Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Graphics Software

RGBS: Color Spaces For The New Millenium 151

Snowfox writes: "Crosley Bendix, Director Of Stylistic Premonitions, U.M.N., has this excellent article explaining Squant, the fourth primary color. He managed to get his hands on a new Apple Quicktake 1500sq, in advance of the US release, to snap some photos. You can view them with the plugins available on the site. -- Sorry, no Linux plugins. :( -- Seeing a new color jumping off your screen is a real head trip though. Just try and imagine a color you may well have never seen before." While it's true that no Linux plugins exist yet, a GIMP plug-in can't be far away. Considering Squant's olfactory characteristics, that might not be the greatest idea, though.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

RGBS: Color Spaces For The New Millenium

Comments Filter:
  • by Anonymous Coward
    no more comments.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    The primary colors are red, yellow and blue. Red, green, and blue are just convenient for mixing on monitors.

  • by Anonymous Coward
    Really funny! Goto www.fuckedcompany.com and see for yourself.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    Squanto say, "Me file heap big trademark infringement lawsuit against paleface!"
  • by Anonymous Coward
    "Do these pants make me look fat?"

    No, dear, your huge ass makes you look fat. The pants are fine.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 01, 2001 @05:37PM (#321706)
    My friend frantically calls me up and says to me "There's a big problem!!" I say to him "What?" he goes "I can't install the Squant plugin! I can't see squant! " so I say to him "uh... that's a joke. you know that right? " He replies that I'm an idiot, and after about a minute realizes he's wrong. Looks like someone reads /. too religiously.
  • I've toyed with the idea of some form of sci-fi alien that doesn't see color the same way most terran critters do. The idea was that somehow(?), with a bit of hand-waving, these aliens still see the same "visible" light range humans do, but within that range they take more than three datapoints (r,g,b). They have the ability to distinguish the exact spectrum at each point in their vision. Sort of a 4-dimensional set of data that reaches their brain: (A 2-d image, and at each point on the image they have a frequency/intensity 'graph' of the spectrum. Somehow this data is collected (no, I don't know how), and their brains are equipped to "feel" this data as color in a much more precise and perfect way than we mere humans can.

    I was toying with the idea of writing up these aliens in some sort of roleplaying game.

    Now, the interesting questions that arise are:

    1. What would they think of human RGB video monitors? They would see a bananna rendered with a sharp spike of red and a spike of green on the spectrum, and this would look nothing like the way a real bananna looks to them. Our RGB monitors are explicitly designed to mimic the limited data our eyes are capable of measuring, NOT the real spectrum that exists when you look at the object directly.
    2. What technologies would they have gotten a head-start on due to their senses? Some things about light that took us humans a long time to deduce would be intuatively obvious to these aliens.
    3. What sort of bizzarre technology would be required to make a color screen that was good enough to work for these aliens? Would it be so hard to do that they just give up and don't bother with anything other than black-and-white?
    4. How would their art paintings look different? Would human mixed paint look wrong to them too? ("Red and blue don't make purple, you silly human! Heck, red and blue are on opposite sides of the visible spectrum, and purple is on the other side of blue from red. How do you get purple from a spike of red and blue?? That doesn't make any sense!" (I think in real life this happens because our red receptors actually get triggerred by two frequencies, red and a multiple of red that is just beyond our vision range in the ultra-violet. The UV echo of red is tickled a bit when you start going past blue into violet, so we percieve violet as red and blue, even though the tickling of the red receptor is a bit "fake".)
  • But your code is not as closely neat as the 2.0 version, which even compiles:

    /* put angle brackets at includes. */
    #include stdio.h
    #include unistd.h

    int main(int argc, char**argv)
    {
    printf("RGBS plugin v2.00 (C) 2001 Fjear-Nation.net\n");
    printf("This product includes software developed by the University of California, Berkeley, and its contributors.\n");
    printf("This product includes characters standardized by ANSI, ISO and their contributors.\n");
    printf("This product includes words in a language developed by the People of England.\n");

    sleep(2); fprintf(stderr,"Unable to initialize RGBS plugin, error 566: PEBCAK situation.\n");
    return 1;
    }

  • This is a genuinely funny hoax, but you should know that it is as almost as old as Slashdot itself. I first came across it in 1998, and I notice that the page hasn't been updated since October of that year.

    On the general topic of April Fools stories, I suggest in future years you take a cue from the mainstream media, and just embed one carefully chosen hoax amongst a slew of actual news.

  • No, he was right about there being a relatively newly identified one. The five (known) basic tastes are sweet, bitter, salt, sour, and umami.
    http://www.salon.com/health/log/2000/01/24/umami /
    http://www.cf.ac.uk/biosi/staff/jacob/teaching/s en sory/taste.html#Umami
    "Umami is the taste of certain amino acids (e.g. glutamate, aspartate and related compounds)."

    --
  • Cathode Ray Tubes need a minimum of one electron gun or else you don't get a cathode ray (which is a bunch of electrons boiling off of a hot--temperature wise--cathode and racing towards the front of the picture tube--the screen--because that's where the anode--which is several thousand Volts more positively charged than the cathode--is).

    Monochrome monitors and black and white televisons have only one electron gun and the phosphor at the front of the tube that gives off light when struck by those speeding electrons is all of the same type.

    A color television or color monitor has three electron guns and three different phosphors are used, one for red, one for green, and one for blue.

    In most CRTs the guns are arranged triangularly and the little dots of red, green, and blue phosphor are also arranged on the screen in triangles. Some CRTs stack the guns and the phosphor triads vertically.

    If you were implying that the person to whom you were replying was using a monochrome monitor, then never mind, except that creating a system that uses 3 or more different colors of phosphor but only one electron gun to light them up would be hideously difficult and horribly expensive.

  • Interference between two frequncies creates a third and fourth frequency, the sum and the difference. This is what allows radio and television tuners to use a variable local oscillator to create a signal at the fixed frequency for which the intermediate frequency amplifier chain is tuned. To learn more, look up hetrodyning.
  • The best part is when you click on customer service and go to the NewHew SquantView Troubleshooting Guide. Especially if you're a BOFH fan.
  • Never watched any of the SNLs from when Dan Aykroyd was still on it as a regular castmember, did you? How about this link on Everything2 [everything2.com]?

    --Joe
    --
  • It's a good thing that April Fool's Day is almost over, because it's rapidly becoming annoying.
  • No, interference between frequencies does _not_ create a third frequency. What it creates is a more complex wave pattern. How this shows up depends on your equipment. If you're looking at the signal with an oscilloscope, you'll see a complex wave pattern. If you use a spectrum analyzer, you'll see two peaks.

    The human eye uses chemical receptors that pick up a range of frequencies centered at a particular 'peak' frequency. Most of us (disregarding tetrachromatic and colorblindness mutations) have three types of receptors for that: red, blue, green.

    If the eye receives both blue and green light, both sets of receptors respond, according to the relative intensities of the two lights. If the eye receives a pure frequency of light _between_ blue and green, both sets of receptors will _also_ respond, according to how close it is to the blue and green that the receptors are tuned for. Two lights of different colors can stimulate the eye in the same way as a single light of only one color.

    White light can be a mixture of all frequencies (like blackbody radiation), or a mixture of only three frequencies that equally stimulate all three receptors.
  • oh, no! MS has now cornered the stupid april fools posts on /. =p
  • I forgot what day it is today. Now I feel better...
  • Do these pants make me look fat?"

    The *ONLY* correct answer to this question is

    "No, honey, not as fat as you looked yesterday"

    "Now, I hope and pray that I will, but, today I am still just a bill"

  • RGB is indeed the primary colours for mixing light, but the colours for pigment are:

    Cyan
    Yellow
    Magenta

    The reason RYB is often quoted is that Cyan and Magenta are not colours commonly used, and they look a lot like blue and red.
  • Am I the only one who looks at the date?

    April Fools...
  • Ok, first off, 'light' or visible light, is the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum with wavelengths from about 4*10^-7 m (violet) to 7*10^-7 m (red). If you 'mix' two sources of light, each of their own frequency, they to not become a third frequency.

    The reason light 'mixes' is based entirely on our biological response to it. It just so happens that when we see red and green light at the same time, our retina responds about the same way as it would to pure yellow light.

    Now, we consider red, green, and blue to be the primary colors of light because we can fool ourselves into seeing most other colors with combinations of them. Again, this is a result of our biology.

    In fact, there are colors in the visible spectrum that we can see that _cannot_ be simulated using a combination of red, green, and blue. Likewise, there are colors that can be produced with red, green, and blue, that cannot be reproduced with the absorbtion of cyan, yellow, and magenta from white light. Hence the development of Hexechrome, a 6 primary ink system from Pantone, that can better approximate red, green, blue.

    So it's perfectly reasonable that given a forth color of light we could expand the range of simulated colors to better approximate the entire visual spectrum. In fact, there are color systems, LAB (luminence, a, and b) and probably others, that allow us to store more color information in a file than our RGB monitors can reproduce. Anyhow, I hope this straigtened out a few people, although I hope I didn't confuse anybody into thinking this article was legit. It ain't.
  • I think I agree with you about the headroom aspect - I saw a demo with a landscape generator. They used logrithmic brightness because it let them have nice bright mountains and still have the sun appear brighter. (I say "I think" because it's not quite clear what your point was.)

    But, how does wanting 16bpcc (color channel) require a monitor capable of 256 times more light output? The problem is that if you display 256 equal width bars of a color across the screen they appear as distinct bars. That's with 8bpcc. So wouldn't it be nice if you could draw 65536 (or rather, as many as you had lines of resolution) different shades of a single color across the screen to avoid the banding?

    And yes, FP pixels would be great. It'd remove the inaccuracy we get simply from repeated truncation of the values, after every blending effect.
  • Actually, I want a much larger numeric range to cover the color range currently represented by 0-256. I don't want the top end to be much brighter, or anything. Just a smaller difference between levels.

    It's barely obvious where the color bars meet if you do a 256-step gradiant from black to full red, for example. I think with each of those steps being represented by another 256 steps, it's be impossible to see the difference.

    And going to a higher resolution DOES solve the aliasing problem. Take a 2048x1536 picture, shrink it to 256x192. Display both full-screen. See the jaggies in the smaller one? Those diagonal lines were just as rough at high resolution, but the pixels were smaller and less obvious. Once the size of a pixel drops below our visible threshold we won't see that anymore.

    Of course, perfect knife-edge rocks against a blood-red sky happen rarely in real life, so Q3 won't appear 'correct' but the jaggies will be gone.

    Dithering isn't the best solution for approximating a color, it's merely the best available.
  • >I think part of the problem is that we're coming from different domains here. My company writes
    >software for people putting images onto film. (Visual effects, mostly.) Therefore we need to
    >handle the huge dynamic range of film. People playing Quake don't need that.

    Quite right. I want something that makes my graphics look nicer. Dithering is a hack we shouldn't have to use, so I want more detail where it would do me good.

    Now, I wouldn't complain if it was decided to stop at 12bpcc (4096 levels) and make the rest headroom, for the benefit that would have for people working with film. (16bpcc is a bit excessive).

    And yes, in this quest for less banding, I'd love floating point rendering so that fog effects didn't look so ugly.

    As for the aliasing, I was talking only of a stairstep effect on a diagonal line. I agree that there are other aliasing problems, like oversampling, or moire effects from rendering fine lines. Those do need more sophisticated handling than simply more resolution.

    As for the "only where it matters"... it would be a nice step if we made better decisions about that, when to drop the quality on a model so as to not make it a visible difference. The problem that I see is that when a model is dropped in complexity the textures tend to shimmy. We need a better way of locking textures, maybe to the center of a polygon instead of the edge.

    As for Moore's law, yes, people seem to expect us to be done soon. What's really happening is that we're discovering tasks that couldn't even be considered until recently, faster than we're 'finishing' old ones. (For reference, Doom tops out of 35fps, and I don't know how to change that, Quake 1 gets 300+ fps, Q2 gets 220+, Q3 gets 110+, and Q3TA (larger, more complex maps) gets 75+.) And it has a long way to go before it looks real.
  • Isn't it Monday yet? In any timezone? Please?
  • I was about to mail my graphic professor.

    IHBT

    (I have been trolled)
  • There's four basic tastes, namely sweet, bitter, salty and sour.

  • Your teachers in kindergarten lied to you about the primary colors, you know, and this article makes the same mistake. Red can be formed by mixing magenta and yellow. Blue is formed by mixing cyan and magenta.

    I stil haven't figured out why this injustice is allowed to continue, corrupting the values of our children. It probably has something to do with the easter bunny.

  • i'd thought maybe this one was serious (even with the `olfactory' thing), that someone'd worked out a new additive primary that'd flesh out the video gamut, or maybe about the fourth receptor that some people seem to have that' isn't connected up, but no... :p

    Ya know, there's some sort of an April Fool rule against post-noon fooling...

  • ua lava!

    I've given up on slashdot for the day. The april fool's day posts are so far from funny it hurts. ugh.

    sean
  • > I guess some of us have to have our humor make sense...blech

    well, some of us prefer our humor to be funny. [theonion.com]

  • How can this plugin add a color-gun to my CRT monitor? Adding hardware with software sounds little too 1337 for me.
  • I don't get it! I downloaded the plug-in, tryed it in IE and Netscape, reinstalled it, even tried it on a friend's Mac a few times. But as hard as I try, I still can't see Squant!
  • ... is it just me or does this entire thing sound like a big joke?

    Especially when they start talking about "sqed" "squello" and "squanty." And smells. And yeah.
    - WrexSoul
    \/.
    vvv
  • I just need to stop reading all news sources on April 1st. Otherwise my Dumbassmeter might malfunction and I'll make quite an idiot of myself.

    - WrexSoul
    \/.
    vvv
  • "The fact is, there is no language to explain colours to someone who can not see them. It just can't be done."

    As a colorblind person, I can confirm this fact 100%. I don't know how many people have attempted to describe to me what color my shirt is. ;)
  • > ...did you know there are some tribal cultures
    > that only have words for 2 colors? And there
    > are some cultures that distingiush between over
    > 200?

    I'm not sure if the employees of "Crayola" constitute a "culture".
  • I've heard Hollywood typically uses 48bpp for the special effects graphics, and there's some 16bpc (bit per channel) features in GIMP and Photoshop, but I don't know much more about how we're advancing for hardware support there. I just want better colors!

    Unless you're working with film, you don't need it. Eight bits per channel is adequate, and will remain so until we have monitors that can deliver 256 times the amount of light that current ones can.

    I've posted two [slashdot.org] comments [slashdot.org] on this topic previously. Go have a read.

    Having said that, one place where we really need more precision is in the intermediate buffers of OpenGL (e.g. the accumulation buffer). But what you want there is floating point pixels.

  • But, how does wanting 16bpcc (color channel) require a monitor capable of 256 times more light output? The problem is that if you display 256 equal width bars of a color across the screen they appear as distinct bars. That's with 8bpcc. So wouldn't it be nice if you could draw 65536 (or rather, as many as you had lines of resolution) different shades of a single color across the screen to avoid the banding?

    First off, I said that 16bpcc would only be useful if you had a monitor capable of more light output. I stand by that. (Note: 256 is too much, of course. :-) What you really want is 0-4095 be equivalent to the current 0-255, and the rest as headroom.)

    As for 256 equal width bars appearing as distinct bars: of course they will. The human eye always looks for discontinuities, causing the Mach banding effect. What you have here is an aliasing problem. Just like going to a higher resolution doesn't solve spatial aliasing problems (I can see the jaggies on the sides of polygons when I play Quake at 1600x1200, which is better than HDTV), going to a higher colour resolution doesn't solve colour quantisation aliasing problems either. You really need something like stochastic sampling to hide the aliasing behind noise. In this case, you need dithering.

  • I think part of the problem is that we're coming from different domains here. My company writes software for people putting images onto film. (Visual effects, mostly.) Therefore we need to handle the huge dynamic range of film. People playing Quake don't need that.

    And going to a higher resolution DOES solve the aliasing problem. Take a 2048x1536 picture, shrink it to 256x192. Display both full-screen. See the jaggies in the smaller one? Those diagonal lines were just as rough at high resolution, but the pixels were smaller and less obvious. Once the size of a pixel drops below our visible threshold we won't see that anymore.

    If the scene that the 2048x1536 image was meant to represent has even higher frequencies in it and that image was not properly filtered, you will see aliasing problems. Especially if this is an animation frame, or if there are fine objects such as hair or fur (although shrinking it properly, using a sinc or Catmull-Rom reconstruction filter will help this a lot). This is particularly noticable in the early films which used CGI (I'm thinking in particular of The Last Starfighter). They rendered larger and then shrunk the frame down for printing onto the film plates. For the most part it looks okay, but you can often see "sparkling" around the edges or on complex textures, because regular sampling never removes aliasing, it just moves it up a few octaves. Modern renderers don't do that. They use stochastic sampling instead, which also doesn't get rid of aliasing, but it does convert it to random noise, which is less visually objectionable than aliasing.

    [Aside: I noticed the "sparklies" in the opening battle scene of Lost in Space when I saw it in the theatre, and you really notice it in cheap TV effects, like the first series of Babylon 5 or pretty much all of SeaQuest DSV.]

    Worse than aliasing, though, that is the fact that it simply wastes computing resources. If your shading is properly filtered (for OpenGL that would include properly filtered mipmapped textures; for offline rendering that would include analytic integration), you don't need the higher sampling rates everywhere, only where it matters. The computrons that you expend on rendering at a higher resolution could be spent on more complex models, which would pay off better for realism. By comparison, Pixar reports that faithfully modelling a typical room in a house requires about 2Gb of compressed model data. For a game, you wouldn't need quite that much, of course.

    One thing that's misunderstood about Moore's Law when it comes to computer graphics is that peoples' expectations increase as computing power increases. Nowadays, we can do Doom at 85 frames per second, but people don't want Doom, they want Quake 3. Which means that to keep up with both you need to work smarter rather than harder.

  • Does squant look like octarine (the color of magic) ?
    ---
  • At the moment, scietists don't know what makes up at least 88% of the universe. This claim has been verified by scientists' observing the effects of gravity on objects in the night sky. To account for odd galatic rotational curves and inexpicable escape velocities, cosmologists coined a term - "dark matter."

    Recently, a friend of mine was fortunate enough to beta-test an alpha-version of the QuickTake 1500sq. I suggested that he try snapping a shot of the sky using the QuickTake and a new NikkorSquant telephoto lens. Our results were astounding. Here's a picture [orst.edu] of the night sky that I made with my Nikkon Coolpix; and for comparison, here is one that my friend took with the 1500sq [orst.edu].

    If you have a new squant-enabled monitor, it is obvious that a great deal of the matter in the universe is actually squant-colored.

    "Why haven't other astronomers discovered this truth?" you may ask. Well, most astronomers are near-sighted and wear glasses. Unfortunately, at present, all glasses are manufactured with materials that are opaque to squant and do not transmit the new hue properly. Also, all telescopes currently in use do not have squant-compliant optics; as a result, squant cannot be detected on any equipment of this sort. Squant optics are so expensive and so volatile that most scientists will not be enchanted with the idea of having to retrofit Keck with squant optics.

    In the 1930s, Zwicky and Smith, two fellows who were observing the Coma cluster and Virgo cluster of galaxies' velocities, were criticized for their work. They were attempting to estimate the mass of the clusters given escape velocity. However, these fellows were critized for a phenomenon known as 'contamination.'

    However, I hypothesize that this 'contamination' was actually the presence of large varieties of Squant-colored mass (SCM) inside of the Virgo cluster. This 'contamination' was actually caused by spectral absorption of squant-colored emissions by other matter present in the cluster. This matter was excited by the squant-colored radiant energy and re-emitted light at lower wavelengths - much more like the better-known phenomina of "phosphorescence." Perhaps "squantphorescence" would be a more appropriate term for this sort of visual contamination.

  • Thos pants make you look PHAT ! (Pretty Hot and Tempting)

    (Why would you settle for someone who isn't hot, intelligent, and a great personality? ;-)
  • by Jace of Fuse! ( 72042 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @06:54PM (#321747) Homepage
    Actaully, if you look at the wavelength of Red, Green, and Blue you will notice something interesting.

    Red is a greater distance higher than green than green is to blue, meaning that a wavelength between Green and Red would in fact be an altogether fourth colour, which is exactly what the Tetrachromat would see.

    How their brains interpret this data however is totally beyond explaination to those of us who have "normal" three colour vision.

    You can't say it's like another shade of red, because saying that is like saying green is another shade of blue. It is not.

    The fact is, there is no language to explain colours to someone who can not see them. It just can't be done.

    "Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
  • #1. Light tends to act like discrete packets of energy called Photons, which have a distinct energy level.

    #2. Photons tend NOT to interact, and pass right by each other.

    #3. The human eye has a range of color perception, called a color space. This range includes colors that can NOT be accurately reproduced by CRT or LCD displays. This has been known since before the design of color TV.

    #4. There is strong evidence that some people can actually percieve a fourth color, in the blue-green range, that most people can't. Slashdot had a story about this about 2 months ago. These people would be able to distinguish between to sets of carefully balanced lights which were composed from different colors of red, green, and blue LEDS, but appear identical to everyone without this extra sense.

    #5. Slashdot needs another axis for rating, funny, correctness, etc.

    --Mike--

  • Negativland kicks serious ass.
  • by Speare ( 84249 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @06:02PM (#321751) Homepage Journal

    Personally, I'd hope that as our electronics D/A converters get more accurate, we'd shift to more colorspace resolution. 48bpp (16bppR, 16bppG, 16bppB) is the next logical step, along with a 16bpp alpha channel, to give a natural 64bpp step.

    While it's true that the human eye's sensitivity is right around 200 levels of gray, unable to see finer distinctions, a human can very easily see the mach banding in ramps of other more subtle hues in the 24bpp color resolution space.

    I've heard Hollywood typically uses 48bpp for the special effects graphics, and there's some 16bpc (bit per channel) features in GIMP and Photoshop, but I don't know much more about how we're advancing for hardware support there. I just want better colors!

  • last year, I believe. In conjunction with Rambus. Looks like GIF all over again, folks.

  • The Guardian [guardian.co.uk] ran a similar story recently
  • April fo... oh... C'mon guys, it's a day late (in AU anyway), and I would have thought it's past 12:00 in the USA too.
  • Fair enough then :D
  • by FunkyChild ( 99051 ) <slashdot@ m k e 3 . net> on Sunday April 01, 2001 @07:04PM (#321756) Homepage
    Have a look at this page [adobe.com] from Adobe's online guide to colour theory. It's very informative and should help clear things up.
  • by FunkyChild ( 99051 ) <slashdot@ m k e 3 . net> on Sunday April 01, 2001 @05:58PM (#321757) Homepage
    Actually, no, the primary colours of pigment are Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow. The whole RYB thing is a myth propagated by artists and ignorant high school art teachers over the years, which has nothing to do with the actual physical characteristics of colour and how our eyes perceive it. I had this sort of thing ranted at me for a semester in Colour Theory class, and it's actually quite interesting. This [google.com] my help clear some things up.
  • this is for the mutant tetrachromats [slashdot.org].
  • Hey you, off my mental wavelength. :)

    I swear, we must've been posting at the same time. Your timestamp beats mine by two minutes. Discworld fans must be like great minds (thinking alike and such).

    Given the nature of Discworld, do you suppose that we would have to start using octal codes to represent shades and blends of squant if it were like octarine?

    -J
  • by Ravagin ( 100668 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @05:42PM (#321760)
    Man, you haven't lived until you've grown octagonal rods in your eyes and seen the eighth color, octarine, the color of magic.

    Of course I can't describe it to you, but it's sort of a purplish-green....

    -J
  • I like the bit about the smell of Squant.

    hmmmmmm..
  • No... you're not the only one stabbing himself with a pencil. The upside is, with my recently-acquired brain damage, I can see squant.


    43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr
  • This ones actually kinda funny. I really started laughing when it points out the names of the colors that are mixtures of the new "color" and other primary colors. It just gets better from there.
    =\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\ =\=\=\=\
  • I was going to mention this too. I found the article about the tetrachromatic mutant females very interesting. Women can apparently see more different colours than men anyway (that's why men should take notice when women say that two colours don't GO together), but the couple of mutants they identified actually had a fourth type of cone receptor in their eyes (if I remember rightly), and thus were able to spot differences in hues much more accurately than non-mutants.
  • Print some garbage into a temp file to fake disk activity ("the computer's thinking! this must be good!") after you sleep(). Also, I'd call exit() instead of returning, but you're the author...

    --

  • My guesses are that red/blue/yellow are easier to pronounce (these are young'ins after all) and that parents wouldn't stand for it. "Your teacher told you WHOT?" It makes the older generation look dumb.

    --

  • From the song "Sometimes" by James:
    There's four new colurs in the rainbow
    Now we know that they're squant, sque, squed and squellow
  • I feel so cheated!

    I caught this one as an April Fool's right away, but the story was hilarious.
  • But what about re-engineering the monitors to take advantage of the new discovery?

    Hook, line, and sinker...

    --
  • How their brains interpret this data however is totally beyond explaination to those of us who have "normal" three colour vision.

    Great... I couldn't understand how women could tell such subtle differences between the origianl 3 colors and now I've gotta try and figure out how the F they do it with 4 .. and I can't even see the fourth one?! This is jacked up. I'm screwed -- I'll just give up on trying to match my clothing for women now.

    Justin Buist
  • Er...this is about 10 years old!
  • the april fools post on blizzards diablo II expansion site was the only truly funny one i've seen this year..
  • South Park creators announced that they've actually been able to produce the Brown Sound. They plan on broadcasting it during a commercial in the midst of Curling Finals in Salt Lake City Olympics.

    The estimated cost of airing such a commercial is $10,000,000 US. The estimated cost of following cleanup is well above 1000 times of cost of the commercial. Authorities across the world are currently pleading with Olympics organizers to prevent a disaster from happening. Olympics organizers, unfortunately, are claiming that they are simply businessmen and do anything for appropriate price.

    m
  • http://www.rewdot.com/squant.zip
  • by milkman1 ( 139222 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @05:49PM (#321775)
    Not Likely...
    If memory serves, it is believed that only women are capable of having tetracromatic vision. Which (if memory serves) is normally seen as an extra shade of red. Tetracromatic people can often tell that items, which seem to match to ordinary people, don't. ie they can tell the difference between a true black ink and a cheap black ink made of cyan magenta and yellow inks.

    Sadly Tetracromatic women generally will have color blind male children.
  • The three primary colors are not red, blue, and yellow, and in no way can they be.

    Well why not? A quick look at my textbook shows that humans have receptors sensitve to blue, green(very close to yellow BTW), and red wavelengths of light. The distribution of these receptors is not uniform across the spectrum. In other words we just happen to percieve colors based on the three "primary" colors. You could just as easily define a color using three different points on the spectrum.

  • Does that mean, that you'd have foursight?
  • There is another primary color, but there's only this one old woman who can actually see it. Serious.

    /Brian
    (4/2)
  • Only half of the male children of a tetrachromatic woman will be colorblind. And, strictly speaking, it is a shade of green, because it is the gene for "green" rods that is in the X chromosome.
  • Your comment was made on April 02, so you must be serious. We are least sensitive to changes in blue. Our intensity resolution is highest for green (out of the RGB primaries).

    True. What I meant was that we are most sensitive to changes 'of hue' around blue and yellow. When it comes to luminance, we are the most sensitive around 550nm (green-yellow). That just means that we perceive it as a brighter color.

  • 24bpp is pretty good when you look at it on a corrected monitor. RGB (which is device dependent) is not the best way to use those 24 bits since it doesnt take into account that we are more sensitive to changes in blue and yellow, but its easy to work with given todays hardware.

    48bpp would be serious overkill for use in video cards, memory is tight even with those 64MB cards. 48bpp is more of an intermediate format image synthesis or processing where you need precision. 48bpp is nice, but i'd rather see better use of the 24bits, perhaps CIE XYZ/Luv (device independent).

    What would really be nice is if we could make monitors with a 4 (or more) primaries. AFAIK, the gamut of a monitor doesn't include many of the shades of green that we are capable of seeing. Does anyone know the gamut of LCD is any better, or are they supposed to conform with RGB709?

  • Often found near abundant quantities of the gas octagen or the metal octin.

    The light fantastic....
    (and perhaps we should stop the quotes here before we get sued for copyright infringement).

    mick
  • Silicon Graphics Octane2 workstations and Onyx2/Onyx3000 "graphical supercomputers" handle 48bpp color nativly.
  • So if, say, two radio broadcasters send at 90 MHz and 98 MHz, "the signals are added or subtracted from each other"? So there will be only one frequency (and radio programme) left?

    When you send white light through a prisma, you don't get a full spectrum of frequencies but only red, green and blue?

    Why don't red, blue and green combine to a single frequency and colour?

  • colored light is light that only represents certain parts of the visible spectrum, adding more colors of light will get you closer the seeing the whole spectrum (white). On the other hand, colored pigments absorb certain wavelengths of light -- red (actually magenta) absorbs green light, blue (actually cyan) absorbs red light, and yellow (the only correct one) absorbs blue light. This is why adding more colors of pigment gets you closer to black (more wavelengths of light are absorbed and never reach your eye) you can acheive the primary colors of light with pigments by mixing any two primary pigments: cyan and yellow take away red and blue and you're left with green (this is how you get the "yellow and blue makes green seal"). magenta and yellow take away green and blue and you're left with red, magenta and cyan take away green and red and you're left with blue. tadah
  • hehe A better practical joke would be to say that the color puce is the only color she looks "thin" in. You can get all kinds of great results by telling a girlfriend she looks thin in something.

    "Yeah, that thong looks great, hon. You look so thin and awesome. Yeah, definitely wear it to dinner tonight. I know it's 20 degrees outside, but you'll look great..."

    Works well if the girlfriend is really thin and bluffs on the fat thing (by the way, the above dinner comment actually worked).

  • You try getting a bio/med student to go out in something unconservative.
  • by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @05:52PM (#321791) Journal
    There was this legit story [slashdot.org] on slash some months back

    But this is not a story of gene transplant for geeks for four color sight.

    And there was a story a while back about a new basic taste being "discovered" (basic tastes being sweet, bitter salty), this being a flavor that is more common in asian foods, and is found in many oriental dishes.

    But what about re-engineering the monitors to take advantage of the new discovery?

    Check out the Vinny the Vampire [eplugz.com] comic strip

  • Up to this point in time there have been only three primary colors, red, blue, and yellow, the basic building blocks of every rainbow. All other hues are made from combinations of these primaries. The secondary color green is formed from a mix of the primaries blue and yellow, for example. Violet from red and blue, and so on.

    This article contradicts itself. The three primary colors are not red, blue, and yellow, and in no way can they be. For light, or color by addition, the primary colors are red, green and blue, like the pixels on a TV or a computer monitor. These primary colors add only one color of light to an otherwise black background. Red and blue form magenta, blue and green form cyan, and red and green form yellow; those are the three secondary colors for light. All three of them form white light.

    For color by subtraction, or the filtering of colors used in dyes, paints, inks, etc, the primary and secondary colors are reversed. The primary colors subtract, or filter out, one color of light from an otherwise white background. Magenta, cyan, and yellow are the three primaries. Magenta and cyan form blue, cyan and yellow form green (not blue and yellow like they teach in elementary school!), and magenta and yellow form red. All three of them combine to make black.

    Also, come on people, "However, in a most interesting sidelight, pure squant has also proven to be the only color, primary or otherwise, to carry its own unique scent with it. The odor of squant is apparently also difficult to describe by comparison to known odors because it is a primary odor." This is obviously another /. April Fool's joke.
  • by Dest ( 207166 )
    Why do we have more articles on April Fools day than any other day. Man this is bullshit.
  • Hence the development of Hexechrome, a 6 primary ink system from Pantone I work for a label printer, and 99.999% of what we do is CYMK. If you all want to see Hexachrome in action, check out a V8 Splash label in the grocery store, they really do stand out against the other labels. Also, you wouldn't believe what Pantone charges for those little color books with the reference colors in them. :) (They expire after a while too, the ink changes color in time)
    -
  • I thought the fifth primary color for screen printing was "taint." When it taint cyan, magenta, yellow or black, it's gotta be taint.

    I apologize for the unnecessary Steely Dan reference. I couldn't help myself. [ridiculopathy.com]

  • Umm, The plug-in works fine! You need to change your graphics card and monitor with the one supporting the 4 color phosphors. Until then don't expect it to display properly on an obsolete 3 color video system. The video system should also support the proper earthworm smell as mentioned in the article when the color is used.

  • One of the colors that can not be produced by the present RGB system is the vilot produced by a laser or prism. It is the shorter wavelength color next to blue. It doesn't have red in it at all, unlike the red/blue aproximation seen much of the time. To experiance this vivid color, it is often seen in laser light shows as it is one of the colors produced and split out of the white argon laser. Too bad film and digital cameras can not properly capture this beautiful color.
  • Light is like any other wave (...) I don't know who lied to you, but it is indeed the frequency of the light signal being changed

    I don't know who lied to _you_ =) it is clearly impossible, that the frequency of the light signal can change... you are right in the first part: it's like any other wave, so lets take sound for an example...

    mix a 100 Hz tone with a 1000 Hz tone. you clearly understand, that you dont get a 1100 Hz tone as a result. you remain with two tones at the same time which you can distinguish with your ear. same is true for light... (except that you can't distinguish light with your ear ;)

    you muddle up the time/amplitude and frequency/amplitude illustraton of waves.. a wave of 100 Hz for example is a sinus-curve in time/amplitude and a single point in frequency/amplitude. if you mix two waves you add the amplitude values for each time or for each frequency.. the result in a time/amplitude diagram is a different lookling wave, the result in frequency/amplitude are two single points, one at 100 Hz and one at 1000 Hz.

    even in the time/amplitude diagram you can see, that the frequencies are not changed, if you mix a intense 100 Hz tone with a weak 1000 Hz tone: you can still see the 100 Hz sine wave, but with a frayed outline. if you look closer, you can see, that this frayed outline is the 1000 Hz sine wave forced to the path of the 100 Hz wave...

    the reason you can mix light is indeed based on the three receptors you have on your retina. there is one for red, one for green and one for blue. each one has a range of frequencies they respond to with different intensity (like a bandpass filter).

    a frequency between green and blue causes signals with little intensity in both receptors a pure green causes a strong signal in the green receptor. these signals are interpreted by a region in our brain and then we think: "hey man.. this is red !" at least some of us =)

  • int main (int argc, char** argv)
    {
    printf(stderr,"Unable to initialize RGBS plugin");
    return 1;
    }
  • by jobber-d ( 225767 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @06:49PM (#321813)
    Boy are all you people going to be surprised when you find out that all of the news posts are TRUE! now THAT would be a good april fools joke
  • With all this April 1st crap arround, I can't see Squant.
  • Light is like any other wave... When two waves cross paths the signals are added or subtracted from each other. I don't know who lied to you, but it is indeed the frequency of the light signal being changed. About the only thing out biology has to do with it is the range of light we can see. In other words, it is a mathematical proof that there are only three primary colors (or four for those that insist on counting lack of light as well). Any part of the spectrum that cannot be reproduced is a result of bad equiment that doesn't have the light frequeny quite right (like out monitors and TVs)
  • by jarettm ( 307240 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @05:34PM (#321832) Homepage
    .. another colour for my girlfriend to wonder if she looks fat in.

    Jarett

A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson

Working...