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Slashback: Alternatives, Ads, Apple

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the what's-wrong-with-my-venn-diagram dept.

Slashback tonight with word on what you can use instead of JPEG, the return of AdCritic.com as payware, NCR vs. Handspring, and more. Read on for the details.

Prepare the JPEG bonfire. Moderator writes: "Here is an open alternative to the JPEG file format. I tried posting it in the JPEG patent article but it got buried under all the comments about "THEY CAN'T DO THIS!" and stuff."

This project is called DjVuLibre and encompasses "a set of compression technologies, a file format, and a software platform for the delivery over the Web of digital documents, scanned documents, and high resolution images."

I hope the judge has a big "WITHOUT MERIT" stamp. theodp writes "A U.S. District Court has issued a summary judgement in the patent infringement lawsuit filed against Palm and Handspring by NCR, dismissing NCR's suit as having no merit. Praising the decision, Handspring's CEO said 'Settlement of this case was never an option,' while Palm's CEO remarked 'We refuse to succumb to intimidation by companies that use charges of patent infringement to bully others.' One of the NCR patents in question was for 'a portable terminal small enough to fit in the user's hand,' and the complaint went on to claim that NCR's researchers, 'recognized an unsatisfied need for a portable, handheld device which would allow the user to information such as appointments, to-do lists, and addresses, and execute financial and shopping transactions by connecting to networks using an interface module.'"

This is sure to bring out the AdCritic critics. thebus writes: "The good news. AdCritic is Alive! The bad news. You gotta pay!"

An annual subscription for $69.95 looks like something worth paying for if you're in the advertising industry, but it would be nice to get a less expensive "interested viewer" option as well. Oh well.

Oh Steve, ya big tease! Maïdjeurtam writes: "In this Yahoo finance article, Reuters asked Apple's CEO Steve Jobs about the possible abandonment by Apple of Motorola and IBM's processors (PowerPC G3's & G4's), and the possibility of Intel processor-equipped Macs. Steve Jobs didn't exclude the possibility. He noticed that, during the year 2002, Apple had to finish the OS X transition and, this done, there would be a lot of amazing possibilities, which he finds exciting."

Most of the content of this article was covered in yesterday's coverage of Jobs' keynote, and the bit at the end about other processors may be only a throwaway line, but it certainly is intriguing.

7 of 427 comments (clear)

  1. Steve is cool! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny
    I just met him at the corner of W. Broadway and Prince Street in NYC. He was walking to the Apple Store that just opened in SoHo. No body guards what-so-ever! I expected an elite team of ultra BSD ninjas to be watching over him. He was nice enough to shake my hand and when I asked him if he was purposely saying, "Jagwire" in the keynote, he just laughed.

    Cool guy! Or maybe it was just the Reality Distortion Field that surrounds him.

  2. Re:Porting OS X by Skuld-Chan · · Score: 2, Funny

    Anybody have any other ideas?

    MC68K!

  3. Gifs??? by robotbrain · · Score: 2, Funny

    The thing that is blowing my mind right now is how there are GIFs all over the djvu website!??

  4. Time to ditch image files altogether by guttentag · · Score: 4, Funny
    or at least reduce our dependency... If you have an HTML page that calls 30 little images, each client that views the page has to make 31 connections to your server. Wouldn't it be better to reduce it to one or two? It would probably speed up slow connections significantly.

    It is possible to render images using intricate table coding in which each cell represents a pixel (use colspans and rowspans as necessary to optimize the table).

    See my example here. It does use one tiny, two-color gif for the page background, but most of what appears to be images are actually table cells with bgcolors. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite properly in Mozilla, which absolutely refuses to render 1x1 table cells.

    In reality, this isn't a total solution, but if image format lawsuits succeed this is what we'll end up doing to render graphics on the Web.

  5. Re:Talk to you all later. by slickwillie · · Score: 3, Funny

    "It's better to burn out than to fade away." -- Kurt Cobain

    That's kind of a no-brainer, isn't it?

  6. Never Saw NeXTStep Intel? by snookerdoodle · · Score: 2, Funny

    If you think Jobs is above running on Intel hardware, think again. Intel hardware does not imply beige boxes, anyway...

    'NeXT Thing you know, we'll have FAT binaries! ;-)

    Mark
    'Still has his Framed '88 NeXT Poster On The Wall

  7. Apple ad parody by SuperMacNinja · · Score: 2, Funny

    Gamer's take on Apple switch campaign.