The BetaNews article is actually very misleading - it is confusing two of LizardTech's products.
DjVu is a document format (like PDF), not an image format, and the techniques mentioned in the article refer to compression of documents.
LizardTech do have a compressed image format. This is called MrSID, and uses completely different techniques for compression.
I would be interested to see an independent comparison between MrSID and PNG - unless there are huge advantages of using the proprietry MrSID format over the OS PNG format, I don't predict much of a future for MrSID on the web (although it would seem that LizardTech are touting it more for internal use rather than for general distribution anyway).
It featured some absolutely amazing footage of volcanic eruptions, and the foolhardy vulcanologists who were getting as close a possible - not something I would like to do, what with rocks the size of cars being flung into the air, choking pyroclastic clouds, the burning pyroclastic flows and lahars (volcanic mud-slides)...
I've now added seeing a volcanic eruption to the list of things I want to do in my life - apparently Mount Etna in Sicily is currently pretty active and erupts at least once a month!
Hmmm...I'm more than a little sceptical about that - I would have thought I'd have found at least one previous reference to it somewhere on the 'net. If it is true, someone should add it to http://www.eeggs.com/.
I'll be able to verify this when I:
1) Dump the speech data ROM and work out its organisation.
2) Get hold of the relevent verion of Speak & Spell - there are at least 3 generations, electronically, plus I've only got UK ones at the moment, and they actually have a different accent and vocabulary to the US (and French and Spanish) ones - most obvious is that it says 'zed' instead of 'zee'.
I'm actually working (verrrrry sloooooowly) on doing something similar with that quintessential speaking toy from the late 70s - the Texas Instruments Speak & Spell. I hope to reprogram it to utter obscenities (childish, I know, but who hasn't ever tried to get their Speak & Spell to say rude things???;)
I wish I had such things as schematics to make the task easier and prize money to get me more motivated. The 'net is strangely lacking in useful information about the range of Texas Instruments speaking toys (yes, there were others - Speak & Math, Speak & Read, Speak & Music, Speak & Write, etc.) - something I hope to rectify sometime in the near future.
Anyone interested in knowing more, or with any helpful information should feel free to contact me.
I used to work in an electronics supply shop about ten years ago (Electro Supplies, Stockport, UK). I used to like to mess about with various LEDs to make window displays. Some of my favorite simple ones:
-Spelling things out using 7 segment displays.
-We used to sell a simple kit that ran seven LEDs off a digital counter IC that produced an effect like the front of KITT from Knight Rider, or a Cylon from Battlestar Galactica. A cool variation on this was to replace the visible-light LEDs with infra-red ones and have the kit hidden somewhere in view of a CCTV camera - you couldn't see anything when looking around the shop, but the camera, being IR sensitive, showed it up brilliantly - we confused a lot of people with that one!:)
-Wiring a bunch of flashing LEDs (built-in flasher ciruit, operates off 12vdc) in parallel and mounting them in a line. Because none of them flash at exactly the same rate, you get a great 'visual beats' effect (I don't know the proper term). They would flash at seemingly random rates, and then patterns would emerge - alternate flashing, all flashing at the same time, lights running from one end to the other, running from the centre to the ends - I still like to trance out to that effect (you get the same thing with a line of cars with their indicators flashing, or a line of those flashing bollards around roadworks).
The Memepool entry that this/. is taken from has a link to a pretty cool LED oscilloscope:
I remember reading how to build an even cooler one that used a vertical strip of LEDs, and a mirror mounted on a motor that reflected the LED strip. The speed of the rotating mirror was the timebase and the LED strip showed the amplitude!:)
I usually put "(this is a joke:)", and occasionally I'll use "(this is no joke ):"! I always put the terminating punctuation before a smiley.;) However, I have a tendency to overuse ellipses, so it usually looks okay...:)
A pretty tedious three page article about the fact that they've chosen to use 'e-mail' rather than 'email' (which is the same as I have always done), and there are links at the top and bottom of the article's pages saying 'Email'...d'oh!
Um...but those boxes of 'just the OS itself' usually come with a stack of apps as well...
I personally think that boxed software is becoming an increasingly unfeasible software distribution mechanism now that the 'net is widely accessible - how much money is wasted in binning boxed software when newer versions come out?
I remember when I used to have an Atari ST, and everything was loaded off floppies (sloooooow!).
I used to regularly put multi-file games (one file per level/map, etc.) into a single executable file that loaded them into a ram disk upon running (and packed (compressed) the executable) - I prefered the slightly longer wait to initially load the game, rather than having to wait between levels whilst files were read off the floppy.
Disk caching only keeps files in memory that have been accessed previously - the above technique acts as a pre-load for files that will be needed later.
How about someone couples DeCSS with a Melissa-style e-mail virus and 'infects' a whole load of Windows PCs with DeCSS (maybe a CoDec for Media Player...maybe not....). Fun!
Of course you don't really mean 'the light side of the Moon', but rather 'the earth-facing side of the Moon', since all sides of the moon are light at some point during a lunar month.
Blimey! I just read the article and was amazed by the revelation on the third page that the VAX architecture was designed in 1757! That's nearly 100 years before Babbage's Differential Engine!
Apparently there is a company in the UK looking at providing access to the 'net in homes via the gas and water supplies. Something about using the conductivity of the pipes...
...they're also sensitive to IR - try aiming your TV remote at one. Lots of fun can be had confusing people by making displays out of IR LEDs so that they can only be seen on a monitor! (incidently, anyone ever tried saturating their car/bike number plate with IR to defeat speed cameras?;)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad I'm not the only one that thought this! The whole humans as batteries thing made me laugh out loud when I saw it for the first time!
I thought it was a visually entertaining and intellectually insulting film!
And why on earth is the Matrix when viewed from the outside made up of back-to-front Japanese characters???
[Happosai]
I hope the Russians aren't thinking of making them...!
[Happosai]
The BetaNews article is actually very misleading - it is confusing two of LizardTech's products.
DjVu is a document format (like PDF), not an image format, and the techniques mentioned in the article refer to compression of documents.
LizardTech do have a compressed image format. This is called MrSID, and uses completely different techniques for compression.
I would be interested to see an independent comparison between MrSID and PNG - unless there are huge advantages of using the proprietry MrSID format over the OS PNG format, I don't predict much of a future for MrSID on the web (although it would seem that LizardTech are touting it more for internal use rather than for general distribution anyway).
[Happosai]
Maybe they should do this with .biz, at least then it would be an improvement over .com - catergorised domain names.
.com (commercial), .biz (business) & .pro (professional) supposed to be?
.rx for pharmaceutical???)
Anyway, what's the distinction between
(BTW, why on earth is it
[Happosai]
The UK TV channel 'Channel 4' showed a two-part documentary about volcanoes last month (called 'Volcano', funnily enough ;):
7 45
0 06
http://www.channel4.com/guide/listings.cfm?id=856
http://www.channel4.com/guide/listings.cfm?id=857
It featured some absolutely amazing footage of volcanic eruptions, and the foolhardy vulcanologists who were getting as close a possible - not something I would like to do, what with rocks the size of cars being flung into the air, choking pyroclastic clouds, the burning pyroclastic flows and lahars (volcanic mud-slides)...
I've now added seeing a volcanic eruption to the list of things I want to do in my life - apparently Mount Etna in Sicily is currently pretty active and erupts at least once a month!
[Happosai]
Hmmm...I'm more than a little sceptical about that - I would have thought I'd have found at least one previous reference to it somewhere on the 'net. If it is true, someone should add it to http://www.eeggs.com/.
I'll be able to verify this when I:
1) Dump the speech data ROM and work out its organisation.
2) Get hold of the relevent verion of Speak & Spell - there are at least 3 generations, electronically, plus I've only got UK ones at the moment, and they actually have a different accent and vocabulary to the US (and French and Spanish) ones - most obvious is that it says 'zed' instead of 'zee'.
[Happosai]
I'm actually working (verrrrry sloooooowly) on doing something similar with that quintessential speaking toy from the late 70s - the Texas Instruments Speak & Spell. I hope to reprogram it to utter obscenities (childish, I know, but who hasn't ever tried to get their Speak & Spell to say rude things??? ;)
I wish I had such things as schematics to make the task easier and prize money to get me more motivated. The 'net is strangely lacking in useful information about the range of Texas Instruments speaking toys (yes, there were others - Speak & Math, Speak & Read, Speak & Music, Speak & Write, etc.) - something I hope to rectify sometime in the near future.
Anyone interested in knowing more, or with any helpful information should feel free to contact me.
[Happosai]
I used to work in an electronics supply shop about ten years ago (Electro Supplies, Stockport, UK). I used to like to mess about with various LEDs to make window displays. Some of my favorite simple ones:
:)
/. is taken from has a link to a pretty cool LED oscilloscope:
/ articl3.htm
:)
-Spelling things out using 7 segment displays.
-We used to sell a simple kit that ran seven LEDs off a digital counter IC that produced an effect like the front of KITT from Knight Rider, or a Cylon from Battlestar Galactica. A cool variation on this was to replace the visible-light LEDs with infra-red ones and have the kit hidden somewhere in view of a CCTV camera - you couldn't see anything when looking around the shop, but the camera, being IR sensitive, showed it up brilliantly - we confused a lot of people with that one!
-Wiring a bunch of flashing LEDs (built-in flasher ciruit, operates off 12vdc) in parallel and mounting them in a line. Because none of them flash at exactly the same rate, you get a great 'visual beats' effect (I don't know the proper term). They would flash at seemingly random rates, and then patterns would emerge - alternate flashing, all flashing at the same time, lights running from one end to the other, running from the centre to the ends - I still like to trance out to that effect (you get the same thing with a line of cars with their indicators flashing, or a line of those flashing bollards around roadworks).
The Memepool entry that this
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/7156
I remember reading how to build an even cooler one that used a vertical strip of LEDs, and a mirror mounted on a motor that reflected the LED strip. The speed of the rotating mirror was the timebase and the LED strip showed the amplitude!
[Happosai]
I usually put "(this is a joke :)", and occasionally I'll use "(this is no joke ):"! I always put the terminating punctuation before a smiley. ;) However, I have a tendency to overuse ellipses, so it usually looks okay...:)
[Happosai]
Microphone
Francophone
Dictaphone
[Happosai]
A pretty tedious three page article about the fact that they've chosen to use 'e-mail' rather than 'email' (which is the same as I have always done), and there are links at the top and bottom of the article's pages saying 'Email'...d'oh!
[Happosai]
Um...but those boxes of 'just the OS itself' usually come with a stack of apps as well...
I personally think that boxed software is becoming an increasingly unfeasible software distribution mechanism now that the 'net is widely accessible - how much money is wasted in binning boxed software when newer versions come out?
[Happosai]
I remember when I used to have an Atari ST, and everything was loaded off floppies (sloooooow!).
I used to regularly put multi-file games (one file per level/map, etc.) into a single executable file that loaded them into a ram disk upon running (and packed (compressed) the executable) - I prefered the slightly longer wait to initially load the game, rather than having to wait between levels whilst files were read off the floppy.
Disk caching only keeps files in memory that have been accessed previously - the above technique acts as a pre-load for files that will be needed later.
[Happosai]
How about someone couples DeCSS with a Melissa-style e-mail virus and 'infects' a whole load of Windows PCs with DeCSS (maybe a CoDec for Media Player...maybe not....). Fun!
[Happosai]
Of course you don't really mean 'the light side of the Moon', but rather 'the earth-facing side of the Moon', since all sides of the moon are light at some point during a lunar month.
[Happosai]
I'm still waiting for BT to offer their own 'unmetered' access service (SurfTime: http://www.bt.com/surftime/) via my ISP...
[Happosai]
Blimey! I just read the article and was amazed by the revelation on the third page that the VAX architecture was designed in 1757! That's nearly 100 years before Babbage's Differential Engine!
[Happosai]
Apparently there is a company in the UK looking at providing access to the 'net in homes via the gas and water supplies. Something about using the conductivity of the pipes...
[Happosai]
...they're also sensitive to IR - try aiming your TV remote at one. Lots of fun can be had confusing people by making displays out of IR LEDs so that they can only be seen on a monitor! (incidently, anyone ever tried saturating their car/bike number plate with IR to defeat speed cameras? ;)
[Happosai]
Not exactly a new idea...;)
I remembered reading a Red Dwarf meets Star Trek fan-fic a few years ago, so I did a search on Google for 'rimmer AND picard' and found a few...
[Happosai]
IE4 on NT4 does the same for me...!