Browsers (Was: A very basic blog about D)

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Tue, 16 Jul 2013 16:35:47 +0200
"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday, 16 July 2013 at 00:28:11 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> > They're corporations. It's not about turning a profit. It's 
> > about being under a legal obligation to shareholders to extract
> > *as much* money as possible.
> 
> Indeed. But at this rate, they're not even staying competitive 
> with their corporate alternatives. The cable company will have to 
> shape up or accept defeat, but nope, they keep raising their 
> rates. Maybe they're just milking what they can.
> 

Yea. While they're desperately trying to hoard money...they're just
doing it very stupidly ;) The action of "squeezing sand" comes to mind.

> And yeah, I agree with the sad state of tv. A lot of what I watch 
> are actually reruns but there's a lot I like about regular tv 
> over dvds: the cost (which was a pure loss with cable, but a win 
> with over the air), the variety, and actually I kinda like 
> commercials because they give me a chance to get up. Yes, I could 
> pause a dvd whenever, and change the discs for variety, but eh 
> the regular tv is nice and mindless.
> 

PUO's do piss me off. I wish I could find a (likely of sketchy
pedigree) player that would let me disable PUOs so I wouldn't have to
waste a DVD+/-R (and often downsample to single-layer) just to get rid
of them (well, I *think* Media Player Classic *might* be able to, but I
mean a proper set-top player). It's kinda weird how it's easier to
find a regionless player, or a player with a hidden regionless setting,
than one with a way to kill PUOs. (Not that I like region coding any
better.)

> > (usually anime)
> 
> Sailor Moon rocks btw!
> 

Maybe I just haven't seen far enough through, but I always thought it
was weird how it seemed like every episode Tuxedo Mask would end up
having to come save her sorry ass. :)

Pretty Cure isn't bad either as a slightly later "Magic Girl" show, at
least the sub version anyway. The fighting is standard generic
stuff, but aside from that it's just very cute. Actually, there was a
fantastic GBA game based on it, which is what originally drew my
attention to the series: "Futari wa PreCure: Arienaii: Yume no sono
wa dai...something" Umm I forget the rest of the name, but it's a
side-scrolling platform puzzle game with a "co-op but only
one-player" concept. Quite brilliant IMO. A shame it never had a
western release.

It is interesting though, how compared to live action stuff and most
western works in general, animes/mangas tend to have much broader
demographic appeal beyond just the "core" audience for a given work.
For example, While there's certainly some good Seinen I like (like
Cowboy Bebop, Death Note, and Ghost in the Shell, as far as the really
obvious examples go), there's also been a bunch of Shojo that's managed
to really hook me: Kodocha, Marmalade Boy (the manga, haven't seen the
anime), Clamp's Suki Dakara Suki, and some others. And that's not an
uncommon phenomenon at all.

('Course, then there's other great ones that I'm not really even sure
what category they'd *technically* fall under: Like FullMetal Alchemist
and K-On.)

> > were going to redo the protocol, I'm sure they could have done
> > something far better than the non-degradable new system we 
> > ended up with.
> 
> Yeah, my thought is at least they could interlace the frames, 
> using the same signal they have now, just changing it from a high 
> res compressed stream to a lower res, redundant and 
> error-correction supporting stream. So it sends frames like:
> 
> 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 1 3 2 2 1 4 3 2 1 5 4 3 2
> 
> well that's confusing looking, but the idea is if the resolution 
> is like 1/4 the size, we should be able to send each frame 4 
> times in the same digital signal. So then if your connection cut 
> out and you lost a frame, it is ok because you'll have another 
> chance to pick it up 50ms later. So if you then have a small like 
> 16 frame buffer in the box you could pick up almost a second to 
> recover a frame and piece it together from its sub-frame 
> checksumed chunks as it is rebroadcast, to give the user a smooth 
> picture.
> 
> 
> Or something like that, I'm not a signal expert nor a reliability 
> engineer, but it seems to me that it ought to be possible.

I was initially thinking along the lines of "there's gotta be a way
these days to make a better analog format than NTSC/PAL", but yea, that
certainly sounds like a direction to pursue as well. And frankly I
barely know shit about analog EM signals, so I could be wrong about
that part anyway.