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Unisys Cracks The Whip
Their GIF patent expires in 2003, so Unisys is
getting while the getting's good, according to CNET.
They're not commenting on the record, but it seems they'll be kicking up their licensing fees. According to one source, they asked Accuweather for US$3.8million. Instead, AccuWeather forecasts switching to
PNG
next month (insert sound effect of
burning GIFs.)
Update: 04/19 09:44 by J : I just checked the bug log for Mozilla's lack of PNG alpha transparency (which has been registered and debated for over a year, and which I gather is the major factor standing between Mozilla and PNG compliance).
Three days ago, after a little tweaking, Greg Roelofs reported significant progress on the latest build:
http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/pngs-img-moz.html
It's gorgeous! Aside from the interlacing bug (bug 3195), it's the equal of MacIE 5.0. Well done, Tim and Pam! It's truly a lovely thing to behold. I look forward to seeing this bug closed out at last.
What's next? Microsoft owns the rights to the .BAT format? And we must pay a $10 fee for every created batchfile used? :P
No, it's fairly obvious that Micros~1 owns the rights to every file that has eight letters, followed by a dot, followed by a three letter extension.
but which was actually a potent virus!
This is a truly horrible state of affairs. This could be the ruin of my company. I am right now notifying my superiors as to the seriousness of this issue. If what you say is true, then our most critical departments are in serious danger. Currently, people in our programming department must execute all GIF files as superuser before they can view them. Instances such as this may be the cause of financial ruin for us. Imagine if one of those GIF images contained malicious code!
This is outrageous. First it was not running programs from warez sites. (How were we supposed to get those programs like Netscape and Linux?) Then it was not opening attachments from our emails. We're now having to run a system where we print out email attachments and then type them into the computer with "dd if=/dev/tty of=file". Now we can't execute GIFs as superuser. Where is the world going?
It's not our fault, though. It's the fault of all you linux hackers. First you're using 'telnet' to get into other computers. Just because we run an open telnet session with a four letter root password doesn't mean that you stupid linux hackers should have the right to break into our computers. I understand that most of you use 'telnet' because you're fat, lazy pigs, but you shouldn't benefit at our expense.
And if that doesn't prove that all Linux users are tools of Satan, this should: Many of you write 'Source Code'. As we know, Source Code is evil. Source Code is used by hackers, communists, and even atheists. Source Code is viewable through the same application that child pornography, stolen software, and cult literature is viewable through. Source code has been responsible for every major virus and bug in computing history. And these stupid Linux people dare to use it, and make it available to everybody! Corporations such as Microsoft are trying to contain this outbreak of source code, but they can't stop it without your help.
Obviously, Linux is a tool of Satan. But that doesn't address Satan himself, in his purest form: BSD. As you know, the BSD license is much more liberal (damn commies) about distribution of source code, and we all know that source code is evil. There is only one way that you can redeam yourself: Windows. Specifically, Windows 2000. As you know, it was said that the savior would rise from the dead on the eve of the millenium. And he did: Windows 2000, one year before the millenium. Windows 2000 contains the spread of source code, doesn't have evil applications like telnet, and takes so long to load GIFs that viruses would die first! Long Live Win2k !
Ahh... where to begin! I guess at the beginning.
Q: Are there animated PNGs?
Don't you dare use MNG. It allows for animation.
;-)
If I remember correctly, there was the original GIF standard, known as GIF 87 (in 1987) and then two years later, the format was updated to GIF 89a which allowed "animated GIF's" (although I believe it was intended for 'slide-shows'). Why not, then add a new extension to the format this year, allowing the same open compression used in PNG?
Of course, many will ask, why not just use PNG? Well, the animation format for GIF is well established, excellent for banner ads and small animations, and it is only the compression that is under patent duress. PNG doesn't allow "animation" although I believe there is a MNG (Ming? [The merciless??]) format that does. Personally, I think we have ENOUGH formats and enough three-letter-extensions as well!
Let's just make a GIF 2000 (or GIF 00) and replace the compression with an open format. Yes, I know that all software that handles GIF's, including all browsers, etc., would need to be updated. Same as for PNG, really. Who needs a "new" format when the GIF specification is so easily extended. I don't remember the URL, but the GIF specification is easily found on the web, and would be *EASILY* extended to support alternate compression formats. I have no doubt that this is the best approach. I would even be happy to work on it myself. What do you think?
Anyone who wishes to comment on this to me can email me at:
xenex -AT- se-tel -DOT- com
GIF is on its way out - 99% of people who graphically browse do so with 4.X or later browsers and they support at least basic PNG displaying.
FYI, I recommend ImageMagick's "convert" command to convert your GIFs to PNGs...
There seems to be some confusion as to why GIFs are still used. GIFs are used for animation. They also have lossless compression which allows tiny text to not be fuzzy. The max number of colors in a GIF is 256.
JPEGs are best used for pictures. Small text tends to get blurred because JPEGs use lossy compressions, however, they support more than 256 colors.
PNG uses lossless compression, but doesn't do animation and browser support is spotty.
GIFs can be created without the LZW compression. A freeware library (for Delphi and C++ Builder only, sorry) is here - http://www.melander.dk/delphi/gifimage/
I would fully support an extension or update of the GIF format to remove the LZW compression.
Unisys isn't claiming ownership over the GIF format. They only claim ownership over the compression algorithm commonly used in GIF files.
Feel free to switch to a different compression algorithm, or to use uncompressed GIFs. But don't compress your BAT files with Unisys LZW unless you've bought a license.
According to the article, the expiring patent is the one on LZW compression. The GIF format is a well-known use of this technology, but there are many others (e.g. TIFF format).
:-).
It will be nice to see the LZW patent die once and for all in 2003. Celebration over the expiration of the RSA patent will probably be winding down about then
hmm... wouldn't that program require a license as well? Since it does deal with the GIF files... tho I could be wrong
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Typical behavior of a monopoly, if you ask me.
It gets clearer and clearer to me every day that
Slashdot is practicallg BEGGING for someone to
compete with them. Where else could you laugh in
the face of 'the customer is always right' for
so long like this and still stay in business?
What did you eat today? http://www.atetoday.com/
http://www.ar.com.au/~storm/ikon/ - I've been meaning to replace the GIFs with PNGs for a while, this article reminded me to get off my arse and actually do it. So it's done. No more GIFs. Fuck you, Unisys!
If anyone has any doubts about how long the life of software patents should be, read this patent; this is all obsolete.
However, it is a good argument for (a) writing new formats; (b) not writing their code in legalese.
Hmm. Sounds like a hash table to me... I wonder if there was any "prior art" for this claim, eh? Or does UNISYS own the patent on hash tables too, so they can sue my File Org. class....
<HUMOR>
See, that's the problem: since UNISYS insists on writing patents instead of software, their next-generation OS is going to be *really amazing*, but it's currently 3 billion lines of source, and loosely based on MULTICS Technology (MT):
</HUMOR>
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Seems like Unisys is charging way too much now and everybody is sick of it. I expect GIF to be phased out by major sites that actually have to purchase a license for it. Smaller sites will probably continue to use them just because they are unlikely to be noticed by Unisys. With Mozilla supporting png, and MSIE probably supporting it too (I have no idea what the status is on MSIE, does it support png already?), sites won't have to use the GIF format anymore and Unisys will have just priced itself out of the game for the remaining years of its patent.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I loathe them! How am I supposed to read the text with all those blinking and flashing gifs jumping around on the page? Thank heavens/hell for JunkBuster! The web is not a TV...
J.
Yeah, right.
You're going to send me the extra memory and a faster processor to use the newer browser? And a patch to include the features removed from older broswers?
Netscape 4 or later is laughable on this machine. BUt even with enough memory and speed, I stick with netscape 3. It's much faster. It crashes less.
Furthermore, everything after netscape 3 and the last mosaic removes featrues I regularly use: auto-image loading by window (rather than all or nothing in a slow preferences setup), and the alt- sequence to go back pages.
I don't care about newer java and javascript. I have yet to see anyone do anything useful with either of these on a web page.
Even so, I'd rather see a slightly updated netscape 3 than the bloated successors. When mozilla runs on my machine I'll try it again. Until then, it's lynx with an occasional netscape3.
I "sing praises about Netscape 3" ???
.
:) }
.
Let's put this simply: Netscape 3 doesn't suck *as bad* as later versions of netscape and IE. As I mentioned, I don't normally use it, nor opera; they're both too bloated. I use lynx for nearly everything. Once I reconfdigured for a light background and for . on a link to open it with another copy of lynx, I was set.
and "pentium head?" . . . This obsolete thing under my desk is the first pentium I've ever been around. And it doesn't seem able to keep up with my 486/50 laptop. I doubt it could match my powerbook 180, either, but since that hasn't been assembled for years . .
\troll{ob ebay-dork: anyone want to buy the pieces
ANd I won't get into your luxurious resources; those machines that come fully assembled, include keyboards and a crt output, cycle times under a microsecond, etc . .
hack, more of a curmudgeon than usual . . .
>Hey, installing Linux used to be easy for the masses, but since RedHat
>5.x they removed "Redneck" language from the installation program.
>(I bitterly miss the opportunity to "emmalate three clickers" and
>"floormat" my hard disk... <sigh> those were the days... )
Well since RedHat is located in North Carolina,they most likely got tired of it after being exposed to it on a daily basis.
Er, you've got it the wrong way around. We're not the customer, we're the product.
The advertisers are customers and they pay Slashdot/Andover for our eyes.
An important distinction that isn't as widely understood as it should be.
:)
If you use libungif you can output uncompressed GIFs, which are not covered by any patent (AFAIK).
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"L'IT c'est moi!"
I know this is response to a troll but...
Unisis did not invent and does not own GIF. They do hold the patent for LZW which was used in GIF and which was patented after being published in a journal with no notice of patent pending (legal but dubious). No action was taken for years until GIFs got popular, then actions were taken against commercial graphics programs, now individuals.
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"L'IT c'est moi!"
This is such a non-issue it's ridiculous. What percentage of people bitching here have actually written any software that would require them to pay? Anyone just using Photoshop or something equivalent to do their website GIFs is covered. No fee. No problem. No need to avoid them, ESPECIALLY because the bloody patent will expire in a couple of years anyway!
The revolution will NOT be televised.
You're right, my fault. Is there another goofy sounding legal term for protecting against trademark infringement and/or dilution? That's what I was thinking of, and it's something that people often think applies to patent law as well, but doesn't.
One thing I've learned from all the patent stories on slashdot is that due diligence doesn't matter for patents. You are free to selectively enforce any patent as you see fit without losing the right to make any future claims.
They make the same mistakes again and again and again.
I see it every day.
Deleted
You wish.
The funny thing is that AccuWeather, in response, sent the Unisys CEO a 50 MB GIF of an altered satellite image of a hand with a middle finger covering the western part of the US. The caption at the bottom said "Blow Us."
= )
I can create a text file and give it a " .exe " extension, but that won't make it executable. I can give it a " .wav " or a " .avi " extension, but I won't get any music out of it. A file with an incorrect extension will usually just be interpreted as a corrupt and therefore unusable file. .gif " extension on a file means that only programs that are set up to open that kind of file will try and since those programs are, I assume, only coded to be able to do anything with those files if they actually are that kind of file, then all they would be able to do is return some sort of error message or crash or both, which, while annoying, isn't exactly the same as having your browser reformat your hard drive.
A "
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Microsoft does most of the HTML, CSS and graphics standards right. A helluva lot more right than Netscape, that's for sure. Netscape, the browser you can crash with compliant CSS...
Anyway, thought I'd mention that Opera does PNG. But, for reasons I can't fathom, it doesn't do them 100% correctly: alpha blends don't.
Absurd, given that the source for PNG is complete and free for the taking.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Yes. In the days before the internet was widespread. the internet is literally 6 orders of magnitude larger today than it was in 1990 when gif first started making inroads.
Ridiculous. They've been around since about 1987, sonny.
So are you trying to tell me that 13 years in this industry isn't forever?
I seriously doubt that ANYBODY has been licensing GIF for 12 years like another poster announced. It wasn't until 1993 or 1994 that Unisys started going after the unix compress command, and wasn't for two or three years after that (1998 or so) that Unisys started sending out demands for patent licensing to websites.
I've been on the internet since 1986 when the school I was at connected to the internet, so watch who you are calling sonny. :-)
Fast forward to today. In the computer business, things that work are never changed until something new comes along. There was such a huge infrastructure in gifs that other formats have taken a while to catch on. jpegs have been well implemented for a while now in most browsers, as have other image formats. It is only recently that UNISYS has started to see gold and is trying to enforce its patents. At first they were too meak and everybody blew them off, just like everybody blew them off when they tried to enforce the patent against compress(1). Well, they didn't completely blow them off, some people went out and wrote other, non-patented algorythms in what would become gzip(1). Now that the internet is more visible, it seems that they have desided to be more agressive in trying to milk money out of this cash cow. I predict that a new format will displace .gifs in the next few months/years. It may be a format we already have, or it may be a new one.
So that's why people still use .gif files. They've been around for ever, there are a zillion tools and they are about the best supported format in a wide range of browsers. Times will change.
Unfortunately, I'm at work, and don't have access to my bookmarks (I knew I should have put it on the web!) but one, while conversing via IRC, a gentleman informed us that .GIF's could use more that 256 colors. He then directed us to his site where, indeed, there were .GIF images with colors-a-plenty. The bad thing about this was that the increased pallette increased the file size dramatically.
I'm sorry. What I meant to say was 'please excuse me.'
what came out of my mouth was 'Move or I'll kill you!'
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PNG files support true colour, GIFs do not. Depending on how you did this private test, you might be comparing a 24-bit PNG to an 8-bit GIF - which is hardly fair. I've done heaps of PNG conversions for my website network and I think there have only been a couple of times when a PNG has been larger than the GIF it was converted from.
Considering the fricking TCP/IP headers are bigger then 132 bytes, I really don't think the size of a single pixel image matters that much.
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I'm a bit surprised that the article on C|Net News.com didn't mention that the format used by many people to post graphics on web pages is NOT .GIF. There's a reason for this: .GIF files tend to download slowly compared to other graphics file types.
.JPG format, and nobody has patents on JPEG format, either.
When I see pictures and photographs posted on web sites, they're usually in JPEG format. After all, illustration programs and photo-editing programs can output to
As for PNG graphics, the issue up till now is that older web browsers will not display them. Fortunately, Netscape Communicator 4.05 and later, Internet Explorer 4.0 and later, and the upcoming Opera 4.0 will display PNG graphics files with no problems.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
The question right now is when will we see .PNG file display and printing support in the major commercial web browsers?
.PNG files correctly, but printing is another matter (Microsoft is aware of this matter (there is a KnowledgeBase article about this); they may issue a patch or library file update to fully support .PNG files).
It's likely that Netscape 6.0 (the final release version) will have it, and I think Internet Explorer 5.5 for Windows 95/98/NT4/2000 may have it also. IE 5.01 will display
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
This may be seen as a feature, not a bug by some ;-) However there's no denying the fact that the web needs animated pictures, if only so advertisers can annoy us so much that we buy their product :-o
The fact is, the lack of animation in PNG is going to be the biggest obstacle to eliminating GIF. Browser support is no longer really a problem, as soon as Mozilla ships - as Microsoft provides enough PNG support to get by (though both have trouble with alpha right now, a sexy feature that gif never supported anyway). What to do? What we really should have done is be ready with MNG, the animated network graphics format, but it just didn't happen - I suppose it's still not ready, for some reason completely incomprehsible to me, and even if it were it's not supported in Mozilla (yet:) and certainly not in in IE.
What then to do? It's possible to use javascript to animate PNGs, but (1) not everybody surfs with Javascript enabled (2) that's not exactly a trivial change to make to a web page. Ideally we'd just want to replaces GIFs by equivalent PNGs but that's just not possible with animated GIFs.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, what to do??? I sure don't know the answer to this, but I know something needs to be done. Not only does Unisys suck with it's abusive royalty policy and sleazy submarine tactic, GIFs suck too: (1) only 256 colors (2) poor compression (3) very difficult to scale dynamically.
Suggestions?
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Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Yeah they're evil. Whereas Compuserve, Netscape, and all of the other companies that standardized on GIF support are just plain stupid.
"Unisys Cracks the Whip" has been news for about 10 years. From a 1200 baud modem to DSL, this whole GIF drama never goes away. Personally, I'm glad that they are raising the fees. Maybe I won't have to hear about how evil they are for another three years.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
They've actually been trying to enforce the patent for years. It is called the "CompuServe GIF" format, which should give you an idea how long this has been going on (since CompuServe had enough power to set standards). Big companies like Adobe and Corel have never had any problems with the licencing -- it's just never been accomodating to shareware and open source authors.
Unisys could give a rat's ass about their reputation, or inventing the graphics format (which they didn't). This is all about them trying to profit from a market that they completely neglected (aka pretty much everything). They did used to be the third largest computer company. Now they are what? A consulting group?
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
whatever the Internet wants, it takes
Someone finally hits on the truth of the matter!
It's not that Unisys is being particularlly unethical, just upholding their right to be greedy. It's that the on-line community (recalling the whole pre-internet Compuserve & BBS angle of this story) will adopt the easiest solution they can get away with. Big, slow minicomputer companies seem like especially fair game.
PNG could have been invented many year ago and fully supported by all software. However, the fact is that it's easier to be high minded, look the other way, and hire some lawyers.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
It is only recently that UNISYS has started to see gold and is trying to enforce its patents.
Incorrect. I recall reading discussions about Unisys and GIF just like this one on local BBSes in the late 1980s. Go ask Adobe how long they've been licencing LZW from Unisys so that they can support the "open" GIF format -- my guess is that it's been at least 12 years, if not more.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
How do you know that they have violated the patent? Maybe they just used the GIMP and libungif. Its not gifs themselves that are the problem, but compresses gifs. It would be better if slashdot used PNGs, but at this point there are probably still enough people reading slashdot with old browsers that it makes sense not to change.
Preventive War is like committing suicide for fear of death. - Otto Von Bismarck
HAHAHAHAH
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Uh...open the GIF in Photoshop and then convert it's colour mode from indexed to RGB, you'll then be able to use all of Photoshop's pretty filters and such. When you're done, switch the image back into indexed colour (however many colours suits your fancy) and then export it as a GIF. Voila.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
funny on this article. Everyone is bitching "we need PNG support in our browsers" yet I haven't seen one person say they had contributed some code to a PNG project or to Mozilla or anything. Is it me or are there more people complaining and less people actually doing things? We all know PNG support is needed in browsers and yes we also know slashdot still uses GIFs. If all the current browsers supported PNG, slashdot could switch over to them and there would be no problem. If you want PNG support tell the programmers of the browser you particularly like, offer to help them test it out or maybe help with some code or something. I'm not a very good programmer but whenever I can I'll try to help out on a project, closed or not. It's like everyone loves watching PBS but no one is giving any money to big bird.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
If everyone knows this, then everyone has the wrong idea, because there is no patent on the GIF format[*]. There is a patent on LZW compression, which is normally used when creating GIF files. However, it is possible to make GIF files without LZW, as described in some other post in this article.
I'm intrigued by the "no selective enforcement" comment made above. Why hasn't anybody used this defense before? Is it because Unisys is only hassling small-time users who can't afford to go to court, or is it that "no selective enforcement" isn't applicable somehow?
[*] Yes, I know the 'F' is for "Format", but "there is no patent on the GIF" doesn't sound right.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Eventually, one must make a decision:
Should virtuosity determine popularity?
or
Should popularity determine virtuosity?
It looks like Malda has chosen the second option. I must admit, that makes it harder to respect him. Perhaps he has a reason for wanting the current "top" browsers on top? (Ownership in Microsoft and/or Netscape/AOL?) I have been using browsers with PNG support since 1995.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The issue isn't old browsers; it's shitty browsers. Browsers have supported PNG for as long as PNG has existed.
Under conditions like that, it is not unreasonable to expect people to toss their defective browsers and either upgrade them or switch to another one. If your browser is new enough to support frames and Javascript 1.0, then there's no reason it shouldn't have PNG too. (Yes, PNG is really that old, and has been supported by some browsers for that long.)
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
No, because you don't need them.
I currently run a web browser that includes full PNG support (including alpha transparency) on a 50 MHz processor. And it is fast. Back in '95 I ran a web browser that included partial (not full featured) PNG support, but it was a 25 MHz processor and 16 MB of RAM. So don't talk to me about hardware requirements, Pentiumhead! ;-)
PNG does not require a fast processor or a bloated browser. PNG only requires that the browser author be thoughtful enough to include it. In other words, it helps if you're not using a shitty browser made by people to whom quality doesn't matter.
This will probably explain things better, so I'll spill the beans: I'm an Amiga zealot (and the browsers I refer to are Amiga Mosaic along with the PNG datatype in 1995, and AWeb in modern times). Whoa, whoa, take it easy -- put down the fireplace poker -- this Amiga zealot isn't going to make a scene. But now maybe that will help you understand what I meant by "upgrading." Hell no, I wasn't suggesting that you switch from Netscape 3 to Netscape 4. I am suggesting that you ditch the "big two" browsers altogether and go looking around at the fringe projects (Opera?), where you're likely to find much higher quality. That's upgrading.
Me too. I included the comment about Javascript to put it into a chronological context. If your web browser can do Javascript (even though everyone disables that "feature") then it is new enough to have no excuse for lacking PNG. Javascript is newer than PNG! That's why I can't help but smirk when you sing praises about Netscape 3. And my Amiga background just widens the smirk into a full-fledged grin when you bring up the topic of bloat.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/gif2png/
This is just pushing people and companies into using free alternatives.
In one month, when most have changed, at great cost, intelligent PHB's (they exist) will say "This time, don't use formats that can bite us later."
Meanwhile, free alternatives have just received that much more exposure and support.
Unisys supports free software while making a profit. Smooooooooth.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
What do you mean you can't open them again? Why not? I've created many non-compressed GIFs and they work fine in web browsers, and GIMP and Photoshop both import them just fine. Yes, of course they are bigger, but if your goal is a small 4 color icon, it isn't going to be all that much bigger.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The fact is, so many tools are out there that make GIFs, have LZW, and are NOT licensed by Unisys. Apparently what Unisys is persuing is that GIFs made by such programs are therefore illegal, but they offer a blanket license to cover it (starting at $5000 and going up to whatever they think they can get out of you).
I'm most curious how they know a GIF is licensed. I suspect they look for the comment block in the GIF format and if it has the name of a licensed software product, it passes. But then, there are optimizers than never touch the compression, but do strip a GIF of unneeded stuff like the comment blocks. And others might even put forged comment blocks in. And then there are non-compressed GIFs but I wonder if Unisys would know how to recognize that.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Companies exist to maximize profit. That's the nature of the beast. People are motivated to acquire capital gains and other people are motivated to provide it. Without it, very little economy will exist. Unisys board members, chairman, and officers would all be subject to being kicked out by the stock holders (mostly institutional ones like banks, mutual funds, retirement plans, etc.) if they didn't make reasonable attempts to maximize returns. I suspect much heat has already been generated within the company for having failed to gain even better revenues on this in the past (especially for having been so ignorant about even knowing its potential in the 1980's).
The real culprit is a broken patent system. This broken patent system is responsible for every patent holder having to do the things they do, mostly because the opportunity exists. In theory, US patent law is supposed to maximize the public good through an appropriate body of laws. In practice it appears to be a drain on the economic flow, diverting huge funds into efforts, such as law suits, legal threats, and just plain negotiation, for massive numbers of trivial patents that are handed out almost as fast as AOL CDs.
The LZW patent is, perhaps, a poor example. I know how LZW works because I once wrote my own implementation of it from scratch from nothing more than Terry Welch's paper. In hindsight it might seem obvious, but at the time it was issued, I don't think it was all that much obvious.
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands or even tens of thousands, of other patents that are at least trivial, and perhaps downright phoney. Those are the patents that need to be used as examples to show that the patent system is currently practiced in a way that contradicts the national good. Patents should be reserved as a reasonable reward and profitable return for those who do put in the effort and investment to bring intellectual wealth to the nation (trade secret being an available mechanism for those who prefer not to divulge their results). There should be a genuine and beneficial gain from that invention that is likely not to have been for some time later than when it was invented. Most of the patents issued today in the US benefit only intellectual property lawyers and allow large and/or monopolistic companies to bully smaller businesses (who, incidentally, are also trying to maximize their own returns on investment no different than any other business).
Focus. This is political. The change that needs to take place is a revision of the patent law. A proper patent law in the US will reduce lawsuits, increase sharing, and make legitimate and genuine patented ideas available to all for a fair and just reward to the inventors.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
PNG = "Please No GIFs"
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Most photos generally do better as JPEGs than as GIFs or even as PNGs. The reason is that JPEG's lossy compression isn't really noticed in the graduations of the image. Lossless compression, such as GIF and PNG use, do better on images which have fewer colors, or would suffer from lossy blending.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Courts have awarded patent royalties long after patents have expired, for the infringements that occurred while the patent was in force, when appropriate notifications were done at the right time. If Unisys claims you owe them royalties, you're not off the hook by stalling until 2003. You may even be liable for interest, as well.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
An agreement on how to interpret such file by Microsoft, Netscape, and Opera Software, when displaying them via web browsers, as well as by Adobe and The GIMP development team in Photoshop and The GIMP for importing purposes, suggests to me that there is a prevailing concensus that the pallette change opinion has lost out to the full color rendering opinion. Remember that neither interpretation was ever standardized by the GIF89A specification. But the defacto standard seems to be clear. Even those programs that do not apply the full color method still don't do the pallette change method either. In fact I haven't seen any such program, ever. While I will stipulate that people certainly can interpret it to mean a pallette change, I have no doubt that today the prevailing intrepretation will be the one that is actually useful for something.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The creation of an uncompressed GIF does not imply the requirement of the LZW algorithm to uncompress it. The opening of the file is irrelevant to whether actually creating an uncompressed GIF is or is not using compression. The fact that you can open the file without LZW code allows the creation to be legal since it can be used entirely without any LZW implementation. The creator is not responsible for how the viewer opens it. You could open it with a text editor or a hex dump program, for all I care. Not using LZW is not using LZW, plain and simple. If you choose to use it on your end, that's your business.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
No, it does not restrict you to 256 colors. That limit came about back when the best graphical displays were 256 colors and indexed, and happened to match up exactly with the number of colors GIF could encode in a single image block. So the practice came about to use exactly one image block for a whole GIF image. There is nothing preventing you from using multiple image blocks (without the animation extension which isn't part of the official GIF standard). IE 3-5, NS 3-4, Opera, and Mozilla all display things correctly (IE fails to print correctly).
There are plenty of reasons not to use GIF, but a limit of 256 colors is not one of them. Such limits exist only in those programs (the majority, unfortunately) that implemented GIF by reusing tired old code over and over from the 256 color display days (e.g. 1989).
You can see non-compressed and true-color GIFs here and get free GPL non-LZW code to produce your own here.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
It just dawned on me. Unisys and AccuWeather are competing providers of weather data, such as value added weather radar feeds. So my suspicion is that this may be more than just trying to get huge royalties. It may also be to try and cripple a competitor. I didn't see any mention of this in the CNET article, but I think it's important enough to bring up. It may even be relevant and further show why so many patents are really bad tools to put in the hands of business. It could help explain why they wanted so much from AccuWeather.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
This isn't quite as simple as done...
Slashdot is less advocating than it is informing (Where dose advocacy end and informming start? not an easy question...)
Also Slashdot uses a lot of transparencys. Quite a few browsers don't support PNGs at all and at least one dosn't support transparencys...
As such switching to PNGs isn't an option for Slashdot at this time. But websites who don't have to bend to what is currently supported CAN burn all gifs...
This story is helpful as it's a prompting to provide PNG support...
However unless I miss my guess Slashdot takes the approch I do and simply not compress the gif images to start with...
Ohh sorry Unisys our GIFs arn't compressed to start with... take your compression patent fee and stuff it
I don't actually exist.
Not quite...
Unisys was slick.. Compuserve used what they (and the whole world) believed to be a public domain compression.
Compuserve premoted GIFs with LZH compression compleatly unaware of the patent...
No other company premoted GIFs...
Originally the web used Unix graphic file formats.. the web standards people of the time (The W3 didn't exist yet) belived they needed to switch from Unix graphic formats to PC formats to make it easyer to move PCs into the internet as Unix could easlly access PC formats but not visa versa.
By then GIF was allready a standard...
Sence then Netscape came into existence and Compuserve stopped working on the GIF format..
THEN Unisys shows up and says "Hay by the way we own that"
By then GIFs were in major use and no Compuserve to switch from lzh to something else.
At that point people were allready using 28.8k baud...
What really stinks is lzh has been used in CP/M, Unix and Dos for years... Unisys never said a word.
"Oh yeah that technology you have been using for 10 years.. we patented it... pay up"
What really stinks is that it's quite likely LZH predates the Unisys patent however 10 years later no one ever rembers where it came from...
Oh yeah and about "From 1200 baud modem to DSL" People were using 2400 baud before Compuserve started premoting GIFs and 14.4k before Netscape and 28.8k before Unisys revealed the patent...
I don't actually exist.
Unisys isn't anywhere near the same issue as Amazon. ..LZH compression.. be used for nearly 10 years before making it known they have a patent...
Unisys was issued a patent and DID NOT enforce it for YEARS. Instead they let the patented item
They waited for the patentted technology to be commen practace before enforcing it...
The Amazon issue is Amazon got a questionable patent so no one else could get it.
Ok fair enough.. then Amazon enforces it..
The argument your making applys to Amazon but not Unisys as Unisys sat on the patent...
Also the Unisys issue cancles this argument... Amazon could have sat on the patent the way Unisys did.
I don't actually exist.
Yes people the moderators have a sense of hummor :) It's the avrage Slashdot reader who dosn't...
:) Yeah I'm full of it... so Thht
This post is proof...
Mod 2 Funny... and a bunch of people leap on it screaming "Your wrong"...
Silly humans...
Oh yeah lets continue the theme...
You know ASCII text isn't patented? Thats right no patent so...... oh no... I just accententally post a virus...
(this is a virus)
Oh no now your computer has been infected with an ASCII virus and whats worse is I MUST post it as my computer is infected and the virus will erase all my porn if I don't...
Yeah thats all I have.. 10 gigs of PORN... all of it specal... so I have to keep it protected...
so I'm posting this virus.. don't post or you'll pass on the virus...
Hehe
I don't actually exist.
GIF Copyright Compuserve...
Unisys waited for Compuserve to stop upgrading the GIF format before they made the patent known..
This way Compuserve won't update the GIF format to not include the Unisys patent.
I don't actually exist.
Wops :) Sorry...
I don't actually exist.
>If the geek world becomes an all whiz-bang mouthing and no true substance, i'd thank #1 to fucking /., and fucking Perl mongers.
And not ZenToe?
Ohh come on.. I feel left out...
Id has kids going on killing sprees Slashdot is distorying the geeks TV warps your mind and McDonalds is a generic evil..
Everyone is distroying the world but me...
Come on... What evil shall we attribute to ZenToe? I wana be evil tooo...
I don't actually exist.
You know, I may be wrong here, but isn't that Trademark law? I know this discussion has been posted on slashdot before, and the general consensus was that trademarks cannot be selectively enforced, but patents could.
IANAL of course, though.
And why would anyone in their right mind continue support for GIFs? It doesn't get you much but trouble. Seriously, Unisys not only makes using GIF an expensive proposition, but they make it nearly impossible to even figure out if you need a license in the first place. Honestly: Have any of you looked into what it takes to sell software that uses GIFs (or even to just write in-house software that helps create software that uses GIFs)? Start small and pretend that you're only writing software that just decodes GIFs. Do you need a license? There's no real way to find out. Ask Unisys and you'll get as many answers as people you ask. Look at their license and it appears that you only need a license if you write software that makes GIF (or compresses with LZW). But then you look again and find that other companies that only decode LZW have a license. It's really frustrating and I can't wait for GIF to go away.
PNG has a lot of advantages over GIF, like alpha channels, gamma correction, etc. It also has some disadvantages. It seems that some PNG creation/conversion programs play a little fast and loose with the rules so things can get weird later on (The GIMP seems to be fine, though). But the biggest advantage PNG has over GIF, IMO, is no built-in support for animation. The decision to leave that "feature" out was absolutely brilliant. Unless you're a web developer, maybe, in which case you'll have to get used to MNG... :-)
Things would be really nice right now if people had gotten on the PNG bandwagon a while ago. Then Unisys would be out of the picture completely and we'd all be happier.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Nope. You're thinking of the wrong thing. PNG doesn't multi-images. Take a look at the PNG web site's intro page. It says:
You want animations, you want MNG. Of course, animations should go away completely and totally for all time, but that's just my opinion...
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Unisys will run the risk of their intellectual property falling into the public domain
This is so NOT true. You're thinking of trademarks, which must be vigorously defended or they can fall into the public domain (like yoyo, or aspirin). If you hold a copyright or a patent, you own it until it expires or you willingly give it up. You can not lose it through nonenforcement. If what you say were true, then Unisys could not now enforce their patent now after years of letting everyone think it was in the public domain.
As usual, IANAL, but I recently consulted with one over this very issue, and this is what he told me.
If you use a program to make the GIF file with such as Photoshop the license has already been paid.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
this is the funniest thing I've seen on /. in a long time. subtle and brilliantly written.
okay, first of all, arithmetic coding is an entropy coder like huffman coding, not a replacement for a front-end probability model (which is basically what LZ and friends boil down to.)
...
it's true that AC is closer to optimal than huffman coding. but by optimal we're talking about a particular kind of information theoretical optimal, having to do with generating output bits with maximal entropy, that is completely different from "generates the smallest files" optimal.
why people still use huffman coding instead of arithmetic coding in almost all applications:
(1) AC is slower and more complicated than Huffman
(2) the patent issues suck hard (eg JPEG can use AC instead of Huffman as a backend, but nobody bothers because of licensing)
(3) the gain is small enough that it's usually not worth the effort
the idea that people should start with AC or Huffman coding and then build a statistical model is profoundly silly. while it's true that a statistical model *exists* that will give you theoretically optimal compression, determining what it is, let alone computing it, is far, far more trouble than it's worth in even mildly complicated cases. instead, you put the data through an invertable transform first, to 'decorrelate' it and simplify the statistical model into something you can deal with. it's much easier to put the transform before the entropy coding instead of inside the statistical model.
this is how all modern compression algorithms that I can think of work (transforms in parenthesis): gif, pkzip, gzip, and friends (lempel-ziv), bzip (burrows-wheeler), jpeg (2d discrete cosine), mp3 (filterbanks and scalefactor tricks), aac (filterbanks, modified discrete cosine, prediction, and other tricks),
of course there's extra magic that happens inside lossy formats.
damn, i'm offtopic. must be late.
Why doesn't /. take some of it's own advice and burn some of it's GIFs? ;)
g if f g if
GIFs from the front page:
http://images.slashdot.org/title.gif
http://images.slashdot.org/greendot.gif
http://images.slashdot.org/topics/topicmozilla.
http://images.slashdot.org/topics/topichumor.gi
http://images.slashdot.org/topics/topicprivacy.
http://images.slashdot.org/topics/topicbe.gif
etc...
--
GroundAndPound.com News and info for martial artists of all styles.
__________________________________________________ ___
rooooar
and it seems different.
.gif, and that, BY LAW, they HAVE THE RIGHT to profit from that patent. THIS IS WELL PUBLICISED, AND HAS BEEN FOR MANY MANY YEARS.
Yes.. I personally think they are being silly.. BUT...
EVERYONE KNOWS that unisys has a patent on
People use it ANYWAY, defiantly, saying 'they won't come after me'. Well.. YOU KNEW! So if it seems like 'aww.. that's not fair, for them to ask for payment now..' well.. go ASK YOUR LAWYER! It *IS* totally fair. That's how it works.
Wouldn't the patent cover the software that MAKES The gifs, and DISPLAYS the gifs? Why on earth would it cover something that simply moves data around? The data itself is not an implementation of the patented method... the codec itself is.
As long as the tools that made the gifs were legit, and the tools that display them are too.. it's just data.
Due diligence refers to the company's responsibility to it's shareholders. By law, the company MUST PROTECT the interests of it's shareholders, and letting others do for free what the company has a right to collect money for is NOT taking care of your shareholders. The officers in a company have a legal responsibility to protect the shareholder's interests.
Do GIF's have a mode whereby they use RLE (run-length encoding) for compression, rather than LZW, and if so, why not just use that mode? Given that, for the web, most GIF's are used as icons and are pretty small, compression shouldn't be a huge issue these days (and fancier, photoquality type things can just use JPEG...).
:)
Someone could take a sampling of Web GIFs and compare their size w/ RLE vs. LZW, and see how much extra space would be used. I may be wrong about GIFs being able to use RLE; someone correct me if that's the case. If so, one could see how much LZW saves on representative GIFs that are uncompressed (and uncompressed GIFs have *got* to be possible
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
Excuse me if this was a joke and I missed it, but if you are serious, then your logic makes me want to get a lobotomy.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
Just a correction; everywhere you said LZH (Lempel-Ziv-Huffman), change that to LZW (Lempel-Ziv-Welch).
The first is free of any patents (as far as I know) and is based on an LZ77 algorithm, with the added step of Huffman coding for the sliding window pointer values. The second is the patented method (where the patent pertains to the methods for dynamically building, rescaling, and otherwise fiddling with a tree of previous symbol strings) and is based on an LZ78 algorithm.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
Yeah, but there are other unpatented "algorithms" that would identically translate the uncompressed version, without themselves being considered decompression algorithms. I think if you make a compressor (or decompressor) that does NOT build an LZW tree and use it for searching and replacing the current message, you are not violating the patent. In other words, handling the "uncompressed" GIFs, without building a tree of some sort, could not be construed (in any reasonable interpretation) as infringing. (IANAL)
I think it would be entirely possible to build a compatible compressor/decompressor that did not use any of Welch's patented enhancements to LZ78 in order to create and decode GIFs. Welch's improvements seem to mainly deal with efficiency (time & memory), but a simpler LZ78 algorithm could probably be made compatible (with some tricks). Of course, that probably would still attract a lawsuit, and wouldn't be as good as just changing to PNGs. I'll have to look into it...
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
They are trying to recap the costs of developing the GIF format?
Unisys didn't develop the GIF format. Compuserve did. However, Unisys owns the patent to LZW compression, which the GIF format uses to make image files smaller. FWIW, the compression algorithm used in PNG is unencumbered by patents and is better to boot.
You point is valid though -- I doubt the negative press of holding the web hostage for infringement is worth the price.
GIF is pretty simple to implement (compared to JPEG or PNG at least).
I disagree. PNG is at least as easy to implement as GIF or JPEG with the libpng library. It is available as source, compiles out of the box for just about any platform. The license is very unrestrictive -- similar to the BSD license.
The big iron, my friend. They do "enterprise server development." Used to be Sperry and Burroughs, then they merged. These days, their project majoris is cellular multiprocessing (using Intel hardware). No plans to have Linux available on their servers tho, just SCO, Solaris for x86, and NT. 'Course they still sell their A-Series as well.
Worked for them over the summer... Banged head with all sorts of corporate types over the Linux/Free Software set of ideals and they just couldn't seem to comprehend. They don't even realize the screwing they're taking from Microsoft (at the corporate/upper management levels, at least). They're "Enterprise Partners" w/M$. Supposed to have access to the NT source code last May. They didn't get it till the day I left in August and even then, only two people in the whole division was "licensed" to look at it...
-------------
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
It's because normally you have to make your graphics anti-aliased so that curves and such don't look like lousy done bitmaps, and when you do so, you will use gradients of the two colors (the color of your graphic and the background color). You will obviously want to mark the "pure" background color as transparent in your graphic, or else the point of the anti-aliasing is gone.
But, anyway, the result is that if you one day change your background, your images will still have those anti-aliasing gradients from the old background color, and it will look horrible. Trust me, I've tried it, and it doesn't look good... ;)
GNU/Linux. The Freshmaker.
Question: Why would /. carry a story detailing the (obvious) evils of Unisys, mention burning GIFs in an implicitly positive way... and then use GIFs for their graphics?
(PNG == "Good Thing")
Jesse
I'm pretty sure that wasn't a death threat. It was just a dead lawyer joke. It's the difference between saying, for example, "I wish you were dead" and "I am going to kill you." One of them is a threat while the other is merely a statement of preference. In fact, the statement "I am going to kill you" is not even neccessarily a threat. I've had plenty of people say "I'm going to kill you" to me and, to the best of my knowledge, not only have none of them meant it, most of them weren't even really angry. It's language, it gets used playfully a lot. Context changes meaning and sometimes you have to figure out which is which (for those who have seen the movie "My Cousin Vinnie", remember "I shot the clerk(?)"?) Text-only forums like Usenet or Slashdot usually make this task more difficult than it is with face to face contact, especially when neither the poster nor the reader understand the established text based conventions to replace things like body language. Given enough time using such forums, you'll learn to understand people's intended meaning better, or to at least give people the benefit of the doubt.
With the possible exception of contract killers, right?
Although, from what I've seen in movies lately, contract killers are often all around decent guys. And we all know that Hollywood is never wrong about anything.
actually go onto any popular IRC channel, and I bet you get about 4 dcc requests for pictures called "my-porn-picture.JPG .vbs" with lots of spaces so that the final extension doesn't appear in the window. Of course if you then open it in Windows by double clicking, the script is run and you've got yourself a friendly virus.
I meant IE and Netscape in their various flavors - together, they make up most people's browsers (in terms of market share).
And I do think one or more wrongly displayed images can hurt the usefulness of a site. If transparency fails all over the page, it looks ugly. And unnecessary, such a bug shouldn't be too hard to fix.
Some postings here said that folks are glad PNG doesn't have animation support, but I'm afraid one has to see it from the other side -- as long as there is no MNG support (which is a format for animation and has some things in common, see http://www.cdrom.com/pub/mng/) everywhere, GIF will stay. Web site creators want animations, and they want their stuff to display on most people's browsers, so they will take GIF. They don't give a damn about Unisys' behaviour, they paid for their software (probably ;-)) and they want to get things done.
The only way to really let GIF die (IMHO) is to create a free MNG library that can be easily included everywhere (like libpng) and put it into all free or semi-free browsers like Netscape, kfm, whatever. Once web site creators start using it, users will ask for MNG support (Ma, the animation doesn't display!) and IE will have it as well. Best thing would be a free GIMP-like animation editor...
Take a look at that page with both Netscape and IE5. I had to switch _back_ to
Yesterday I grabbed the daily build of Mozilla and I find the transparent png
does now work. They did not on the last version I tried
Anyone charging more than the market will bear will soon see the market bearing down on them. As Microsoft is now.
GIF is unimportant in the long run. Let them thrash; we'll invent better, and freer, formats.
Cheers,
KenB
--
test
Companies like this just make my blood boil. The only reason I can think of they're doing this is because they're greedy.
All I can say to that is... well, duh. What is the point of a company? To make money. How can a company be greedy when its sole purpose is to produce revenue? A company can be stupid -- in that its quest for money isn't tempered with enough wisdom to keep from alienating customers. But then again, Unisys isn't going to alienate any of its customers with these practices -- its customers are large companies and government institutions, not individual consumers.
--- Where's my X.400 protocol decoder?
Use MNG then. It allows for animation.
As cheesy as this post may sound (and trollish, for that matter)
I wasn't aiming for a troll, more like an informative look on how ridiculious Unisys is taking this. If they were even trying to be remotely cooperative with smaller software developers who simply want to incorporate their technology, I think people would be a lot less critical of their ownership of this patent.
So I have this graphics library for novice programmers I have developed. I recently begain work on a new version, and many of my users have request GIF support. I've mostly told them that PNG is really what they want, but to give myself more ammunition, I actually decided to see if I could get Unisys to give me a license for using LZW in my library.
As my library is freely available and the entire project is non-profit, I figured I might be able to get a license at no cost, as the Unisys page on LZW implies this is possible. So I e-mail off my license request. They send me back a questionaire about the nature of my software. I fill out and send it back. They e-mail me back, saying yeah we can license it to you for a fee, just tell us where to fax the forms. I reiterate the non-profit nature of my software and ask just how much the licensing fee actually is. They e-mail back 5000$, and that a) they can't license it to me anyway as they are only allowed to license to companies, not individuals and b) that users of my library, in order to be legal, would also need to license their use of LZW seperately (most likely for another 5000$).
So there you have it. Unisys is evil and this damn patent nonsense must stop.
If IE ignored Content-Type, then CGIs that return images wouldn't work at all. And auto-download-redirect-pain-in-the-ass-cnet things wouldn't work. In short, most non-static scripted content on the web would be misinterpreted by IE, and it all works, so you're wrong.
Anyway, IE only assumes a Content-Type when:
1. The type is unknown (Unknown/* IIRC)
2. The type is text/plain
3. The type is not specified
As far as I can tell, it guesses based on part of the URL and looks to the internal Win32 MIME database for patterns.
I know, it's insane, but it's better than just dumping the content as text to the browser like Netscape does.
Hands in my pocket
this damn patent nonsense must stop.
As cheesy as this post may sound (and trollish, for that matter), I agree. And I feel like ranting for a bit.
I think that, yes, patents began as a good thing (tm). People who are/were smart invented cool stuff (or, with respect to relevance of topic, wrote cool code) and wanted to protect it and say "hey, I'm the genius who did that!" Well, that's hunky dory. And sure, some of them were probably poor and needed money off of it so they maybed charged a bit for patent usage. I'm sure that not all of them did and i'm sure not all of them do now (linux? is it patented? *scratches head* I should know the answer to that question. sorry.)
Anyway, back to the money - invariably, not everyone will charge, but even if they do, there comes a point when it's ridiculous. I'd say Unisys got there. I'd say Amazon did too. What I'm saying is: please, people, stop being so danged greedy and just do good things. When you do that, we'll be happy you did them, we'll be happy you were smart and insightful enough to do them, and we'll be glad you didn't go make a fuss just because you did them. The quality of your work can speak for itself, don't go charging unthinkable fees for it, and don't go patenting your left toe because you're the only one who's got it.
Phew. That's over with. Thanks everyone.
Just my $0.02 worth. (Maybe someone should patent that too; they'd get a ton o' $ if they enforced it.)
Insert mind here.
I didn't mean that your post was cheesy, but that mine was. I'm sorry!
Insert mind here.
The solution is simple. Pull their licese to use free software. As a copyright holder you can exclude some people from a standard licnese agreement.
Patent issues are civil issues, copyright (when more than 10 programs are involved) can be criminal -- thanks to the SBA (which Unisys helps fund)
Companies like this just make my blood boil. The only reason I can think of they're doing this is because they're greedy. Do any of you know logical reasons why they might start this NOW, as opposed to when they got the patent?
To me, this seems like they're just out to cripple the internet...
As for PNG, the problem now is that I can't find two browsers that support it the same way so it's impossible to do layouts properly using them.
What are we supposed to do, honestly? Pay their fee? Go JPEG?
-PhaseBurn Welcome to Linux country. On quiet nights, you can hear windows reboot.
But still there they are, all over the frickin' internet. Even CmdrTaco uses them on Slashdot. I would think such a big open source advocate would have never touched the format with a 10-foot pole. It seems hypocritical.
Web browsers have suppored JPEG since the begining of time, and most of them have supported PNG for a while now. JPEGs have good image quality and excellent compression ratio. PNG will do all the animation stuff you need. Both are open formats. I really can't imagine why these GIFs are still around.
I can think of a couple of "interesting" ways to help this catch 22 situation. Write a clever squid plugin to do one of the following: (and get as mand people as possible to install it.)
1) A squid (or other www proxy) plugin that converts all pngs it encounters to uncompressed gifs on the fly, allowing all browsers to see the images, but also allowing web developers to start using pngs now without worrying. Once browsers catch up, the new plugin can be deleted.
2) A squid plugin that converts all gifs to pngs. Meaning nobody will be able to see any images and pressure will increase on the browser developers to improve png support.
Okay, so point 2 wasn't serious, but point 1 _could_ help if enough people did it.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
Lovely to bask in the glow of CONTROL and POWER, isn't it!
Bill Gates - I can see why he does what he does. It's the buzz.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
I used to have a command line tool (gif2png) to convert gifs to png for dos, and there probably is one for linux. shouldn't be too hard to write a script that extracts the gifs, converts them and change the extension with png..
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Well, to me this looks like the push PNG has needed for some time. As soon as some major sites start switching to PNG we'll see IE and Netscape finally implementing proper support for it in browsers and probably other popular software packages will follow.
BTW: Does anybody have a good package for Win32 (yes, my Linux is still only for experimenting 'cause I'm way too stupid to get it up correctly) that could convert an entire site to PNG? (ie convert the images and scan the HTML code, changing all references to PNG) That would be very helpful because I don't have the time to do all that manually.
Greetings,
Experienced graphic artists and web designers know that GIFs and JPeGs serve very different purposes. The most notable is that JPG is much larger than any GIF at 256 colors simply because JPG is a true-color format. Anything below 24-bit color doesn't save you anything. The lossy compression also reduces text quality. All you have to do is use a graphics manipulation program that is licensed. I've used PMView for several years. www.pmview.com
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
by bitmap I mean any raw bitmapped images... microsoft didnt invent bitmapping, nor is .bmp the only implemntation of bitmapping :) .gif work, so obviously .gif format is the main intrest of unisys, but they're really going after anyone who makes any amount of money off the use of any form of LZW compresion technology. ... god... 90-91 over a 2400 baud modem, man that RULED, of course I was like 12 then, so the 20 minute DL was worth it.
LZW comprtession can really apply to almost any form of data, it's just the it's what makes
As for porn... I rember DLing a _GIANT_ like 200K "hi-res" gif off a BBS back in like
-Doug
Q. What's it take to get a story posted on
Having worked with graphics for the past 8 years, I've noticed a general sentiment of moving away from GIF reguardless of what Unisys does to kill it off before then. There's been talks and rumors of this weird lisencing thing in the past, and of course, it still doesnt affect the end user from what I have seen. Of course, also from the way I understand it, this isn't a GIF issue, rather a LZW comression issue. gif is the most common use of LZW but tiff and bmp and several other formats, graphicsal or not, can and do use LZW....and this would affect those other formats as well :)
*shrug* it's late, I shouldnt be posting
-GuS
Q. What's it take to get a story posted on
the compression schemes used in gzip and bzip2 offer superior compression to LZW (used in the venerable UNIX compress) in almost all non-trivial cases.
LZW should have died a long time ago.
That was one *extremely* subtle troll (for slashdot, anyway).
.jpg extension. This code apparently spawned a background process that made an SMTP connection (to a different IP each time I tried it, until I got bored and trashed it completely). It also extracted the JPEG data into a temp file and ran MSIE to view it, thus hiding the shenanigans from a less technical user (or just one with better things to do).
;)
In point of fact, I did recently receive a mail attachment (happened to be a JPEG, not a GIF) which was actually a Windoze executable (by magic number) with the JPEG data appended. It took me a while to actually get around to playing with it because I alternately use LinuxPPC and the Mac OS (but this did make it clear to me that it wasn't an easily viewable JPEG).
Eventually I got around to dragging it over to Virtual PC and double-clicking it (after backing up the VPC drive image, natch). The resulting Windoze behaviour was typically inconsistent - once it failed to open, another time (fresh image) it simply displayed, but on most occasions it actually ran the executable code despite the
I never did pin down just what the hell it was trying to do, mostly because the payload seemed pretty buggy; if not for the emulation layer and the Open Transport monitoring crap I had running on the Mac OS side, I probably wouldn't have noticed the socket connection at all. It may have been reporting on the machine (not knowing it was a Virtual PC playground), or just passing on some chain-letter style spam. It did also install a virus version of itself so that the spawned process would run on subsequent boots, but sadly that drive image file wasn't destined to live very long. B+ for effort, in case the author is reading this (grin).
All very off-topic as far as GIF patents, but amusingly on-topic for the parent article troll.
-- Life is short. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. ~ Robert Doisneau
>You have to change your file mappings so QuickTime doesn't open it .png extension associated
>How do you do that on Windows? I have the
>with an image viewer, but IE sends all of the PNG images to quicktime.
It's not necessary on the Mac side, but on Windows you might try un-checking PNG files in the Quicktime control panel's media selection.
>This wouldn't be all that annoying, except that quicktime "forgets" to
>put scrollbars on large PNG images such as screenshots.
Yeah, the Quicktime plugin really expects media items to be standalone. I think the real problem is in the plugin spec, though; it's not really clear whether scrollbars would be the right solution (the overall right thing would be for the plugin to communicate the oversize element's presence back to the browser).
-- Life is short. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. ~ Robert Doisneau
We're currently putting Dell Computers into all 700 of our retail locations. Unisys will be providing the support contract on the machines (which, btw, run RH 6.0).
One nice thing about Unisys offering this support program is that our techs can be trained by Dell, and not have to worry about going through Dell to call out support. The tech's can call Unisys and dispatch them directly.
-Kris
(1) AC is slower and more complicated than Huffman
Actually good implementations are very evenly matched in terms of speed. The BIG bonus is that in arithmetic coding the statistical model only has to supply the coder the interval of the symbol to be encoded, in Huffman the statistical model is linked to the encoder so it is _much_ harder to make adaptive. Huffman sucks big time when there's one symbol, which has a probability near 1, which I can imagine happening with a good statistical model.
2) the patent issues suck hard (eg JPEG can use AC instead of Huffman as a backend, but nobody bothers because of licensing)
This I won't deny, but only in the US.
(3) the gain is small enough that it's usually not worth the effort
This is only true when you're trying to do a typical compression task with a fixed distribution and then compare AC to Huffman. In dynamic situations AC is clearly superior.
[about statistical models]
You could apply the MDL principle and use the model that gives the best compression when you take into account the space of the model and the space of the model error. This is computationally expensive.
[transforms]
The decorrelating transforms are as much ad hoc as is finding the statistical model. The transforms are actually a form of statistical model. For instance with the DCT it states that the data can be compactly expressed with the basis vectors of the DCT. The optimum linear transformation Principal Component Transform (PCT) is data-dependent. Estimating the best transform is also a statistical modeling task. Using a DCT may work well for audio/video, but it is not a general solution.
LZW is a general purpose adaptive compression algorithm that can achieve the information theoretic maximum compression for a suitable source. It is based on LZ78 by Lempel and Ziv (IEEE trans. on inf. theory in -78) and modified by Welch (IEEE computer, sometime in the 80's)
The basic idea is to keep an indexed dictionary of strings seen so far (initially contains the alphabet) and then encode the index of the longest string that can be found in the dictionary starting from the current position. Then a new string consisting of the found string and the first unknown symbol (ie. not a suffix to the string) is inserted into the dictionary. So it is basically a method of replacing a string with a single symbol which references the dictionary (thus the name dictionary methods for LZ77 and LZ78). There are a number of modifications to this algorithm, for instance freezing the dictionary and flushing it at certain intervals... in practice the strings could be stored in a trie (you read right: a trie, not tree, but trie is a kind of tree).
LZW is old, nowadays people should use arithmetic coding (which is nearly information theoretically optimal in practice). IMO arithmetic coding and statistical modeling is the way to go. Basically you've got the best engine room possible (arithmetic coding) and then the problem is to add the intelligence (statistical modeling). BTW from what I gather arithmetic coding is also patented, but I don't give a fsck since I live in Europe... AC is pretty old, but it is based on an unpublished work by Elias... so finding prior art might be possible.
Managed Services is the name of the game. At the Unisys call-center where I work in Austin, we're supporting the City of Chicago, Warner Lambert, Western Union, Dairymart, and all sorts of other folks.
Tools | Internet Options | Advanced | Play Animations |
It's just the gif compression which is at issue. You can still use gif files but you can't use compressed files unless you get a license. This is tragic since it's a relatively obvious optimal binary level dictionary based compression, and any number of alternatives compression schemes would have done quite nicely instead. Even if gifs had given you some kind of choice of compression we'd all be in better shape.
What's really odious is the way Unisys is trying to enforce it's patent rights here. Not only do they want fees from major application providers but they are now chasing end users too, basically anyone who wants to use the gif format with compression. This is a rather dubious approach since web designers often use packages which have ALREADY licensed the LZW algorithm. Unisys have a pretty screwed up notion of what their I.P. is worth and are darned fortunate that gif files happened to use their compression algorithm, they basically struck gold by pure accident. The rest of us are fortunate that gif compression is optional but it still isn't ideal.
In some respects you have to admire their guts. They're in it for the money, plain and simple. They know that and also know how long the gravy train will run before it derails and they're making the most of it.... simply because they can. There are no relationships to be managed and no follow-on business, they just gotta milk this cow until it dies. That is the nature of corporations in a situation like this, they're in it for the money, it's no use wagging your finger at them, they almost have a duty to maximize the benefit from this little accident.
What is surprising is the momentum behind the LZW in gif files, PNG took a while but a simple modification of the gif format to allow another compression algorithm would have been a viable alternative for gifs.
PNG is long overdue and very welcome for many reasons, it's just MUCH better on so many levels, gif won't be missed. If this patent nonsense helps displace gifs with PNG files then Unisys will actually be doing everyone a favor, and that is wonderfully ironic.
Do any Windows or Linux browsers? (Honest question)
Insert wit here.
Gee, if the licensing structure is in place to prevent people from "hiding virii", why hasn't it affected .JPG, .PNG, .HTML, .GODIHOPEYOUARETROLLINGBECAUSEYOUAREMAKINGNOSENSE, etc...
Seriously, though, the issue here is that UniSys bought this patent for the express purpose of making money off it, period. And now, with only three years left in this potential money-maker, they're trying to collect. That is their position: they want to make as much money off their investment as possible. Trying to paint some lame benevolent picture doesn't hide that fact.
"Nobody owns the fucking words man." - James Dean
I will be relieved when I don't have to see these irritating flashing advertisement banners anymore.
If only it was possible to turn off animations alltogether. Whenever Mozilla starts being useable, and I have a browsers whose source code I can modify, it will be one of the first things I do with it.
Talking about shareholder value: Their value might decrease from actions like this (so they might get sued by their shareholders).
Having shareholders doesn't mean that they have to behave like pigs.
I for one have a deep rooted hatred against Unisys (for several reasons, the GIF issue is just one of them but they are simply a company with very bad ethical values). I'm not sure if I am the only one, but I guess there must be more. If you make yourself very impopular (and don't have a monopoly such as MSFT) this means that some decision makers will avoid your products, some of the brilliant engineers will refuse to work for you, etc. Thus, they damage themselves.
Whether the GIF issue costs more damage as that it earns them in licence fees is hard to judge for me. But anyway the point is that having shareholders and operating in their interest does not mean that you have to be as aggressive and unethical as possible.
Fire people
:-)
Then hire them back
Wash, rinse, repeat
I just had to post this for everyone that has ever worked for Unisys
If you login and go to user options you can do it yourself if your really sensitive to a gif appearing on your screen.
Granted the logo and adds (if you don't block adds them) are still there, but you can't get everything the way you like it I guess.
Ok, that mostly worked. It took me a while to figure out that you have to double-click the options to select and unselect them. But now when I click on one of the links to a png image from here, IE asks me if I want to download the image. No, I just want the browser to display it!
--
The shareholder is always right.
--
The shareholder is always right.
How do you do that on Windows? I have the
--
The shareholder is always right.
so then it's a matter of losing quality to compression or cash to Unisys.
I'll keep the cash anyday.
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
/me glances at the above responses
/.ers have no sense of subtlety nor humour.
Moral of the story:
(Score: -1, Offtopic)
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
Jean Louis-Gassée highlighted this during an interview with Nightly Business Report yesterday. He was talking about trying to compete against Windows and mentioned Linux. "Why can't you walk into any store an buy a computer with an operating system other than Windows? Or a dual-boot configuration with Linux, Linux is totally free, so why isn't it more available?" (I'm paraphrasing horribly, so that may not be an exact quote.)
/. he was talking to a bunch of stock brokers, CIOs, and suit-wearing Warren Buffet wannabes. And they don't buy computers from the same places you do. What he meant is being able to walk into any random BestBuy and picking up a computer with Linux installed.
The point he was trying to make is a) it's damn near impossible to break into the PC OS market and b) just because something is free of cost doesn't mean it's going to immediately smother the other expensive options.
#include <std_freebeer_freespeech.h>
PS. Okay, yeah, we all know the zillions of places you can buy computers with Linux installed, or FreeBSD or some multi-boot variation. But he wasn't talking to
PPS. Of course, the real enemy is NS and MS for putting piss-poor PNG support in their browsers. If they had done it right back when PNG was introduced, or at least in the 4.0 browsers when they had no excuse but their own laziness, and Unisys had already been making a fuss about the patent, so everyone knew that GIF was a dead-end. Not to mention the nerve-grating limitations of GIF. And you'd think that, in the heat of the "browser wars" someone would point out how much of a selling point full PNG support could be. But NOOOOO, It was more important to have fancy animated buttons! And adding all these ridiculous panes so we could all browse in a tiny window with an effective size of a postage stamp, which is entirely filled with an ugly, flashing, patented, animated GIF! AAARRRGGHHH!!!!
But then, maybe we should encourage Unisys. All those banner ad mongers will find that it's no longer cost-effective to pollute our screens with their bloated, garish, animated crap. Unisys could license all the banner ads off of the internet. Woo-Hoo!
(off to take my medicine)
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
It would be nice if that were true, but people have been saying this for years, and it hasn't happened yet. There are still far more GIFs than PNGs on the net. And there are some good reasons for this.
Most browsers still don't support PNG properly. If you create a proper GIF and use it properly on your web page, just about every browser ever written will handle it the way you expect. The same isn't true of PNG.
PNG doesn't do animation. Recently, the PNG family has included a format called MNG that can do all kinds of cool stuff with animation. But very few browsers have any way to display MNG animations, while most can display GIF animations.
While PNG has kick-ass support for transparency (16-bit alpha with background color, background image, or "whatever's behind me"), it doesn't work in many browsers.
There are a lot more tools for creating, playing with, optimizing, using on the web, etc. GIFs than PNGs. For example, some WYSIWYG web page editors will let you drop any image in some other format (TIFF, for example) onto your web page, and silently convert it to a nicely-optimized GIF, put it in the right place, and write the HTML to insert it yourself. I don't know of any that will automagically do all of this with a PNG. (Note: I'm not saying people _should_ use such crappy tools when they could just use convert on their image to make a PNG and insert the tag in emacs, or export as a PNG in PhotoShop and import it properly in their tool, or whatever--I'm saying people _do_ use such crappy tools.)
Finally, for some really small 8-bit images, a GIF actually is smaller than a PNG. (Of course the vast majority of images are smaller as a PNG, even with 16-bit high-color instead of 8-bit palette color....)
I'd love to see the GIF format die a quick death and PNG/MNG/JNG take over the universe, but wishing doesn't make it happen.
no
One major advantage of PNG that you left out: PNG can handle 32-bit images. Actually, it can handle 16 bits/channel RGB plus 8 bits of alpha, or almost any other sensible combination you can think of.
PNG's biggest disadvantage is lackluster browser support. 8-bit or 16-bit alpha is much cooler than 1-bit transparency--but many browsers don't handle it properly, and some don't even handle PNG's 1-bit transparency properly right, so it's not usable.
As for animation, others have already commented on MNG. Check it out; it's spiffy. But no browsers support it yet.
no
So I'm supposed to design my page so I show PNGs to people who can handle them, and GIFs to people who can't?
Well, that definitely improves the user experience for people with modern browsers, but it doesn't help with the patent issues at all. If I have the GIFs on my site and server them to some of my customers, I'm using UniSys's patented technology, and I'm screwed.
The only solution is to ditch GIF entirely. And I'd love to see it happen, but after years of predictions, it hasn't happened yet.
no
This is a good question. Let's look at it. Why does anyone pay for Windows (other than the fact that it came "free" with their computer--meaning they already paid for it whether they use it or not)?
Well, there are a large number of things Windows does better than linux. Even if linux is clearly better overall, Windows is much better for playing games, watching ASF movies, reading the stupid Word-formatted memos that everyone emails around on the Exchange mail server at work, browsing the web, working on images, composing music, etc. If vmware didn't exist, I'd actually have to boot to Windows reasonably often (ditto for mol on my PPC machines).
So, why does anyone use GIF instead of PNG?
Again, there are things it does better. For one thing, it shows up in every browser. Transparency works in almost every browser. It does animations. There are better tools for manipulating GIFs.
In other words, while the PNG format is clearly far superior to the GIF format, there are reasons people keep using GIFs.
no
It has to end it .COM or .EXE? Can't it just be chmod a+x, or have file type APPL?
no
I don't know what you've been gathering, but you might want to read the article. UniSys can charge people to use (LZW-compressed) GIFs on a web page, and is doing so. That's what all the fuss is about.
no
The TIFF format may be open, but it uses LZW, just like GIF, which means it has the same problems. (Also, there are all kinds of problems with the TIFF spec, but that would be getting way off-topic.)
As for "implementing essentially a JPEG driver," I'm not sure what that means. Any application can use libjpeg or libpng to take a JPEG or PNG and use it. It's really not that hard.
You might want to have wrapper classes that fit in nicely with your foundation (MFC, BeKit, Gtk--, PowerPlant, etc.), but they're pretty easy to write and can be easily supplied by a third party. For example, on one Windows/MFC project, I replaced all the BMPs with PNGs just by swapping in a (free) third-party library with a class called CImage and using it in place of MFC's CBitmap.
Anyway, any application that I work on that needs to display images, I push for PNG as the format to use, and having news stories like this to show to the suits often helps. But on web pages I design, I often find myself having to use GIFs because I want the page to work with most browsers. Sad, but what other choice do I have?
no
I'm not sure you want to call something a "real innovation" if every other OS already has it....
Anyway, it's interesting that you should use the Amiga as an example, because back when I was last doing serious BeOS development (this is in the days when BeOS for Intel was just a "sometime in the future" idea, so things may have changed...), a lot of developers were using the datatypes library ported from the Amiga.
It's actually a pretty cool library. If I build my app to use datatypes to draw images, and the user adds a PNG datatype library to her system, my app can magically use PNGs (except for some minor issues with selecting files by extension or MIME type...).
And I think that's the level this should be at--it shouldn't be built into the OS (or the windowing system). I should be able to download the PNG datatype library and install it, and maybe even choose among a few different PNG datatypes.
Anyway, it would be nice if linux had something like that, right? But doesn't it already? Isn't that the point of ImageMagick, and a few other libraries?
By the way, Windows doesn't natively have anything like this. If you use the Win32 bitmap APIs, you only get BMPs, and that's it.
But QuickTime (on both Windows and MacOS) will draw all kinds of images for you painlessly, and every time it's updated, your app magically gets new image types. And under Windows, there are ActiveX controls (including the IE control, but also some lighter-weight choices) that will give you the same thing.
no
Yes, GIF animations are mostly annoying. But people still use them, and they're obviously not going to stop any time soon. So it's still a concern.
no
Right now, GIFs and JPGs are the only image formats that are reliably supported across browsers, platforms, yada yada yada. Since the features of the two formats are different, using gifs is impossible to get around in some cases (like when transparency is needed). I would switch to PNGs in a heartbeat (for several reasons) if I knew they would appear the way I designed them to look.
I don't think support for PNGs will become a priority for browser vendors until enough sites use them, but until the browser support is there, all those sites are potentially disfigured. There's no way I can tell a client I'm going to use an image format that might mess up their webpage. It's a catch-22, and browser developers are the ones best situated to get out of it. All that to say, PNG support needs to made a priority now.
As far as "political" considerations go, using GIFs has always been a little distasteful, but it wasn't as big an issue as it is now. Now that Unisys is pressing the issue, it't time to leave the GIF format behind.
www.code-fix.com
Is it just me, or is Unisys like a void in computing right now? I'm not familiar with anything they've been up to in recent history other than trying to get cash off of their dated compression. Can someone clue me in to what else Unisys does?
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Unisys: Give us money....
Company: OK....let's see, where did I put that.....
(stall until 2003 and then)
Company: Oh, here it is. (Pull out a middle finger from pocket).
GIF will probably come back after the patent expires. It's the best format around for small icons and stuff. I just did a quick screenshot of a piece the Netscape toolbar. The (crappy) jpeg is 10k. The smallest PNG I could get is 2449 bytes. The GIF is 1230 bytes.
PNG has a lot more overhead than GIF. The benefits outweigh this pretty quickly, but when things get small, nothing is better than GIF. A single pixel white GIF is 35 bytes. PNG is 132. It's a small amount of data, but it adds up.
Besides, by 2003, we might be getting decent color net connected cell phones. Bandwidth will be a major issue with these.
But this isn't worth the licensing fees. The only thing worth the licensing fees is backward compatibility, and (miracle of miracles) 3 years is about the longest anyone could expect this conversion to take. Well, about 2 years before you can use PNGs everywhere, with no worries. More like 2 decades to irradicate all the GIFs from the web, but that patent's up before then.
--Kevin
I'm not sure what patent this refers to. The earliest relevant one seems to be 4464650, but CompuServe refers to 4558302, which also fits the date a little better -- 20 years from date of filing.
Unisys would like to force licensing on a much wider range of activities than they in fact can. I don't know how anyone could claim that distributing a GIF file infringes their patent. I mean, if you are not in possession of any software which implements LZW, how can you infringe?
If anyone is unsure whether this actually hurts anyone, I used to work tech support at a clip art company. We used to get people using cheap software all the time who would say, "it says unsupported file format" when they tried to import an LZW compressed TIFF.
--Kevin
I imagine Unisys would justify this under something like due diligence. That, for all you can complain that they never should have received the patent in the first place, nevertheless it is their duty to enforce it, and if they didn't, they could be sued by their shareholders.
What I question is whether exercising this patent really does constitute due diligence. Especially exercising it the way they are now, asking $3,000,000 fees. Strikes me that there's more publicity advantage to being The Makers of the Graphic Format That The Whole Internet Uses, (akin to Cisco's "90% of the internet runs on the systems of one company, Cisco Systems" ads) than there is financial advantage gained by charging these fees.
Just my random $0.02CDN.
Johnath
People, this is a subtle(?) troll. Tink about it.
PNG seems to be an excellent quality compression format, even though I will miss my animated GIFs...
*sniff*
Well cry no more! There is a format called MNG which is based (somewhat) on the PNG tech, but allows things like... tada! Animated graphics. It's still in development but I suspect that support will be in Mozilla fairly soon.
The MNG webpage is at http://www.cdrom.com/pub/mng/
I'm glad Unisys is doing this. Not only are they displaying themselves as the idiots they obviously are, but now major companies will be switching to PNG. Which means Netscape and MSIE will soon follow with really good PNG support. Which means we'll finally be able to get rid of the completely obsolete graphics format that is GIF and replace it in it's entirety with PNG (and JPEG where useful).
Erm... Unisys's patent does not even cover the GIF format, let alone files with a .gif extension. The patent is on LZW compression, which is used by most GIF images. It's fairly obvious that Unisys's position is that of a fat, rich bastard who wants to be fatter, richer and even more bastardly.
Of course, if you were joking I now look like a complete dick. B==@
Strange that the lacking or buggy Java or JavaShit support in *ALL* browsers haven't stopped a single site from using it.
AFAIK more browsers these days support PNG in a useable way than JavaShit but I see a lot of "JavaShit-only" sites wich don't work without it and only very, very few without GIF images.
Maybe PNG not sexy enough?
Seems like most of the graphics here are GIFS. ..when will we see PNGs instead?
"Man has always been his own most vexing problem." --Reinhold Niebuhr, "The Nature and Destiny of Man"
What Properly licensed software means is that the maker of the actual graphics editor paid a licensing fee to unisys, so that you wouldn't have to.
JASC's page in reference to this says that you are pretty much free and clear to use
Anyway (the lazy method), go ahead and right click any topic icon at the top of the main page, assuming you're using a graphical browser...click save image(picture) as... and there they are .gifs in all there glory...I would think it would be trivial to do.
.gifs are O.K. as long as they were made with an image program which paid an lzw licensing fee or something like that (correct me if I'm wrong here guys). So while it might not be exactly the brightest torch of solidarity to have the gifs on the website, they whould breathe easier if they were made using, say photoshop. Any word on whether the gimp's handling of gifs is covered here?
Now the really big thing, from what I gather is that the
I am a man of const int sorrows
mmm, I submitted this six hours ago and got it declined.
Anyway, I have some questions maybe someone here can answer. Why hasn't everyone switched to PNG if it's free? Why pay for these licenses? Does GIF have advantages that PNG doesn't that makes it an option worth considering despite the costs? Are we just being witnesses of another marketing influenced stupid decision by IT managers or whoever is responsible for paying these licenses to Unisys?
And what about the current state of PNG? How's browser support? Graphics apps support?
p.s. I'm posting this with Mozilla M15, and yes, it seems faster to me.
"All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams". Elias Canetti
Both the posting and the article itself refer to a so-called "GIF patent". Of course, we all know that there is no such thing. Unisys' patent is for LZW compression.
Sure, LZW is used in GIFs, but that doesn't warrant its being called a "GIF patent". LZW is used in a lot of other things, including TIFF images, but there's absolutely nothing about it that intrinsically makes it an image compression scheme, let alone a dedicated GIF compression algorithm.
The GIF image format was originally developed in the 1980s by Compuserve for use in its online service. IIRC, Compuserve was not aware at the time that LZW was protected by patent; if it had, then it certainly would have used some other compression technique. In any case, if anyone "owns" GIF, it would have to be Compuserve, not Unisys. (I'm pretty sure you can't patent a file format in the US, although you could always obtain copyright protection on the file specification text itself.)
Anyway, it's interesting to note that for a long time, Unisys was equally clueless about this matter. LZW technology was actually not developed by Unisys; it was developed by another company that was subsequently acquired by Unisys. GIF flourished for years on BBSes and then the Internet before Unisys even became aware that it was utilizing LZW.
So please, do your part to fight sloppy disinformation, and don't refer to the LZW patent as the "GIF patent". That's like referring to the MP3 format as the "illegal music piracy" format.
begin 644
*sniff*
Free music from Jack Merlot.
For instance, I bought my last two PC's from MicronPC.com. It came with a 1 year parts and labor warranty. Recently one of the case fans and keyboards stopped working. I called Micron, and they hooked me up with the local Unisys center here in Hawaii. They have very quick service.
JPEG is 32bit color (at least, there aren't any boundaries like a maximum of 256 colors) but is lossy. Borders aren't as crisp as on GIF. Therefore, JPEG is a format that's generally used for pictures.
GIF only supports max 256 colors, but the image's more crisp. GIF is therefore more used in logo's, text, and big objects. Generally the stuff you make on your computer and doesn't have much blending between colors.
(taken from http://artpacks.acid.org/pub/png/png intro.html) PNG really has three main advantages over GIF: alpha channels (variable transparency), gamma correction (cross-platform control of image brightness), and two-dimensional interlacing (a method of progressive display). PNG also compresses better than GIF in almost every case, but the difference is generally only around 5% to 25%, not a large enough factor to encourage folks to switch on that basis alone. One GIF feature that PNG does not try to reproduce is multiple-image support, especially animations;
-Reeves
A big chunk of their business is mainframes.(eg the A series mentioned earlier) Though they do run NT, it runs along MCP which isn't a bad OS at all. Other than that, Unisys technicians seem to just sit in the back room and look at porn all day. Oh and they suck at quake
The rest of us realize that all of the above are just individual, unrelated people. There are good ones, there are bad ones.
It's not rational to judge a person by their job.
Hell, there must be some smart people at MS, right? ;^)
Your wallet stays open. Our source remains closed. We are MSFT
You can get realtime (not delayed) streaming stock quotes for free from DATEK. It's kind of cool to see the stocks move around during the day. The javascript pops up another window that shows the bid, ask, last, etc price, and you can just leave it running, it keeps updating the prices.
Your wallet stays open. Our source remains closed. We are MSFT
Amazon still holds patents for jpeg, png, and www until 2006!
-
unix compress uses lzw, but tiff does not (in fact .tiff files don't use any compression which is why they are so huge! :)
.gif, the gnu folks refused to write .Z files with gzip because of the patent. They were obviously correct to do so + great fortune tellers...
Way before unisys started suing over
>jpegs are much easier to mess with and offer >similar cmpression sizes.
yeah, but jpegs are lossy
> [of PNG] was absolutely brilliant
couldn't agree more!
But there's always MNG. It's a format that makes animations of of a png.
Anyway the reason I like it is the browser can tell an anim from a static image from the filename.
Therefore I'm going to put some code in Mozilla to ignore requests for *.mng! (on a per-site basis maybe)
Anims are unnecessary and usually ads
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"If I can shoot rabbits then I can shoot fascists" -
gif's lossless, jpeg's lossy
jpegs suit "real life" photographs
gifs suit logos and stuff
I don't think a 100% yellow big picture is very representative.
Compare the gifs and jpegs of a scanned photograph (jpg is great for this ) and then a logo (i've been trying the
--
> and PNG doesn't do animations
Like I said in another post - this is good. MNG is a new format "wrapped around" PNG which makes anims but at least now we can tell
animated PNG's ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H MNG's
from static images
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"If I can shoot rabbits then I can shoot fascists" -
on
AFAIR it's -1 but I think it should be +1. A proper troll is both funny and ontopic at the same time. It can be informative too:
eg. this troll that i'm replying to makes the point that Unisys doens't own a patent on
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"If I can shoot rabbits then I can shoot fascists" -
Note that CmdrTaco never really did say that. Find "png" turns up nothing. OTOH now that it's been pointed out... Maybe I should buy him some asbestos underware for Christmas...
We really need to see these companies stop using file formats as weapons, and start utilizing them as ways to communicate. File formats should be open, period. It seems to me that gaming companies tend be way ahead of the rest of the industry in most trends, and the trend toward open file formats seems to be one of them. In Q3 the sounds are WAVs, the graphics are like TIFFs or something (don't remember exactly), the map format is open, and even the format they use as a container is open (in this case, uncompressed ZIPs). We'll get the rest of the industry there, but it's gonna take awhile.
The above comment is CopyWrong (K) Erisian Entertainment. All Rights Reversed. Ewige Blumenkraft!
The US Postal Service was a big user of their "stuff", build to spec. kind of thing. If you want to find out what systems USPS used goto the US Postal sites. -d
If you really want gifs off of slashdot, why lobby Malda (who is too busy to listen, anyway)?
Here's how to get some action on the matter:
I wouldn't normally encourage this sort of approach, but Slashdot is no longer a couple of tech slackers working out of their apartments. It's a business enterprise. Andover.net will probably pay the $5000 without even flinching and Malda won't get called on the carpet over it. But then again, in the world of stock options, any obstacle to a dot.com achieving profitability is an obstacle to the employees becoming millionaires (off of paper).
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I will take this opportunity to discuss my hatred for the GIF. I absolutely hate GIFs. I think they are a dying fromat anyway, Jpegs are much easier to mess with and offer similar cmpression sizes. Besides I see less and less websites depending on GIFs everyday. It just drives me crazy that photoshop cant use GIFs without having to use a special plugin or importing technique. I hope that company gets screwed over for lisencing a what could have been an open useful standard.
Just my two cents.
thepaulmeister
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity" -MLK
PNG already supports alpha transparency, which is better than that 1-bit mask $#!+ that GIF uses. Animations are part of the MNG specification, a superset of PNG, or you can hack them in with a JavaScript(TM) image-switching script.
Will I retire or break 10K?
You mean web2png?
Will I retire or break 10K?
But very few browsers have any way to display MNG animations, while most can display GIF animations.
Other than ad banners, what are GIF animations really used for? They're distracting.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I'm soooooo happy that in Slashdot's commentary they talk about the burning sounds of gifs. Hmmm. I kind of recall that on the "Burn your gif day" they still used gifs. If you are going to preach about something PLEASE do as your preach. People will have a bit more faith in you this way. :P
They are going for the most negative publicity and are pursuing an anti-business marketing campaign?
Some companies/people are soooo stupid.
Unisys's move to "cash in" on this event may actually hurt them. From now on(or from when they started doing this) whenever someone talks about Unisys this is going to be the first thing they think of. Bad PR isn't exactly a good thing in the world of business. If I had to choose between two companies of comparable services Unisys and company B, it's company B all the way. This whole situation shows just another flaw in the patent. A company loosely licensing it's patent for years and then, one day pulling the reighs tight--something's very wrong with that. The entire patent system needs an overhaul(if not a pink slip). If you needed to defend a patent like you did a trademark this situation wouldn't even have happened....then again, just think of all the other problems this would bring in(screwing over the little guy).
True, but the LZW compression algorithm still has its uses. It compresses text down considerably. It could probably use lossiness to squish real world images down quite considerably too.
I get a nice flamey email about once a week from some ass who calls me a hypocrite and slams me for not getting out a new release. My usual response is to tell them that I delay replacing GIFs with PNGs by 24 hours each time someone asks me when I'm going to do it. They'll be replaced when they're finished. And if you ask me again I'll postpone it again.
(the original quote is here)
What's next? Microsoft owns the rights to the .BAT format? And we must pay a $10 fee for every created batchfile used? :P
Honestly, I think unisys is just pure greed.
------- What exactly is real?
An oldie but a goodie. I remember the days of trading .gif files. Scanners were rare commodities and were expensive. To ray trace a good picture took ages (even on a really beefy 386DX with a Maths Co-processor). Even downloading images on a "state of the art" 14.4Kbps modem took ages. Back then, maybe there was justification for charging for .gif format because it saved time and added value to some peoples life styles.
C.Burgess - email:colvinb@airnet.com.au
These GIF files tend to be about 4 times the size they would be if they were uncompressed, so this techinique often isn't used...
Besides, I already can put .gif at the end of any file I want, but it won't DO anything. And very few people are dumb enough to try and execute image files as if they were programs...
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Because opening GIF's requires the decompression algorithm... I suppose you could hardcode YOUR code to do only open uncompressed. In other words, if you choose not to use the alogrithm, you lock yourself to only these uncompressed and very large GIF files.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Imagine being sent what you thought was just a GIF photograph, with an innocuous filename like james.GIF -- but which was actually a potent virus!
.COM or .EXE) or interpreted by something that can run system commands with little security (M$'s office Macro's). Not to mention that any rendering code checks for a set of bits that act as a signature of the graphical data and, if corrupt, will fail to render the image.
.COM and .EXE (in the case of the latter, there's the tell tail MZ as the first two characters, plus the code to configure/identify the namespaces of the program). All they really do now is make for a convenient filter for your Open File dialog boxes.
Not to be an ass, but that statement shows someone's lack of understanding of virii. A virus has to be executed (via a
or a virtual anarchy in which the GIF name could be appended to any file at the creator's whim?
File extensions don't mean much anyways (See my first statement). This is also true for
Aside from trying to get money out of GIF, what do they do all day? The days of the Remington-Rand/Sperry-Rand UNIVAC are long gone, and their PCs are just HPs. Do they even deal with UNIX anymore? I looked around www.unisys.com and all I can figure is they sell piles of hype to big business. Am I close?
[cmdrtaco@www /home/cmdrtaco]# crontab -l .GIFS to PNGS and then back /root/scripts/fuck_with_website
/scripts]# cat fuck_with_website
/usr/bin/gif2png -d /home/httpd/pics/*.gif
/home/httpd/html/*.htm | wc -l)
/bin/sed s/.gif/.png/g $1 > $1.new
/dev/mem > hotchick.png
#Script that moves
#again
0 0 * * *
[cmdrtaco@www
#!/bin/bash
#######################################
## Author: CmdrTaco ##
## Date: 9/1/97 ##
## Purpose: I'm Drunk ##
#######################################
# This script takes in the file names of all the
# htm docs for our website.
# Example: $1 is index.htm $2 is faq.htm
COUNT=$(ls
while [ $COUNT -gt 0 ]; do
mv $1.new $1
shift
done
#Just for fun.....I'm really drunk
cat
mailx hemos@slashdot.org
90% of the internet runs on Cisco's expensive hardware ... Implication : Cisco's management has created a profitable monopoly, buy Cisco stock.
... Implication : Unisys's management is crazy, dump Unisys stock.
90% of internet websites use Unisys's free GIF format
It's probably good if only because a company like Unisys is always going to suck the blood from a luck out standard like this. So it's only value is to show how corporations are crazy to have warm fuzzies about proprietary technologies... especially these kinds of patents where you still have to write the software yourself anyway! cushy!
-pyrrho
And very few people are dumb enough to try and execute image files as if they were programs...
No, people aren't that stupid... Windows is.
~~~LXT~~~
Life is like a computer program: anything that can't happen, will.
Send a message to Unisys identifying Slashdot as a site violating the gif licensing terms. Remind the company that if they are negligent in demanding the $5000 licensing fee from Slashdot, Unisys will run the risk of their intellectual property falling into the public domain- as is the case with any copywrited material which isn't dilegently protected by a myriad of lawsuits.
Actually...shouldn't this have happened allready ? After all Unisys has waited for 10 years to enforce their patent.
Of course this is not valid. Patents are not the same as trademarks and you can hold a patent, not defend and it will still be valid after a decade or more (until it expires of course). If GIF was a Unisys trademark then it would be long gone now (like Aspirin, Xerox etc).
Yu Suzuki
Yu Suzuki
Deamcast. It's thinking.