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Wired Releases Annual Vaporware List
alacqua writes: "Wired
has an article titled
Vaporware 2001: Empty Promises
which is a top-ten list of last year's vaporware.
'You've Got Smell!'
made it, but the Justice Department did not. Says Wired, 'Speaking of Microsoft, some smart-aleck readers opined that the most vaporous thing in tech last year was the Justice Department's failure to deliver on its promise to punish Bill Gates for his company's monopolistic misdeeds -- but we thought that a bit of a stretch.'"
However, government does meddle in the marketplace: by purchasing M$ products, they validate the actions of the company. They are also a large purchaser, whose actions have repurcussions on the market as a whole.
Yes, Econ 101 might say that government interference is bad. But take a later course (or a special seminar), and you will see that many of the assumptions of Econ 101 are not so simple in the real world. First: perfect information. Consumers do not have perfect information. FUD is spread all around. More importantly: no buyer or seller has the power to individually alter the market. In this case, both M$ and the government have this power. The former through marketshare, and the latter by both legal means and methods of purchase. Finally, there must be no significant barriers to entry. There haven't been. Until the past... couple of years. There are substantial barriers to entry (patents, copyright, and other IP law).
America is not a free market. It is, in some cases, a slightly freer market than many others. But don't presume that this case is a prime example of basic economics. Outside of the classroom, those basic principles do not have effect on companies with 90% marketshare.
An A for Econ 101. A D for Econ 401.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
It's in the /. MacWorld coverage.
But still, they're right. I think I can be correct (mostly) in saying that Apple wouldn't exist today if it weren't for Adobe, and without X-native Adobe apps, X will flounder. It's a *wonderful* OS, but Adobe has long been providing Apple with the killer apps it needs to stay alive, and OS X is no exception.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
Both are entirely lossless compression. GIF supports up to 256 colors, with one optional transparent color. PNG supports 24-bit color plus 8-bit transparency. Only PNG supports some color calibration/adjusting. Only GIF supports animation.
Which one is better at compression?
GIF is good enough, especially for line art and things that don't use more than 256 colors. PNG is almost always better than GIF, sometimes compressing images to 1/2 the size.
Are the encoders copywrited?
Of course, nearly everything's copyrighted (including a lot of GPL and other "free" code). The LZW algorithm, which is used to encode GIF images, is patented, and the patent owner (Unisys) tries to get people to pay if they sell software with a GIF encoder in it. PNG is patent-free and royalty-free.
Which one is supported more?
Mozilla, Konqueror, Opera, Netscape 4.0+, and IE 5.0+ fully support PNG. That's 99% of normal web surfers. Unfortunately there were a few versions of IE (around 3.0 - 4.0) that actually crashed if a web page had any PNG's on them.
That's very unfortunate because it means that 0.1% of your website viewers will get a crash and write you hate mail. That's why very few sites use PNGs.
When I want to include a PNG of something on a webpage, I usually make a high-quality JPEG thumbnail which links to a PNG. That way people know it's the image that crashes their browser, not my webpage.
There's a great free, portable, easy-to-use library for encoding and decoding PNG images, so if you want to include support for some image format in a program you're writing, PNG is a great choice.
Only GIF supports animation
Not entirely. MNG is an animated variant of PNG, and already widely supported (e.g. by anything using Qt, such as Konqueror).
No reason whatsoever to use gifs for anything, unless you're worried about legacy browsers.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
I think they did start shipping at a point this year actually, but after a month they suspended operations:
link.
Or alternatively: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005NCE Z/o/qid%3D1010095826/sr%3D8-1/ref%3Dsr%5Faps%5Fvg% 5F1%5F1/026-6218755-4392446
two words, HOLY SHIT!
Our Price: £27.99
Platform: Windows 95, Windows 98
Release Date: 8 March, 2002. Not Yet
Available: You may still order this product.
We will ship it to you when it is released by the manufacturer
-- Dan