Full screen WebGL is being held up by security concerns. The browser vendors are eager to get it in as soon as they settle on how to make it difficult to exploit.
FLAC is great and all, but you only save about 30%. That's a significant help, but it's not a killer feature in my opinion. Uncompressed WAV format (RIFF storing PCM) has one significant advantage: it is such a trivially simple file format that any junior programmer can write a parser for it in an afternoon. fread(), a pointer cast, a linked list traversal and there's the bits. You don't need any libraries other than standard file I/O. That makes future support and migration a zero-risk proposition.
A nice feature of audio is that our requirements are scaling much slower than our tech. It takes about 100K to store one second of one channel of 16 bit, 48 Khz uncompressed audio. People will always argue about how many channels they need or if 96Khz is actually any better, but we aren't going to see real demand for 10X storage/bandwidth requirements for audio in the foreseeable future. Meanwhile storage and bandwidth are going to continue to get cheaper by factors of 10.
I expect FLAC to go the way of Stacker. It's a great tech that helps bridge the gap between the time when it was just too expensive to store so much data and the near future when it will be so cheap that it doesn't make sense to bother compressing it. I loved Stacker back when I had my first (5 gig) hard drive. Now that I'm pushing a terabyte, it would be silly to put up with the risks and the hassle of drive compression.
They sell shelf space that publishers use to sell video games. Particularly end-caps.
Even for the big guys, the mark-up on games is insignificant. But the video game market is so crowded that being one of the tiny fraction of games that are actually on the shelf at Wally World is incredibly valuable -and therefore incredibly expensive.
The standard configuration for Lua uses 64-bit double precision floats for numbers. If you look in to how the format works you'll see that doubles can exactly represent a wider range of integers than standard 32-bit ints.
If you stick to addition, subtraction and multiplication, integer math will stay quite integer using doubles. Divides will result in reals, but you can floor(x/y) if you need to.
It is my understanding that it wasn't even K&R's choice to lay out the code that way. It was a demand from the publisher to save paper.
It may be a urban legend, but assuming it's true it makes me laugh when I see programmers get zealous defending a standard designed by a bean counter who was just trying to trim his dead tree budget.
Given a 1 terabyte disk, how hi-def could the video be? Let do the math. I'm going to assume base-1000 marketing measurements where "1 terabyte" is actually exactly 1 trillion bytes.
Assuming a 2 hour movie at 24 frames per second...
2*60*60*24 = 172,800 frames
1 terabyte / 172,800 frames = 5,787,037 bytes per frame
If we stick to uncompressed but low dynamic range pixels then we need 3 bytes per pixel...
5,787,037 / 3 = 1,929,012 pixels per frame
That's actually slightly less than the 2,073,600 pixels in a 1080p (1920x1080 progressive scan) highest-end HDTV image.
Of course, WMV9PRO compression supposedly delivers something like 2 hours of 1080p on a standard DVD. If we accept compression, the math becomes much easier. Given that 1 terabyte is roughly 200 DVDs you can do:
1) 400 hours of 1920x1080 video
2) 2 hours of 26,880x15,120 video
3) any balance between 1) and 2)
Personally, I'd like to see some of that extra space go to delivering 72 frame per second, 16 bit per channel video. That 6x multiplier would still give us approximately 66 hours of 1080p video even if the compression only scaled linearly.
You can mod the game if you want to (it's your time and money after all), but I am thoroughly enjoying the challenge presented by Doom's designers. I've had several encounters in pitch-black rooms that went like:
flashlight: There they are!
shotgun: Boom!
flashlight: Next...
shotgun: Boom!
flashlight: Ne.. %#!+ guess I didn't kill that last one!!!
shotgun: Boom! Boom! Boom! ...and I've loved it every time!
Say what you will about the venerable TI series. I purchased a TI-85 10+ years ago for about $80. Today you can buy a TI-86 new at amazon for $117.99 even though it is only marginally more powerful.
The TI-85 is the only computer I've ever heard of that has _appreciated_ in value for over a decade even without an antique factor!
I still have it on my desk right next to my Athlon-XP. Even though the TI-85's processor is equivalent to an 8086, it has enough power to get the job done. The TI combines all the functionality I need with a highly usable physical and software interface. That is what gives it real value.
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Full screen WebGL is being held up by security concerns. The browser vendors are eager to get it in as soon as they settle on how to make it difficult to exploit.
FLAC is great and all, but you only save about 30%. That's a significant help, but it's not a killer feature in my opinion. Uncompressed WAV format (RIFF storing PCM) has one significant advantage: it is such a trivially simple file format that any junior programmer can write a parser for it in an afternoon. fread(), a pointer cast, a linked list traversal and there's the bits. You don't need any libraries other than standard file I/O. That makes future support and migration a zero-risk proposition.
A nice feature of audio is that our requirements are scaling much slower than our tech. It takes about 100K to store one second of one channel of 16 bit, 48 Khz uncompressed audio. People will always argue about how many channels they need or if 96Khz is actually any better, but we aren't going to see real demand for 10X storage/bandwidth requirements for audio in the foreseeable future. Meanwhile storage and bandwidth are going to continue to get cheaper by factors of 10.
I expect FLAC to go the way of Stacker. It's a great tech that helps bridge the gap between the time when it was just too expensive to store so much data and the near future when it will be so cheap that it doesn't make sense to bother compressing it. I loved Stacker back when I had my first (5 gig) hard drive. Now that I'm pushing a terabyte, it would be silly to put up with the risks and the hassle of drive compression.
They sell shelf space that publishers use to sell video games. Particularly end-caps.
Even for the big guys, the mark-up on games is insignificant. But the video game market is so crowded that being one of the tiny fraction of games that are actually on the shelf at Wally World is incredibly valuable -and therefore incredibly expensive.
The standard configuration for Lua uses 64-bit double precision floats for numbers. If you look in to how the format works you'll see that doubles can exactly represent a wider range of integers than standard 32-bit ints.
If you stick to addition, subtraction and multiplication, integer math will stay quite integer using doubles. Divides will result in reals, but you can floor(x/y) if you need to.
It is my understanding that it wasn't even K&R's choice to lay out the code that way. It was a demand from the publisher to save paper. It may be a urban legend, but assuming it's true it makes me laugh when I see programmers get zealous defending a standard designed by a bean counter who was just trying to trim his dead tree budget.
Given a 1 terabyte disk, how hi-def could the video be? Let do the math. I'm going to assume base-1000 marketing measurements where "1 terabyte" is actually exactly 1 trillion bytes.
;)
Assuming a 2 hour movie at 24 frames per second...
2*60*60*24 = 172,800 frames
1 terabyte / 172,800 frames = 5,787,037 bytes per frame
If we stick to uncompressed but low dynamic range pixels then we need 3 bytes per pixel...
5,787,037 / 3 = 1,929,012 pixels per frame
That's actually slightly less than the 2,073,600 pixels in a 1080p (1920x1080 progressive scan) highest-end HDTV image.
Of course, WMV9PRO compression supposedly delivers something like 2 hours of 1080p on a standard DVD. If we accept compression, the math becomes much easier. Given that 1 terabyte is roughly 200 DVDs you can do:
1) 400 hours of 1920x1080 video
2) 2 hours of 26,880x15,120 video
3) any balance between 1) and 2)
Personally, I'd like to see some of that extra space go to delivering 72 frame per second, 16 bit per channel video. That 6x multiplier would still give us approximately 66 hours of 1080p video even if the compression only scaled linearly.
Let me know when it hits the shelves.
You can mod the game if you want to (it's your time and money after all), but I am thoroughly enjoying the challenge presented by Doom's designers. I've had several encounters in pitch-black rooms that went like:
...and I've loved it every time!
flashlight: There they are!
shotgun: Boom!
flashlight: Next...
shotgun: Boom!
flashlight: Ne.. %#!+ guess I didn't kill that last one!!!
shotgun: Boom! Boom! Boom!
Say what you will about the venerable TI series. I purchased a TI-85 10+ years ago for about $80. Today you can buy a TI-86 new at amazon for $117.99 even though it is only marginally more powerful. The TI-85 is the only computer I've ever heard of that has _appreciated_ in value for over a decade even without an antique factor! I still have it on my desk right next to my Athlon-XP. Even though the TI-85's processor is equivalent to an 8086, it has enough power to get the job done. The TI combines all the functionality I need with a highly usable physical and software interface. That is what gives it real value.