Okay, well, I can still think of features ten times more useful.
Redirecting (not forwarding!) of email: very useful if I want to keep the same header information once it's sent to the new account.
Archiving of email: If I want to download the 5000 emails I've collected to my own computer (in text format) that would be great.
The clincher: Combine the above, and have redirecting of the whole collection of stored email. That means I would be able to switch email account if something better came out in the future. Okay, Gmail is very good, but say if someone wants to change email address or client? At the moment, you're forced to stick with Gmail forever.
Re:Not radioactively powered but a trickle charge
on
Nuclear Batteries
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Sorry, but this one always irritates me.
Should be: "Could'NT care less". It's only 3 extra characters!
Re:Flying Car: Completely Impractical
on
NYT On Flying Cars
·
· Score: 1
The most versatile system would be a 360 radar which detected moving (or solid objects), and used a repelling force so that both sky cars would 'push' away from each other at a specified distance (depending on the relative speed). This means you can get the freedom to fly wherever you want, and I bet it's much easier to implement too.
This way, we can scrap the entire concept of sky lanes altogether.
Whereas chess skill is largely dependant upon how many tactics you know, go is much more a game of finesse.
Not to get in an argument about chess versus go, but I couldn't resist. Try googling:
"best chess games" (739, at least half of which mean in an aesthetical sense)
Then try:
"best go game/s" (0)
(Around 14 come up for Go, but none are actually relevant).
In other words, most games of go are quite similar to each other, while with chess, there's more of a unique atmosphere behind every game. Don't get me wrong, I love playing go (it's a more 'pure' game than chess), but chess has more variety - like music.
Did you try the zlib compressor (aswell as the mszh one) in high compress mode? I remember trying the TSCC one a while back, and found the compression wasn't as good as the LCL/zlib one.
Another thing to check is to make sure the animation is also converted down to 8 bit mode (256c). Saving in 24bit color when only a few colours are needed will add a significant amount of redundant data to the file. The editor I use - Videomach - can decrease color depth to 8 bit when saving out AVIs.
Either way, both LCL and TSCC seem to beat the CorePNG codec.
I've always wanted a decent PC lossless animation format that's quick, highly compressible and convenient. APNG looks like it could fulfil this criteria.
But for those that can't wait, one of the best I've found so far is to save in a lossless AVI format; the codec is LCL (lossless codec library), created by Kenji Oshima. It compresses cartoon-style animations very well.
However, there is one format that even beats this, but it means RARring or ZIPping the file at the end. In fact, you've probably already got it - the "Microsoft Video 1" codec. Simply configure the "Video Quality" to 100%, and you have a fair-sized file normally, but when zipped/rarred, it's the smallest I've ever seen. Plus, you can use the animation through the Explorer browser, and can make it run at 60 frames per second or more if you so wish.
Is this an issue with PNG in general, or is it browsers and viewers generally that could potentially help resolve the gamma correction problem? I just can't imagine that GIF is somehow 'immune' to this, while PNG (by default) isn't.
If however it is a problem with PNG, then why haven't the authors of the PNG format already done something?
Am I right in saying that the advantages that the 'gamma correction' feature once had are now not necessary, because most viewers and browsers tend to recognise colour the same way?
"Optware plans to commercialize the technology in the first quarter of 2006".
"Much less expensive consumer versions could be on the market as soon as 2007"
"The company is initially planning to use the technology for enterprise applications. Drives for this market will cost about $20,000 and will initially use 200GB HVDs, with a target cost of about $100 per disc."
"Drives for home users will cost about $2,700, about the same as commercially available Blu-ray Disc players cost now."
"Future developments of the technology could take its capacity up to 1TB of data on 12-centimeter discs the company said."
This is it though. Most if not all monitors (including all the TFTs and CRTs I've seen) do have this problem. If you try the illusion, you'll see that you can get a more true cyan than usual.
Another way to see how bad cyan is is to fill the screen in 00FFFF, switch off the lights, and use the back of a shiny CD as a kind of 'prism' to split the screen's 'cyan' colour. You'll see that there's a lot of red pollution shown on the CD if you get the right angle.
The most interesting question that I've always wanted to know is this; what would happen if one were to separately stimulate the colour cones of our eyes?
Fundamentally, I believe that every colour can be represented by red, green and blue. It's just in the real world, our eyes see a bit of red pollution when we see green and vice versa. In fact, we even see a tiny bit of red pollution in blue! This is due to the fact that our red cones are slightly stimulated when our eyes are hit by blue wavelength light.
I'm glad to see they're upgrading the colour on displays, as I've always hated the weak saturation of the cyan/green colour in particular (much closer than you'd think to pale grey than actual cyan).
For those that want to cyan should look, try the 'Eclipse of Mars' illusion at this site.
It's all down to the amazing time attack mode in the Sonic Jam collection (Saturn). Try and beat these times:
Green Hill zone: Act 1:21"96.... Act 2:15"89
Spring Yard zone: Act 1:23"13.... Act 2:27"49
Labyrinth zone: Act 2:1:01"01
StarLight zone: Act 2:17"68 !
You wouldn't believe the subtle and surprising intricacies that one can discover by choosing the best route (I'll have to put videos online one day). Of course, if anyone get even close to those times (within a few tenths of a second), don't hesitate to contact me. But I bet that nobody, but nobody, could ever beat those times. I worked on them for ages!
By the way, Green Hill Zone is a nice website on the game, and contains trivia about the Sonic team.
I agree that the music from Sonic 1 has some of the best music ever (not quite Outrun, Monty on the run, Axelay, or Secret of Mana standard, but getting there). They're relatively simple tunes of course, but the melodies are 'concise'. As if they'd make music as good as that for today's games... sigh.
And yes, better than Super Mario World's music of course =p
There are loads and loads of pictures - all worth looking at, but I thought I'd give my favourites (with best at top). If you like, go from the last pic (no. 12) to the first for a buildup:
6:Interior design for Lake Meritt BART -
I just like the unusual architecture of the surroundings in this one more than anything else - the way it's multi-tiered and stuff.
7:The Freedomship -
One day, we'll all live on massive ships like this!
8:A horseless sulky -
Haha. Something right out of the wacky races. I like the way it can go at 116mph:)
Re:Interesting concept
on
3D Mouse
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Even in 2D programs, this would be useful. Think of simple controls like moving a slider or zooming in/out. There are plenty of other program specific functions too. For example, in paint programs, it could represent the opacity (translucency level).
Almost any type of program could benefit from the extra dimension. In fact, the mouse wheel on a lot of mice already counts as this 'extra 3rd dimension'. But unfortunately, it uses discrete steps to funtion, rather than a smooth continuous movement (one would think there'd be a market
for analogue mouse wheels, but no company seems to produce them... shame...).
The funny thing is how artificial the harmonic language we think of as natural is. The urge our ears feel to resolve along the cycle of 5ths evolved over centuries, and only seems natural because we grew up hearing music that spoke in it.
Not necessarily 'only'. It could be natural because it is some fundamental sense a good thing. It makes sense that good music tends to use 'hierarchy' to the various chords and keys. Indeed, you'll find that the best melodies and chord combinations do seem to have an underlying pattern behind them. Decent rhythms also have a wonderful 'fractalness' that seems to go beyond cultural trend.
A similar story applies with me, but with Zelda 3 especially. Somehow the later 3D incarnations of Zelda just don't do it for me. The Zelda 3 world was more compact (but still massive), the 2D control was more intuitive and it was simply more fun to play than Zelda 64. And of course the music was better. Today we're given 'cinematic' and 'film-like' (read mostly generic, and/or mundane) soundtracks, instead of the original and atmospheric music of the old games. Indeed, the SNES most likely had the best music for a console ever (you just can't beat the likes of Secret of Mana, Axelay, Pop 'n' Twinbee or the Kirby series for melody).
but, now I want the games to lose quality
Agreed. Though I would in fact call the graphics of today poorer. Yes, they may be more complex in one way (I would say mostly the wrong way), but simplicity and/focussed/ complexity is the way to go. Compare the classic Outrun to the new Outrun. I'm not sure how fun it is to play, but to me, it's obvious the graphics of the new Outrun look less colourful, less 'sharp' and generally less inviting. And I wouldn't be surprised if it's less fun.
How about some sort of system - kind of like Google's PageRank - where scientists can vote for other scientists, or give them some kind of credibility rating. Just like PageRank, more voting 'weight' will be given to the scientists who are already very credible.
The system could also be applied to the actual papers too, with scientists rating each others' quality of research.
Not quite as newsworthy, but I thought it might be worth mentioning that Cloanto recently released the latest version of the 'Amiga Forever' package (version 6), priced at $60. In a nutshell, it emulates the 'classic' Amigas on standard PC hardware (particularly Windows, but also Mac OS X and GNU/Linux), and also provides the latest Amiga OS3.9 software.
The problem with conveyor belt style 'rolling roads' is that it would be difficult for passengers to get on or off due to the speed of the road. However, there is are possible solutions to this problem...
One way is to make the center of the road move faster than the left/right sections. If you wanted to increase speed, then you can skip from lane to lane. There could be about 10 to 40 lanes in total - ranging from 0 to 200 mph in 5 or 10mph incremental steps. You could even stack the rolling roads on top of each other, with the largest and fastest at the top. Very practical I'm sure you'll all agree!
Slashdot Mirror
Even more interesting would be to see what our dreams look like. Especially the weird cool ones with surreal/good music and lots of detail.
Okay, well, I can still think of features ten times more useful.
Redirecting (not forwarding!) of email: very useful if I want to keep the same header information once it's sent to the new account.
Archiving of email: If I want to download the 5000 emails I've collected to my own computer (in text format) that would be great.
The clincher: Combine the above, and have redirecting of the whole collection of stored email. That means I would be able to switch email account if something better came out in the future. Okay, Gmail is very good, but say if someone wants to change email address or client? At the moment, you're forced to stick with Gmail forever.
Sorry, but this one always irritates me.
Should be: "Could'NT care less". It's only 3 extra characters!
Read:
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/errors/care.html
The most versatile system would be a 360 radar which detected moving (or solid objects), and used a repelling force so that both sky cars would 'push' away from each other at a specified distance (depending on the relative speed). This means you can get the freedom to fly wherever you want, and I bet it's much easier to implement too.
This way, we can scrap the entire concept of sky lanes altogether.
- Whereas chess skill is largely dependant upon how many tactics you know, go is much more a game of finesse.
Not to get in an argument about chess versus go, but I couldn't resist. Try googling:"best chess games" (739, at least half of which mean in an aesthetical sense)
Then try:
"best go game/s" (0)
(Around 14 come up for Go, but none are actually relevant).
In other words, most games of go are quite similar to each other, while with chess, there's more of a unique atmosphere behind every game. Don't get me wrong, I love playing go (it's a more 'pure' game than chess), but chess has more variety - like music.
Did you try the zlib compressor (aswell as the mszh one) in high compress mode? I remember trying the TSCC one a while back, and found the compression wasn't as good as the LCL/zlib one.
Another thing to check is to make sure the animation is also converted down to 8 bit mode (256c). Saving in 24bit color when only a few colours are needed will add a significant amount of redundant data to the file. The editor I use - Videomach - can decrease color depth to 8 bit when saving out AVIs.
Either way, both LCL and TSCC seem to beat the CorePNG codec.
I've always wanted a decent PC lossless animation format that's quick, highly compressible and convenient. APNG looks like it could fulfil this criteria.
But for those that can't wait, one of the best I've found so far is to save in a lossless AVI format; the codec is LCL (lossless codec library), created by Kenji Oshima. It compresses cartoon-style animations very well.
However, there is one format that even beats this, but it means RARring or ZIPping the file at the end. In fact, you've probably already got it - the "Microsoft Video 1" codec. Simply configure the "Video Quality" to 100%, and you have a fair-sized file normally, but when zipped/rarred, it's the smallest I've ever seen. Plus, you can use the animation through the Explorer browser, and can make it run at 60 frames per second or more if you so wish.
Is this an issue with PNG in general, or is it browsers and viewers generally that could potentially help resolve the gamma correction problem? I just can't imagine that GIF is somehow 'immune' to this, while PNG (by default) isn't.
If however it is a problem with PNG, then why haven't the authors of the PNG format already done something?
Am I right in saying that the advantages that the 'gamma correction' feature once had are now not necessary, because most viewers and browsers tend to recognise colour the same way?
Key quotes:
This is it though. Most if not all monitors (including all the TFTs and CRTs I've seen) do have this problem. If you try the illusion, you'll see that you can get a more true cyan than usual.
Another way to see how bad cyan is is to fill the screen in 00FFFF, switch off the lights, and use the back of a shiny CD as a kind of 'prism' to split the screen's 'cyan' colour. You'll see that there's a lot of red pollution shown on the CD if you get the right angle.
The most interesting question that I've always wanted to know is this; what would happen if one were to separately stimulate the colour cones of our eyes?
Fundamentally, I believe that every colour can be represented by red, green and blue. It's just in the real world, our eyes see a bit of red pollution when we see green and vice versa. In fact, we even see a tiny bit of red pollution in blue! This is due to the fact that our red cones are slightly stimulated when our eyes are hit by blue wavelength light.
See this diagram for spectrum response.
I'm glad to see they're upgrading the colour on displays, as I've always hated the weak saturation of the cyan/green colour in particular (much closer than you'd think to pale grey than actual cyan).
For those that want to cyan should look, try the 'Eclipse of Mars' illusion at this site.
I still play the game today. No really.
It's all down to the amazing time attack mode in the Sonic Jam collection (Saturn). Try and beat these times:
Green Hill zone: Act 1:21"96.... Act 2:15"89
Spring Yard zone: Act 1:23"13.... Act 2:27"49
Labyrinth zone: Act 2:1:01"01
StarLight zone: Act 2:17"68 !
You wouldn't believe the subtle and surprising intricacies that one can discover by choosing the best route (I'll have to put videos online one day). Of course, if anyone get even close to those times (within a few tenths of a second), don't hesitate to contact me. But I bet that nobody, but nobody, could ever beat those times. I worked on them for ages!
By the way, Green Hill Zone is a nice website on the game, and contains trivia about the Sonic team.
I agree that the music from Sonic 1 has some of the best music ever (not quite Outrun, Monty on the run, Axelay, or Secret of Mana standard, but getting there). They're relatively simple tunes of course, but the melodies are 'concise'. As if they'd make music as good as that for today's games... sigh. And yes, better than Super Mario World's music of course =p
There are loads and loads of pictures - all worth looking at, but I thought I'd give my favourites (with best at top). If you like, go from the last pic (no. 12) to the first for a buildup:
:)
1: Tomorrow's railroads in the sky -
My favourite - this one's just bizarre. A flying bullet rollercoaster. 'nuff said.
2: The traffic light parade -
The funniest. A perfect candidate for the old "False or True" TV show.
3: The TransDrive system - So that's what cars were designed for... A great way to travel I'm sure you'll agree!
4: Flying saucer bus -
Great artwork and design this - look at the transparent rim! I would love to travel on this thing.
5: The Interregional Highway System -
Archaically massive, and dream-like. Think 'metal slug' (the Neo-Geo game).
6: Interior design for Lake Meritt BART -
I just like the unusual architecture of the surroundings in this one more than anything else - the way it's multi-tiered and stuff.
7: The Freedomship -
One day, we'll all live on massive ships like this!
8: A horseless sulky -
Haha. Something right out of the wacky races. I like the way it can go at 116mph
9: Here's your helicopter coupe -
There's something you don't see everyday.
10: Louis Brennan's mono-rail car -
Pure Metal Slug again. Elaborate, clunky and above all - some big machinery.
11: Here comes the flying bus -
Nice chopper.
12: Automotive engineers forsee radical changes -
Okay, this one comes straight from the wacky races. Dick Dastardly's car no less.
Even in 2D programs, this would be useful. Think of simple controls like moving a slider or zooming in/out. There are plenty of other program specific functions too. For example, in paint programs, it could represent the opacity (translucency level). Almost any type of program could benefit from the extra dimension. In fact, the mouse wheel on a lot of mice already counts as this 'extra 3rd dimension'. But unfortunately, it uses discrete steps to funtion, rather than a smooth continuous movement (one would think there'd be a market for analogue mouse wheels, but no company seems to produce them... shame...).
The funny thing is how artificial the harmonic language we think of as natural is. The urge our ears feel to resolve along the cycle of 5ths evolved over centuries, and only seems natural because we grew up hearing music that spoke in it.
Not necessarily 'only'. It could be natural because it is some fundamental sense a good thing. It makes sense that good music tends to use 'hierarchy' to the various chords and keys. Indeed, you'll find that the best melodies and chord combinations do seem to have an underlying pattern behind them. Decent rhythms also have a wonderful 'fractalness' that seems to go beyond cultural trend.
A similar story applies with me, but with Zelda 3 especially. Somehow the later 3D incarnations of Zelda just don't do it for me. The Zelda 3 world was more compact (but still massive), the 2D control was more intuitive and it was simply more fun to play than Zelda 64. And of course the music was better. Today we're given 'cinematic' and 'film-like' (read mostly generic, and/or mundane) soundtracks, instead of the original and atmospheric music of the old games. Indeed, the SNES most likely had the best music for a console ever (you just can't beat the likes of Secret of Mana, Axelay, Pop 'n' Twinbee or the Kirby series for melody).
/focussed/ complexity is the way to go. Compare the classic Outrun to the new Outrun. I'm not sure how fun it is to play, but to me, it's obvious the graphics of the new Outrun look less colourful, less 'sharp' and generally less inviting. And I wouldn't be surprised if it's less fun.
but, now I want the games to lose quality
Agreed. Though I would in fact call the graphics of today poorer. Yes, they may be more complex in one way (I would say mostly the wrong way), but simplicity and
How about some sort of system - kind of like Google's PageRank - where scientists can vote for other scientists, or give them some kind of credibility rating. Just like PageRank, more voting 'weight' will be given to the scientists who are already very credible.
The system could also be applied to the actual papers too, with scientists rating each others' quality of research.
Surely that's the best way of going about it...?
Not quite as newsworthy, but I thought it might be worth mentioning that Cloanto recently released the latest version of the 'Amiga Forever' package (version 6), priced at $60. In a nutshell, it emulates the 'classic' Amigas on standard PC hardware (particularly Windows, but also Mac OS X and GNU/Linux), and also provides the latest Amiga OS3.9 software.
a tegory=news&start=1&24
For those who are at all interested in the Amiga, it's well worth a look:
http://www.amigaforever.com
http://www.ann.lu/comments2.cgi?view=1082056810&c
The problem with conveyor belt style 'rolling roads' is that it would be difficult for passengers to get on or off due to the speed of the road. However, there is are possible solutions to this problem...
One way is to make the center of the road move faster than the left/right sections. If you wanted to increase speed, then you can skip from lane to lane. There could be about 10 to 40 lanes in total - ranging from 0 to 200 mph in 5 or 10mph incremental steps. You could even stack the rolling roads on top of each other, with the largest and fastest at the top. Very practical I'm sure you'll all agree!