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Slashback: Alternatives, Ads, Apple
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.
Surely it's 3x8 for RGB and another 8 for transparency.
It's *nix only, which makes it useless to the vast majority of users. Sure, you can get a plugin for Windows browsers here http://www.lizardtech.com/download/?f=0&d=1 but that doesn't mean you can compress images.
A more suitable alternative is JPEG2000. And if this patent thing helps it's rollout get along faster, I'm all for it.
Regards, Guspaz.
I suspect Apple would require a different BIOS than what is used, per se, but right now Apple uses Open Firmware, which is an open standard for booting. You can wipe MacOS off of the so called "New World" Macs (most Macs since the original iMac) and install Linux if you like.
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
People often attributed Kurt Cobain's famous quote to him: "It is better to burn out than to fade away."
Ole Kurt was not the source of the quote though, that would be Neil Young from around '76-'77 time frame. He just, uh, borrowed it since it, uh, fit the moment, I guess.
For GNU/Linux, the link in the posting leads straight to a free software project DjVuLibre which handles the DjVu format (encoder, decoder, browser plugin, and standalone viewer). There doesn't seem to be a gimp plugin or any kind of editor. For Windows and Mac, LizardTech provides a browser plugin. I haven't seen it before either, but it seems to have potential.
true && more || less
See:
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Even if Apple switches to x86 procs, their hardware will still be proprietary. Why? Because they would go broke in a heartbeat if they tried.
1) Apple is largely a hardware company, and one with fat margins to boot. If they tried selling PC clones with similar margins Dell would take them to the cleaners. Hell, Dell would probably take them to the cleaners even if they charged slim margins.
2) That stable as a rock feature your brother enjoys? The almost seamless integration of most hardware into the OS? Those are features of the tight control that Apple can exercise over their hardware. If you think you would get these same features running on generic PC hardware you are sorely mistaken. Most vendors don't bother writing OSX drivers now, despite the fact that all PCI, AGP, and USB devices will plug right into a Mac. What makes you think they'll bother writing OSX-x86 drivers? Or were you just going to use the high quality BSD 3d acceleration video drivers? The world of PC hardware is a tar pit of cheap hardware, poorly documented interfaces, and Windows-only drivers. Hardware detection and configuration has never really been one of Unix's strong points. Why do you think OSX would be much better?
And don't let the fact that PIV's have almost 3x the clock of a Mac fool you into thinking it has 3x the performance. The PIV is first and foremost a high speed oscillator circuit. It is designed to have a high clock speed because most people are stupid and think it means fast. Meanwhile, Intel's highest performing chip at FP (the new Itanium's) is clocked slower than a Mac. So is it slower than a Mac? (Not that I'm arguing a PM is faster than a PIV, I just don't think it's a factor of three slower.)
*opens IE* .png, please explain what you mean by "IE does not support .png"
*loads his forum, which uses only PNG images*
wtf are you talking about?
IE seems to support
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I use PNG's almost exclusively for my websites (and images I save on disk, for the most part). I even use the transparency, just no translucency (yes, because of IE in Windows). I make sure to set the background color to something reasonable so that IE users don't notice that IE won't handle the transparency though.
Don't presume that moving to Intel hardware will create a Mac with the highly-modifiable box you take for granted on PCs.
Apple survives today because their boxes are designed to make a user's life easier. That means, despite a change to the processor, it is very likely that Apple would still have a custom motherboard available ONLY from Apple, still use Open Firmware rather than a PC BIOS, (this is done on Sun as well) and still not be subject to the resource-hungry design of the aging PC design.
Intel may assist Apple in a mobo design, but Apple will not release it for general consumption. If they want to continue to survive as a business, it would be suicide to do so. Apple is a hardware company. They have to keep some things closed to keep a competitive edge. The hardware would be generally closed-source, along with the upper layers of Mac OS X (Darwin, the core of OS X, is open source and works right now on x86 as well as PPC.).
A more serious matter would be the Pentium's lack of Altivec--the vector processing unit and the true power in the PowerPC chip that lets it keep up with Pentiums doing the same calculations in most instances, despite PPC chips having half the clock speed.
Not insurmountable things, however. I tire of the PowerPC production issues at Motorola. I would rather get IBM to make the chips--they should know how, since the PowerPC chip uses the same tech as in the POWER mainframe chips.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Uh, is the GNOME project "big enough" for you? Or how about the KDE project? Both are using PNG, thank you very much.
Apple's hardware strategy made sense back in the days when the extra money you paid for a Mac was really worth it just for all the extra hardware stuff that would Just Work(tm) -- until recently, 24-bit color, built-in sound input and output, etc. etc. were not common in the PC world, and were not cheap either. But within the last year or so, it's gotten so you can get comparable features in a $300 Walmart or Fry's PC.
Find free books.
The serial part will work on macs with serial ports, in fact that was the only way to access the OF for the longest time on a mac because, the OF drivers for the video card sucked.
Yeah. That's Nick Drake. Great stuff -- so good that (as a card carrying music snob) I'm embarrassed to admit I first heard of his work from the VW commercial. He's a folky 1970's singer-songwriter who lived a pained and short existence, and finally committed suicide via pills I believe.
Personally, I'd check out his "Pink Moon" album first, and maybe work backwards frm that; and there's a few compilations out now that are truly excellent as well. And there's a short documentary on his life called "A Skin Too Few" making the festival rounds which is supposed to be very good as well.
~jeff
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.
.9.something.
Noy if you are running any modern browser. HTTP 1.1 includes piplining which reuses tcp connections for multiple elements in an html page so you should have maybe 4 connections at the most, though often 1 will do. HTTP 1.1 is the default in all modern version of both IE and netscape browsers including all builds of mozilla since
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The Unisys patent expires June 30, 2003, 20 years from filing.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
First of all, just because Apple might switch manufacturers does not mean they will switch to x86. Such a move would not only be impossible, it would be foolish. If Apple were to have anyone else develope processors for them, it would be IBM, as they are the other part of the PowerPC. Neither Motorola nor IBM seem to have an interest in making consumer level processors, which is why it is so long between updates. Motorola also (I believe) owns AltiVec, so if Apple was going to have someone else manufacture for them, they would need a processor that could perform significantly better with much higher clock rates to compensate for the lack of AltiVec or pay an arm and a leg for processors since the manufacturer would have to pay licensing fees to Motorola.
I don't think you're being quite serious, but just in case...
Suppose you have an image that's 100x100 pixels. If the image is uncompressed and in 24-bit color, then that's 100*100*3 = 30,000 bytes of data to download, not including image headers.
Using the TABLE method... well, each pixel would require, what, at least 42 bytes? So now that's around 420,000 bytes to download.
If the original image were compressed, then the original 30,0000 byte figure would be even less. For JPEG, let's assume the compression ratio is ~5:1 (I think ~10:1 or better is more accurate, but I'll be conservative). So now the original file size would have been 6,000 bytes.
So your solution is to use an image format that's 70x as large as the original. Maybe if you have a lot of little images, the overhead from opening a lot of connections to/from the server is significant enough to offset all the extra data you need to download.
But isn't the whole point of using some alternate image format so that we could store images we care about in some non-proprietary way? Who cares about all those tiny little images? It's the big ones that people want to save.
Plus, you're screwed if somebody already has a patent for your little image-represented-as-markup plan.
DJVU was designed for scanning paper documents, mainly. It doesn't include actual ASCII text like scanned PDFs can, but it is tuned for accurate visual representation of printed pages. The images have a couple of layers - the high-contrast material (such as text) and the background nuances (shading of the paper etc.) So it's possible to view the image with or without the background. And the background, being low res smooth shading, doesn't cost much space. I've been using it for a couple of years for this purpose, because neither JPEG nor PNG are ideally suited for it. Separating the foreground from the background strikes me as a really good idea.
It wasn't completely free at first so that was good news when it was announced a while back.
Of course to be truly useful as a JPEG replacement it needs to be included in browsers. People don't like having to mess with plugins.
Anyway I bet the JPEG patent stuff will blow over soon enough. This company obviously has brass balls and no brains to think they can pull that off. Maybe they will manage to sue a few big guys, bully some little ones, make some money and then get a little more complacent as their time runs out. But I imagine we will still be seeing lots of JPGs 10 years from now (just like GIFs didn't go away).
I think the Steve comment was taken a bit out of context. Here is the whole quote: "The roadmap on the PowerPC actually looks pretty good and there are some advantages to it. As an example, the PowerPC has something in it called AltiVec, we call the Velocity Engine -- it's a vector engine -- it dramatically accelerates media, much better than, as an example, the Intel processors or the AMD processors... so we actually eek out a fair amount of performance from these things when all is said and done. And the roadmap looks pretty good. Now, as you point out, once our transition to Mac OS 10 is complete, which I expect will be around the end of this year or sometime early next year and we get the top 20% of our installed base running 10, and I think the next 20 will come very rapidly after that. Then we'll have options, then we'll have options and we like to have options. But right now, between Motorola and IBM, the roadmap looks pretty decent. "
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I believe the poster meant that there are 2 different Itaniums:
One that is x86 backwards compatible (and only x86 backwards compatible)
One that is PA-RISC backwards compatible (and only PA-RISC backwards compatible)
And the poster thought it not much of a stretch to create a third version, that is PowerPC compatible.
Of course, there is only one Itanium core, and it handles all 3 (as you said). However, most RISC chips (such as the PA-RISC and PowerPC) at least have enough similarities that emulating PPC on PA-RISC (or using the PA-RISC decoder) is relatively simple; the opcodes may be different, but otherwise almost everything translates over directly.
eg. (example-- the actual binary is probably different)
Function to perform: A+B=C
"ADD A, B, C"='AF0F32BFh' in PPC machine language.
"ADD C, A, B"='CBBF0F32h' in PA-RISC machine language.
The difference is the opcode byte (AF v. CB), and ordering (A+B=C v. C=A+B)
The commands translate directly over, and only the formatting of the instruction matters. Easy emulation. x86 emulation is more of a bear: a single instruction can do different things, depending on the context (almost like operator overloading in assembly)
There have been similar rumors about using AMD chips; they go along these lines:
AMD Athlon & Opteron processors are really two processors: 1.) An x86 decoder, which translates the x86 instructions to 2.) AMD's completely original RISC core; each is roughly 1/2 of the total die size.
Take the upcoming Opteron, chop off the x86 decoder (which is about 1/2 of the chip), and use its RISC core natively (and emulate PPC)
Take the Opteron, and replace the x86 decoder with a PPC decoder (which would still be a smaller die than the x86 Opteron)
AMD is more likely to modify their design than Intel is.
Of course, the argument can be made 'why modify anything?'
As the poster said: x86 is on its last legs. The Opteron is likely the bed it will die in. There's really no reason to even have a CISC chip now that compiled languages are used instead of assembly.
There aren't many compelling things that show that VLIW is a better design paradigm than RISC. Few convincing reasons that VLIW (Itanium) is better than RISC (PowerPC)
Even Intel will have to debunk the MHz myth when trying to convince the public to buy the consumer version of Itanium, rather than the x86 Opteron.
Itanium and PowerPC have roughly equivalent SPEC scores at the same clock speeds.
There's not much to show that PowerPC is 'showing its age', as many of Itanium's touters claim. (It's more of a VLIW vs. RISC argument)
Apple has already done the processor emulation: When it moved from 680x0 to PowerPC. It's not as big a problem for them, having learned how to do it)
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
- The quote regarding Steve Jobs on Intel may have been misrepresented by the original article. The quote came from Apple's Q3 Financial Analyst Meeting Q&A. From that broadcast, here is the entire quote in context:
... so it looks like discussions of OS X on Intel/AMD may be a premature. (despite repeated speculation on this
A bit clearer, is his intent when taken in context.(5m 40s) Steve Jobs was asked about porting Mac OS X to Intel:
Steve Jobs: "The roadmap on the PowerPC actually looks pretty good and there are some advantages to it. As an example, the PowerPC has something in it called AltiVec, we call the Velocity Engine -- it's a vector engine -- it dramatically accelerates media, much better than, as an example, the Intel processors or the AMD processors... so we actually eek out a fair amount of performance from these things when all is said and done. And the roadmap looks pretty good. Now, as you point out, once our transition to Mac OS 10 is complete, which I expect will be around the end of this year or sometime early next year and we get the top 20% of our installed base running 10, and I think the next 20 will come very rapidly after that. Then we'll have options, then we'll have options and we like to have options. But right now, between Motorola and IBM, the roadmap looks pretty decent. "
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
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