As someone who would love to use variable transparency (translucency) pictures on my own website, this story is very cool news. For one thing, it allows pictures to have drop shadows on varied backgrounds, without having to be forced to save as full 32bit PNG.
I'm now somewhat disappointed PNG didn't get this far sooner. It's served its purpose well over time, but I didn't realize there was still so much room for compression.
Congrats to Google, and I hope the other browser quickly adopt this apparently great picture format. I wonder how its animation side compares to APNG or MNG. The PC has always been gasping for decent lossless animation support, even though the Amiga 20 years ago had seemingly a dozen animation formats to choose from. Also, web browsers have (or at least had) great difficulty in playing animations at higher than around 16-25fps (apart from flash). It's a pretty sad state of affairs all round really.
Software EULAs can be just as irritating. But this link nicely demonstrates how things should be done: http://lawactually.blogspot.com/2011/10/thats-interesting-approach.html
It should be the same idea to prevent all suing in the US. 'Everything's at one's own risk' etc.
Some years could be 5%, but some could be up to even 20%. I'd still like to see how much progress we're making. I know it's not as 'sensational', but it's still encouraging.
These 'amazing new tech' articles are cool and everything, but in a way, I'd rather have stories about how batteries on the market RIGHT NOW hold 10% more energy on average than they did last year. I like seeing more tangible stuff as well as the more speculative news.
Newspapers use thin columns so our eyes don't need to move much. Books and the web could benefit from this approach.
I wonder if the logical conclusion of this is to format words/letters into a Hilbert or Z-order fractal curve like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-order_curve
This optimizes the locality of the words, and reduces our eye movement to a minimum. At least in theory...
On a related note, end-user software license agreements are also far too long and winded. This blog entry here shows a surprising and refreshing approach to how things should be done:
No what's really a bad dream is the characters dying, and then "oh they're not *really* dead". Or are they? Oh they are, kind of. Do we even care anymore? Like that previous slashdot story said, death should be a very rare occasion for important characters, and not used as a gimmick in almost every episode.
Even if they supply non-DRM tracks, and they are below say 50p, iTunes is a mediocre player for the PC compared to something like Mediamonkey.
And I doubt they'd supply the rarer tracks I'd be interested in anyway. And I bet they make you jump through hoops for anyone wanting to upload their tracks to sell.
1: Last time I heard, Amazon's music store isn't in the UK and many other parts of the world.
2: I don't think just *anyone* can put their music up for sale easily on Amazon's store. You have to go through hoops. I'm hoping Google will make the system universal so that anyone can sell their music almost instantly if they want to.
3: I browse videos more often, and Google will suggest other videos of a similar nature, making it easier to find ones you like. Videos are often more fun to look at anyway.
Here's a hint to Google. If I can visit Youtube (or a similar music service) to see how good the music is before I buy it, and they make it fairly cheap (say 10p-£2 per track), I will be buying tons of individual tracks and enjoying it.
However, I want a single click, and download of the Mp3/video to my drive in non-DRM format without any fuss or hassle. That's the thing, and I imagine Google is one of the only companies non-evil enough to pull it off.
Neah, $1.9 is actually about right, give or take 9 orders of magnitude of error margin.
It was only a matter of time before it came to this. At first it was the story, then it was the summary. Now we're getting so lazy that we can't even be bothered to check the title!:):o
Also remember that "lifelike" isn't necessarily an ideal, and that there are things we can see which far exceed the mundane visuals you can get from the relatively dull world we inhabit.
I was more thinking about things like switching tabs, or Ctrl+F to open the search window, or clicking a menu item, or pressing RMB just about anywhere. Maybe it's because VS10's GUI was created in WPF.
Slashdot Mirror
I've looked at pngquant before, but it didn't seem to handle the alpha channel. Maybe "improved=pngquant" is better though.
As someone who would love to use variable transparency (translucency) pictures on my own website, this story is very cool news. For one thing, it allows pictures to have drop shadows on varied backgrounds, without having to be forced to save as full 32bit PNG.
I'm now somewhat disappointed PNG didn't get this far sooner. It's served its purpose well over time, but I didn't realize there was still so much room for compression.
Congrats to Google, and I hope the other browser quickly adopt this apparently great picture format. I wonder how its animation side compares to APNG or MNG. The PC has always been gasping for decent lossless animation support, even though the Amiga 20 years ago had seemingly a dozen animation formats to choose from. Also, web browsers have (or at least had) great difficulty in playing animations at higher than around 16-25fps (apart from flash). It's a pretty sad state of affairs all round really.
Software EULAs can be just as irritating. But this link nicely demonstrates how things should be done:
http://lawactually.blogspot.com/2011/10/thats-interesting-approach.html
It should be the same idea to prevent all suing in the US. 'Everything's at one's own risk' etc.
Price per kwh has really plummeted hasn't it? From 1991-2005 we've doubled capacity, but the price has dropped 10-fold. Amazing.
It's figure 2.14 btw.
Some years could be 5%, but some could be up to even 20%. I'd still like to see how much progress we're making. I know it's not as 'sensational', but it's still encouraging.
These 'amazing new tech' articles are cool and everything, but in a way, I'd rather have stories about how batteries on the market RIGHT NOW hold 10% more energy on average than they did last year. I like seeing more tangible stuff as well as the more speculative news.
Not forgetting those upcoming "Lithium Air" batteries.
Newspapers use thin columns so our eyes don't need to move much. Books and the web could benefit from this approach.
I wonder if the logical conclusion of this is to format words/letters into a Hilbert or Z-order fractal curve like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-order_curve
This optimizes the locality of the words, and reduces our eye movement to a minimum. At least in theory...
Interesting, but surely you're in the minority here? Not many people will do that.
On a related note, end-user software license agreements are also far too long and winded. This blog entry here shows a surprising and refreshing approach to how things should be done:
http://lawactually.blogspot.com/2011/10/thats-interesting-approach.html
That seems to cover most bases, and I would hope the legal system would cover that software's creator.
No what's really a bad dream is the characters dying, and then "oh they're not *really* dead". Or are they? Oh they are, kind of. Do we even care anymore?
Like that previous slashdot story said, death should be a very rare occasion for important characters, and not used as a gimmick in almost every episode.
Surely it would be possible to tweak the algorithm so outbound links don't detract from the site, and keep things mathematically sound?
Can't a laser do this kind of job instead of sound?
Even if they supply non-DRM tracks, and they are below say 50p, iTunes is a mediocre player for the PC compared to something like Mediamonkey.
And I doubt they'd supply the rarer tracks I'd be interested in anyway.
And I bet they make you jump through hoops for anyone wanting to upload their tracks to sell.
Three things:
1: Last time I heard, Amazon's music store isn't in the UK and many other parts of the world.
2: I don't think just *anyone* can put their music up for sale easily on Amazon's store. You have to go through hoops. I'm hoping Google will make the system universal so that anyone can sell their music almost instantly if they want to.
3: I browse videos more often, and Google will suggest other videos of a similar nature, making it easier to find ones you like. Videos are often more fun to look at anyway.
Here's a hint to Google. If I can visit Youtube (or a similar music service) to see how good the music is before I buy it, and they make it fairly cheap (say 10p-£2 per track), I will be buying tons of individual tracks and enjoying it.
However, I want a single click, and download of the Mp3/video to my drive in non-DRM format without any fuss or hassle. That's the thing, and I imagine Google is one of the only companies non-evil enough to pull it off.
The joke was that successive versions after around 4 weren't any better than 4, hence the /1000 bit (though log(x) would've made more sense tbh.
That log you pasted at https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/topcrasher/byversion/Firefox/7.0.1/14 looks like the stuff of nightmares. It makes me glad I have so few bugs in my own software (I guess using C# helps a bit too).
That's a bit optimistic. I was expecting doubly exponential growth.
Don't panic - it's pretty simple if you want to convert from the advertised version to the real version. This is the formula I use for Firefox:
realFireFoxVersion(x) = 5 - 4.5/x + x/1000
Works for me every time.
Neah, $1.9 is actually about right, give or take 9 orders of magnitude of error margin.
It was only a matter of time before it came to this. At first it was the story, then it was the summary. Now we're getting so lazy that we can't even be bothered to check the title! :) :o
Decent graphics/music can greatly add to the atmosphere whatever the quality of the playability.
And believe it or not, I prefer old retro games to most modern games these days.
A few words for you: Global illumination, path-tracing, trillions of particles, atom worlds, AI.
See 5, 3 and 2 from this page:
http://www.skytopia.com/project/cpu/cpu3.html
Also remember that "lifelike" isn't necessarily an ideal, and that there are things we can see which far exceed the mundane visuals you can get from the relatively dull world we inhabit.
A while back, I created a much more devious, twisted version of the sphere packing problem which can be found here:
http://www.skytopia.com/project/imath/imath.html#12
I was more thinking about things like switching tabs, or Ctrl+F to open the search window, or clicking a menu item, or pressing RMB just about anywhere. Maybe it's because VS10's GUI was created in WPF.