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CritterKeeper

All of time and all of space....

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It's a quote from Doctor Who, when he offers someone the chance to join him in the TARDIS.

"All of time and all of space....where do you want to go?"

I think my first answer would be The White City.  That is, the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, the World's Columbian Exhibition.  It was a massive affair, a huge attraction for its day, with wonders of the modern world far and near.  I've been hearing about it for years, and it would be really cool to see it in person.

Then, I'd like to go somewhere with dragons.  Nice ones, mind, not ones that eat virgins and burn villages down that get too clever and decide to run out of virgins all at once.  Something like the dragons on Pern, or in How To Train Your Dragon.  Or even miniature dragons, like fire lizards or Flinx's minidrag.

I'm sure what I'd want to see after that would depend on how the dragons turned out.

 

So, how about you?  If you could go any time or place in the near-infinite universe, where would you want to go?

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London, 1773 - 1775.  If I had to be more specific, a point where I could change the opinion and/or temperament of Solicitor-General Alexander Wedderburn, before he mocked and humiliated Ben Franklin in front of the Privy Council on January 29, 1774.

If Franklin's diplomatic mission was successful, North America could have remained British.

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9 hours ago, mlooney said:

August 14, At the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, Poland. The pebble that took 9 years to roll.

Should have included the year 1980

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9 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

London, 1773 - 1775.  If I had to be more specific, a point where I could change the opinion and/or temperament of Solicitor-General Alexander Wedderburn, before he mocked and humiliated Ben Franklin in front of the Privy Council on January 29, 1774.

If Franklin's diplomatic mission was successful, North America could have remained British.

meaning no offense to any modern brits, but why? 

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12 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

meaning no offense to any modern brits, but why? 

I can probably guess one reason, but the politics thread is locked. ;)

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I should have specified, you can't change major historical events.  No killing Hitler or stopping Revolutions.  No telling your younger self to buy the winning Powerball ticket (unless you've already won and recall getting the numbers from a mysterious stranger).  This is just places to see, things to experience.   ;-P

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29 minutes ago, CritterKeeper said:

I should have specified, you can't change major historical events.  No killing Hitler or stopping Revolutions.  No telling your younger self to buy the winning Powerball ticket

Ok, so going to May 5, 1973 for the Kentucky Derby might be fun, I wouldn't be allowed to place a bet on Secretariat.  Good to know.

In that case, I would like to see the first meeting between the Native Americans and the Vikings.  With subtitles if possible.

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4 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

Ok, so going to May 5, 1973 for the Kentucky Derby might be fun, I wouldn't be allowed to place a bet on Secretariat.  Good to know.

In that case, I would like to see the first meeting between the Native Americans and the Vikings.  With subtitles if possible.

Sort of.

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Austin, Texas. August 1st, 1966. I was about 2½ years old then. Don't ask me why I'd want to go there, I've just always had this morbid curiosity about this horrible event that took place in the city where I was born.

I would want to visit it from several angles—close up and personal (but not targetable), nearby and listening to radio coverage, and somewhere where I could see the television coverage with a group of people (like in a lunch counter or similar).

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CompuServe office, some time in 1989.  Find the people that added animation to the Gif89a file format and talk them the [redacted] out of using it.  For the love of all things lawful good, people of the Internet stop using them.  If you have to animate some things, make a for real video file and use HTML5, with autoplay turned the [redacted] off.

Growl, snarl, snap, grumble, etc.

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1 hour ago, mlooney said:

CompuServe office, some time in 1989.  Find the people that added animation to the Gif89a file format and talk them the [redacted] out of using it.  For the love of all things lawful good, people of the Internet stop using them.  If you have to animate some things, make a for real video file and use HTML5, with autoplay turned the [redacted] off.

Growl, snarl, snap, grumble, etc.

How about convincing the creator of the GIF format that it is in fact GIF and not JIF! ;)

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1 hour ago, Scotty said:

How about convincing the creator of the GIF format that it is in fact GIF and not JIF!

The Peanut Butter people spent a lot of money making sure their preferred pronunciation was oft repeated early on.

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11 hours ago, mlooney said:

CompuServe office, some time in 1989.  Find the people that added animation to the Gif89a file format and talk them the [redacted] out of using it.  For the love of all things lawful good, people of the Internet stop using them.  If you have to animate some things, make a for real video file and use HTML5, with autoplay turned the [redacted] off.

Growl, snarl, snap, grumble, etc.

I have perhaps slightly different opinions on the matter…

We've found ourselves in a state with the PNG group pushing MNG (Multi-image Network Graphics), Mozilla pushing APNG (Animated Portable Network Graphics), Google pushing Animated WebP (animated Web Picture) and everyone using either Animated GIF (animated Graphics Interchange Format) or WebM (Web Matroska video).

Now, GIF has been superseded by PNG in all other respects (hence in the vernacular "GIF" now implies an animation).  PNG is in general superior: it has better compression; it supports true-colour colour-depth without arcane hacks.  The GIF format should be a quaint format supported for compatibility but which noöne uses for new images anymore.  But it isn't, due to the animation use.

Why GIF?  It was simple.  If wasn't that much work to add animation support to a GIF decoder.  Hence everyone supported it.  And noöne managed to come out in time with a replacement that everyone could agree on.

Should PNG have come out with something akin to APNG from the start?  They had their reasons not to (wanting whether an image is animated or not to be discernable from its extension).  Should Firefox have dropped MNG support?  They had their reasons to (was the size of the other image decoders combined, and if nothing else the initial purpose of Firefox was to create a slimmed down browser based on the Netscape sources).  But the effect is that GIF is now the vernacular for a short, silent animated image, while it should have fallen out of use about a decade ago.

Maybe MNG should have been designed to be simpler to start with, even if still nominally distinct from PNG.  I don't know, but (edit: if so) that might mean (edit: that the reason why) it failed (edit: is) for the same reason as GNU Hurd failed: failure to abide by the KISS principle.  But be whatever however, I'd say that the fact that GIFs are still in active use for anything (animated or otherwise) speaks volumes of the failure to supersede it.

Should Google be pushing WebP?  Certainly the usage case seems to have changed: no longer are animated GIFs pixel art or simple digital artwork, they are now generally photographic footage, something which the GIF format full stop was never supposed to be used for even pre-PNG (granted MNG has JNG (hence JPEG) frame support but that isn't much use if noöne supports it).  It is, however, something that the codec used by WebM/WebP is doubtless better at.  On the other hand, it relies on WebP actually taking off much.  Something needs to take over from GIF and to do that, it needs to gain comparable momentum.  If this ends up splitting vendors between APNG and WebP, neither would be likely to take off.

Drawing a distinction between WebM and WebP is still valuable though.  When something is a GIF, people can be confident that it will not make noise and will usually only take a few seconds.  This is not so with video files, in spite of HTML5 and WebM having removed much of the technical barrier to using videos more, and in spite of them being technically capable of fulfilling that role.

All that being said, WebM seems to be the de facto successor as far as Gfycat is concerned.  And Imgur at least in the past, although they seem to be adopting WebP for some purpose and to some degree.  And then there's Ugoira, for the sake of completeness…

This is of course just my ramblings at present.  This is not necessarily representative of my future or past opinion, or of the future, past or present opinion of any vertical or horizontal associate of mine.

Edited by HarJIT

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March 8 and 9, 1862, Hampton Roads, VA to watch the CSS Virginia take on the Union blockade forces on the 8th and see its duel with the USS Monitor on the 9th.

Note to self: Bring earplugs.  A good seat for this show could be much louder than any rock concert.

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On 4/30/2017 at 8:31 PM, mlooney said:

Silent short videos should not have been invented was my point, not which file format the use.

Well, long videos were utterly impractical at the low data transfer rates available in 1989--IIRC modems for home use were only capable of 14.4 kb/s at that time. So it was either short or nothing, and they chose short.

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18 hours ago, ijuin said:

Well, long videos were utterly impractical at the low data transfer rates available in 1989--IIRC modems for home use were only capable of 14.4 kb/s at that time. So it was either short or nothing, and they chose short.

Also the resolution would have been tiny.

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Everyone's talking about the past. So I'm gonna do something different.

May 14th 2017, where wishing my mom a Happy Mothers Day would be less embarrassing...

I wake up, have my coffee, wash up a bit, then went and gave my mom a hug and said "Happy Mothers Day", she looked at me and said "Well thank you, but that's next Sunday."

Ffffffffff.......

Dad had to joke "Well, on the bright side, you've got it out of the way, so she can't get mad if you forget next week."

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