI is the rock and roll of the AI world. Everything needs to be real-time.
This is where fuzzy logic lends itself best. However, there are some very commendable variants in games that I've seen in my theoretical reverse engineering.
Most action games use modes for the AI. If an entity hits a wall, he goes into Finding New Direction Mode. If the entity is in the direct line with the player, he will advance forth.
Every mode repeats throughout the gametics, with exceptions, which are the rules which make them leave the current mode.
Halflife provided an interesting variant with the marine human AI. When they switched modes, the entity played an audio sound. "Hit the deck!" meant they were in grenade lobbing mode. "Establishing Recon" meant that they were in walk-around mode.
Trespasser introduced something that I wanted to implement for a long time: Instictual probabilities. Instead of always switching to certain modes, have the entity's codebase have a few options to go to, at any given time. The probability of each could be pre-defined, or dyanmic. For example, the probability of a dinosaur's attacking you could go far down if he had just eaten. The hunger factor would be at 5%, where the thirst factor would be at 70%. He would most likely travel in a fuzzy-direct route to the nearest water supply (that he knows about).
In 3D shooters, what always impressed me was what enemies did after you drop down dead. In Jedi Knight, some of them did a dance. In Half Life, the humans reported and walked away. I thought it added a touch of realism when the tense monster started walking around casually. Savage mutilations after death with lots of bellowing are always immersive.:)
The key to the illusion of making a computer look like it has more cycles is to pre-render as much as possible. This could work with mode probabilities. If a player is exceptionally good at taking out a behemoth tank with mines and finishing it off with an air strike, for example, the ai probability could opt to go into "defense from behemoth tank with mines and air strike" mode. I have not seen this variant on modes in games yet.
Game AI has to be designed to live in the same CPU as a graphical rendering engine. For this reason, I don't see AI taking entirely new directions, such as Genetic AI being introduced as a replacement for Fuzzy Logic. Rather, I see game AI as getting some welcome variants to the modes such as I said above.
Whether Microsoft had anything to do with the posting of these flames or not, it is something that they would have done good for themselves to have done. Truly, our response to the whole Mindcraft issue is of the nature of herding cats, exactly as Dave Taylor said in a recent interview.
Through our lack of unity, they managed to use our own words against us. Attacking a process, from it's weakest point. Just like the halloween document said.
Kind of ironic, considering the Halloween document was used against Microsoft in many quotes from people.
Oh well, popularity of my OS aside, back to coding for fun...
Abrash was working on Natural Language Parsing at Microsoft, the last I hear. THink of the auto-summarize feature in MS-Word, or the ability to find a word in the spell checker from a wrong word in the document.
I've been a diehard reader of ID Plans from before Hook joined ID Software. Judging by his work on GLide being far superior to Redmond's work on Direct3D at the time, and showing up Microsoft again with Quake 2, the first all-OpenGL hardware accelerated commerical game (GLQuake 1 was an unsupported download) I am willing to wager someone at Microsoft would want this man to fill the shoes of, say, Alex St. John. Farfetched, perhaps. However, Hook has managed to keep his mouth shut in his.plans representing ID software for the past year or so. This is something that Alex St. John could not do, and was fired from Microsoft.
I wish Brian good luck, but I would not be surprised if he shows up at Microsoft, and we see a drastic improvement in proprietary 3D. If that ever happens, I would have wished that it was someone still working at ID calling all the shots on the Direct3D team.:)
More food for thought: This wouldn't be the first ID employee to make the shift over to Microsoft. Abrash did so on the release of WinQuake 1.0.
I am assuming at this point that the performance will be quite different on the TNT. When the OpenGL renderer for Tribes was being designed, one of the main things that held it up was the fact that the engine works by downloading textures to the card when the player even just starts to turn his head around when he is outside.
The first generation 3Dfx could handle that. The TNT could not. The 3Dfx and TNT have different bottlenecks. Although these bottlenecks still apply for OpenGL games, there is the fact that games written with GLide are not designed for other cards, regardless or not of whether they work with them. This has been like that for all of the past titles, and will most likely be like that for a while in the future, even if GLide is now to catch on as a standard.
Speaking of standards, Microsoft has no qualms about adding very high-level features to the HEL of Direct3D. I saw some info about DX7 having the ability to stream light through a window and have it radiate through. With features like that and NURBs, it will be the API to fear if cards try to move its features from the HEL to the HAL. Nonstandard features and proprietary. Carmack mentioned something about proprietary NURB APIs being A Bad Thing.
ID registers ANY domain that might lead to situations that might suck for them down the road.
I remember reading about a talk Carmack was giving, and in it, he started to shoot off names of ideas (I think one of them was Quake 3: Arena), and one of the other employees rushed off right there and then to register the domain.
I decided to teach myself Dvorak last summer because of the potential it had to increase my programming productivity. After 3 to four weeks of frustrating slow typing, I've managed to get myself back up to my QWERTY speed of 120wpm.
120 WPM seems to be my mind's limit, not some inability to physically hit buttons. What have I gained from Dvorak? I make about four times less errors. Also, my hands are often focused along the home row. I find I can sustain 120WPM for longer periods of time without my hands getting tired. Surely, for people like me who enjoy CLIs more than GUIs, Dvorak has been a positive switch.
I am troubled by a point that the article makes near the end. "Ergonomists point out that QWERTY's bad points (such as unbalanced loads on left and right hand; excess loading on the top row) are outweighed by presumably accidental benefits (notably, that alternating hands sequences make for speedier typing.)
One of the features of a Dvorak keyboard is that both hands do as close to equal amounts of work, as far as being reasonable goes with the diversity of the grouping of characters in the english language permits. The largest number of letters used in a single right-hand word is five. The largest number of letters in a left-hand word is four. I cannot remember the atrocious number that was presented to me for QWERTY, but 'sweater' comes to mind almost immediately.
It would seem to me that the author of this piece is using pro-Dvorak logic to back up his thesis. The 'accidental benefits' of the QWERTY keyboard really are fabricated for this article.
I realise that this article focuses on the marketing side of things, but I see people interested in actually choosing keyboards reading this as well.
On a different note, one of the most bothersome things to any gamer is the raw keyboard mode when they have a software remapped Dvorak keyboard. Thanks to Open Source, I modified the svgalib sourcecode and changed my Quake/Quake 2 config files button choices, and now I can use Svgalib in Dvorak.:)
Commodifying software is good in the long run for everyone. Take the Linux kernel and GCC for instance. If they were released under a commerical license, Linux would never have become the financial advantage companies seek right now because the user base would be considerably smaller.
Commercial projects are built with free software. If they get replaced by free software, possibly, the free software they get replaced by will be used to develop future commercial/free software.
Personally, I have no remorse for companies who can't compete on terms of quality, and that includes free(price) open source software. It's software darwinism out there, whether it's a community driven effort that drives out a piece of commercial software, or another piece of commerical software.
The more potential software has to be good, the more we (slashdot) digs it when it's endangering our freedom.
Commerical software, of all types, can only offer us short term success. Before Scitech came along, graphics card companies would have started to feel pressure to release their specs for xfree. Now they can just get Scitech to sign an NDA and say deal with it.
Supporting Scitech will retard the release of new free video card information. Before we get the massive influx of people using Linux who don't know what a binary is in the next year, we should vote with boycotting this closed core software to further our open software agenda, while our votes mean more because there are fewer who would accept Scitech now than there will ever be.
Companies that come in and want a slice of Linux had better not affect me when they change their standards to make their own distros, modify software, etc. I run a slackware (server), Debian (workstation) network in my house and I don't want to see entire agendas for the operating system development fork, however, if it must, it will be to get away from companies who want a slice of my stability, my wallet and my control so they can make capital on the unsuspecting.
I'm worried. This is an operating system that no one wants to compromise the life of, not Duke Nukem. For those who don't know, Duke Nukem 3D came packaged on the CD with Scitech Display Doctor shareware. You could play with it for 30 days, then every time you booted up your computer, you had to wait and all the modeX modes were disabled.
Sounds like a compromise for the greatest OS I've ever enjoyed.
>A.tar.gz of BMPs would probably be smaller than >a lot of single GIFs
Two potential shortcomings with this. One, over how many bytes does gzip check to see duplicate patterns? I remember 'ol pkzip for dos, unless otherwise specified, only checked 64k chunks in the name of compression speed.
Second, tar.gz is made to compress binary files. If you can develop a lossy compression algorithm, one that is right-brain recognizable, then you do not have to worry about being as accurate with the data as gzip would be. This is why gzded BMP's don't compare.
Here's an idea that I haven't heard of yet to help compress still images.
What if images came in packs, and after being compressed (using an algorithm:), I haven't had any experience with this yet) they were compressed to find patterns against each other as well? This would be perfect for webpages which show more than one image at a time anyway.
I understand mpeg does something like this, but that adds the fourth dimension (time, there is no third dimension here:) )
I have a friend who used to be able to type 90wpm, but he got a MS-Ergo board with his new computer, and became optimistic about learning it because his typing slowed down immediately. I'm not sure if this applies to all people or Ergo boards, but my friend never ended up getting his typing past 70wpm again.
Otoh, when I switched to Dvorak, I felt less effort to find common keys as my hands don't really move as much anymore. I can type at my mind's speed limit without my hands getting tired for longer. (120 wpm, but I could type that in qwerty before I switched. Less errors, tho)
I still honour odd tidbits from e-mail, the www and usenet and put it in $HOME/texts, but this page has gotta be the first that made me recognize that other people identified.
It used to be so much fun, someone bringing up an obscure topic, and me saying, "i got a textfile on that.":)
By the way things have been going for Linux, I'm guessing that the binary will have the option to link with GLide, as most of the MesaGL stuff would be superfluous. Case and point: NURBs.
When 3Dfx released GLide for Linux, I noticed quite the speed increase in my games.
I, for one, have purchased every Id Software game since Doom, and I don't plan on stopping with Quake three.
Ever notice most free software is high on functionality, but low on art and creative content? High level software tends to be less free, more often.
Fact is, last thing is I need to do is have another reason to install an OS that just gives me a hard time with my hardware. I refuse to buy any software or hardware that does not work in my OS, and I won't install hundreds of megabytes of redmond-generated gunk to do it. Because of the support in Linux these days, I can still get away with doing 90% of what I want with my computer.
Slashdot Mirror
When I am meta moderating, the intuitive thing to do is to glance at the comment, read the first line, and then check fair if the comment has been moderated up for 'interesting' or 'informative'. Sometimes when large amounts of text is being read on subjects that people aren't particularly interestd in, they try to skim. I don't curretly have an answer to this problem. I'm also not too sure this is a bad thing, as everything I've marked as one of the two I's has actually BEEN interesting when I read down further. My intuitions were right.
Is the voting question comments included in meta moderation? I have yet to see one.
The idea of the different reasons for marking up and marking down is interesting. Articles are posted for different reasons. For example, when Stanley Kubrick died, there may have been a funny comment posted about him, and it may have been moderated up for such, but a funny comment is not necessarily the thing people would want to see moderated up to 5. However, it may deserve a 5.
One solution to this problem would be drop down boxes next to all the moderation types for the poster of the news article. The poster would select a priority from 1 to the number of moderation reasons. When the user reads the messages, a '3' that is informative would be read before a '3' that is funny.
This could be prioritized at the user level, but I think it would be more appropriate for the article poster to decide which the priorities should be.
When The Autism Article's comments were read by me, I was dismayed to find a humour post being moderated to the top of the posts, when this was a potentially sensitive and touching issue. (Although there is a place for humour, even there.)
I theorise no consperacies here. Although I acknowledge that games for console systems aren't developed on the consoles, bugs may arise at a later date.
I am willing to bet that the telnet entrance gives the user read-only access to registers, and maybe even snapshots of memory. Such tools could be useful to have memory snapshots show up in a web browser on the same PC as the development going on.
Unfortunately, I haven't followed the specs of the system, but I'll assume also, that Sega may exploit open ports with later addon products.
I did this sort of thing with Babelfish manually months ago. I handed in an essay to my AP Literature 12 teacher with a sense of humour that had been translated to french and back, with an explatation.
:)
I recommend this language scrambling to anyone who picks up on near nonexistant sexual innuendos.
I'm not quite sure about some of these mass data storage devices- having 50 megs of data the size of the dust landing on your storage medium would be catastrophic.
Granted, this is a hard drive and operates in a sealed environment, but still, corruption would be so much more absolute, pending there was a failure at all.
Whenever I purchase something online, or enter my name into a computer, I always embellish. Instead of plain "Michael Labbe", I enter something such as "Michael 'The Ninja In The Mist' Labbe". It's interesting to see when these things come back to me.
Such a case of information that I never leaked getting out is my E-Mail address. I'm an at home customer, and I've been getting spammed in a CC list of @home customers whose E-Mail addresses start with 's'. I've never given out my at home email address, as I prefer AtDot.
While something like this can't be expected to work in realtime on every home computer, it may be able to be calculated on the developer's machine, and a memory (brain) dump of the resulting, evolved AI could be used. The pre-rendered aspect comes into play here.
The datafile of the AI that would be passed along to the home user would be unreadable, perhaps, even to the developers.
rtfm.mit.edu contains some very good FAQs from Usenet on Genetic AI.
When Id Software ported Doom to SGI, they made an option for dual CPU owners to use their second CPU for enhanced AI.
I would have liked to have seen that, as well as Doom's v1.1 networked support for three views. If you had a three computer network, you could place a monitor to the left and right and get a very wide view.
The article which was linked from / that was called a counterpoint misses the point of video game AI. While serious AI research includes making robots respond intelligently, most video game AI is the rock and roll of the AI world. Everything needs to be real-time.
:)
This is where fuzzy logic lends itself best. However, there are some very commendable variants in games that I've seen in my theoretical reverse engineering.
Most action games use modes for the AI. If an entity hits a wall, he goes into Finding New Direction Mode. If the entity is in the direct line with the player, he will advance forth.
Every mode repeats throughout the gametics, with exceptions, which are the rules which make them leave the current mode.
Halflife provided an interesting variant with the marine human AI. When they switched modes, the entity played an audio sound. "Hit the deck!" meant they were in grenade lobbing mode. "Establishing Recon" meant that they were in walk-around mode.
Trespasser introduced something that I wanted to implement for a long time: Instictual probabilities. Instead of always switching to certain modes, have the entity's codebase have a few options to go to, at any given time. The probability of each could be pre-defined, or dyanmic. For example, the probability of a dinosaur's attacking you could go far down if he had just eaten. The hunger factor would be at 5%, where the thirst factor would be at 70%. He would most likely travel in a fuzzy-direct route to the nearest water supply (that he knows about).
In 3D shooters, what always impressed me was what enemies did after you drop down dead. In Jedi Knight, some of them did a dance. In Half Life, the humans reported and walked away. I thought it added a touch of realism when the tense monster started walking around casually. Savage mutilations after death with lots of bellowing are always immersive.
The key to the illusion of making a computer look like it has more cycles is to pre-render as much as possible. This could work with mode probabilities. If a player is exceptionally good at taking out a behemoth tank with mines and finishing it off with an air strike, for example, the ai probability could opt to go into "defense from behemoth tank with mines and air strike" mode. I have not seen this variant on modes in games yet.
Game AI has to be designed to live in the same CPU as a graphical rendering engine. For this reason, I don't see AI taking entirely new directions, such as Genetic AI being introduced as a replacement for Fuzzy Logic. Rather, I see game AI as getting some welcome variants to the modes such as I said above.
Whether Microsoft had anything to do with the posting of these flames or not, it is something that they would have done good for themselves to have done. Truly, our response to the whole Mindcraft issue is of the nature of herding cats, exactly as Dave Taylor said in a recent interview.
Through our lack of unity, they managed to use our own words against us. Attacking a process, from it's weakest point. Just like the halloween document said.
Kind of ironic, considering the Halloween document was used against Microsoft in many quotes from people.
Oh well, popularity of my OS aside, back to coding for fun...
On the contrary. Two companies are not allowed to cooperate and combine to create a monopoly according to antitrust laws.
Abrash was working on Natural Language Parsing at Microsoft, the last I hear. THink of the auto-summarize feature in MS-Word, or the ability to find a word in the spell checker from a wrong word in the document.
I never once mentioned money as the motive.
I've been a diehard reader of ID Plans from before Hook joined ID Software. Judging by his work on GLide being far superior to Redmond's work on Direct3D at the time, and showing up Microsoft again with Quake 2, the first all-OpenGL hardware accelerated commerical game (GLQuake 1 was an unsupported download) I am willing to wager someone at Microsoft would want this man to fill the shoes of, say, Alex St. John. Farfetched, perhaps. However, Hook has managed to keep his mouth shut in his .plans representing ID software for the past year or so. This is something that Alex St. John could not do, and was fired from Microsoft.
:)
I wish Brian good luck, but I would not be surprised if he shows up at Microsoft, and we see a drastic improvement in proprietary 3D. If that ever happens, I would have wished that it was someone still working at ID calling all the shots on the Direct3D team.
More food for thought: This wouldn't be the first ID employee to make the shift over to Microsoft. Abrash did so on the release of WinQuake 1.0.
I am assuming at this point that the performance will be quite different on the TNT. When the OpenGL renderer for Tribes was being designed, one of the main things that held it up was the fact that the engine works by downloading textures to the card when the player even just starts to turn his head around when he is outside.
The first generation 3Dfx could handle that. The TNT could not. The 3Dfx and TNT have different bottlenecks. Although these bottlenecks still apply for OpenGL games, there is the fact that games written with GLide are not designed for other cards, regardless or not of whether they work with them. This has been like that for all of the past titles, and will most likely be like that for a while in the future, even if GLide is now to catch on as a standard.
Speaking of standards, Microsoft has no qualms about adding very high-level features to the HEL of Direct3D. I saw some info about DX7 having the ability to stream light through a window and have it radiate through. With features like that and NURBs, it will be the API to fear if cards try to move its features from the HEL to the HAL. Nonstandard features and proprietary. Carmack mentioned something about proprietary NURB APIs being A Bad Thing.
ID registers ANY domain that might lead to situations that might suck for them down the road.
I remember reading about a talk Carmack was giving, and in it, he started to shoot off names of ideas (I think one of them was Quake 3: Arena), and one of the other employees rushed off right there and then to register the domain.
I decided to teach myself Dvorak last summer because of the potential it had to increase my programming productivity. After 3 to four weeks of frustrating slow typing, I've managed to get myself back up to my QWERTY speed of 120wpm.
:)
120 WPM seems to be my mind's limit, not some inability to physically hit buttons. What have I gained from Dvorak? I make about four times less errors. Also, my hands are often focused along the home row. I find I can sustain 120WPM for longer periods of time without my hands getting tired. Surely, for people like me who enjoy CLIs more than GUIs, Dvorak has been a positive switch.
I am troubled by a point that the article makes near the end. "Ergonomists point out that QWERTY's bad points (such as unbalanced loads on left and right hand; excess loading on the top row) are outweighed by presumably accidental benefits (notably, that alternating hands sequences make for speedier typing.)
One of the features of a Dvorak keyboard is that both hands do as close to equal amounts of work, as far as being reasonable goes with the diversity of the grouping of characters in the english language permits. The largest number of letters used in a single right-hand word is five. The largest number of letters in a left-hand word is four. I cannot remember the atrocious number that was presented to me for QWERTY, but 'sweater' comes to mind almost immediately.
It would seem to me that the author of this piece is using pro-Dvorak logic to back up his thesis. The 'accidental benefits' of the QWERTY keyboard really are fabricated for this article.
I realise that this article focuses on the marketing side of things, but I see people interested in actually choosing keyboards reading this as well.
On a different note, one of the most bothersome things to any gamer is the raw keyboard mode when they have a software remapped Dvorak keyboard. Thanks to Open Source, I modified the svgalib sourcecode and changed my Quake/Quake 2 config files button choices, and now I can use Svgalib in Dvorak.
Commodifying software is good in the long run for everyone. Take the Linux kernel and GCC for instance. If they were released under a commerical license, Linux would never have become the financial advantage companies seek right now because the user base would be considerably smaller.
Commercial projects are built with free software. If they get replaced by free software, possibly, the free software they get replaced by will be used to develop future commercial/free software.
Personally, I have no remorse for companies who can't compete on terms of quality, and that includes free(price) open source software. It's software darwinism out there, whether it's a community driven effort that drives out a piece of commercial software, or another piece of commerical software.
There have been hints of a game called 'Doom 2000' being the next thing that Id Software creates after Quake 3.
The more potential software has to be good, the more we (slashdot) digs it when it's endangering our freedom.
Commerical software, of all types, can only offer us short term success. Before Scitech came along, graphics card companies would have started to feel pressure to release their specs for xfree. Now they can just get Scitech to sign an NDA and say deal with it.
Supporting Scitech will retard the release of new free video card information. Before we get the massive influx of people using Linux who don't know what a binary is in the next year, we should vote with boycotting this closed core software to further our open software agenda, while our votes mean more because there are fewer who would accept Scitech now than there will ever be.
Companies that come in and want a slice of Linux had better not affect me when they change their standards to make their own distros, modify software, etc. I run a slackware (server), Debian (workstation) network in my house and I don't want to see entire agendas for the operating system development fork, however, if it must, it will be to get away from companies who want a slice of my stability, my wallet and my control so they can make capital on the unsuspecting.
I'm worried. This is an operating system that no one wants to compromise the life of, not Duke Nukem.
For those who don't know, Duke Nukem 3D came packaged on the CD with Scitech Display Doctor shareware. You could play with it for 30 days, then every time you booted up your computer, you had to wait and all the modeX modes were disabled.
Sounds like a compromise for the greatest OS I've ever enjoyed.
>A .tar.gz of BMPs would probably be smaller than >a lot of single GIFs
Two potential shortcomings with this. One, over how many bytes does gzip check to see duplicate patterns? I remember 'ol pkzip for dos, unless otherwise specified, only checked 64k chunks in the name of compression speed.
Second, tar.gz is made to compress binary files. If you can develop a lossy compression algorithm, one that is right-brain recognizable, then you do not have to worry about being as accurate with the data as gzip would be. This is why gzded BMP's don't compare.
Here's an idea that I haven't heard of yet to help compress still images.
:), I haven't had any experience with this yet) they were compressed to find patterns against each other as well? This would be perfect for webpages which show more than one image at a time anyway.
:) )
What if images came in packs, and after being compressed (using an algorithm
I understand mpeg does something like this, but that adds the fourth dimension (time, there is no third dimension here
I have a friend who used to be able to type 90wpm,
but he got a MS-Ergo board with his new computer,
and became optimistic about learning it because his typing slowed down immediately. I'm not sure if this applies to all people or Ergo boards, but my friend never ended up getting his typing past 70wpm again.
Otoh, when I switched to Dvorak, I felt less effort to find common keys as my hands don't really move as much anymore. I can type at my mind's speed limit without my hands getting tired for longer. (120 wpm, but I could type that in qwerty before I switched. Less errors, tho)
I still honour odd tidbits from e-mail, the www and usenet and put it in $HOME/texts, but this page has gotta be the first that made me recognize that other people identified.
:)
It used to be so much fun, someone bringing up an obscure topic, and me saying, "i got a textfile on that."
By the way things have been going for Linux, I'm guessing that the binary will have the option to link with GLide, as most of the MesaGL stuff would be superfluous. Case and point: NURBs.
When 3Dfx released GLide for Linux, I noticed quite the speed increase in my games.
I, for one, have purchased every Id Software game since Doom, and I don't plan on stopping with Quake three.
Ever notice most free software is high on functionality, but low on art and creative content? High level software tends to be less free, more often.
Fact is, last thing is I need to do is have another reason to install an OS that just gives me a hard time with my hardware. I refuse to buy any software or hardware that does not work in my OS, and I won't install hundreds of megabytes of redmond-generated gunk to do it. Because of the support in Linux these days, I can still get away with doing 90% of what I want with my computer.