Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>> OK, that's just absurd. The sofa and the rug are *exactly* the same
>>> colour. How the hell can the machine tell them apart? Additionally, how
>>> on earth can it tell what colour they were originally? That's
>>> impossible...
>>
>> Except it clearly isn't impossible, because it was done.
> 
> Well yeah, OK, I rephrase: It defies explanation.
> 
>> Adjusting the white balance of the photo involves picking out 
>> something that actually is/was white (like the white on the baby's 
>> shirt).  That gives the computer a reference to make the adjustments 
>> from.  When photos age, they tend to age consistently and the colours 
>> adjust with consistency.  The computer basically is doing an "undo" on 
>> the age effect applied by real life.
> 
> But surely no scanner on Earth has sufficient resolution that you can 
> amplify a signal by many orders of magnitude and not be swamped by 
> noise? The photo posted contains almost no blue whatsoever, so you'd 
> have to apply a ridiculous amount of gain to that channel...
> 

The picture is an older, sorta analogue media, it does not fade it's 
colors the same way a bitmap would if bitmaps actually faded. It is so 
predictable, in fact, that baring strange papers and processing, it is 
very easy to correct for. Just treat the picture as if the lighting it 
was shot with was different from normal daylight of around 5500 K.

In effect, the computer doesn't boost the blue channel, it uses a damned 
"nonlinear colourspace transformations".

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Gilles Tran wrote:
> On the version I got with Vista controlling the transitions is just done
> by pulling them with the mouse and zooming in the timeline for more
> precise control.

If I understand correctly what you're describing... Same in XP, FWIW.

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Invisible wrote:
> Yep. There's only so much that human senses can perceive. ;-)

I can see banding in grayscale POV-Ray renders. I checked with an image
editor and there is no color level skipped. So I see the difference between
rgb(42,42,42) and rgb(43,43,43).

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Invisible wrote:
> Now there's interesting. Do you have a reference for that? Last I heard,
> DVD audio typically has lossy compression applied to it...

It does, so what. It's 48kHz anyway. MP3 is usually 44.1kHz, DVDs use 48kHz
MP2 audio.

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Of course, using a point-and-click interface, it's not possible to do
> POV-Ray style tricks like positioning a sphere exactly at the end of a
> cylinder... the CLI has plus points! ;-)

Of course that's possible with a point-and-click interface. I never used any
remotely-decent modeller, but I'm sure Google SketchUp lets you do that.

(in my opinion, the CLI *still* has plus points; but you're wrong about that
specific feature)

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Mike Raiford wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
> 
>> With enough preprocessing, an AGA Amiga can basically display 24-bit 
>> graphics. It just has to be encoded cleaverly. Recall that at this 
>> point in history, PCs were still lumbering around with EGA or maybe, 
>> if you're lucky, VGA. Ooo, 16 colours. Wow. :-P
> 
> What? Back in 1990 I had a PC with a VGA and it could display 256 (out 
> of 262,144) colors at 320x200. It was a Paradise card, so it could 
> actually do 256 at 640x480, 16 at 800x600. Of course, sound was 


It was only 91 or 92 and I had some card with an Oak chip that could do 
24bit SVGA up to 1024x768.  It didn't actually have enough memory for 
that, so you *had* to go with a lower bit depth at that resolution, but 
still :)

And it had all those fancy bit-blitting modes, as well.  I read through 
the specs once, and was astounded at all the things they thought to add in.

Of course, my Sound Blaster was the one that had two OPL chips for 
better synthesis.

And my CPU was a measly little 486sx... When I finally upgraded to an 
FPU, I was astounded to see POV-Ray trace the RSOCP with double digit PPS :)

Anyway, I think the only real problem with performance in PCs is the 
non-standardization.  Every Amiga XXX had the exact same performance 
characteristics.  Every PC was different, and had different bottlenecks. 
  As a result, some programs would run well on one PC and not another, 
and other programs would be the exact opposite.  Just like today ;)

...Chambers

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> Well... it looks fine to me, that's all I'm saying. ;-)

But "fine" is nowhere near what you see in real life.  While there is still 
an obvious gap between real life and what you can reproduce, there will no 
doubt be improvements in the future.

> OK, well that's pretty weird. I wonder why they suddenly changed it to 48 
> kHz then...?

Well don't forget, that there was nothing widespread before DVD that 
recorded films in a digital format.  For some reason 48 kHz was pretty 
standard in the music recording industry, even after CD came along with it's 
lower sampler rate.  I guess in the film industry they stuck with 48 kHz (as 
films were obviously never put onto CDs), but then when DVD came along it 
made sense to have a 48 kHz soundtrack if everything was recorded at 48 kHz 
anyway.

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> Of course, using a point-and-click interface, it's not possible to do 
> POV-Ray style tricks like positioning a sphere exactly at the end of a 
> cylinder...

Of course it is.  You can even tell it that the sphere is referenced to that 
point on the cylinder, and to make the radii equal.  So when you change the 
cylinder length or radius, the sphere changes position and radius to match.

You've never really used a modeller have you?

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> For comparison, the excellent Flashback got 97%.

Oh I loved flashback, I think it was one of the first games that I actually 
spent a long continuous amount of time playing until I finished it.  But I 
got stuck right at the end (I think I said that before in here and someone 
told me what I missed).

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> The real point is more that on a PC, just switching from one window to 
> another always seemed to take forever, whereas on an Amiga it was 
> instantaneous unless the machine was under heavy load.

Yeh, I remember my friend had a 33 MHz PC, and just closing a window it took 
several seconds for his desktop wallpaper to repaint itself, slowly scanning 
down the screen line-by-line.  I think the difference was, that Windows was 
always designed to use the hard disc as additional RAM, whereas the Acorn 
was specifically designed not to do this.  Of course it meant you sometimes 
had to quit applications if you ran out of RAM, but it also meant that you 
never got slowed down by the OS thrashing the hard disc.  In fact, if you 
didn't want anything extra loaded at startup, the hard disc wouldn't be 
accessed at all.

They also ported some really cool vector art package that was originally 
written for the Acorn (I think it was called Artworks on the Acorn and Xara 
on the PC).  At some computer show I went to they had both packages running 
on a latest Acorn and PC at the time, and of course the Acorn was something 
like 8x faster at drawing complex shapes with lots of graduated fills and 
transparency.  It had fininshed drawing the entire picture, while the PC was 
still drawing the background fills.

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