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The GIF Format is Finally Patent-Free
tonymercmobily writes "Not many people noticed that the GIF file format is only now free from patents, as of the 1st of October 2006. Quick recap: first in 1999 Unisys tried to extort money from users and developers. Then, in 2003 the world hoped that the saga would finally be over. Then, in 2004, it was IBM's turn. Now, the SAGA seems to be over for real! Does anybody find Unisys' page on GIF as hilarious as I do...?"
... for it to be obsolete.
"The need to build the internet comes from something inside us, something programmed... something we can't resist."
This doesn't affect the average user, or even creator of GIFs. I imagine that companies like Adobe would not have to pay a royalty any longer, but this saving is unlikely to be passed to purchasers of image software.
Your outdated compression and obsolete alpha channels were not worth all those years of effort! Long live the network graphics!
Sigs are for Terrorists.
What I find genuinely hilarious, however, is the United State of America's Patent System.
My work here is dung.
October 1st came early this year...
It's still September over here in California... And I reckon it won't be October for another day or two. Are some of us on Mars or something? Or is this an entrapment ploy for some cash by the patent holders to make us infringe?
I'd draw a picture showing how time zones work here on earth, but that'd be patent infringement.
png pong
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
As lame as this whole thing was, if it hadn't happened, we wouldn't have the PNG standard today.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Does anybody find Unisys' page on GIF as hilarious as I do...? .....No
Don't Tread on Me
Killed the format? It's still one of the most common image formats on the web...
The only thing I know that might kill the format is the fact that it's limited to 256 colors.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
GIF is still usually a SMALLER format than PNG if you want to display a few-color, non-lossy image. If you're dealing with bandwidth issues and lots of users, it can add up.
common to whom? The only thing it's used for these days is cheesy animated banner ads, but that's quickly being replaced with flash and java stuff. There are some applications like transparency that people still use it for, but professional web designers would probably be required to put a little more thought into their work.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
we are to render unto Unisys what is Unisys'...
If you think jpg is a replacement for gif I can tell you're obviously not anyone working with graphics. On any level.
Of course, like most on here, I will relish the day that the LZW patent expires. But look at how long that took to expire. Every day someone patents yet another obvious invention and it holds everybody back.
Take the Certicom 'Patents' on Eliptic Curve cryptography (ECC). Certicom act as if they own ECC - the write it on practically everything they publish.
Yet on close analysis their patents give them almost no real control of ECC. The long and short of it that anything that operates on GF(p) is not covered.
The consequences of this is that NOBODY is using ECC, despite the fact that it's faster and has shorter keys. The whole field is held back for 20 years and nobody can make any progress.
It's not even used in Europe where these patents don't exist. Let me repeat this: The fact that some jerk of a company says it's theirs means the *whole* world doesn't use me.
I really wonder what goes through the minds of these poeple. Nobody wants to pay a fucktard like Certicom (tm) for a license for their mathematics. Nobody in the history of cryptography has made any serious amount of money from selling a security scheme. Why bother?
Simon
You haven't been to MySpace, have you?
Evidence? Except for 1x1 images and the like, you're wrong. And you shouldnt' be using 1x1 images anyhow so...
Before sending any examples, make sure you're comparing same-depth images and have used pngout.
I once, as a demonstration, took a review off HardOCP and converted/recompressed all their GIFs into PNG, and saved several hundreds of kilobytes.
Still webmasters continue to use GIF because of ignorance.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Looking back at the whole GIF patent saga, I believe Shakespear said it best. Much ado about nothing.
so, with a free alternative, why use GIF up to now?
I also did a quick search of common file types on Google*
GIF 519,000,000
JPG 777,000,000
JPEG 111,000,000
BMP 44,700,000
PNG 111,000,000
So GIF is not all _that_ dead. * = Results could mean anything really - PNG could be Paupua New Gunnea, and BMP could be best manufacturing practices.
I had the opportunity to work at Unisys and turned it down precisely because of the GIF patent grab.
Does anyone have any estimates of how much Unisys collected in blackmail^Wlicensing fees on GIF? And any analyst estimates on the costs of producing, defending and prosecuting that "submarine patent"?
Is the flagship submarine patent really worth the money Unisys sank into it? Worth the money the US government spent protecting it? Worth it to "the progress of science and useful arts"?
--
make install -not war
JPEG isn't a replacement for GIF. 8-bit PNG serves pretty well as a replacement under many circumstances, but it's not supported as ubiquitously, nor does it support animation. Java and Javascript have nothing to do with it, and flash is fine for some animations, but it's certainly no less encumbered by IP restrictions than GIF.
Let's say you have a 4 color raster logo. Are you going to make a JPEG? That'd be dumb. Let's say you have that same logo, and you want to animate it for 3 frames. What's a better solution than animated GIF?
I only really laughed at the improvments to gifs. What new thing is totally unavailable in any current graphics format that Unisys can make ca$h from?
Shameless plugs and inaccessible site design FTW! - www.mistletoestreetmusic.com
except - i cant think of anything of theres we want.
GNU should be the happiest.
In my book, being limited to 256 colors is a show stopper for all but the simplest and smallest images. Anything with more than a trivial degree of complexity in its color composition is, to my eyes, absolutely and irredeemably ugly when it gets downsampled to 256 colors. It used to be an acceptable compromise for shorter load times, but that is a much less significant issue these days than it once was. Now I can't see any excuse for ugly dithered images.
> What's so hilarious about it?
:-)
This bit:
"Unisys Corporation holds and has patents pending on a number of improvements on the inventions claimed in the above-expired patents. Information on these improvement patents and terms under which they may be licensed can be obtained by contacting the following:"
Maybe I have a weird sense humour?
So does this mean we are free to pronounce "GIF" with a hard G now?
Properly made GIF images are almost always smaller than PNG images of comparable bit-depth and features, except PNG does not support animation. If you have a simple image with only a few colors, GIF is still the best choice because it is small and fully supported by everything.
Professional web designers should use the best tool for the job, not what's hip and trendy.
=Smidge=
Parent is troll, but I'll bite.
Everything runs fine with jpg, java, javascript, and flash.
Java and Javascript are not image formats. Flash is much broader, is a non-accessible resource hog, and is most commonly used for irritating ads (not unlike animated GIFs, I suppose).
That leaves JPEG, which is actually an image format, but a totally different one. GIF was designed, for logos: it is lossless, has a very limited color palette, and allows for some amount of transparency. JPEG was designed for photos: it's lossy, has a broad color palette, no transparency, and it looks terrible on things with crisp lines, like text or diagrams.
The real competitor to GIF is PNG, which is still lossless, but has better transparency and more colors. Unfortunately, it also has poorly-specified gamma correction, which makes it painful to use in web design.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
The only thing it's used for these days is cheesy animated banner ads, but that's quickly being replaced with flash and java stuff.
First, that's just not true. Go to major web sites, look at the source, and search for ".gif". They're all over the fricken place. And who in their right mind would use Java for a bannar ad? I haven't noticed this, but the idea is completely retarded. Flash--- well Flash has its own problems. You need an expensive program to make them, and a special plug-in to view them. They can be better for certain purposes, especially if you want your ad to be interactive somehow, but if you just want to make a slideshow of completely different images, you're not going to beat animated GIFs for ease, or even size.
Professional Web developers, if they're any good, will use the proper tools for the job, and try to maximize compatibility as much as possible across different browsers. Use of plain HTML, CSS, JPEGs, and GIFs should be used the their maximum capability before looking to Javascript, and certainly before Java or Flash.
Finally, I can now sleep soundly, knowing the flaming torches on by web site are -fully legal- flaming torches.
Gimp already allows saving images in Gif format. It didn't earlier because of patent issues. It is nice really because now we can create banners which are less than 2k in size - even just a couple of hundred bytes.
....
But I do find that saving images in gif using gimp creates larger size image compared to saving the same image using say photoshop. I have sometimes wondered why this happens
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Four more years until the MP3 patent expires. I can't wait - finally there will be no reason to advocate a media format named after a neanderthal cave dweller!
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
Are you an skillfull troll, or an ignorant ass? Sometimes it's hard to tell.
The 'vendors' did pay licensing, until something better came along (png). Thanks to Unisys contracts* though, Microsoft never provided proper support for PNG.
* Ask yourself why Microsoft never had to pay gif licensing fees when everyone else did, and PNG alpha layer support stayed broken through 3 versions of Internet Explorer.
In addition to flashing banner ads and stylish web sites, the Graphical Interchange Format has brough us another important wonder.
Your The Man Now, Dog.
Imagine if we never had such a format. Would YTMND even be possible? We can only speculate, but I, for one, would like to thank Unisys for this valuable contribution. Afterall, 361,984—and growing—YTMND sites can't be wrong!
Join Tor today!
1) Pre-IE7 versions of IE do not support transparent PNG without hacks. The hacks are not terribly difficult to implement, but if you don't like hacks, and you need transparent images, you might use GIF. OTOH, you might not: GIF only supports on/off transparency. That means a pixel is either completely transparent or completely opaque. Lots of things like soft shadows only look right with the alpha transparency of PNG. This argument will gradually fade away as IE7 gains widespread adoption. It isn't much of a reason today.
2) GIF supports animation, PNG does not support animation. The other standard, MNG, does, but it has very little browser support. Firefox doesn't even support it out of the box. OTOH, animating an 8-bit image is not considered the height of cool any more; you're probably going to use Flash if you want graphics that move. Again, not much of a reason today.
Conclusion: If you're designing a new website, you probably have no reason to use GIF at all. If any of the above reasons apply to your existing website, it's probably time for a site redesign, eh? Nevertheless, there they are.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
You are the jerk. Learn how to spell, dummy.
LZW was published in IEEE in '84 by Welsh. It did not mention the patent. Some have argued this made the algorithm public knowledge. Unisys applied for the patent in '83, but did not enforce it until '89 WHEN IT WAS WIDELY ADOPTED. A lot of people that helped its adoption did so under the impression it was patent free.
So... how can it be stolen... if it was given away?
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
I think it's for the same reason they left HTML, CSS and Javascript support similarly crippled, while providing perfect VBscript and ActiveX support.
But it's too bad there isn't more excitement about more modern (and more functional) formats like SVG.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Slashdot posted something two days early?? *head explodes*
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
Death to the banana!
If it ain't broke, it needs more features!
If you mean Vorbis, then yeah, there will be no reason, apart from the *much* better quality at the same bitrate. I'd like to see mp3 be audible at 4 kbps (as vorbis does with floggy) :P
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Run-length-encoding is just plain better for images with areas of solid color, like cartoons. JPEG-type compression sucks for images with areas of solid colors and hard transitions. Sure, I could find some variant of PNG that would work, but could I be sure that it would work on every browser? The great part about GIF is that I know it will appear, and I don't have to worry that some browser out there might not impliment the pallette-based part of PNG.
HAH! Most of them don't know that there is anything other than JPEG or TIFF, from what I've seen.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
That's gonna be a fun file type to say out loud...
"Dude, check out this mung!"
Yeah, the lack of true 16-bit and 24-bit support in GIF would never have spurred the development of something better. Try again.
I'm not saying it wouldn't have ever happened. I'm saying we wouldn't have it TODAY.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
GIF was designed, for logos
Nope.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
"how can it be stolen... if it was given away?"
You've obviously never dealt with IP lawyers.
Good. There's few Web features I hate as much as moving, flashing things in a page of text. They draw the eye towards themselves, and make concentrating on text harder. The only ones who use them are ad banner makers and web "designers" who are too young to shave.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
It was already available freely from the patent office too. Just not read as much...
Also you need to remember where GIF came from. It was basically a bunch of people, as a HOBBIE, working on a decent Graphic Interchange Format. Do you think everyone read patents at the time. Ignorance of the law does not shield you from the law.
Which came first patent or publication in IEEE? For example there are HUNDREDS of articals out there that describe process that is patented yet do not list the patents. Are those now 'free' to use under your logic?
you use jpg for internet graphics? okay, this may get me kicked out of slashdot, but... you, cheeze, are a noob. not the "newbie" kind, but the "n00b" kind. the bad kind. may you rot in a pixely and grainy hell for using jpg. now seriously, i do not hate jpg. it's good for photo's and scans. but internet graphics are mostly computer-generated. and any animated series of jpg images would look horrible due to the semi-random graininess. have you ever considered using png or gif or if absolutely necessary, bmp?
GIF is dead.
:_/
Does anyone use GIF anymore?
PNG is much better.
GIF sucks, and Unisys helped kill it off.
Any way to make Firefox not download/load GIF images? I can live without them.
Maybe GIF is finaly patent-free, but who cares about GIF? It is dead, dead and burried. Just forget about GIF.
PNG for the win!
Not animating it.
How do you pronounce that? Minge?
...or he works with graphics with a specific objective that the GIF format does not live up to the same quality standards. I can think of one industry where the JPG rules over the GIF...hmmm...ever since the days of 2400 Baud modems, I remember that certain industry using JPGs and having to wait for the blurred image to refresh with the next compression level...Mmmm anyone else miss the anticipation of waiting for the JPG to finish loading... ~CYD
//Nothing to see here, please move along.
Headline should read: "GIF format is finally patent-free, but bows down to formats such as png."
Isn't TIFF's patent mess now over as well? And if so, when will I be able to view TIFFs in Firefox? Soon? Please? Question mark?
Fortran programmer...oh yeah. Array math for life!
That's just not true. I know everyone here is trying to sound cool by saying, "Animated GIFs are teh 5uXx0rs!!!11! You probably use MIDIs on all your pages!"
Yes, the technology has limited practical use, but that's not the same as no use whatsoever. Just like many other technologies in the early days, animated GIFs were overused in horrible designs. But does the existence of a "BLINK" tag mean that all HTML was bad?
Sometimes people use animated GIFs as actual content, and not part of some needless flashing decoration. You know, like if you were describing a process, and you needed to include a simple animation on your page to illustrate your point, an animated GIF might be appropriate. Just maybe.
In the whole of the web, good use of animation does exist. There are even cases of animated GIFs being used in very clever web pages as activity indicators. I hate the term, but you know all this "Web 2.0" junk? Yes, some of it is actually pretty good, and sometimes they make use of animations, and every now and then, those animations are animated GIFs.
What I'm saying is, animated GIFs, like a lot of web technologies, are overused and abused, but that doesn't mean they're inherently bad. It just means you shouldn't use them when they aren't appropriate.
Who modded this informative? You really don't understand patent law.
LZW was published in IEEE in '84 by Welsh. It did not mention the patent. Some have argued this made the algorithm public knowledge.
By publishing it, it was made it public at that time. You don't have to mention that you filed for a patent. You certainly can say "patent pending", but you aren't required to.
Unisys applied for the patent in '83,
So, Unisys filed for the patent before it was made public. Perfectly legal.
but did not enforce it until '89 WHEN IT WAS WIDELY ADOPTED.
Does not matter at all. Unlike trademarks, where if you don't actively defend the trademark there is a risk of losing the trademark, you don't have to defend a patent to make it valid. A patent remains valid even if you don't defend it, even if you allow some people to infringe the patent without suing right away.
A lot of people that helped its adoption did so under the impression it was patent free.
Then they were mistaken. That's their own fault.
So... how can it be stolen... if it was given away?
It wasn't given away. It was published. By publishing after filing for a patent, you retain all your rights to the patent.
Now, you might want to argue that algorithms shouldn't be subject to patent law, but that's a completely different discussion.
Your point (1) is completely wrong. Thank you for being one of the igorant people "helpfully" spreading ignorant "facts" about PNG, hindering its adoption.
IE doesn't support anything ABOVE 1-bit alpha. ABOVE. You're not giving anything up by going PNG when it comes to transparency.
The GIFormat is not limited to 256 colors! Read this for more information and a demonstration. I guess I should fix the Wikipedia entry sometime as well.
I still use GIF's most everywhere, but it cannot be stated enough that the allegation that "PNG's are larger than GIF's" are completely false. Most of this idea comes from many popular applications improperly or inadequately supporting PNG.
Although many applications that claim to support PNG do not perform adequate compression, any compression at all, or worse save every PNG in an uncompressed 24/32/40/48 bit format, in 99.9% of the cases for any given GIF file a PNG file can be created that is smaller. The edge cases where a PNG could not be made smaller only occur when a GIF file can be constructed that is smaller than the header information necessary to support the corresponding features in PNG.
It is true that transparency, gamma, and animation are either not implemented or poorly implemented by a great deal of software, though, which in my book makes it a fairly unreliable format for deployment on many commercial sites. This has been changing for the better the last few years, but the fight for proper PNG support is far from over.
Should probably mention that one can write uncompressed GIFs. It's not impossible that some packages did this to bypass the LZW issues.
OK; bunch of you nay sayers say "ignorance of the law" is no excuse. But this isn't a case of ignorance. Two important things; disclosure and prior art. Its the same reason why Coke doesn't publish the recipe; because disclosure of a recipe (algorithm in our case) is mixing things from the domain of common knowledge. Nothing Lempel, Ziv, and/or Welsh did was unqiue. Sliding windows and dictionary substitutions for compression; I have published ACM algorithms from '68 that have similar concepts. Course now you'll argue that the patent office erred in granting the patent but that doesn't obviate that it was granted and people should have respected the patent. Thats where it becomes totally subjective; if a patent is blatently wrong, its left to the courts to figure it out, with adversaries on both sides that can afford to fight it. Joe hobbiest doesn't give a shit, and its a stretch to say ignorance in this case is willful maleficence. Why? Because if those hobbiests didn't implement the fucking thing, Unisys wouldn't have been able to capitalize on it. No damages.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
The original music from Hampster Dance is a sample from "Whistle Stop" performed by Roger Miller, sped up 70% (as if a 45 RPM vinyl record were being played at 78 RPM). This song originally appeared as the theme song from Disney's animated feature film Robin Hood, and when Hampster Dance went commercial, it might have proven cheaper to cover the song (as Cuban Boys did with "Cognoscenti vs. Intelligentsia") than to license Miller's recording.
The above-mentioned patents don't relate directly to image storage formats; they relate to compression algorithms, which I imagine are still in demand in all sorts of specialized cases.
No.
GIF was created for the cutting edge graphics of its time, the IBM Color Card, that went into the more-power-then-youll-ever-need IBM XT. It also worked well on the Commodore 64, the Apple IIc, the TI994a, the Tandy Coco, and the venerable Amiga.
There was no great for logos on the web; back then the web was downloading a cheesecake photo in GIF, from Comp$erve or Fidonet, or if you were really clever FTPing a coupla pictures from simtel20 or the like.
However everyone was well aware of the visual limitations of GIF and so JPEG was soon developed, ratified and supported. Critical to the success of JPEG was the early developent of a free, portable, library that could be trivially implemented into all sorts of products.
One of those was an obscure internet client in the spirit of Gopher that used a stripped down SGML to layout pages with links in em. That went on to spark the great browser explosion, which begat numerous competing file formats/plugins all vying to be the next big thing, all with restrictive & expensive licenses.
Of the still image formats only the late-developed PNG, which was intentionionally free & extendable, has enjoyed sucess. All of the other clever ones went away, rendered irrelevant by increasing transmission speeds, network effect standardization, and an unwillingness by everyone to pay for what nearly-good-enough could do for free.
Today? VRML is dead. SVG a stillborn promise (though if Apples Safari supports it we might see renewed interest.) JPEG2000 going nowhere fast. PS/PDF a niche application. Flash stereotyped as dumb annoying animation. PNG slowly being adopted, waiting for IE7 to really step up to bat.
But GIF? Going strong.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
And the superior tagging one can get with Ogg versus what one can use with MP3. I also enjoy using the same set of tags on FLAC and Ogg Vorbis files.
And that 4 years is a long time in patent law; the US patent regime might move from a first-to-"invent" to a first-to-file system (in other words, let the largest corporate lawyers prevail). Patenting trivial variations to extend the life of an expired patent might become popular for software patents (as I'm told they are for drug patents).
Digital Citizen
http://sa.madtasty.com/images/nws/animated-goatse. gif
I don't know what will. Poor, miserable human being...
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Anyone notice the suspension of Habeas Corpus in the bill? Why if your suspected of supporting terrorism, you could simply disappea...
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
What are the reasons to have animated gifs?
a great reason
another great reason
another wonderfull reason
another pretty darn good reason
You can't handle the truth.
For really "size"-intensive images, you can save a PNG as an indexed format instead of the (usual default) true color. You end up with basically a gif (no variable alpha transparency) and a limited amount of colors, but the file size is a lot smaller. Smaller, I'm pretty sure, than an identical GIF.
:-)
I'm not sure how to do this in newer graphics programs, but my PhotoImpact 6 from half a decade a go does the job fine.
All browsers worth caring about support indexed PNG at least as well as they support still GIF. This includes Microsoft Internet Explorer >= 4, Netscape >= 4, and all versions of browsers using engines based on Gecko (Firefox, Epiphany, Camino), KHTML (Konqueror, Safari) or Presto (Opera, Nintendo DS Browser).
True.
False. GIF is lossy, as it is limited to 255 colors per frame. Conversion from a 24-bit image to GIF involves an operation called dithering, which adds noise to the image. In fact, the amount of loss in GIF (called "palette size") can be dialed up and down just as easily as JPEG's quantization scale factor.
Of course, they still don't look any better.
The Gospel according to lolcat
So if you claim that the web should be devoid of animation, then what do you recommend for illustrating how a rotary engine operates?
Do you know anything about video production? For one thing, see Motion JPEG and DV.
the second one, in firefox 2.0b2 (ubuntu edgy). i'm not even kidding.
I use GIF files still becayse I have a lot of software on variuos platforms which legally supports it, and I don't have as much software which supports PNG. That, plus animation, makes it a useful format for me.
In time I may switch to PNG. Who knows?
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
I'd say we don't have to worry about Unisys anymore, until I read this press release,... I guess we don't have to worry about the GIF thing no more, but you better not throw away your tin foil hat,... ;-)
How JPEG is animated
To how many listeners at once?
That's refering to an enhanced LZW algo, so if your'e interested in THAT algo, they're letting you know one exists and how to get it, as people will be going there to find out about the current LZW. At worst, that's a sign saying "This is free, but we have a better version you can still pay for."
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
As long as someone is using an internet explorer that doesn't support PNG transparency, i will keep using GIF for low color images that need to be transparent. My guess? About 5-10 years where there aren't anymore win9x/2k/me users.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
That's the reason that they still put up new websites using HTML 3.2.
That's the reason that they still link to print density pictures.
That's the reason that they still depend on frames for navigation.
That's the reason that they still use font tags.
That's the reason that they still use tables.
Sometimes I believe that the only way to see things improve is to wait until all of the dollar-bin how-to HTML books from 1999 decompose. It may have been the best technology available last decade, but "best technology" doesn't remain stable over the years.
Slashdot can go back to using .GIFs on its front page again.
Oh wait.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
YES Dammit!
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
OK; bunch of you nay sayers say "ignorance of the law" is no excuse. But this isn't a case of ignorance. Two important things; disclosure and prior art. Its the same reason why Coke doesn't publish the recipe; because disclosure of a recipe (algorithm in our case) is mixing things from the domain of common knowledge.
.GIF doesn't matter. He's still infringing on a patent. It isn't profitable for unisys to sue Joe for damages, but that doesn't mean Joe is innocent.
You are confusing two types of intelectual property, and different law applies. Unisys had a patent. Coke has no patent on the recipe. In law, the recipe is called a trade secret. If someone buys a coke and puts a sample in a gas chromatograph or mass spectrometer, they can easily determine what goes into Coke. Since the recipe is not protected by patent, they could then make your own product that tastes exactly the same as Coke, without breaking any laws, and sell it.
There are many "no name brand" copies of coke on the market, and they taste pretty much the same. Of course, the real reason people buy Coke is not because of the taste, it's because of the marketing and the power of the brand.
Nothing Lempel, Ziv, and/or Welsh did was unqiue.
Well, many patent offices around the world disagree with you. Many deep-pocketed lawyers also disagree with you.
Sliding windows and dictionary substitutions for compression; I have published ACM algorithms from '68 that have similar concepts. Course now you'll argue that the patent office erred in granting the patent
I'm really not sufficiently qualified in computer science to judge if the patent office made a mistake.
if a patent is blatently wrong, its left to the courts to figure it out, with adversaries on both sides that can afford to fight it.
Correct. And some of the Unisys victims were deep-pocketed, and they eventually believed the patent was valid.
Joe hobbiest doesn't give a shit, and its a stretch to say ignorance in this case is willful maleficence. Why? Because if those hobbiests didn't implement the fucking thing, Unisys wouldn't have been able to capitalize on it. No damages.
You are confusing business and law. The reason that Joe hobbiest doesn't give a shit is:
- it does cost money to sue
- the damages in each case would be small
- unisys doesn't know who the millions of joe hobbiest are
The fact that Joe hobbiest helped the market penetration & popularity of
Instead, unisys went after the easy targets: software companies with deep pockets.
There is a very good possibility that you missed the sarcastic tone of my comment.
Join Tor today!
Perhaps. However it does not detract from the fact that it WAS published before hand. You were trying to imply that somehow something 'shady' went on. It did not. It was a rather big mistake on the part of the compuserve group. At the time no one was really paying much attention to this sort of thing anyway so how would they know? Seriously how WOULD you know that you are infringing on some patent. They just read some cool artical and used it. If lzw in GIF had been tweaked somehow it may have been unique. However it was almost verbatem from the artical which was lifted from the patent...
r s_of_giants
However there are many patents that are just mashups of other patents and other 'art'. It is how science progresses. Is what they did 'unique' yes according to the patent office? It was also upheld in court several times. So it must have been unique enough. For example your 'similar' example, try mine, there are hundreds of patents on hinge brackets in the patent office. Does that somehow make them less patenable? Each one is unqiue yet it is just a hinge bracket.
Now Unisys did submarine it a bit. But not a whole lot. It was only about 3-5 years AFTER GIF came out that they realized what was going on. Would you notice if someone was infringing on your patent if they made 1 item and sold it to some poor slob somewhere? No. But when it is used EVERYWHERE you kind of notice... Why would Unisys give a crap about some BBS board that made some file format? Was Unisys dicks about it? Definatly. You however seem to begrudge them the work they did. Even though it was not Unisys directly that did it. They did BUY that work. Meaning they paid a pretty sum for another company and its assests becoming if you will that company that did pay for that work. They also paid to get it patented (not a cheap thing to do). They took on the risk of the patent and it paid off. The 'shady' part was 'hey we got all this work we paid for lets make some money' In effect becoming a patent troll.
Was I mad at the time they said 'pay up or else'? Hell yeah. But http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_on_the_shoulde
It is currently september 29th, tomorrow is the 30th. I would hope slashdot can prevent idiots trying to jump the gun. Slashdot should be able to read a calendar and understand that the month of october starts on the 1st of october, not the 29th of september.
so... can we drop this cumbersome unsupported PNG format at last, and get back to using GIF without being told it's wrong?
;)
so?
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
First of all, that's MJPEG which might have some of the JPEG standards but is not the same thing by any means. If you'd read that wiki you'd know that. Sorry, the gap isn't bridged by dragging in a "new" format(if you consider 1995-ish technology to be new, that is), for one it's more for speed than compression(I can tell you from first hand experience that 30 min of vhs quality video is about 2Gb), and it was designed with non-linear editors in mind, not video for playback on the web. Speaking of the web though, everytime I've seen an MJPEG, it's required Quicktime so it's even less favorable since jpg, gif and png are useable in almost every browser available without modification.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Nothing except for the thousands of man-years it took to develop and deploy PNG and other workarounds for the Unisys patent.
And for what? Unisys didn't even develop the key technology in question, and what was patented provided no useful advantage over open methods. The only reason Unisys was able to blackmail the world and cause all this trouble is because they failed to enforce the patent until the method had become a standard part of the infrastructure.
This patent has cost the world a huge amount of money and provided nothing in return.
All Flash is used for is (1) Ads, (2) convoluted, hard-to-navigate web sites written by newbie tossers to impress their idiot Advertising Agency bosses. These are generally throw-away marketing campaign web sites.
I disable Flash, so I don't have to look at their stupid ads.
I don't waste time with tosser web sites either. As soon as they give me that "You need Flash"
I go somewhere else.
No, I do not find Unisys' page on GIF as hilarious as you do.
The new one that appeared, is the Microsoft lost lawsuit that now requires you to "click to use this (Flash) control". I also still seem to get some odd results for flash in FireFox 1.5.0.6, though I haven't yet pinpointed them.
When not animated, simple gifs get the job done on pages with modest goals. Many of the free web hosts have file size limits, and uneven support for higher end web tech. Since my planned pages are "all about the info" anyway, I don't need most of that glamorous stuff, and I can now sleep in peace using nice, friendly gifs!
The preview word for this post is entrap, which the Slashcode came up with in honor of Unisys.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Animated PNGs would have been very easy. The fact that the PNG format developers chose not to is perhaps at least partly to blame for the slow uptake of PNG. I never did understand why they felt it needed a whole new format. This is NOT about making something to replace MPEG. This is about making something to replace a feature of GIF (which was never any threat to MPEG).
It would have been simple to do. There could be additional chunks with repeated frames. Other optional chunks would set the time delay between the current frame and the next frame and be the default for subsequent frames unless another of these chunks appeared. Another chunk would specify repeating, possibly with a count, and posisbly with how many frames at the front to skip for the repeat point (something GIF didn't even have, but would be simple to do).
I know there were detractors that said "animations suck, we need to ban them" or "animations are just a form of abuse" or "if you want movies, use MPEG", etc. But one stated purpose of PNG was to eliminate the need for GIF (not to eliminate the need for JPEG or MPEG). It didn't meet that goal. GIF is still THE format for basic animations, whether they are abusive banner ads, or usable tools like a clock. Small images with a few frames are fully practical in GIF.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The problem I have with the PNG format, is that it forces a gamma correction of its colours. Even on a website.
This means that it is impossible to match a plain coloured PNG to an HTML background colour. (Unless that colour is pure black or pure white!)
People may say that one can cope by using PNGs alpha transparency, but this increases the size of a picture dramatically.
For 8-bit graphics on the internet, GIF is still sadly better, because some fool thought to include gamma adjustment on 256 colour images.
And if it's not an animated diagram, then it is probably more akin to a video clip, and we have a fair share of decent formats for that as well, Ogg Theora being the notable open one.
IE7 will have PNG transparency, i haven't seen an animated gif on a serious site for a long time ... and then, when it is animated it is most probably flash which offers a ton more options.
:)
I'd say: finally it's free, just too late guys
What I find genuinely hilarious, however, is the United State of America's Patent System.
Well, that was a rather hilarious misuse of the term "system".
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Properly made GIF images are almost always smaller than PNG images of comparable bit-depth and features, ...
Well, I have a bunch of web stuff that I've ported to a number of different systems and tested after upgrades. Part of it offers the user a choice of graphic formats for downloaded images, including GIF and PNG. I've yet to see a single case where the GIFs came out smaller than the PNGs. The PNGs are generally about 10% smaller than the GIFs.
Of course, this might just mean that I've never seen a system with "proper" GIF software. But I just use the conversion software that's in the system libraries. I don't have the time (or interest) to replace the conversion software. So I'll just keep using what's installed, and my brief explanations to users will continue to say that PNG is usually about 10% smaller than GIF.
I do sometimes wish that I could find and install the best version of everything that I use in a system's libraries. But the fact that something could be done better isn't all that useful to those of us with a finite amount of time per day.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Professional web designers should use the best tool for the job, not what's hip and trendy.
Ah, but to most of the people paying those designers' salaries, what's hip and trendy is the best tool for the job.
(This is based on bitter experience. YMMV.)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Not dead. You can find a gif-to-raw decoder in less than 200 lines of C, public domain implementation. What about PNG? 500MB library? Think about it, just think about it man.
Two characters in his books are the witch Nanny Ogg from the Lancre series and Vorbis the bald religious freak from Small Gods.
However, and as much as I like to read Pratchett, I too, find the name Ogg stupid for a codec.
What marketer would like to boast it in a specs sheet? None, we have found out.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
But as you're pointing out, it depends on the information and your purposes. Ogg Theora? How many people can play that on their computers right now, without installing anything? Compare that with the number of people who can view an animated GIF right now, without installing anything.
When I clicked on the Lynx url, the first thing that popped up was an ad for Firefox.
Now THAT'S confidence!
(of course I was using IE6 at the time...
I'll try looking at the page again with FF...)
.
- aqk
F U
please stop spreading this myth, a gif like (paletized with a single transparent color) transparent png will display just fine in IE and will be smaller than the equivilent gif.
yes IE has problems with some transparent pngs but not with gif like ones.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
1: it means free software can support gif writing properly (e.g. not using hacks that avoid the patent but also make the files bigger than plain bitmaps) without legal issues. This is a biggie for packages like gimp and imagemagick.
2: likewise for small commercial vendors who unisys fucked arround until they decided that gif support was more trouble than its worth.
3: unisys has in the past gone after some website owners forcing them to either somehow prove thier gifs were produced with licensed software (basically impossible) or pay an anual license fee themselves. It means theese websites are now safe.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Sure, I could find some variant of PNG that would work, but could I be sure that it would work on every browser?
gif like (8 bit or less pallette based with a single transparent color) work just fine accross every major browser back quite a number of versions.
if you are trying to match colors in the png to other colors on the page you should write the png WITHOUT color correction information to make it work right in most browsers (if your editor insists on writing this info use something like pngout to strip it).
Some programs (e.g. photoshop) also have notoriously bad png output support and third party optimisation software (of which i belive pngout is the best arround) is always worthwhile if filesize bothers you.
you might wan't to take a look at png tips for cartoonists which covers a lot of the issues with using png for this type of artwork.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
And a camera CCD is lossy too, as it doesn't represent all the photons that cross the lens. The question is how and when information loss occurs.
In what way is JPEG any lossier than GIF? Both are conversion lossy, but both can be generation lossless. Some people claim that JPEG has generation loss, but it can be avoided: if I open and re-save a JPEG image with the same quantization matrix, I'll get the same DCT coefficients back. JPEG is generation lossy only if you use a different quantization matrix (GIF too has problems with changing the number of colors), or if you move things by a non-multiple of the block size between opening and saving, or if you are using a encoder implementation with poor rounding.
True. But it is useful to define "acceptably lossless" image format: one that 1. preserves all information that the human visual system can discern in the given use case (no discernible conversion loss) and 2. save A, load A, save B, load B results in the same pixels for both loads (no generation loss). A truecolor image satisfies 1 to me; therefore PNG, JPEG-LS, and (for grayscale only) GIF qualify.