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Are You Ready For Burn All GIFs Day?
ESR writes "Are you ready for Burn All
GIFs Day?. On November 5, webmasters all over the world will
convert their sites to eliminate all GIFs. Please join this
effort and show Unisys that the net will not tolerate its sleazy
attempt at a $5000-per-site shakedown based on the LZW patent.
For tools to make converting your entire site easy, see the
gif2png home
page. "
Dude, there are different encoders available. It is simply a method of taking the frequencies that make up most of what we hear and trashing what frequencies are most inaudible, on a frame by frame basis, and writing the file.
So what if Fraunhofer has a patent on one, use a different one, they are available!
What is the real difference between formats... particularly, why is jpg so bad? Also, tell me more about the differences between gimp and photoshop for image compression, etc. I had naively thought that a gif was a gif... but I guess the ones I've made with RH are in fact ungifs...
Tactics of "da man" include surveillance, intimidation, harassment by proxy (through the court system), and a near-monopoly on lethal force. And how exactly do I arrange to have Free Software with a license to generates GIFs? Does that also cost every user $5,000?
I don't have the article offhand, but GNotices had something a while ago about how GNOME was converting the official documentation to PNGs/JPGs, and the lack of DocBook support. Apparently, they had already created a patch (or had one far along), and sent it back upstream. So there's not much of a worry there.
Windows 2000: Designed for the Internet. The Internet: Designed for UNIX.
I have two comments to make about this.
Number one, I think this excessive worry about whether PNG support in existing browsers is sufficient, is another instance of this sin of ``worrying about appearance more than about content'' pointed out by ESR in his HTML Hell Page. The whole idea of having transparency in images seems dubious at best.
Even if you insist on having transparent images, please don't let the fact that PNG browser support is not perfect prevent you from using them anyway. If you do, it never will be perfect (spell ``vicious cycle''). This (refusing PNG's because browsers don't fully support them) is a form of bugware: don't indulge in bugware. Just like you should write correct HTML even though buggy HTML might look better on some (or even on all) browsers. (One canonical example of this is — which I insist on using even though Netscape — under Linux at least — bugs on it.)
Secondly, I have a proposal for action, to show how ridiculous this whole patent issue is. Create a small image that reads something like ``PATENTS SUCK''. Draw it on a piece of paper. Get a copy of the GIF standard, and do the LZW compression by hand. This is not nearly as hard as Huffman, it should be doable if the image is small enough. Then distribute the image as widely as possible. Even better: sell it, so you can claim you made a commercial use of it.
Suddenly your brain is worth $5000. Impressive isn't it?
banner. (With newes for nerds. Stuff that matters)
It's is a gif. If you didnt know.
No nasty, yukky GIFs on *my* server!
Yay!
Rev. Dr. Xenophon Fenderson, the Carbon(d)ated, KSC, DEATH, SubGenius, mhm21x16
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
I created one and tested it in IE 5 and Netscape 4 for Linux, and both did not look right. The one in IE looked OK, except it was centered, which it normally is not for a .jpg or .gif picture. It also seemed to almost crash my browser, when I right clicked, nothing came up. I had to use the toolbar at the top. In Netscape, it doesn't render at all when you just view the image. If it's in a page however, you can see it. Gifs all looked correct. PNG is not ready for the big time in compatibility.
} I tried taking all my scans & videocaptures and
} saving them to PNG format...
} Unfortunately the images, compared to saving
} JPEG files with compression set to 1(at least
} in PSP) resulted in UNGODLY huge file sizes
No surprise there. PNG is for computer graphics.
JPEG is for natural images. You need both in
your toolbag.
Actually, you translate your specs into a sort of gibberish courts have ruled only patent lawyers are qualified to read, and then the PTO makes it ludicrously difficult and cumbersome for the public to get access to any of them, much less find relevant ones. Considering a patent to be "publication" is a sick joke.
Sure I can blame them. They waited until GIF was entrenched and then started shaking down programmers (they would have had to settle for getting the actual value of their tech if they'd been honest, of course), and they see no ethical problem with demanding money from people who aren't earning any money through using LZW.
I dig your second point, but your first one perplexes me. Are you addressing something specific in my argument, or just the manner in which I presented it ? If the former, then please elaborate. If the latter, then I spose I should explain that my style comes from being a (moderately successful) Linoln-Douglas debater in High school, where I developed a habit of trying to prove my point while acknowledging the argument of the other side... by so doing, at least in debate, you put yourself in the enviable position of being able to state the opponent's case in your own words, which if done skillfully lets you undermine it without a direct, and potentially messy, clash on the case as the opponent stated it. This is why you often hear speakers in a debate say "Now my opponent will tell you that..."
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
crazy dynamite monkey
a) If you created your GIF with licensed products (like Photoshop) the use of GIFs on your site is covered.
b) This issue is terribly old, nearly ancient, and *HAS* been addressed by Unisys. I'm no friend of patent whores, but to be fair to Unisys, the Gif2Pingers are blowing this way out of proportions.
c) PNG would have replaced GIFs a long time ago, if the PNG advocates would realize that there are platforms out there than PCs - and that certain browsers do NOT support PNG, and that PNG support in some browsers is spotty at best.
d) The same goes for pulling the head out of the ass, and providing bowers plugins for both main browsers, for all three main platforms, Mac, PC and Unix.
I'd have switched a long time ago, if platform support were there - so far, pNG is a nice technology, but nothing much beyond that, if it means cutting out a majority of my browser users.
Harry
GIF is only lossless for cartoons - step one is to map every pixel into a painfully tiny palette. And how do I get a license for open source GIF tools?
I guess you haven't been paying attention.
./netscape ./netscape
One more time:
perl -pi -e 's:ANIMEXTS1:ANIMEXTZ1:'
perl -pi -e 's:NETSCAPE2:NOTSCAPE2:'
Run that AFTER you Fortify to 128 bit (you DO Fortify those weak 56 bit browsers, right?) and then Netscape will show it ONCE and then stop.
I have experienced this problem with some program (can't remember which) too, but I have never experienced that with gif2png or pnmtopng.
So I don't know what you are doing wrong, but switching to gif2png or pnmtopng is probably a pretty good fix - and gif2png can handle a whole directory at a time.
Back to the topic of GIF burning:
Most people have probably made their GIF files with a licensed program (or have had them made in a non-software-patent country), so there are probably not many people, if any, this whole LZW licensing story will touch.
We should, despite this, fight software patenting in general (those of us who believe it is wrong). But I can't see there is any point in wacking Unisys all the time. It looks more like witch-hunting than sensible action. What about MIT, Microsoft, IBM, and all the other companies who also hold software patents?
I have decided to keep my old GIF files around together with the PNG versions of the images. Using content negotiation and the MultiViews setting in Apache, I leave the actual choice of PNG or GIF to my visitors.
Jacob (who lives in a software patent free country :)
Atheism is a non-prophet organisation.
The original poster said he was talking about IP in general, not just software patents. You're right; patents aren't too useful in the software industry, because usually by the time they're granted the idea has already been copied by the entire industry and trying to enforce your patent accomplishes very little other than the generation of bad will.
Copyrights are essential to software though, especially GPLed software. It's the copyright holder who decides what license to release a program under. If copyright laws were abolished, Microsoft would have the same rights to your code as you do, and could legally take your GPLed code and use it in closed source software.
--
This space unintentionally left unblank.
That should be moderated up... Haven't you guys ver seen those JIF peanut butter commercials? Lol
The LZW patent will indeed expire. In 2003.
In the meantime, I'll urge anyone doing any business with Unisys to stop, assuming I ever meet anyone that foolish.
I converted my whole site from GIF to PNG a while back. IE5 works great, Mozilla breaks on the transparencies (not alpha channel), that is, binary transparency for PNG is still broken. You can see my bug report, and vote for it at: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_ bug.cgi?id=13627. It seems the mozilla folk (who I love) are very concerned with DOM, XML, and HTML standard support...but have left out the PNG standard as a _fundamental_ required building block of the web. I think full PNG support should be as core as HTML, and I eagerly await full support in my favorite browser.
There's an article at evolt.org ( Don't Panic About GIFs ) on this subject, with a few added comments /.-style from readers.
One of these additions suggests that the Unisys patent is not enforceable in Australia (among a few other major countries). I encourage people to read the article linked, and (even though it was posted back in August) feel free to add further information likely to be considered relevant.
Please note that evolt.org is a resource largely for Web designers, so even though there are many OSS-related postings, a lot of the content is aimed at those who produce their images on Windows/MacOS machines. As such, the original article is more of a "if you are using Photoshop, then calm down - you're OK!" type thing, than applicable to those using free image-manipulating software.
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
Animation using PNG is called PNM. Heh. It's also the format PSP uses when it saves in it's native format for animation.
Ian Zink
There's been a PNG patch for Xv available since
1995. Xv itself hasn't been upgraded because
in order to keep GIF support without paying
the tax it has to have been released before
January 1, 1995, according to the original
UNISYS manifesto. But since the grandfather
clause seems to be gone now, Xv's only choices
seem to be to eliminate GIF support or to pay up.
Please tell me there's something similar to that to disable pop-ups...
(And no, completeley disabling javascript is not what I want.)
Moderators, please refrain from flagging information "Informative" unless you actually know it's correct. MNG is the new PNG-like standard for animation, while PNM is "portable anymap" - the simple truecolor format for Jef Poskanzer's pbmplus package.
No, no one ever noticed that.
get you facts straight: just beacuse Iraq is embargoed doesn't mean the rest of the middle east is.
have a look here to see what's going on at Gitex in Dubai. And the article here shows that US imports from the UAE were $8.9bn in 1998. That doesn't sound like a trade embargo to me.
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
http://graphicswiz.com/png/pngapps.html
(as pointed out in one of the refered pages)
Seriously, is there enough browser support for PNG so that we can do this? I know IE5/NS4/Mozilla at least will work fine... but how about a little backwards compatibility?
The subject icon for this (and most other) stories are gifs... My question is, why is Slashdot, one of the most prominent Linux/Open Source websites, still using gifs?
It'd be really cool if sites that are funded by banner adds would require that the ads be .png or .jpg images. This would reduce the obnoxiousness and load time of the ads immensely.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
I just followed the links on their page, what let me to the gif-to-png page
There you can find a python script to convert your web to png, it is said to be around for 4 years already..
I haven't tested it yet on my page, it's under construction right now.. One thing left.. animated gif.. the only way out JAVA script? And I think converting to png is just making a stand, after all, everyone knows Linux users are rebelious...
"Notice that the animated GIFs do not come from Slashdot's servers themselves."
IIRC Slashdot uses Adfu, Rob's open source ad server. When Andover took over Adfu when they picked up Slashdot so Andover might still be liable. In other words, yes the ads are run on Slashdot servers so we should all contact Andover and ask them to burn the GIFs! Actually, we should talk to Rob, because he would probably still be in charge of Adfu itself and would be the one who'd have to rewrite the script.
There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
Of course we in Europe can fart in the general direction of your software patents. (I'm sorry Rob just don't put Monty's foot at the top of the page !). Ha Just you guys wait for my patent on Algebra 101 (in the US only!) Nee, bring me a shrubbery!!!!!
Yes, apparently Quicktime 4 likes to assume that Netscape & IE do not know how to render pngs on their own.
Upside is that gamma with Quicktime is perfect, so gamma-dependant images in netscape can be viewed as they should be.
Downside is that alpha rendering with Quicktime is just as bad as how Netscape renders it, so in IE5 (haven't found a machine to test IE4 yet), when you view a PNG rendered by QT (not an inline image), it's WORSE quality than that of IE5's internal renderer.
Of course, QT has one of the worst hooks of any application. It's not a matter of going into the given program's ini files or the registry, you need to rearrage the order of the files in the plugin folders for each in order to view / not view movies or images or midis(!!) with QT. At least this was the case for older Quicktimes -- it's downright absurd.
There are a couple of problems I can see with this going off right, although I completely agree with the initiative at its essence.
For one, as far as I've been able to tell, Unisys hasn't made any real attempts to ENFORCE this since making that initial announcement (I'm sure somebody will correct me if I'm wrong).
The second issue is that PNG support in web browsers isn't perfect, and from what I've seen, animated PNG support is nonexistant... is it really feasible to do this now ? Imagine the logical extreme... java/javascript ad banners... AAARRARARRRGH !!!!!
Again, I completely agree with this initiative, and long-since scrapped all my GIF usage a long time ago, and I've been lobbying my school (Georgia Tech) to do the same in all class curricula and on their web page. But, I just don't think that there's a workable alternative for ALL usage of GIFs right now.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
I wasn't aware PNG was widely compatible. I'll look into it. thanks.
http://www.logient.com
I remember a few months ago or so, there was a slashdot poll asking whether or not your browswer supported png, and I remember if not the majority, then atleast a big chunk of people's browsers weren't compatible. I remember comments also of people saying that their broswer support was kind of wack.
Besides, didn't the people say they werent going to press charges anyways?
Joseph?
hehe, yes it does, thanks.
http://www.logient.com
From the userinfo page: [greendot.gif] :) I think slashdot will be going through more modifications in the next 5 days :)
hmmm...
OFTC: By the community, for the community
} * "In particular, GIF is well adapted for online .. does this mean that
} communications because of its streamability and
} progressive display capability. PNG shares those
} attributes. (Stress added).
} ====Can some one tell me
} PNG can support animation?? what does
} "progressive display capability" mean ??====
It refers to the ability to display a low-resolution
version of the image followed by increasing amounts
of detail. Not animation. For animations, see MNG.
Ok, Unisys sucks but I won't (and I doubt anyone will) double or triple the size of my site just for a cause.
http://www.logient.com
Why doesn't your version of kfm support gifs? Being one of the most widely deployed image standards in existence along with, and probably topping, jpeg, it sounds like a lack of features of kfm is your problem. Recompile your kfm with gif or send a bug report to the KDE people informing them that the binaries you received do NOT have gif support. It is not illegal in ANY way to be able to view gifs, only to create them with an unlicensed product. Unless what you're saying is that you did this just for a political statement which I guess is fine but don't complain then.
How it is that I am in violation of their patent by having gif images on my site, regardless of the tools used to create them? .gif codec to my image datafile and see a recognizable image is irrelevant.
The patent covers the codec. not the data.
The fact that you can apply the
I am not a lawyer, as many are fond of saying, but just like the fraunhoffer patents cover mp3 and the RSA patent covered pgp, neither of them covered the data produced, only the products that process the data.
I recall a post by someone claiming to be a lawyer (though they weren't offering professional advice, of course) pointing out that patent law only covers commercial use of products. Nothing forbids you from building your own tools to do something. You just can't sell it.
.gif format in no way violates their patent. Their patent is on the codec.
As for site owners, I maintain that having data that happens to be in
(Think, this is like fraunhoffer saying all mp3's are illegal unless they were made with licensed software, simply because they hold the patent on the codec)
Export restrictions on munitions and patent law are completely unrelated.. so what are you trying to say?
Full disclosure of a process is PART of patent law, you HAVE to make all the information about your patented process public! It is REQUIRED in order for you to get patent protection. This is the whole point of the patent! (read: without patent protection, many companies would simply keep the results of their research a secret, to protect their hard work. With patents, they can disclose them publicly in exchange for exclusive rights for a limited time)
There are, of course, far too many frivolous patents, and these are a terrible thing.
I think it makes sense for us all to switch to PNG now, because if we don't switch, good PNG support will never become de rigeur for web browsers.
We have to force the issue.
Since PNG is also technically superior (it compresses better), good support in browsers will mean that nobody uses GIFs any longer. And people will notice when a format goes out of use due to software patent problems.
Thanks
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens.
What a fascinating suggestion. Bruce Sterling, are you listening? :-)
hmm.. it did manage to shrink my smut..
although I can't verify the rate, I scrapped it to make room on me drive..
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
This could be true, however, ignorance of a patent is no excuse.
I believe, though, that if Unisys *knew* you were in violation of their patent, but they decided *not* to act on it, and instead waited 10 years for you to become super rich and then tried to claim that you owed them millions, that you would have some sort of defense.
I use many transparent gifs on my projects and I think I'm just stuck with them. Are there any programs which convert transparent gifs to ...err ... "transparent" jpgs? Michael -
What are they going to do, sue the entire internet. I can see another jam echelon day coming up. Don't like 25% of you use netscape 3 anyhow? That doesn't support PNG. I can see the 1000's of emails to rob now.... "what the hell happened to all the icons?"
It's late, I'm angry, filter accordingly. Learn what is happening before continuing the joke this has become! If your GIFs were produced with software which is licensed, you are OK. I make my GIFs with Photoshop or steal them from the web. Photoshop is licensed, e.g. I'm OK. I thought this was covered here before. Read the news for Christ's sake!
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
Unisys does *not* OWN the .gif format! they hold the patent on the LZW codec. Period.
They can go after unlicensed tools, but not the images they produce.
Not really, if you have the same palette the PNG will be smaller than the GIF nearly every time. The only time when the GIF will be smaller is when you're eithor A: Working with 2 pixel images where one pixel is white and the other is black or B: You've images happen to be one of the specific patterns of bits which LZW is optimal at compressing.
This means that, for all real life intents and purpoises, the use of PNG/JPEG will *always* be smaller than GIF.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Regardless of the tools used, how on earth can Unisys claim any kind of patent infringement for the IMAGES? The images do not violate the patent. They do not contain a single piece of the codec. They are just data. Period.
On the other hand, patents, copywrights, and the like provide a service by preserving the ideas and technology behind the inventions and writings. This is actually, AFAIK, one of the reasons these things were developed, so that inventions, books, etc would not be lost forever when they stopped being sold, or something weird happened.
Of course, there are a lot of people who make a living by developing new things, and I think they have a right to profit from the sale of those things.
I think that in our zeal for free software, we easily forget that legal protections of IP do serve a purpose.
Of course, I think this whole GIF thing is total BS, but that is, as you say, because of the "bait and switch," not because they are trying to charge for their patent.I would like to know how Unisys can claim that a web-site is infringing on their patent, simply because they have .gif images?
.gif images themselves! they are not the codec, they are simply the result of it.
To my knowledge, Unisys holds the patent on the LZW codec. They do not 'own' the gif format, but only control the method by which they can be created/viewed.
As for creation, perhaps they can sue me if they can provie I am using their patented process without paying proper royalties, but I doubt it would hold up in court.
Generally, I would guess, I would be in trouble if I was actually selling (or even just distributing) software that made use of their patented codec without the appropriate royalties.
There is no way, however, that they can lay any sort of claim to the
To put it differently, Let's say you have a patented process for making confetti. Let's say this process is 100x faster than typical processes for confetti making.
If I make a bunch of confetti using your patented process, do you have some sort of claim over the confetti? No. It's just plain old confetti. I just made it quickly.
Do you have some sort of claim over me even, as I am not actually selling your patented process?
> Does LZW expire anytime soon?
As I recall from the last time we saw this, it expires in 2003, which is why UniSys wants to crack down on things now -- to get the last drops of blood out of the stone.
Ditto on what others have said about this not constituting being in the public domain. When you patent something, you make public all information about it, but no one can sell it until the patent expires. If you want to keep is secret, you do not patent it, you lock the information in a vault and hope nobody figures it out on their own.
Also, why do you feel it neccesary to put three lines of white space between each of your paragraphs and/or sentances? Not everyone has a huge, high res screen and can afford wasted space like this, you know. Think a little before you post about things like this.
This is a chicken or the egg argument. Except that as others have said, there is no widespread support for PNG. IE on the PC supports it, more or less. It doesn't exist as far as IE Mac is concerned. Some versions of Netscape 4 (4.03 IIRC) support it, but it is buggy across platforms and versions. And of course, there is no animated version (MPNG isn't even finalized AFAIK).
Now, if you are a major site are you going to risk alienating your audience and advertisers with content your viewers cannot access, simply because some misunderstood argument about patent enforcement is being bandied about? I don't think so. You won't be a major site for long.
Only when the format was a strongly entrenched de facto standard ...
You mean only when it entrenched as a de facto BBS standard. Unisys has been trying to enforce it patents since the late 80s, long before the WWW days.
Most BBS standards died along with the medium -- GIF unfortunately survived. Blame Mosaic and Netcape for foisting a dubious standard on to the World Wid Web at it's inception. There was an opportunity there to introduce a new image format, and it was balked.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Well, for graphics that small, size doesn't matter much anyway. Network packets come in large chunks of bytes, so the additional time spent downloading 144 vs. 45 bytes is negligible unless you're downloading a thousand of them-- in which case you'd probably be better off combining them into one image so the compression can exploit redundancies.
~k.lee
(remove nospam for email)
A degree from Chicago perhaps? Always gotta love the "leave everything alone, it will fix itself" people. How many Chicago school economists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: None. If it needs to be done the market will do it.
The MNG format (basically an animated PNG) is currently being worked on. It's not done yet, but...
I'd like to be able to turn off the starting of a new window from a hyperlink (i.e. ignoring the "target=new" attribute to the HTML tag). If I want to open something in a new window, I'll do it myself, thanks.
I'd like to be forewarned when a page with JavaScript is "mined" with something that fires off multiple top-level windows when you back out of or close the page.
(I'd like to see the "Open Link in This Window" option that was in the right-click menu in Netscape 3 return, as well. I used that a lot, and it was removed in Netscape 4 for reasons I've never understood.)
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
should be slashdot :) .gifs everywhere... on the subject of browser support, last i checked, most browsers support .jpg, which, although suboptimal, will do until people get their collective arses into gear and add decent png support. while people are content to sit back and continue to use .gifs, why SHOULD browsers implement a new file format? .. upgrades suck, but i know one of the main reasons people upgraded to netscape 2.0 was things like background images, frames, java, and the like. no difference here... smash (at work, not logged in. my page has .PNG throughout :)
Be careful with PNG and BeOS! The PNG translator that ships with current versions of BeOS can create corrupt PNG files. Applications which use libpng are typically unable to read/display these damaged files.
Unisys has been trying to enforce their patents since the BBS days -- I've been reading these Unisys-is-getting-evil-with-GIFs threads since back when I had a 1200 bps modem.
A brief bit of history - Compuserve published the GIF format in the 1980s without regard to the fact that it used patented technology. The "minicomputer giant", Unisys (formerly Sperry Univac) was so out of it that they didn't realize that their algorythm was all over the online world until the late eighties. Then they started to demand that authors fork over money. The big guys (Adobe, Corel) have been paying Unisys for over a decade.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Jpeg 2000 might not be finished as of yet, but I suspect that it will have a good chance of being a standard in the future (just as jpeg/mpeg is today), and even greater, it has support for most about anything you'd want. From lossless to lossy compression and a whole range of other nifty things such as wavelets. Read up on it yourself, and then wonder what format you'd like your browser to support in the future...
PNG is a good thing, and has always been a good thing since it arrived, but I fear that it won't ever be a de facto standard. Sure, I want real transparency (GIF? Does masking at best, it's plain silly) and non LZW, but I won't recode any browsers (especially since I am using IE and can't stand Netrape/Mozilla with it's lack of design) nor will I recode any software packages (few of them seem to be able to save PNGs correctly && be of any use). On top of this, will there be a gateway that translates GIFs into PNGs? Because as far as I know, I can't make everyone use PNG...
Once again, I hope those that has invested in JPEG will make use of it, and thus make it widespread.
LZW and LZ77/78 are only common in that they are both called dictionary algorithms. While LZW calculates a dictionary of 4096 entries on the fly while decoding or encoding, LZ77/78 commonly use a sliding dictionary of 4096 bytes of previous data. Look for some implementations of LZW with adaptive code length and/or huffman encoding combined and LZ77/78 with huffman or mathematical encoding to find the signifigance of those sizes by yourself.
Data compression FAQ will also be a good source of information and several good books have been written on the subject.
Quite an interesting point on the patent quarrel is to note that v42bis-compression used on every modem operating on phone lines uses LZW compression, from the days of the good old v32 modems. (9600bps) Unisys could try to sue the big companies like Rockwell, unless they have paid the fees.
btw, LZW stands for Lempel, Ziv and Welch.
Make that 48bpp actually.
PNG is so far beyond GIF that it's barely even similar.
Full alpha/ transparency, full colour (up to 16bits per colour channel), all the time, FREE HIGH SPEED, HIGH COMPRESSION codec available globally.
What's the problem? You suckers use web browsers that wouldn't know what "standards compliant" was if you stuck it up them.
When IE5 shipped, YOU, the users of IE5 should have shouted "This is broken, it doesn't work with PNG", but you didn't. You shut up and took it up the arse. Not my problem.
B) Patents (and copyright) have everything to do with a free market. You can't have a free market in information-based things without an artificial monopoly, because the marginal cost is zero. Free markets only work when the goods in the market have certain properties, and software does not have those properties. If you want to use a free market to determine how software production resources should be allocated, rather than, say, having the government decide it by funding software development with a tax on something, you've got to artificially give software the properties that real property has.
If you (yes, I mean YOU):
- Have spare cycles/bandwidth on your server AND
- live in a SW-patent-free country OR
- have a licensed GIF-production software
please do this.Announce that you'll convert uncompressed and RLE-compressed GIFs to LZW-compressed ones, for anybody who asks, FOR FREE, while supplies last (that is while you still have some spare cycles/bandwidth). No warranty blah blah.
Now, if you serve GIFs from your site, let UNISYS prove that your GIFs were not processed by such a filter.
I mean, if say Photoshop output GIFs with a comment "Created by Photoshop" or somesuch, and your GIF bears such a comment, it must be created by Photoshop, right? And if you don't have Photoshop it doesn't matter, because your generous neighbour does have one, and he did the conversion for you online, for free.
Umm...better have a log file to back it up <g>.
--
Industrial space for lease in Flatlandia.
How about boycotting idiotic patents? That's what we're doing this way. And if Unisys gets bad press, all the better.
| The MNG format (basically an animated PNG) is
| currently being worked on. It's not done yet, | but...
The format is done. The applications aren't.
But ImageMagick's implementation of MNG-LC is
fairly complete.
Read the spec at http://www.cdrom.com/pub/mng/
The problem with this is that, AFAIK, the algorithm Fraunhofer has patented is by far the best known algorithm. And I see no need to use another, they don't have a patent on it where I live (Sweden, where you can't patent software), so I'll keep using that one. :)
Mac IE 5.0 betas do not support pngs at all, and the Netscape 4.x implementation is broken enough to require plugins.
That is a major warning flag for me. People are seriously advocating a push to _one_ _modern_ browser for web use? Like "First one to PNG takes all!"? I can't go along with that and absolutely won't. I used iCab which handles PNGs a bit, but their method of causing versions to 'expire' killed that for me- I won't go back, won't use software they can 'take away again'. I'm currently using Netscape 4.08: I have no intention of subjecting myself to rushed v5 crapware just to chase features. Any push for technology that forces existing working (even in a very loose sense of the term) stuff to be replaced with crapware or monopolyware is not something I'll have anything to do with. Causing that to happen is _worse_ than the LZW patent. I've really had it with switching around stuff. I edit text in an older version of BBEdit Lite- has that become useless with the passage of time? In Linux I'm always using vi, is that deprecated and to be discouraged since there is gNotepad and a bunch of other button-heavy monsters?
GIFs are also far more compact than PNGs; you can have GIFs with two or three colors. I don't believe PNGs have this ability.
Wrong, PNG has support for paletted images with 2, 4 and 8 bits per pixel. Moreover, the compression method is the only thing that will determine the resulting file size. That's why PNG beats GIF all the time, it has a better method including clever filtering as a pre-compression step.
JPEG is obviously not practical to replace GIF, the images are larger and lack the indexed color of GIFs as well.
JPEG's are for continuous-tone images (== photos), GIF's are aimed at pictures with large areas of the some colors and relatively few colors, e.g. cartoons. That's why PNG and JPEG hardly overlap, it has nothing to do with the size of the image. Palettes wouldn't make sense in JPEG, the compression method in it works on truecolor data only.
That's exactly what's happening - market is adjusting. They call you to help this adjustment by phasing out old, bad and patent-ridden format and moving to better free one. If you don't want - you may still use BMP, TIFF or EPS on your pages.
[[ the fastest and biggest bank of information (um... that would be the Internet) doesn't need help from geeks ]]
Weren't it geeks who built it to be as it is now?
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
(IIRC, JPG transparency isn't widely supported yet)?
Ehm, there is no transparency support in JPEG's. Where did you hear that?
If you need serious animation, you go Flash. If you need something like flashing "new" button, you better don't.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
A real Chicago-school economist would recognize that IP is horseshit, and nothing related whatsoever to the free market.
That guy is a statist, pure and simple.
"The GIF patent thing has been a big deal for a while. I know that I've not used a GIF that I created myself for a while, and that I've even gone to the trouble of converting all the non-animated GIFs on sites I've built to PNGs... so at least there's some support for this."
:) But pardom me if I sound rude, even though individual efforts do add and counts like drops in oceans, oceans are made of too much of drops.
/. or some banner company burns GIF, will awarness spread to the general public. But I agree that every step taken is a step in the positive direction.
OK I can see one supporter here...
Only when BIG sites like
Manifest
... "follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind
| GIFs are also far more compact than PNGs; you
| can have GIFs with two or three colors. I don't
| believe PNGs have this ability.
In fact, you can have a 3-color PNG, but with
GIF you can't. GIF palettes must be a power
of 2 in length. You can have a 150-color PNG
but with GIF you have to waste 105 palette entries
if you have 150 colors.
It's hopeless to expect reform from within... the patent crisis is not even on the national agenda. The average person has never even heard of the issue.
The only viable medium-term strategy is containment. US-style software patents (and business model patents and other bogosity) cannot be allowed to spread to other countries. Containment efforts should therefore shift away from the US and towards other countries and cultures.
It would be very helpful, for instance, if influential Islamic clerics could examine the issue of patents on mathematical formulas and business models and determine if they are compatible with the Quran and Islamic teachings.
I'm not Muslim and have no idea... but usury and other practices are disallowed under Islamic law, so it's possible they would disallow software patents and issue a fatwa or legal opinion to that effect.
Broadly speaking, patents that cover small human ingenuities and artifices should be OK... but if the universe is the creation of God, then asserting ownership over fundamental laws of nature and mathematical formulas seems a trifle blasphemous.
A finding that software patents are un-Islamic would, in effect, permanently immunize the Islamic countries from this nonsense. It would create an invulnerable "patent haven" that would set an example for the rest of the world.
Remember, containment kept Communism in check until it collapsed under its own weight. It should work for "patent disease" as well... but it could take decades, and things will get worse before they get better.
Send RMS to Saudi Arabia... I'm not kidding.
IE and Netscape are too large for their customers to download on 14.4 lines in addition to per minute charges. Until Mozilla ships (hopefully < 2M) it won't be possible for them to convert to PNG.
The only other option I can think of is a plugin to handle the PNG images. Does anyone know of such a plugin?
PNG was designed specifically as a not-patent-encumbered image format, partially as a replacement to GIF. One goal of BAGD is to spread this info around.
The GIF patent thing has been a big deal for a while. I know that I've not used a GIF that I created myself for a while, and that I've even gone to the trouble of converting all the non-animated GIFs on sites I've built to PNGs... so at least there's some support for this.
This is a problem with any attempt to change public opinion. It's still important to try to get publicity for the issue.
People have been pushing for this for 10 years. It didn't work. After a certain amount of time it makes sense to try a different tactic.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
First - PNG's can't technically actually replace GIF's because PNG's can't do what GIF's can do, like animation and simple transparency support. Without a solid, _single_, replacement file format, it's going to go the way of all newer technology - slowly being picked up by the early adopters that don't mind all the problems and then five to eight years later by the mainstream.
Second - we can't expect everyone to convert to a new format if we haven't actually supplied folks with a decent toolset, which includes easy to use tools to create animated [P|M]NGs. Even if people could convert their GIFs to animated PNGs they'll want to keep using their time-tested tools and not go through another conversion.
hmm, thanx for the info. but your answer brings up another technical question: if gif2png is going to decompress the GIF and then re-compress into PNG, it seems that the image quality may still suffer a bit even if the quality of PNG compression is better than LZ for the simple reason that by the time it gets to the user it will have gone through two (lossy) codecs.
Interested in learning Chinese or Japanese? check out Chinese/Japanese-English Dictiona
Ok, the way a patent works is that you give away the specs to your new invention to the public in exchange for a 17 year government-enforced monopoly on that invention.
That's not exactly how it's enforced/done now, but that's the idea.
So, they can try to take your money, and PNG is technically superior to GIF anyway.
Make the world a better place... convert your GIFs to PNGs.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
There will be no decrease in quality as both GIF and PNG use lossless compression methods while JPEG (at least the most widely used part of it, it has a lossless mode, too, which is used in medical imaging) is lossy - it gets much better compression results at the costs of not recreating the exact original, which isn't visible to human beholders whenever the quality settings used to encode weren't too extreme.
I don't think they did, they bought it from some other company IIRC. And IBM has a patent on the same algorithm (what better proof of the incompetence of the USPTO?). But in any case, I don't think that just because they invented it, they should be able to stop others using the algorithm. The inventor gets a first-to-market advantage, and being first is often very important. I think this is enough incentive to innovate, since allowing software patents restricts competition too much and makes every software author (and webmaster) liable to legal terrorism.
The LZW algorithm was invented by Terry Welch (based on earlier work by Lempel and Ziv) because it was needed to compress data on hard disks. It wasn't written in order to get a patent, and it is a historical accident that it's used for many images on the Web (LZW is not a particularly good algorithm anyway). Allowing companies like Unisys to patent such algorithms and demand protection money from everybody who uses GIF images is counterproductive. Yes, we should reward people for writing software, but in my opinion copyright does that well enough. Software patents benefit nobody except a handful of huge companies which can afford lawyers and a large portfolio of 'defensive' patents.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I understand it covers the lempel-ziv welsh patent, but is that the only variant covered? What about Lempel-Ziv huffman (LZH)? What exactly is the welsh varient?
I think the problem with that is that Unisys need to prove that you *had* the GIF, don't they?
:)
rm would appear to be a fantastic way to sort out one's conscience on this sort of thing...
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
Geez... now he's got bad karma just because he corrected himself...
-- Religion is a major weapon in the war against reality.
--
Tommi Leino / Majik 3D project
namhas@majik3d.org http://www.majik3d.org
You're wasting your time. The average slashdot reader (and hence the average slashdot moderator) is easily swayed by anything technical sounding. They fancy themselves of the technocratic elite, but lack any signifigant knowledge. They are who Ziff Davis refers to as the "Power User", the ones who applys downloaded .reg files to his NT box. More simply, slashdot moderation would have been a good idea, if it wern't for slashdot readers.
They are a buisness after all, they need to make the money or they'll sink
What part of the Capitalist manifesto did you read that makes you come to THIS fine conclusion?
"Sorry if we forgot to pay taxes, but my company IS a business after all, and we needed the extra money or it will sink!"
Wake up: Patents are welfare at best. Take your bleeding heart and bleed over something worthwhile. 17 years is WAY too long in this day and age.
} Be careful with PNG and BeOS! The PNG translator
} that ships with current versions of BeOS
} can create corrupt PNG files. Applications which
} use libpng are typically unable to
} read/display these damaged files.
A bug report has been filed with BeOS, and the
bug is very simple (the IEND chunk is omitted),
so I expect that that will be fixed very soon.
First, two disclaimers: 1) IANAL 2) There is no way I'm switching to PNG until it has browser support--sorry, GIFs are part of my living. (It'd be like asking you guys to switch to a new, .01a build of a kernel just because Linus suddenly became evil.)
Anyway, here's my thoughts: If company Foo makes Widget illegally using a process patented by company Bar, the purchasers of Widget are not liable for the illegal actions of company Foo.
Now, with the players substituted: If Developer Joe's software uses LZW w/o a license from Unisys, End User Jane is not liable for the actions of Developer Joe.
Right? Or am I just stupid. (Sorry--on a MAJOR candy corn buzz right now.)
----
Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
I believe that ie5 farms out pngs to quicktime (at least it does when not viewing them inline, you can watch the qt logo pop up when you look at an image on its own in ie5)
I personally would love to start using pngs but until the support is correct it isn't really an option, especially when transparency isn't supported and when netscape screws up the gamma of images.
http://www.lanl.gov/projects/ia/stds/ia680120.html #2.3-lzw
Although Microsoft couldn't actually force you to pay the $200, they could say "Pay us the $200 now, or we revoke your licence and you must stop using that app".
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
They have no right to charge for LZW use in GIFS, its should be 100% payed for by Compuserve, since they are the ones who put it in the GIF format, UNisys did squat all to promote LZW in gifs, so thank compuserve for that mistake, therefore they have to pay unisys, not US the people because of their mistake.
GIFS should be except because for too long they have been used without payment, so by default its void and null!
And yes, there is an alternative, if people had a clue in 87 they would have changed Gif to a new compression, (GZIP) and made Gif89 use it. But now its too late, we cannot do it, its too entrenched into too many OSs. its fucked!
We have NO POWER to change, therefore we are illegaly FORCED to use GIF but we cannot change it! That is why it has to be free!!!
What ever btw happende to oject oriented code any way, ie ONE legal lzw.lib or something in every OS, that every app can use legally without paying for it because its payed for be the OS maker.
I can't believe I have been knocked down two points. I think that I have a valid point.
.gif's. This isn't flame bait, just a valid point. In addition, I don't see how it can be redundant, when I posted it, no one else had said anything about the media builder site.
If Andover wants to become an open source company, they need to show it. If you have used any of their web building sites, you know that they heavily use
Oh well. So is life.
geach
nyet, comrade
PNG support in M10 is terrible. PNGs render inline, but slowly. Alpha seems to be binary instead of 8 bits, and gamma is ignored completely.
0 1 - just my two bits
I've been using compressionless GIFs...
I get sick of people making pages that are IE only so I'm happy to know there is a way to make pages that that exclude IE with out going out of your way.
But it's generally a bad idea to make pages that exclude a browser even if that browser is MSIE.
So I'll stick with compressionless
I don't actually exist.
The most obvious one is IE's inability to display a PNG image. It can do it if the image is embedded in a web page, but not if it's a standalone image. Other than that, it only handles the basics of PNG, and doesn't do very well with transparanecy, etc (Netscape's not much better in this regard, either).
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
PNG supports GIF style transparancy, as well as a so called "Alpha" channel that allows for each pixel to have a varying level of transparancy.
Problem is, current browser support is, well, crap - with the single exception of Mozilla. I usually just use the GIMP to make a non-transparent image that will end up looking the same as it would look if it were transparent.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
That moron Andreason!
What a looser programmer
The deflate algorithm can be used in TIFF, it's only poorly supported (not really a fault of the TIFF viewers and editors, the format is a real mess, to fully support it is almost impossible). See libtiff for a free library that can deal with it.
PNG's superscede TIFF's, not GIF's. Lets put Deflate into GIF and call it GIF99a.
ARGH! No, let GIF die. PNG is very well designed (checksums, great specs, the folks who created it really knew what they did), so please make it your choice!
I guess I don't live in the real world; I've tried the PNG experiment, and in every single case, the images on my site that matter expand by 5% to 15%.
You can emulate transparency by opening the image in the GIMP, opening the layers&channels dialog, adding a layer of the same color as your site's background, moving the new layer to the back of the image, and merging visable layers.
Pretty simple, eh?
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Hmmm...isn't the .GIF format patented by AOLpuserve? I believe CI$ attempted this a long time ago and couldn't make it stick.
(I know the Unisys LZW patent is another story...)
My journal has hot
When the world needed, and wanted, a free alternative to GIF many, many people went to work on a solution. But PNG had ZLib. That and the fact that its list of features covered everything a web designer could ever want. Other developers stopped working on their formats.
Slowly the spec was released. It was immediately clear that the spec was another 'ideal' format for lossless graphics that was created by people who didn't know or care what Gifs were being used for. We had been promised a replacement for Gif and this was not it. Sure it could support true-color with embedded gamma settings. But could it do animation? Of course not. Then there was MNG. To replace GIF, which takes about 20K worth of C source code (a little for for animation), I now need to support two formats, and add 120K to my application's binary. Hell, even the reference implementation didn't even work right for months and people just reading the spec were supposed to implement it.
Frankly everybody should just sit back, shut up and live with it. There was a window of opportunity to quickly create a replacement for GIF, but that day is gone. The patent expires in a few years anyway. PNG is an impressive format, but it is not the replacement for GIF we wanted or needed. We we burned by the PNG format, why should we now burn the only real cross platform lossless format. It sucks, but this is tech.
Speaking as a tech support goon with a legion of Navigator 3.0 lusers to support I sincerly hope that PNG doesn't become the defacto standard for quite some time.
Try to imagine answering 2000 phone calls from idiots who have no idea why "the graphics aren't showing".
As I remember, Unisys's line was that the $5000 was, in effect, insurance that if, by mistake, you were using unlicensed GIF generators, they wouldn't come after you. They never said they *would* come after you, or check up on you, but it was just insurance in case you didn't know and wanted to be safe.
Not their words of course, but that's how I remember it.
--
Infuriate left and right
http://home.earthlink.net/~mcclure111/hamsterdeath
links to similar sites can be found at the end of the main page.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
| folks with a decent toolset, which includes easy to use tools to create animated [P|M]NGs.
If you have installed ImageMagick, version 4.2.9, which is freeware, you can do the following in a directory full of animated GIFs:
The only thing missing AFAIK is proper translation of animated GIFs containing the "dispose=previous" method. I haven't seen any animated banners that make effective use of that feature anyhow.
Yeah, I rememeber reading hte FidoNET sysop lists regarding this... CI$ was asking for royalities for anyone that used or contained GIF89A (animated GIF) format images on an online service. IIRC, CI$ tried this several times. Basically the big pay Porn BBS's who could afford lawyers helped end this.
:) More than likely, this same commotion is going to have the same effect on the PNG format.
:)
They lost. Just like the FCC and their 16 billion attempts to tax modem communication.
I remember getting my first taste of the PNG format with QPEG, probably the only DOS image viewer that handled it (and the coolest thing was that it came with the commented assembler source used to decode it). PNG is feature for feature equal with GIF (except animation, can't recall if PNG does that), supports higher compression and bits per pixel, and the freely availiable decompression algorithms are faster.
The last time GIF was being tossed around like a red headed stepchild people started noticing the JPEG format. (alpha wasn't an issue for most people then, they just wanted free porn
However for now though, I would offer both PNG and GIF versions of my web pages and push the PNG version.
Me
| I confess I haven't looked closely at the specs
| for the gif format. Is the LZW compression an
| absolute, or is it possible to have uncompressed
|images in gif? (I suspect it's not possible,
It's possible, and John Miano's recent book,
"Compressed Image Formats, JPEG, PNG, GIF,
XPM, BMP" shows how. You encode all the data
using 9 bit codes, and write a "clear" code after
each 254 codes.
You may want to let them know that you are in compliance with the patent now. Contact information can be found at: http://corp2.unisys.com/LeadStory/lzwfaq.html Maybe if they get enough feedback, they'll figure out that their business strategy wasn't all that smart.
I won't be sad to see GIFs disappear, die animated gifs, die! I like using Opera 3.6x and Net+ on BeOS, atleast with them I can force those animated gifs off.
What about those small companies with an innovative new product who hope to make some money?
My father is currently involved with a small company with an innovative new product that is trying to make money. If there weren't patents on it, they'd be screwed. The product is so simple that most of the people who see it say "Why didn't I think of that," and if there wasn't a patent protecting them, I am 100% sure some big company with money would have ripped them off a long time ago. My father, and two other men, previously two middle class and one lower class Americans. Common men, absolutely. And they're (hopefully!) going to be rich soon. Has the patent office served them?
I think you're just following the recent trend of bashing the patent office. Things like algorithms (sometimes) or genes should not be patented. But patents are not obselete. Yet. I think the whole GIF thing is absurd though. They did not enforce their patent. I would like to see them take someone to court. But I would also like to see the movement to an open standard.
It's been said before but I'll say it again, GIFs made with licensed software are free. GIFs made with unlicensed software require a $5000 license. Says so right on the Unisys web page, in plain english. I think Slashdot is again fucking with our heads.
FUD.
PNGs can be transparent. GIFs can't.
And an animated PNG is an MNG (although no browsers support it yet...)
I would recommend just removing animated crap though.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
Backup. Reality Checkpoint - we don't have any other way to make platform-independent transparent images.
gif and jpeg are the only two de facto image standards that interoperate with (most) modern browsers today. Does MSIE support the png format? Last time I looked it didn't. the png format also has a few bugs (maybe it's gimp ! png, but I'm not sure). If you're running a site that has any complex documents on it, you may very well wind up redesigning large portions of your site to make your site gif free.
--
All I got as a comment was that some people had problems with the graphics. (This happened during the time the 4.0 browsers had just come out.) I told them that a) the graphics really don't matter that much, and b) the new browsers (and quite a number of old browsers) do support PNG.
I haven't needed alpha channel support or stuff like that at all. Heck, I hate animated gifs (unless they're really funny or otherwise clever, that is - but as for others, I just hate them).
Lesson learned? You Can Live Without The GIFs these days. The support already is there, and it is coming up nicely.
With NS 4.0 and a standard install of QT 4 on a Mac, all the PNG's load just fine. My QT 4 install didn't do anything to reset my helper apps, which someone else suggested as a possibility. Maybe the PNG Fairy has been fooling with yr machine.
can anyone recommend a good *shudder* M$ based tool for converting GIF's to PNG's and I am curious, does PNG support animation...I tried a freeware tool that converted my static gif's very well but all my animated ones froze solid :( I would really appreciate some help or a KICK in the right direction with this..I have way too many gif's to burn, and very little time to burnm them... :)
Most of gfx in /. are .gif. convert them /. admin!
Now, are there any other deprecated formats, of any kind or in any use, that we should get rid of?
.exe, .com, .bat, .386, .vxd, .sys...
.Z, .lzh, .zoo, maybe even .gz (I have a particular fondness for bzip2).
:-)*
.dll,
.zip,
ISA PnP
??????~?.???
.swp (separate swap partitions make too much sense. Fragmenting and adding an unnecessary layer of processing (FAT16/32) is evil)
.htm
The use of extensions as the *only* method of determining filetype. I was quite surprised that Windows Commander 32 would simply go into a compressed archive even if it was named ".jpg"
It all should be done by magic.
Oh yeah, how about the placement of the "close window" button right next to "maximise window?"
because jpeg doesn't... as far as i know...
Imagine, if you will, when a user goes to load your home page (which you diligently converted to PNG images) and starts seeing the apple logo pop up every time a little 1k PNG is loaded on the page. imagine the user watching his resource meter slowly drop as the plug-in consumes the last of his precious resources.
It's also worth noting that this only happens for PNGs by themselves. If they're included in a page via the IMG tag, we don't see this problem.
Bloody stupid apple installer! (sigh)
-- I'm omnipotent, I just don't care.
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
Don't convert your gifs! They simply cannot sue billions of websites and therefore sue the world. Technically it's not possible. If millions of websites will convert their gifs, all you do is give Unisys more power by shrinking their opponent (us). Leave the stuff untouched and start laughing...that's enough.
umm, this may be repetitave, but...
"First - PNG's can't technically actually replace GIF's because PNG's can't do what GIF's can do, like animation and simple transparency support. Without a solid, _single_, replacement file format, it's going to go the way of all newer technology - slowly being picked up by the early adopters that don't mind all the problems and then five to eight years later by the mainstream."
Ummmmm...
Do you know what alpha channel transparency is? There are 256 levels of transparency, as opposed to the single level of transparenct in gif files. This means that you can easily have anti-aliased text on top of a textured background, or drop shadows, or whatever. Of course, if you really wanted to, you could simulate the simple transparency of gif by only using the lowest and highest levels of alpha transparency.
Plus, PNG can replace JPEGS (compressed 24bit color) while giving you the option transparency in a true color image. (you can't do that now.)
And finally, there's the related MNG format, which is intended to supply animation functionality.
PNG is a single, solid replacement file format. It is currently not supported by browsers, but the file format itself is very flexible.
"Second - we can't expect everyone to convert to a new format if we haven't actually supplied folks with a decent toolset, which includes easy to use tools to create animated [P|M]NGs. Even if people could convert their GIFs to animated PNGs they'll want to keep using their time-tested tools and not go through another conversion."
The MNG format is in development, so I may of jumped the gun a bit...
But for PNG:
As I type this, there is an animated GIF ad just above the "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." slogan on my screen. Will Slashot ban GIFs and sacrifice the ad revenue? Or are we about to be embarrassed, thoroughly, when Burn All GIFs day is a bust?
Unfortunately, the organizers didn't do the ground work, like distributing Java or Javascript code that could provide advertisers with alternate means for doing animated ads, plus conversion scripts to instantly turn an animated ad into an alternative form. Yes, this would have required work. But since that work wasn't done, the open source community is about to be embarrassed as every webmaster who depends on ad revenue ignores the call.
They'd need to prove that you created a gif with a non-licensed program which would be pretty tough without a whistle-blower in your shop. Having the gif would be nice, but not necessary.
I feel a bit silly speculating on this since it seems like such a moot point.
As cool as PNG is, the browser support just isn't there. What many people don't know is that you needn't use LZW compression to use GIF. Gifsicle can even make animated GIFs that use an alternative (run length I think) compression
The resulting GIFs are about twice as large, but they should work in any browser that supports GIF, and they don't use the patented technology.
I should add that since I've made some minor contributions towards gifsicle, I have some bias towards it. There are probably other programs that can create such GIFs also.
--Steve (comments@vrml3d.com)
IE (4.5) doesn't support it *at all*
This is only partially correct. IE can't view PNG's by itself, but you can set the preferences to view them with the Quicktime plug-in. However, this won't work for PNG's on a web page. The Quicktime plug-in can only display PNG's by themselves, which is useless for most things. Visiting a web site that uses PNG's will just display broken images in IE 4.5 no matter how the preferences are set.
sorry.
My browser sees JPG, GIF, and PNG equally well. It is fast, smooth, has no problems with compression algs, interlacing, or anything of that nature.
My browser is LYNX!
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Did you by any chance save them as RGB? You have to save them as indexed (with a palette) to gain any compression over GIF.
This is a fine example of open-sourcers overreacting in a psudo-millitaristic manner. There is no need to burn anything.
Unisyss invested resources in developing LZW, the algorithm used by GIFs. Their owners (investors) have every right to cash in on GIFs. If there is a better alternative for the price, the market will adjust, and folks will use other compression formats. This market really does work -- with or without virtual pyros.
Relax, and choose the options that work best for you. Everything will work itself out; the fastest and biggest bank of information (um... that would be the Internet) doesn't need help from geeks in serch of a cause.
Perhaps instead of investing time and energy on Unisys and GIFs, we could be writing drivers for the open source community...
- Tom Vitolo
Just a guy who likes computers (and has a degree in Economics)
Support a few technologists in Washington.
I agree. Lets see some examples of unisys enforcing this patent, then I'll get rid of my semi-transparent pornography.
*shrug* Seems like a reactionary move that won't get anywhere. The effort wasted changing sites to a widely-incompatible format would be better spent writing to your congresspeople and getting these rediculous century-old patent laws changed.
Title 35 of the United States Code (the United States Patent Act) was passed in 1956, and has been amended repeatedly, as recently as this year and last year. Many things can be said about the Patent Act and U.S. Patent policy, but "century-old" is inaccurate. Indeed, if you want to talk about its heritage, the present Patent Act was inherited from the First Patent Act, passed during the First Congress, pursuant to Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution.
So please, either acknowledge that its a modern act, or respect its multi-century heritage.
If you believe that any activisim that you do will have no effect, you will never do any activism and it will never have any effect.
I've avoided this by convincing myself that if I've decided that something needs to change/something's going to happen/etc there are probably others who have reached the same conclusion using the same line of logic.
Every little bit helps, remember, activism on an obvious thing like GIF => PNG is a chain reaction. If you can convince three people that they should switch to PNG, they'll probably tell three other people each, who will each tell three people. Five iterations is 243 people. Ten iterations is nearly 60,000 people... no longer a small drop in the ocean.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Hey folks, we may all be forgetting the miracles of plug-ins here... any recent computer can run QT3.0, which can read and display the PNG format.. i'm sure 3.0 does, and I think 2.0 does as well, though i'm not sure... The beauty of ubiquity. Also, despite the touchy-feely open source movement here... Unisys DOES have a patent on this technology. Simply because pretty much everone is thumbing their nose at it doesn't mean they don't have their rights. I think CompuServe did a very good thing back in 94 by regonizing that the GIF format was taking off on the web and that there would be patent issues which might have held it bak. They offered a licensing scheme on very good terms (1.5% on registered copies). We didn't have to use GIF, we just did. This is what happens when you ignore someone else's rights.
It is your civic duty to ignore (not necessarily break, just ignore) unjust, ridiculous, or otherwise braindead laws. Otherwise you encourage their continued production and enforcement.
TM
What costs more, applying for a patent or having some bastard steal your idea? If it's a good idea, the latter.
As I was reading the burn-all-gifs www site, I came across this little gem of an email from unisys.
To:"'webmaster@burnallgifs.org'"
http://burnallgifs.org/
Is this the only way you've been able to get attention?
Competition a bit tough there fella? The article above appears to have been written by a big crybaby.
This kindof attitude really lights my fires. Say goodbye to all my GIFs.
-Derek
I can't remove PNG from the Applications section of preferences (Netscape 4.08 @ school, and 4.5+ @ home).
.dll, then netscape crashes when you try to load a png
Real pain, especially if you remove the plugin
Why are limitations 1 & 3 limitations????
If you want lossy compression, go for JPEG.
Uncompressed, go for BMP, or similar.
LOL; It's funny 'cause it's true.
Still, the theory is that the 'new knowledge' is given to the public at large, so it being easily avalible wouldn't void the patent - as it's supposed to be easily avalible anyway.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
While I strongly feel we need to abolish the Patent Office, as it no longer serves to common man, and I also tend to respect many of ESR's writings and his role as an open source advocate, I really object to this type of yellow journalism that is hype-oriented and does not convey an accurate picture of the truth. The last time this thread came up on /., I wrote off the sensationalism of every webmaster has to cough up $5000 simply as ignorance. /. revealed the truth on this matter and I find the continued dishonesty via omission to be reprehensible.
How is the open source movement to have any credibility when we choose to employ the same tactics as da man?
Alpha is indeed binary-only (see bug 3013)--and not on the fast track to improve much--but gamma is fully supported and works correctly. As for speed, I haven't noticed any particular problems there, but libpng 1.0.5 includes MMX code for fast PNG decoding on Windows, and libpng 1.0.6 (or 1.1.0?) will include corresponding code for Linux and other gcc/gas targets.
-- GRR: Newtware, PNG Group, AlphaWorld Map, Info-ZIP, Google cluster infrastructure,
Unfortunatly many sites today seem to have forgotten about the 8 second rule... You only have 8 seconds to capture the attention of someone browsing your site. And that includes load in time. GIFs tear the hell out of loadin time; being able to support a flexible palette is still a glorious idea and I know that GIFs have allowed me to create sites that load in in less that 4 seconds on 33.6 modems but with still really good graphics. While I might have a moral objection to GIF, I cant stop using them until I see an alternative that is able to give such small images. Because when you have 10-20 images 1k _does_ matter. Cheers, Secret Agent Conrad Uno
Great! Thanks for the info. I hadn't seen the patch. Also, congrats: you're the first useful info I've seen on /. in months.
This is just plain stupid.
No one -- not a single person -- doing serious commercial Internet work would consider it for a moment. Why? Clients today (and busdev, marketing types when stuff is developed internally) still hold the 3.0+ rule as ironclad, and that rules out PNG.
For the tens of millions of "nothing" sites out there that together represent a tiny percentage of Internet traffic have that as their option, of course, since they have little traffic anyway. Losing a few percent to people with old browsers isn't going to hurt them.
PNG support is too spotty in the modern browsers to seriously do it anyway. They all seem to handle things like transparency differently, and things like that.
On the low-end of the internet bell curve, wanna-be designers are way to infatuated with their animated GIFS -- the late 90's version of the blink tag. They're certainly not going to switch and give up their beloved animated icons collection.
*shrug* Seems like a reactionary move that won't get anywhere. The effort wasted changing sites to a widely-incompatible format would be better spent writing to your congresspeople and getting these rediculous century-old patent laws changed.
Fork over $5k? Yea right, makes as much sense as legal mp3's.
.png's are the way to go. Excellent compression with little loss of image quality. Go here to find out more.
----------------
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
Since we own Photoshop 5.5, which is made by Adobe, who are, in fact, licensed by Unisys, every GIF on all of our clients' sites is legitimate. So from the "afraid of litigation" angle, there are no worries. My personal site was created with a licensed version of Photoshop that I bought, and therefore it's in the clear, too.
I've been looking forward to PNG for a long time. The variable alpha support, specifically, interests me. But, alas, browsers are tied up in their support, and all of them bungle the variable transparency. So while PNG has wonderful possibilities, its current implementation falls flat. Add that to a 4.0+ browser restriction, and consider the work of revamping a site, and "burn all GIFs day" becomes less than attractive. (And if you suggest letting a script touch your images, I'd reply that you're a chump...I can compress better than any script, and so can you, because we can _see_ the final quality, and judge each image individually, and ensure that each are the smallest possible. Only with very large sites -- say an online catalog with 5,000 parts -- does a script come into the equation)
I want to see the days of PNG, but I just don't think today's the day.
| Do you know of any programs that can create a 67 | byte PNG? Does the GIMP? I've not been
| able to get anything under 100bytes (or even | 100bytes)...
echo "P2 1 1 255 0" | pnmtopng > 67byte.png
give you a PNG with
signature 8 bytes
IHDR 13 bytes content + 12 bytes overhead
IDAT 10 bytes content + 12 bytes overhead
IEND 0 bytes content + 12 bytes overhead
The 10 bytes of IDAT content is actually
1 byte content + 9 bytes zlib overhead
Software patents, and IP in general, have nothing whatsoever to do with a "free market." They are an artificial construct created by government to enrich certain members of society.
Sure, but we don't want people going and batch-converting hundreds of GIF's with the broken translator for BAG-Day. Yes, it'll be fixed and distributed hopefully soon, but not that soon. There is an older translator by Simon Clarke, which is probably based on libpng, and which writes files correctly.
slc.gif
title.gif
topicnews.gif
topicmovies.gif
topichardware.gif
topicslashdot.gif
topicus.gif
As for the freekin' blipvert, well..that's another story. ;)
Moderators!
How exactly is this flamebait, jesus give the guy a break...
Moderate him up, I laughed my arse off at this !!
I agree that what Unisys proposed to do with LZW licensing is ridiculous, but to date I have not heard of a single website that has been forced to cough up the money. I don't think we have to worry about Unisys lawyers knocking on our doors anytime soon. While the elimination of GIFs might be the right thing to do, it just isn't feasable for most sites. It requires quite a bit of effort to convert a large site.
In most browsers, PNG support is incomplete at best, buggy at worst. The rendering time for PNGs is also far greater, especially if you have a slow machine.
GIFs are also far more compact than PNGs; you can have GIFs with two or three colors. I don't believe PNGs have this ability.
JPEG is obviously not practical to replace GIF, the images are larger and lack the indexed color of GIFs as well.
The intentions might be honorable, but most sites can't afford the additional time it takes to convert and the increased bandwith usage.
This idea is a little bit ahead of its time. Maybe if software support gets better and we can all afford the increased bandwidth, then it will time to dump GIF.
Nix absolutably seriousness.
Unisys does not require licensing, or fees to be paid, for non-commercial, non-profit GIF-based applications, including those for use on the on-line services. Concerning developers of software for the Internet network, the same principle applies. Unisys will not pursue previous inadvertent infringement by developers producing versions of software products for the Internet prior to 1995. The company does not require licensing, or fees to be paid for non-commercial, non-profit offerings on the Internet, including "Freeware".
Gimp has gif code written by the venerable Adam D. Moss, who just so happens to be in the UK, out of reach of the LZW patent.
It's probably the best gif code in the world. Adam has also contributed to the gif handling in Mozilla.
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
Well I'm getting rid of all gifs on my webpage. As far as I can see if things don't change gifs will be history in a few years. I used Unisys BTOS/CTOS machines a few years back - utter junk!
Just rename all your GIF file's
will still be decoded correctly.
Yea they are still gif's but you can
claim you didn't know.
mycal
Well... that's fine if you only want to use the image once, or will always use it over the same flat-color background. But maybe you don't have a flat color background (and can't predict for sure exactly where the image will be in relation to the background) and/or maybe you want to use this image in a number of different places with different backgrounds. There are times when it's nice to have real transparency.
Market adjustments depend on the free flow of information and freedom of choice.
The burn is a publicity stunt that seems to have worked to encourage flow of information. I now know that something stinks about gifs, and I'm going to act on it. Even more people will learn something if this gets picked up by the mainstream media.
Colmpacency leads to a lack of all choices eventually.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
look, it seems that if PNG is to preserve the benefits that GIF provides, it must use some kind of fast and strong compression algorithm like Lempel-Ziv. If the compression is fundamentally different from GIF, then what kind of compression rates and speed are we expecting from the new algorithm? if it is fundamentally the same compression algorithm, what legal benefits does anyone gain from using this software? even according to the page, there is no consensus about whether this new program is even legal.
sh_
Interested in learning Chinese or Japanese? check out Chinese/Japanese-English Dictiona
--
I noticed
--
I noticed
It's getting about time to leave everywhere
In reading their explanation, it seems that they're not going to actively police this. They say that if you've bought the tools which create GIF's, they're covered under license and you're fine. Their $5,000 / site fee is if you're unsure of what was used to make the GIF files and you want to be sure you comply.
I guess users of Photoshop are fine, it's just GIMP users that are effected by this. Oh, wait...
But as the Burn all GIF's page states, LZW is a patented algorythm that's inferior to superior and unpatented algorythms which is used to create obsolete GIF files.
My question is, why does anyone even care then? Use JPEG or PNG. Other formats exist. If you want to use GIF files for any reason, then there's a price to pay. That's either $5,000 for the "license" from unisys, or $49 for some cheapo program that you never need to install, just have handy to say that yes, you have a license... If you don't like their terms, there's plenty of other formats to use.
If you value compatiblity, then, it is their algorythm afterall. No matter how innane current patent laws seem, they are the law, afterall.
Mmm, okay, so what kind of image does that wind up with? 1 x 1 pixels, or what? It's obviously not a useful method of generating PNGs. :)
I must say, though, that if it's that easy to create such a small PNG, why can't GIMP or Photoshop come up with small PNGs? The need for something like pngcrush is rather embarrassing, I'd think...
Did they choose Guy Fawkes day on purpose for this?
(For you Americans, this marks the day in history that conspirators tried to blow up the repressive British Parliament in the 13th century, by using large amounts of gunpowder; and this is the day we have our annual fireworks display)
Let them try to get money out of me...
I can't afford to even pay attention.
I've already mailed netscape about this, I'm having troubles with transparant png's in netscape 4.7 for linux. The transparant bits are all white or all black. Anybody else have this problem?
Several months ago I came across a site that used JPEGs, and animated them using JavaScript (I think that's how they did it).
This would be a halfway decent way to replace most of our animated GIFs. Only problem is that at least 2 are transparent GIFs, which means that I still can't replace them.
Incidentally, the reason that I can't just fudge the background is that my BG is not solid, and if I tried to put the background in, it wouldn't always be aligned.
Anyway, if anybody out there is great at JavaScript, maybe they can write such a script for animating using multiple JPEGs.
The Docbook DTD and the associated DSSSL which are being extensively used in the open source community still use gif as the default format.
A tarball with source is in the same FTP directory ftp://sun.pmbc.com/pub/solaris/
I don't think this has been brought up before, so here goes. Why doesn't the internet community come up with a single program that uses the LZW compression, pay UNISYS for the license, and then distrubute this program/api/sdk/whatever freely/more-cheaply-than-$5000 to other image software developers? This way, all the image software developers would only be responsible for creating images in some other intermediate format (that behaves *exactly* like a gif--transparency, animatability, etc) then feed it to the mentioned sdk/library, and out comes a real gif. This way, the only component in the chain that uses the LZW compression is the said library, which has already been licensed at the start.
It all stems from what UNISYS means by "creating" a gif image. Technically, the image creation software is not creating a gif, but something else.
Does this hold up legally?
-----------------
Your attention please everyone, if I could just say a few words... I would be a better public speaker.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
I'd like to see that stupid hamsterdance.com get whats coming to it, no only does it suck now, imagine it with half assed png support. Thats if anything supports animated png. Maybe they'll be the first site to get nailed for $5000... if we're lucky...
I'm no lawyer, but aren't you just as liable to pay any licensing fees after using gif2png as you were before? It's not the gif itself that means you have to pay, but the way the gif was generated.
Using gif2png may help you avoid detection, but you still used an unlicensed gif-generator at some point in the image's past.
Alternatively, if you have perfectly legal gifs, you may use gif2png as a form of protest...
Puh-lease. Like I am going to take the time to go through and convert several hundred images into JPGs on two sites? I don't think so. Unless someone wants to pay me, you can count this webmaster out.
This is stupid. I hardly think Unisys is even going to bother. Just imagine the backlash that would happen if they even so much as tried.
Have a good day.
Properly done, PNGs are smaller than their GIF cousins.
I suppose that if you use some shareware image program, or an open source piece of software for image development/manipulation, you might run into problems if the authors of the program didn't deal with the licensing issue.
How is that verifiable, though? How can unisys effectively prove which program you used to create an image? That's like putting a patent on ascii; how can one effectively prove that I used emacs instead of vi for typing a text document (assuming that emacs had acquired the ascii license and vi hadn't)?
Anyway, back to my original point... isn't the licensing fee (sub-licensing I guess) included in the purchase price of professional image dev. software? I believe I read that somewhere when this all started a few months ago.
If that's the case, then the likely targets (web development houses, corporate web sites) are much more likely to have purchased and used the professional software (such as photoshop) for the creation of gifs than the unlikely targets (personal web pages, small businesses).
I don't think this is something we really need to worry about.
-j.
- Jonathan
good luck burning them, unless you print them out first...
maybe it should have been delete the gifs day...
oh well
I'm curious how exactly Unisys can determine exactly what tool was used to generate the GIF's on a site. And how are they going to tell whether that tool wasn't pirated?
Sun isn't Open Source. Microsoft didn't propose going Open Source. In fact, both companies have specified denied that they were going to release their products as Open Source. I think you are too optimistic.
Or hope anyone who needs to figure it out invests in their own research instead of getting a free ride from yours.
One of the essential practical questions that tells us how much a particular patent harms the industry is how much more the prior inventor's licensing demands (minus the cost of the patent clerks and everybody's lawyers, of course) exceed what it would have cost the licensees to invent it on their own.
I converted my pages over to PNG on general principles when Unisys started this. The only thing left in GIF format is a NetMechanic graphic, and that's hosted off of NetMechanic's servers. Unisys wants payment for that, they can talk to NetMechanic.
My problem with Unisys is that this is the third time they've changed their story. First, they put LZW compression forward to Compuserve when CIS was explicitly looking for an unencumbered graphics format. Then, when this format became popular, Unisys turned around and said that it's really encumbered, but we're only going to charge commercial vendors, not freeware. Now, they're saying they're going to charge freeware too, and individuals if you can't prove the software had a license. Yes, I know what Unisys is saying. I also know what their written statements say. They conflict, and in any conflict involving lawyers I believe only what's written on paper with a signature below it.
Long and short, I dislike Unisys's attitude and PNG does what I need and lets me avoid dealing with Unisys. No contest. Sorry, Unisys, as far as I am concerned you lose.
Oh, I agree publishing any information about a patent is all to the good (it may inspire other inventions that are actually available for use, and will hopefully warn some of the people who've reinvented it how screwed they are), I was just griping this doesn't happen nearly often enough. Didn't we get into this mess in part because someone like Welch published LZW without mentioning it was being patented, tricking folks into innocently adopting it?
I confess I haven't looked closely at the specs for the gif format. Is the LZW compression an absolute, or is it possible to have uncompressed images in gif? (I suspect it's not possible, and that lzw is an integral part of the format, because that's how things were done back then.)
The idea is that the things like animation/transparency have NOTHING to do with the unisys patent, at all.. the patent only covers the algorithm used to compress the graphics in a lossless fashion.
Several people have voiced an opinion that this burn all gifs day is an overreacton. They complain that we aren't ready for it yet. Well, we will never become ready if people refuse to use pngs. If there is a large enough response to BAGD, then that alone is progress toward a net where GIFs aren't needed. The more sites out there that use PNGs exclusively, the more pressure there is for Netscape and MS to release browser revisions which properly support the format. Without that pressure, we'll all have to wait for Mozilla and hope that everyone on the planet decides to use it over MSIE.
Heh, well, I personally prefer MPEGs over animated GIFs for such purposes... but uhh... I think I should get off this topic :)
the real at&t mix
Personally, I'm all for it. GIF, as a graphic format, is pretty much deprecated and useless. The two uses there still are: ad-banners and tiny pictures on homepages. Yes, I would love to have transparency for PNG, but I can live without it. There are ways to circumvent the absence.
Of all the graphics I've done recently, they're just about anything but GIFs. Should it be grayscale or full-color, I just don't see the need for GIF-use any longer. It was a fine format once in its time, but evolution does happen. Even in computer world, where draggind the past along with is de facto.
True, Unisys can never enforce their license to the full. They don't even have to. There are much better formats available, and people are actually starting to use them.
As to the annoyance of potential java-banners... True, they are really horrible. The few I've witnessed are not easy for eyes and not the browsers either. Who ever said java should be kept on at all times? From personal experience it only hinders surfing. And I'm not the only one, this opinion seems to be commonly shared.
Actually, Unisys may be doing a big favor to the web community. By being greedy, they encourage the users to stop using GIFs in the first place. No, it's not the license itself but all the talk and noise it invariably generates among the public.
Now, are there any other deprecated formats, of any kind or in any use, that we should get rid of?
There is no such thing as good luck. There is only misfortune and its occasional absence.
Choosy Perverts Choose .GIF!!
(yes I know its pronounces gif as in gift without the t.. but I don't care)
Hey, anyone who has a copy of the Be operating system should check out a program I whipped up which will convert any image (for which a translator is installed on your system) into the png format. You can easily convert an entire folder of many image types to png in one easy move.
available at BeBits under graphics utilites
or here
Source is included and is in the public domain.
The basic fact is that the patent has not be enforced. Can it be ? I am not sure of this.
When one calls for such BIG changes many things have to be considered.
(*) How much infomartion on PNG has seeped onto the general public. Many know that GIF is patented, but about PNG ??
(*) Are you sure of atleast a moderate following ?? It is better not to remain silent and work underground, moving people than call for a BIG Burining session like this and see a flop happening.
(*) Does any one care ?? True GIF is patented.. but majority of people will just stick to it until a situation comes where pple start getting jailed.
(*) Well if GIF is patented, y cant we try to talk to pple concerned and get things sorted out. If SUN can go "Open Source" and MS can even think about being "Open Source", I dont think this issue is any tougher.
So what say u all ??
Manifest
... "follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind
The PNG format allows for full 8-bit alpha (transparency). However, most browsers don't yet support that feature. You can help convince the Mozilla engineers that full alpha support is A Good Thing. You can vote for that feature enhancement at this location (If nothing else, it is a good excuse to get a bugzilla account set up) :-)
It's not a bad idea to pronounce "PNG" as [ping].
We could even say it means "Portable Inter Net(work) Graphics", and it's easier to pronounce.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
There appear to be several things which need to happen before such a boycott could proceed successfully:
Perhaps my biggest qualm is that the initial furor over Unisys has died down. If this had been organized earlier, maybe there would have been more positive reaction--and, I dare say, the mainstream media might have latched on to it!
-W-
Is it all journey, or is there landfall?
--Ellison & van Vogt, 'The Human Operators'
It's not because I can't change my GIF's to PNG's (I can) nor that PNG's aren't supported (if you can't see them, complain to the site for not recognizing them as PNG's).
It's because the source code to GIF encoding/decoding is published here on the Internet AND in deadtree form. I can go to my public library and check out a copy of Windows Bitmapped Graphics and get the code to do GIF encoding/decoding using LZW. There's probably ten to twenty books that do this. Therefore, it's already wide-spread. I bet it would be in the public domain now.
I'm not a lawyer (someone get a lawyer) but I bet it would be nice if someone could take this tactic and nuke the claims Unisis has to charging site owners.
---
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com." The purpose of that site was not known. -- MSNBC 10-26-1999 on MS crack
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Fron the spec:
Pronunciation
PNG is pronounced "ping".
I just converted all 3 gifs I use on my site, and one doesn't look as it should. The transparency doesn't work correctly... and isn't that why you'd use gif in the first place? Maybe i'll wait for full browser support...
.GIFs. Looks like they have some work to do... ;)
also, i've noticed that ALL graphics on the GIMP website are
The GIFs you've been converting to PNG, then, must have had 'lots' (relatively) of colours, then.
Try this: 10 x 10 pixel image, 2 colours, non-interlaced, then strip it down and save it as a GIF.
Do the same with a PNG. Then use pngcrush on it to make it as small as possible.
red-white.gif (2 colours in palette): 45 bytes
red-white.png (2 colours saved by PS): 182 bytes
red-white2.png (2 colours, by pngcrush: 144 bytes
For ultra-small graphics, PNG is not anywhere near as small byte-size as GIF.
Is set up their servers to server pngs to the ppl who can handle it and gifs to the ppl who don't.
.asp do it, just have whatever it is check the browser vendor and version against a table of support for the features in the particular graphic, and serve up the one that matches best.
Can't be too hard to have apache do most of it for you. Heck you could probably have your fancy
Could be expanded easily when browsers start handling translucency and animation correctly.
Need a Catering Connection
Funny that at the top of this article is an advertisement banner using an animated gif.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
"Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots." - Jonathan Nolan, Memento Mori
Does anyone know of the legal status of an LZW compressed TIFF? Why isn't Unisys complaining about them? I know that LZW TIFFs are not nearly as promiment as GIFs, but they do exist. I mean, the GNU site just has JPEG images and all kind of notes about "no gifs due to patent problems" not "no LZW compressed images due to patent problems".
And that's supposed to mean something? Look a few millimeters to the right on this burnallgifs.org site, you'll see Unisys has since changed their position to any and all software/hardware.
Quicktime 4's infamous for grabbing PNG's. It happens on the Macs too.
But if you view them on Linux, or w/o any such plugins, they're fine.
I just wish QT4 had scroll bars. I use PNG's instead of TIFF's now, and they work very well.
---
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com." The purpose of that site was not known. -- MSNBC 10-26-1999 on MS crack
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Looking at my Mac browsers, it looks like Netscape doesn't totally support PNG, and IE (4.5) doesn't support it *at all* - the W3 pages come up with all broken images.
./ - GIF isn't going away any time soon, and PNG is far from ready as a common image format, IMO. Unisys doesn't seem to be coming after anyone with any great vengence - how could they? First of all, the web is way too large - how do you take that on? Second, how is Unisys going to know if you created your graphics with an unlicensed graphics program? This whole thing is silly.
I'm a bit surprised this story made it on
Luke (sticking to GIFs and JPEGs, for the near future, anyway)
This is mostly left over from when I had a horribly slow system, and wanted to cater to people with similar setups while designing my web page, but I had maybe two graphics on the whole site. A title logo and an email button. That's it. Everything else I prettied up with colors and tables and whatnot. Made for a site that looked nice, loaded quickly, was easy to use, and anybody could look at it no matter what their setup.
In response to the article a while ago about AltaVista's new look (or rather, to a comment on that article), I started designing my own, personal "portal." Guess what? Not a single graphic on the page. It looks nice, layout is rather efficient, and the whole thing only takes up 7kb (inlcuding a 1.6kb ASP script so I can search multiple search engines from the same form). http://silverlight.org/cray/ if anybody's interested.
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"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
This is probably flamebait but is Unisys in financial trouble?
Why did it take them so many years to come after everyone. I recall that LZW compression dates back to the late seventies. Granted Gif didn't exist until the late eighties. Still that is nearly a decade the Unisys hasn't acted.
Since one of my sites at least has commercial aspirations, and I use the GIMP for all my image editing needs, I figure it's better to be safe. I don't really need transparency or animation at this point anyway. Given that most of my pages don't use many GIFs anyway, it won't be a whole lot of hassle either.
I can't be happy because I am losing my hair, getting a gut, and my car is making a funny noise. What I am not unhappy about, is the fact that all my gifs were made using licensed software. If Uni cyst goes after anyone it would be developers using their tools with out being licensed. They won't go after my one transparent Gif on my non commercial site. Relax guys and gals, go back to worrying about internet tax hoaxes and herpes. Have a good holloweenie sweethearts. XXXOOO
photosMy Photostream
I seem to remember the GIF format allows for uncompressed GIFs (from reading about the IJG support for GIF in their JPEG software). Is there any reason for these to be covered by any patents/ copyrights/ trademarks. Maybe this could prove the solution to the animated GIF/ banner ads/ transparency/ browser support type problems. I think most people could cope with the small amount of extra bandwidth these would need. On the other hand, it might be nice to get away from GIF for once and for all.
As impractical as it sounds, its probably for the best, once enough people start using more PNG's you'll see better browser support and raise awareness about the evil GIF compression patent.
GIFs will probably be here until the end of time, but maybe they'll get some half-way decent competition. Its like a mini Linux vs. Windows fight. Though I have a feeling that PNG is gonna end up meaning Probably Not Gonna replace GIFs.
I've noticed the same thing mentioned by other people as well. What's interesting is the install of QT4 *at no time* mentiones that it is going to change the PNG MIME type to the QuickTime 4.0 plug-in.
I seem to recall a /. discussion on this subject a few months back. Unisys is not interested in charging every little website money. What they are interested in is stopping wiley e. coder who didnt pay for LZH to use it in his dinky little graphics app. What it comes down to is this. If you used a commercial graphics package to create your .gifs (photoshop, corel, or whatnot), youre fine, use your gifs, no one is going to charge you. If you wrote a program that uses LZH to compress GIFs and didnt pay for it, then you need to watch out. The fact is, Unisys really did nothing that any other company wouldnt do, I'm actually surprised they waited this long. All theyre trying to do is stop companies from using their algorithm in products w/out paying for it. Can you blame them? They are a buisness after all, they need to make the money or they'll sink.
..does the patent expire? Most of us are happily awaiting the expiry of RSA, that should solve some Free Software headaches. Does LZW expire anytime soon? Or should we all get the contingency plans into gear and make PNGs work?
Incidently, all that has to happen is for Mozilla to do PNG's PERFECTLY and that will set a precendent for IE to do it too.
Lets all use PNG's, regardless of whether Unisys will sue us or not. The Internet is based on free standards, lets keep it up.
Once the images were there, I fired up always trusty "Paint Shop Pro v 5.01" to do a Batch conversion. The file sizes seemed about the same size as the original GIF files (which is to be expected given the 1~3K file size).
Then I thought I would throw one of the PNG files back into Netscape v4.7 to see how it handled things. I draged and droped an PNG file into NS 4.7 and saw "Loading plug-in" flash in the status bar ...then the apple logo came up for a split second, then the PNG apeared.
I couldn't believe my own eyes, so I did it again just to make sure I wasn't imagining things....and sure enough, the PNG file format (win98/NS4.7) is being opened by a Apple Quicktime 4.0 plug-in!
Imagine, if you will, when a user goes to load your home page (which you diligently converted to PNG images) and starts seeing the apple logo pop up every time a little 1k PNG is loaded on the page. imagine the user watching his resource meter slowly drop as the plug-in consumes the last of his precious resources.
Has anyone else recently installed the QT 4.0 player? Can you confirm it handling the PNG format?
The one thing that I've always liked about .gif is the animations. So, does anyone have suggestions about an open source animated format to use in place of .gif?
** Sig-a-licious **
1. convert all gif to png 2. create an apache module that checks the browser support for png. if it does not, any request for a png will send corresponding jpeg file. If no corresponding jpeg file, convert/create one. QED. Feasible? Hasdi
luckily, the startup i am presently employed by as sysadmin hasn't been going long enough for this conversion to be huge, time consuming process. the only worry i have is programs (such as minivend?) supporting PNG. does anyone know if any programs that interact on the server with the browser have any restrictions on the type of images?
Does anyone out there have a version of Netscape for Linux that can display a PNG without crashing? If major numbers of sites do switch to PNG, I'm gonna have to revert to an older version of Netscape unless the newer ones have fixed the bug.
fish and pipes
Mentioning something like that would just confuse the average Windows user. MS did the same sort of thing a while ago with Windows Media Player, taking over file formats like Real Audio. Don't install QT, and Netscape can load PNGs (somewhat) fine.
For one thing, http://graphicswiz.com/png/pngapbr.html lists browsers and their state of PNG support. You'll notice what's already been said about Netscape lacking transparency support, et. al., but more importantly they have a list of PNG plugins for different architectures that is worth a try.
More generally, http://graphicswiz.com/png/pngapps.html lists all applications with PNG support by categories.
yeah, good point. this should be moderated down.
Every day we pick the coolest animated GIFs to add to our extensive library, and the best of the best are featured here.
GIFWorks
Enter the URL of an image:
Andover.net sure doesn't seem to have a problem with gif's. I think Rob should try to talk some since into the "leading Linux/Open Source destination on the Internet."
I think Andover need to walk the walk
geach
EVERYBODY convert all the graphics you can on your website to GIFs! Put MORE GIFs on your websites! Let 'em try and stop us! They can't sue the world! Power to the people! Muahahahahaha!
Oops, I'm getting a little carried away there. Sorry about that.
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I'm not a real anonymous coward, I just play one on TV.
not just because of unisys but it's about time we had an excuse to switch to a better format. But I don't think it's the right time now. Wait for full PNG support in mozilla/Netscape 5. That also means waiting for mozilla/Netscape 5! And you still have to wait for MNG format to replace animated gifs-as well as browser support.
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Hey while were at it, why don't we start burning witches again too.. hey maybe we can find some Illinois Nazis and burn them !
Or maybe we could find some Macs, yeah, and them some ducks yeah.. ducks.. maybe McDonalds should start serving food in those old non-biodegradable containers!!!
Seriously people... GIFs have been around forever and they've just started bringing this up, isnt there some sort of statute of limitations or something that affects this kinda thing?
~tony
GIFs have wonderful support in pretty much every browser (save Lynx, etc) ever made. PNGs does not. The fact that PNGs are not even supported fully until the 5.0 version of a browser that has over 60% market share (IE) should deter anyone who wants their website to actually serve a purpose away. While I heartfully agree that what Unisys is doing is highway robbery, I and anyone else who makes a living designing web sites can't look their customer in the eyes and tell them that PNG is the way to go with conviction. GIFs load faster (because of better support in the browser, not compression) and are virtually bug free. PNG support, I'm sad to report, isn't.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Do you know of any programs that can create a 67 byte PNG? Does the GIMP? I've not been able to get anything under 100bytes (or even 100bytes)...
As i was doing my experimental hi bandwidth website(ie lots of images and stuff), I tried taking all my scans & videocaptures and saving them to PNG format since I was getting sick of the JPEG format. We're talkin' 16 million colors, no loss.
Unfortunately the images, compared to saving JPEG files with compression set to 1(at least in PSP) resulted in UNGODLY huge file sizes. Instead I just reverted back to saving my JPEGs for compression set to 1.
The (or one, at least) mp3 encoding algorithm is patented by Fraunhofer Institut, and they are exercising their patent rights by demanding people to pay them license fees for mp3 encoders. The big difference here is that they've been doing this since before mp3 became popular, AFAIK. Considering this is part of the MPEG standard, it would surprise me if they haven't.
Fraunhofer did manage to shut down at least one free mp3 encoding project, 8Hz, despite the fact that there isn't even a patent in the country it was developed in (the Netherlands).
In a way they are worse than Unisys, who have permitted people to make free GIF encoders, but at least they didn't wait until it had become popular and then start demanding license fees.
The following RFC on Portable Network Graphics is from RFC2083.txt.
.. does this mean that PNG can support animation?? what does "progressive display capability" mean ??====
Features:
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* PNG supports truecolor images.
* "In particular, GIF is well adapted for online communications because of its streamability and progressive display capability. PNG shares those attributes. (Stress added).
====Can some one tell me
* PNG has been expressly designed not to be completely dependent on a single compression technique.
*"Indexed-color,grayscale, and truecolor images are supported, plus an optional alpha channel. Sample depths range from 1 to 16 bits."
Limitations:
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* There is no uncompressed variant of PNG.
* There is no standard chunk for thumbnail views of images.
* There is no lossy compression in PNG.
Hope that clarifies where PNG stands
Manifest
... "follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind