In my experience pngs have larger file sizes most of the time.
I don't see how. PNG's Deflate packs pixels tighter than GIF's LZW.
Perhaps this is not a matter of the file format but of the programs i use(d).
How much larger? If you're talking 10%, try not saving gamma or physical resolution and cranking the compression up to maximum. (These options are presented in GIMP for Windows's Save As... dialog.) If you are trying to blend a non-transparent PNG into your bgcolor (necessary to make PNG look good in netscape 4.x), you don't want to save gamma anyway.
OTOH, if your PNG file is twice as big as your GIF file, convert the images to indexed (palette) color before saving them, as your GIF export plug-in is probably doing this automatically, whereas your PNG plug-in is preserving 24-bit color.
A 256-color PNG image is smaller than the equivalent GIF if you don't include information on physical resolution or gamma because the Deflation algorithm packs pixels more efficiently than LZW.
If an alternative format is created that's superior
PNG can do 24-bit images with alpha transparency and gamma correction. It's already replacing TIFF in many domains.
and the methods to create/view media in that format is easily available
GIMP for Windows is free software and can create PNG images. Mozilla and IE have good support for PNG.
then it has a chance of being adopted.
I already use PNG for all non-animated non-photoreal images on web sites I run. As soon as GIMP exports MNG (mozilla already reads it), I'll convert my animated images.
IMHO, the primary thing holding up use of PNG is that PNG cannot represent animated banner ads, and its animated cousin (MNG) doesn't work in IE 5.x for Windows.
steven halking now cant make phone calls to order a pizza now can he, or 911.
Except the FCC will probably look the other way in the case of Prof. Hawking or of other individuals using assistive speech devices. 47 USC 227(b)(2) gives the agency every right to do so:
The Commission... (B) may, by rule or order, exempt from the requirements of paragraph (1)(B) of this subsection, subject to such conditions as the Commission may prescribe - (i) calls that are not made for a commercial purpose; and (ii) such classes or categories of calls made for commercial purposes as the Commission determines (I) will not adversely affect the privacy rights that
this section is intended to protect; and (II) do not include the transmission of any unsolicited advertisement
This pretty much covers most common types of calls that an individual using assistive speech devices would place.
Actually they will flush after a period of inactivity (say 2-3 seconds). But you never know exactly when the power outage will come
Some drives have a capacitor to give them just enough power to write out the contents of the cache before they lose power or to hold the contents of the cache until power is restored.
Bochs is an emulator. TuxNES is an emulator. DGen is an emulator. SNES9x is an emulator. Transmeta's Crusoe uses Code Morphing, which is an emulator. But WINE is not an emulator but "an implementation of the Windows 3.x and Win32 APIs on top of X and Unix. Think of Wine as a Windows compatibility layer" for FreeBSD, Linux, and Solaris. It's also a complete Windows application server that uses thin clients called X11 terminals.
Question: Is there any loss of quality in converting from the CD native ".cda" files to the ".wav" format?
.cda files are shortcuts to raw data stored in a Red Book track. This data is 16-bit stereo linear PCM at 44,100 samples per second. The most common version of the RIFF WAVE (.wav) format can encode (8*D)-bit C-channel linear PCM at F Hz, of which 16-bit stereo linear PCM at 44,100 Hz is a special case. (There are extensions to RIFF WAVE to handle MPEG layer 3 audio, but I'll skip those.) A Red Book extractor such as CDex or cdparanoia converts the raw data to the wav data by simply reading each 2,352-byte Red Book sector, changing the order of the bytes to fit RIFF WAVE's little-endian channel-interleaved data encoding, and writing the sector to a file.
but if you would then downsample the 48 back to 44.1 I don't know what the algorithms would do.
The inverse fourier transform of the rect function (1 for |f| < x; 0 otherwise) is sin(Pi*x*f)/(Pi*x*f), a "cardinal sine" or "sinc" function. Convolving an input sample with sinc (either in FFT or in FIR space) will remove ALL energy above frequency f, which is generally set at just below the Nyquist rate (half the sample rate) and, if implemented well, will not add appreciable noise to the signal beyond the -90 dB SNR of 16-bit linear PCM.
when you read in raw mode, you also get the correction data. So it's a simple matter of taking the data you got and correcting it in software
CD-ROM stores 75 sectors per second. Red Book sectors contain 2,352 bytes, or (44100 samples/chn/sec) * (2 channels) * (2 bytes/sample) / (75 sectors/sec). CD-ROM sectors recorded in mode 1 (the vast majority of computer CD-ROMs) contain 2048 bytes of data and about 300 bytes of error correction data. For more information, read http://www.eaglevisiontv.com/General_Information/C DROM_Formats/body_cdrom_formats.html.
missing features (32-bit color and large texture support being two of the most blatant omissions)
3dfx cards supported 256x256 textures. Are you talking about a texture larger than that for a single polygon? If you're not, you can simply use multiple textures for one object, as in the 8- and 16-bit world where a sprite was made of several smaller tiles.
Yes it does, to the tune of USD $320. (I'm ignoring Windows ME pricing, as its reliability is subpar.) If you have FreeBSD, Solaris x86, Linux, or any other non-Windows operating system, you have to buy Windows before being able to use IE, as IE is under a "supplemental EULA" that gives no rights to those who do not have a valid Windows license.
You had to pick which sound card you wanted to lock your life into. Adlib? SoundBlaster? ELS? I can't hardly remember anymore.
Sound Blaster became popular partially because it could run all the old music software that used the Adlib's Yamaha OPL2 synth.
ATI and nVidia *are* arguing about standards right now.
So why aren't they arguing about a standard OpenGL extension? Why does it have to be Wintel and DirectEcch? Don't they know that NVIDIA already has a near monopoly on Wintel gaming <cough>Xbox</cough>?
HTML rendering between the two browsers haven't exactly meshed.
Most sites are designed around IE 5, but I see very few problems with Mozilla 0.9.x aka Netscape 6.1, except for some Really Stupid Sites(tm) that use VBS instead of ECMAScript. HTML is not designed to be a pixel-perfect layout language; it's a structural markup language. For layout use CSS, which supports pixel-perfect positioning and is supported in current versions of IE (5+) and Netscape (6+). Except for a few glitches in IE such as inserting an extra 3px of left and right margins into the CSS box property float: and treating a newline before </div> as whitespace (contrary to the SGML spec), Mozilla and IE look pretty much the same.
I agree that Netscape 4.x is sucks. Users can't turn off CSS (cascading stylesheets) without turning off CSS (client-side scripting), and the buggy implementations of the parts of CSS it does support will only make sites look ugly.
copyright lasts for (IIRC) 50 years from the death of the creator (although I have a funny feeling that it is longer now)
The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act[?], passed under the same conditions as DMCA (double cover of Kosovo and Lewinsky, lots of corporate bribes, unaccountable voice vote), extended copyright to life + 71 for freelance works written after 1978 and 96 years for all other works. It pretty much amounts to welfare for GGM[?] companies.
US gov wanting to protect Micky Mouse
I'm not sure that's even possible anymore, as Mickey Mouse has fallen into PD because Disney screwed up the copyright notice on the first couple films with Mickey Mouse.
Keep extending the application as long as you can. This allows you to Extend the life of your patent. You can have an application in for 20 years but the clock doesn't start ticking until it's awarded... This is now no more
New U.S. patents now expire 20 years after filing (instead of 17 years after they're granted) to prevent just this type of abuse. Our lawmakers aren't completely clueless.
grandfathered
This is what bugs me about another GGM[?] issue: copyright term extension. The Walt Disney Company was able to grandfather its old works into the new 96-year copyright terms when there was no good reason to except for greed, as extending the term of an existing work's monopoly does nothing "To promote the progress of science and useful arts." However, some doubts have been cast as to whether Mickey Mouse's likeness is under copyright at all because of an oversight in the copyright notices for the first two Mickey Mouse films.
See what gets used and invented in the industry during that time. Amend your patent to include these technologies.
Outright fraud. A patent application includes an affidavit to the effect: "I/we invented everything described in the claims." This type of fraud can get the applicant thrown in prison for the life of the patent.
(Note: In this discussion, I use "ROMs" to mean "software binaries in any of the common formats used for ROM images.")
It says (at Nintendo's site): Are all Nintendo ROMS on the Internet Illegal?
The exact text of a listed question and answer:
"Does Nintendo Think Emulation Companies Promote Piracy? Why?" Yes. The
only purpose of Nintendo video game emulators are to play illegal copied games from the Internet.
(Emphasis added by yerricde.) Nintendo is implying that programs that emulate Nintendo game consoles can emulate only proprietary software not licensed for redistribution. For example, the 4 kilobyte Game Genie ROM is free(beer)ware, and many popular emulators can handle Game Genie format patches. (Ignore for a moment the fact that Nintendo did not authorize the Game Genie patcher.)
They are saying that pirating THEIR software is illegal, which, well, it is.
According to Nintendo's legal page, Nintendo is hiding behind a mask work[?] copyright on the semiconductor ROM chips that contain game software. A mask work copyright does not permit backups except for fair-use reverse engineering, which in the NES's case requires you to be familiar with 6502 assembly language. After the ten-year term of mask work copyright expires (thank goodness Sonny Bono[?] never got to this one), a piece of software on a semiconductor becomes the same as any other piece of software, subject to the full limitations on exclusive monopolies embodied in the fair use and backup exemptions.
Personally i am looking forward to the new SEGA console much better.
Sega is developing for Game Boy Advance and PlayStation 2 and is expected to sign up as a developer on the Nintendo GameCube.
The Sega Genesis's 68000 CPU was made by Motorola, who would later work with IBM on the PowerPC design. Macintosh and Amiga computers started out on 68K and ended up on PPC. GameCube has an IBM PowerPC Gekko processor. See the connection?
My biggest problem with nintendo is its policy against roms: "The only purpose of Nintendo video game emulators are to play illegal copied games from the Internet." Bullshit. Ever heard of open-source roms such as GNOME vs. KDE Bingo?
The computer animated television show ReBoot had purple "game cubes" that landed into the Mainframe. The show's animation looked similar to the GCN demos. Is this where Nintendo got its idea?
Delete your old messages because you are receiving new ones, or keep the old ones and flush the new ones
Or keep the old ones and BOUNCE the new ones
which might contain an important e-mail
that the sender knows did not arrive, from the bounce message. Think of what filesystems would be like if they deleted old files because you were creating new ones: you might delete your kernel!
How does the BSA get to levy fines so out of proportion to actual damages?
17 USC 504(c)(2) provides for statutory damages: "In a case where the copyright owner sustains the burden of
proving, and the court finds, that infringement was committed
willfully, the court in its discretion may increase the award of
statutory damages to a sum of not more than $150,000."
Now if someone puts Office 2000 on a Tqiwanese ftp server, what law is being violated?
Import regulations. Unless the FTP server is firewalled off from the rest of the world, a counterfeit electronic copy of Microsoft Office 2000 is being imported every time somebody in a WIPO country downloads the software. If that isn't illegal now, wait until the BSA catches on to offshore servers in non-WIPO countries, pressures ISPs at the edge of the U.S. to firewall off Taiwan's IP blocks, and then lobbies for legislation making it unlawful to use a public computer network to communicate with non-WIPO countries.
Typically the came Computer Space is considered the first "arcade" game
A quick Google search shows that Computer Space was the same thing as Spacewar, except ported from PDP to dedicated hardware.
because it set precedent for all future games: coin accepting, dedicated unit instead of multipurpose computer
All? Taito's Space Invaders (1977) was one of the first popular arcade games to use a microprocessor instead of a board full of 7400-series logic chips. Nintendo's VS Multisystem and PlayChoice machines, SNK's Neo-Geo system, and the Capcom Play System had replaceable program cartridges, making the machines definitely multipurpose.
"Mono" is NOT a name of a disease. Mononucleosis is. There are many, many words that begin with the prefix "mono".
"Mono" is not the medical name of a disease, just as "the clap," "the flu," and "TB" are not. Like "the kissing disease," "mono" is a widely used colloquialism for mononucleosis. Before Ximian's.NET clone was announced, what would you have thought had you heard "She has mono"?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, look at the ad on the top of this page.
What ad?
People use what works
People use Junkbuster because it works.
More colours and alpha channel support is useless if the person needs to create an animated gif.
MNG is supported in 6.0 browsers. Besides, if you really need to show animation, you'll use SWF or SVG+SMIL.
In my experience pngs have larger file sizes most of the time.
I don't see how. PNG's Deflate packs pixels tighter than GIF's LZW.
Perhaps this is not a matter of the file format but of the programs i use(d).
How much larger? If you're talking 10%, try not saving gamma or physical resolution and cranking the compression up to maximum. (These options are presented in GIMP for Windows's Save As... dialog.) If you are trying to blend a non-transparent PNG into your bgcolor (necessary to make PNG look good in netscape 4.x), you don't want to save gamma anyway.
OTOH, if your PNG file is twice as big as your GIF file, convert the images to indexed (palette) color before saving them, as your GIF export plug-in is probably doing this automatically, whereas your PNG plug-in is preserving 24-bit color.
One of the problems with PNG's is the size
A 256-color PNG image is smaller than the equivalent GIF if you don't include information on physical resolution or gamma because the Deflation algorithm packs pixels more efficiently than LZW.
If an alternative format is created that's superior
PNG can do 24-bit images with alpha transparency and gamma correction. It's already replacing TIFF in many domains.
and the methods to create/view media in that format is easily available
GIMP for Windows is free software and can create PNG images. Mozilla and IE have good support for PNG.
then it has a chance of being adopted.
I already use PNG for all non-animated non-photoreal images on web sites I run. As soon as GIMP exports MNG (mozilla already reads it), I'll convert my animated images.
IMHO, the primary thing holding up use of PNG is that PNG cannot represent animated banner ads, and its animated cousin (MNG) doesn't work in IE 5.x for Windows.
steven halking now cant make phone calls to order a pizza now can he, or 911.
Except the FCC will probably look the other way in the case of Prof. Hawking or of other individuals using assistive speech devices. 47 USC 227(b)(2) gives the agency every right to do so:
This pretty much covers most common types of calls that an individual using assistive speech devices would place.Actually they will flush after a period of inactivity (say 2-3 seconds). But you never know exactly when the power outage will come
Some drives have a capacitor to give them just enough power to write out the contents of the cache before they lose power or to hold the contents of the cache until power is restored.
Then what the hell is it? An emulator?
Bochs is an emulator. TuxNES is an emulator. DGen is an emulator. SNES9x is an emulator. Transmeta's Crusoe uses Code Morphing, which is an emulator. But WINE is not an emulator but "an implementation of the Windows 3.x and Win32 APIs on top of X and Unix. Think of Wine as a Windows compatibility layer" for FreeBSD, Linux, and Solaris. It's also a complete Windows application server that uses thin clients called X11 terminals.
Question: Is there any loss of quality in converting from the CD native ".cda" files to the ".wav" format?
but if you would then downsample the 48 back to 44.1 I don't know what the algorithms would do.
The inverse fourier transform of the rect function (1 for |f| < x; 0 otherwise) is sin(Pi*x*f)/(Pi*x*f), a "cardinal sine" or "sinc" function. Convolving an input sample with sinc (either in FFT or in FIR space) will remove ALL energy above frequency f, which is generally set at just below the Nyquist rate (half the sample rate) and, if implemented well, will not add appreciable noise to the signal beyond the -90 dB SNR of 16-bit linear PCM.
when you read in raw mode, you also get the correction data. So it's a simple matter of taking the data you got and correcting it in software
CD-ROM stores 75 sectors per second. Red Book sectors contain 2,352 bytes, or (44100 samples/chn/sec) * (2 channels) * (2 bytes/sample) / (75 sectors/sec). CD-ROM sectors recorded in mode 1 (the vast majority of computer CD-ROMs) contain 2048 bytes of data and about 300 bytes of error correction data. For more information, read http://www.eaglevisiontv.com/General_Information/C DROM_Formats/body_cdrom_formats.html.
missing features (32-bit color and large texture support being two of the most blatant omissions)
3dfx cards supported 256x256 textures. Are you talking about a texture larger than that for a single polygon? If you're not, you can simply use multiple textures for one object, as in the 8- and 16-bit world where a sprite was made of several smaller tiles.
Microsoft does not charge you for their browser.
Yes it does, to the tune of USD $320. (I'm ignoring Windows ME pricing, as its reliability is subpar.) If you have FreeBSD, Solaris x86, Linux, or any other non-Windows operating system, you have to buy Windows before being able to use IE, as IE is under a "supplemental EULA" that gives no rights to those who do not have a valid Windows license.
You had to pick which sound card you wanted to lock your life into. Adlib? SoundBlaster? ELS? I can't hardly remember anymore.
Sound Blaster became popular partially because it could run all the old music software that used the Adlib's Yamaha OPL2 synth.
ATI and nVidia *are* arguing about standards right now.
So why aren't they arguing about a standard OpenGL extension? Why does it have to be Wintel and DirectEcch? Don't they know that NVIDIA already has a near monopoly on Wintel gaming <cough>Xbox</cough>?
Which hand has a monopoly on QWERTY?You mean like when Netscape and IE were competing?
Were?
HTML rendering between the two browsers haven't exactly meshed.
Most sites are designed around IE 5, but I see very few problems with Mozilla 0.9.x aka Netscape 6.1, except for some Really Stupid Sites(tm) that use VBS instead of ECMAScript. HTML is not designed to be a pixel-perfect layout language; it's a structural markup language. For layout use CSS, which supports pixel-perfect positioning and is supported in current versions of IE (5+) and Netscape (6+). Except for a few glitches in IE such as inserting an extra 3px of left and right margins into the CSS box property float: and treating a newline before </div> as whitespace (contrary to the SGML spec), Mozilla and IE look pretty much the same.
I agree that Netscape 4.x is sucks. Users can't turn off CSS (cascading stylesheets) without turning off CSS (client-side scripting), and the buggy implementations of the parts of CSS it does support will only make sites look ugly.
But [the PowerPC architecture is] useless to 99.9% of business software.
Are you counting Microsoft Office for Macintosh computers as part of that 0.1% of business software available for PowerPC-based computers?
If the GNUstep developers get their butts in gear, porting Mac Cocoa apps to GNU, BSD, and UNIX platforms will be a piece of cake.
copyright lasts for (IIRC) 50 years from the death of the creator (although I have a funny feeling that it is longer now)
The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act[?], passed under the same conditions as DMCA (double cover of Kosovo and Lewinsky, lots of corporate bribes, unaccountable voice vote), extended copyright to life + 71 for freelance works written after 1978 and 96 years for all other works. It pretty much amounts to welfare for GGM[?] companies.
US gov wanting to protect Micky Mouse
I'm not sure that's even possible anymore, as Mickey Mouse has fallen into PD because Disney screwed up the copyright notice on the first couple films with Mickey Mouse.
Keep extending the application as long as you can. This allows you to Extend the life of your patent. You can have an application in for 20 years but the clock doesn't start ticking until it's awarded ... This is now no more
New U.S. patents now expire 20 years after filing (instead of 17 years after they're granted) to prevent just this type of abuse. Our lawmakers aren't completely clueless.
grandfathered
This is what bugs me about another GGM[?] issue: copyright term extension. The Walt Disney Company was able to grandfather its old works into the new 96-year copyright terms when there was no good reason to except for greed, as extending the term of an existing work's monopoly does nothing "To promote the progress of science and useful arts." However, some doubts have been cast as to whether Mickey Mouse's likeness is under copyright at all because of an oversight in the copyright notices for the first two Mickey Mouse films.
See what gets used and invented in the industry during that time. Amend your patent to include these technologies.
Outright fraud. A patent application includes an affidavit to the effect: "I/we invented everything described in the claims." This type of fraud can get the applicant thrown in prison for the life of the patent.
It says (at Nintendo's site): Are all Nintendo ROMS on the Internet Illegal?
The exact text of a listed question and answer:
(Emphasis added by yerricde.) Nintendo is implying that programs that emulate Nintendo game consoles can emulate only proprietary software not licensed for redistribution. For example, the 4 kilobyte Game Genie ROM is free(beer)ware, and many popular emulators can handle Game Genie format patches. (Ignore for a moment the fact that Nintendo did not authorize the Game Genie patcher.)They are saying that pirating THEIR software is illegal, which, well, it is.
According to Nintendo's legal page, Nintendo is hiding behind a mask work[?] copyright on the semiconductor ROM chips that contain game software. A mask work copyright does not permit backups except for fair-use reverse engineering, which in the NES's case requires you to be familiar with 6502 assembly language. After the ten-year term of mask work copyright expires (thank goodness Sonny Bono[?] never got to this one), a piece of software on a semiconductor becomes the same as any other piece of software, subject to the full limitations on exclusive monopolies embodied in the fair use and backup exemptions.
See my Everything writeup on 'mask work' for more information and U.S. Code citations.
Personally i am looking forward to the new SEGA console much better.
Sega is developing for Game Boy Advance and PlayStation 2 and is expected to sign up as a developer on the Nintendo GameCube.
The Sega Genesis's 68000 CPU was made by Motorola, who would later work with IBM on the PowerPC design. Macintosh and Amiga computers started out on 68K and ended up on PPC. GameCube has an IBM PowerPC Gekko processor. See the connection?
My biggest problem with nintendo is its policy against roms: "The only purpose of Nintendo video game emulators are to play illegal copied games from the Internet." Bullshit. Ever heard of open-source roms such as GNOME vs. KDE Bingo?
"Warning: incoming game."
The computer animated television show ReBoot had purple "game cubes" that landed into the Mainframe. The show's animation looked similar to the GCN demos. Is this where Nintendo got its idea?
"I send you this file in order to have your advice"
or
"All my file are belong to you" ?
Delete your old messages because you are receiving new ones, or keep the old ones and flush the new ones
Or keep the old ones and BOUNCE the new ones
which might contain an important e-mail
that the sender knows did not arrive, from the bounce message. Think of what filesystems would be like if they deleted old files because you were creating new ones: you might delete your kernel!
How does the BSA get to levy fines so out of proportion to actual damages?
17 USC 504(c)(2) provides for statutory damages: "In a case where the copyright owner sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that infringement was committed willfully, the court in its discretion may increase the award of statutory damages to a sum of not more than $150,000."
Now if someone puts Office 2000 on a Tqiwanese ftp server, what law is being violated?
Import regulations. Unless the FTP server is firewalled off from the rest of the world, a counterfeit electronic copy of Microsoft Office 2000 is being imported every time somebody in a WIPO country downloads the software. If that isn't illegal now, wait until the BSA catches on to offshore servers in non-WIPO countries, pressures ISPs at the edge of the U.S. to firewall off Taiwan's IP blocks, and then lobbies for legislation making it unlawful to use a public computer network to communicate with non-WIPO countries.
Typically the came Computer Space is considered the first "arcade" game
A quick Google search shows that Computer Space was the same thing as Spacewar, except ported from PDP to dedicated hardware.
because it set precedent for all future games: coin accepting, dedicated unit instead of multipurpose computer
All? Taito's Space Invaders (1977) was one of the first popular arcade games to use a microprocessor instead of a board full of 7400-series logic chips. Nintendo's VS Multisystem and PlayChoice machines, SNK's Neo-Geo system, and the Capcom Play System had replaceable program cartridges, making the machines definitely multipurpose.
"Mono" is NOT a name of a disease. Mononucleosis is. There are many, many words that begin with the prefix "mono".
"Mono" is not the medical name of a disease, just as "the clap," "the flu," and "TB" are not. Like "the kissing disease," "mono" is a widely used colloquialism for mononucleosis. Before Ximian's .NET clone was announced, what would you have thought had you heard "She has mono"?
I am not a doctor, and