From your linked document: "If you really need lossless storage, don't try to approximate it with regular JPEG."
Which has nothing to do with the question of whether or not a lossless mode exists within JPEG.
When people talk about JPEG, thay talk about the JPEG decoder/encoder pair that can be found in most software: Gimp, Photoshop, IE, Firefox and others. Of all of these programs, not one supports any kind of lossless JPEG.
So now it exists, it's just that "people" don't use it. That's not really in line with your earlier statement Hmmm, no. JPEG is lossy. It's funny how your tone would indicate that you know what you're talking about and in fact you don't. Sad but unfortunately typical.
In other words, you just learned that you were wrong and are trying to wiggle out of it by redefining for yourself what JPEG is. Just don't behave like an ass the next time you think you know something better.
Hmmm, no. JPEG is lossy. It's funny how your tone would indicate that you know what you're talking about and in fact you don't. Sad but unfortunately typical.
Right back at ya. There's some info on it in the JPEG FAQ.
Do you really not? I don't want to be against Microsoft just by principal, but it's not as if they don't have a history of locking formats up in ways that lead to Windows lock-in (whether or not that is the purpose). Sure, WMP might be a really swell format with liberal licensing and all, but considering such things as the other formats in the Windows Media family, the new Office XML formats, the VFAT filesystem, etc., I would require extensive proof before I were to trust it.
They would have to declare it an open standard, that's right. Not sure if that can be phrased in a way that the rest of us can't be screwed over after time.
However, with image formats there are just too many alternatives to really be able to pull of a lock-in. OTOH, that is what they do for a living, so they may have something up their sleeve.
The thing is, their browser doesn't even support PNG properly yet (even ie7 I believe), so why would I believe that a) they could support this properly or b) everyone else would.
The range of quality between Microsoft products is huge. It's a big company. Besides, it not closed-source code but a spec, everyone can pick it apart.
My problem with it (haven't read much yet)--it tries to do everything, like TIFF. That makes implementations complex and the format harder to support. I would have kept it simple. Mixing lossy and lossless in one format is also bad. It's hard enough already to teach people which is the format with loss of quality after saving and which isn't. If you mix the two approaches, confusion will be much bigger.
I'm not confusing anything. As the page you linked to for JPEG-LS says in its first sentence, there is a lossless coding mode in JPEG. It's not that good, but neither is JPEG--the lossy part--if you compare it to state of the art lossy compressors. That's natural after about 15 to 20 years.
GIF, JPG, and PNG do everything I need -- why a new image format?
There are patents on certain parts of JPEG. Including the ones everyone uses, where the claim is highly disputed, by Microsoft and others are already paying licensing fees.
My second reaction is:
Ok, I'm innovative, so maybe there is a good reason for a new image format. Maybe I'll read more. But then I re-read it's from Microsoft and it's got called Windows in it's name, and I think I've got enough MS and Win in my life -- I really don't want more.
If they came up with a great file format I see no reason why MS would be a problem. Microsoft also helped defining TIFF, so what.
If you look at JPEG, the Wikipedia article states:
In computing, JPEG (pronounced jay-peg) is a commonly used standard method of lossy compression for photographic images.
And now you see that it only supports lossy. There are other lossless formats out there but I don't think there is another popular MIME file format that is widely used to support both lossy and lossless.
Actually, JPEG can do both lossy and lossless, no matter what the Wikipedia article might say (I haven't read it).
It seems that a real world challenge would put an "end" to this story.
How? Those who value performance over security will prefer the monolithic kernel approach, those who value security over performance will go with the micro kernel. In a nutshell, how slow is too slow?
But that doesn't change the fact that larger fonts lead to broken layouts with these designs (as someone else pointed out, I haven't tested this myself).
I doubt that. The countries are too diverse within themselves. Typically German, typically French, what does that mean (leaving aside clichés)? The differences are more along the lines of social classes and origin (immigrants or not, which part of the country exactly a person comes from, and so on).
%SUBJECT% is the real problem. Yahoo + MSN search isn't twice as good as each of those two alone. What makes Google a better search engine? That's what they have to find out--together, or each on their own. I'm constantly running queries against the Google competitors only to come back to Google to get the real answer. Not for trivial queries, but the interesting ones. I'd like to see better competitors because Google knows too much about everyone already.
This all depends on if the students are sharing inside the school LAN privately like the i2hub did, or if students are hooked up to the outside world sharing illegal files via bittorrent and gnutella protocols.
Why should that make much of a difference? Three to four thousand students only sharing files within their LAN are also infringing on someone else's copyright. If it's the usual stuff. If it's only Linux ISOs, I apologize.
Does anybody remember when the MPAA was bitching and moaning about VCRs back in the day? Ohhhh nooo peple aren't going to buy movies any more. Guess what, people still buy movies because they're superior format and quality.
However, with HDTV AVI rips and DVD ISO images there is no or almost no difference.
The RIAA should be imbracing file sharing instead of trying to squash it. If they had brain one over there then they would be trying to spin this to their advantage.
They are selling files over the Internet already. See iTunes etc. There are Bittorrent-like services where you download something you just bought and at the same time upload it to other legitimate clients. Students just sharing files on the university LAN are customers lost to this branch of their business. And as much as I like the anecdotes about people finding stuff on file sharing systems and then buying them, that is by and large an exception to the rule.
Look, I'm no stranger to campus file sharing systems, so I know about the convenience and I'm pointing no fingers. And the RIAA's tactics are sometimes downright illegal. But it's pretty much a no-brainer why unlimited file sharing is a threat to them. You sound like students are just victims here.
Business is a well-understood term world-wide. It's even been included in quite a few languages, although the spelling is sometimes altered: bisness, bisnis, and so on.
Having said that, I don't see the necessity for any new TLDs.
Now, you and I can certainly agree that Usenet, by definition, is a way of publishing a work. Joe posted his magnum opus to alt.fan.furries or whatever, and that's his right. What Google has done is to take an ephemeral work and make it available: 1) permanently, 2) in a different medium (the web, not Usenet), and 3) in a way that makes money. Part (3) is not necessary to show a copyright violation, but I'm sure it helps.
(3) is true for every commercial news server like Easynews, Giganews and so on. Yet nobody would try to call their copy-and-forwarding copyright infringement.
Let me give another example. Joe creates a web page with his opus. You could certainly argue that Joe wants his work seen. You might even say that technology makes it easy and likely that Joe's page will be copied (by visitors and by web crawlers). Does Joe, by publishing to the web, lose his copyright? Does someone who copies his work suddenly have the right to redistribute it forever, and in a different medium, in a way that makes them money?
The analogy is flawed because Usenet by its definition works via copying other people's material, while the Web does not function that way.
That book is not about the grail. It's a crime story in a medieval monastery where monks are killed over some mysterious book.
While I enjoyed the novel immensely it is not an easy read as Dan Brown. My copy (German translation of the Italian original) is full of Latin phrases and historic references which are only partially translated and explained. There are many digressions to philosophical and theological questions. It's a novel written by a scholar, and he lets you know that on almost any page. And it's quite a tome.
NotR--stripped down to its core story--was made into a terrific movie with Sean Connery and Christian Slater. If I understand it correctly that movie is not so well-known in the US.
Google hopes to use this as an opportunity to help bring global censorship into the spotlight of American politics.
The spotlight of politics is mostly on the matters that the general public are aware of as well. And while Google/China is debated at length here at/. and similar places, let's not kid ourselves--the general public isn't aware and probably doesn't care either.
Looking at the Web logs, recently everyone and their brother seems to have started crawling the Web. And the little ones are usually not as good-behaved as the major crawlers.
Slashdot Mirror
From your linked document: "If you really need lossless storage, don't try to approximate it with regular JPEG."
Which has nothing to do with the question of whether or not a lossless mode exists within JPEG.
When people talk about JPEG, thay talk about the JPEG decoder/encoder pair that can be found in most software: Gimp, Photoshop, IE, Firefox and others. Of all of these programs, not one supports any kind of lossless JPEG.
So now it exists, it's just that "people" don't use it. That's not really in line with your earlier statement Hmmm, no. JPEG is lossy. It's funny how your tone would indicate that you know what you're talking about and in fact you don't. Sad but unfortunately typical.
In other words, you just learned that you were wrong and are trying to wiggle out of it by redefining for yourself what JPEG is. Just don't behave like an ass the next time you think you know something better.
Hmmm, no. JPEG is lossy. It's funny how your tone would indicate that you know what you're talking about and in fact you don't. Sad but unfortunately typical.
Right back at ya. There's some info on it in the JPEG FAQ.
Do you really not? I don't want to be against Microsoft just by principal, but it's not as if they don't have a history of locking formats up in ways that lead to Windows lock-in (whether or not that is the purpose). Sure, WMP might be a really swell format with liberal licensing and all, but considering such things as the other formats in the Windows Media family, the new Office XML formats, the VFAT filesystem, etc., I would require extensive proof before I were to trust it.
They would have to declare it an open standard, that's right. Not sure if that can be phrased in a way that the rest of us can't be screwed over after time.
However, with image formats there are just too many alternatives to really be able to pull of a lock-in. OTOH, that is what they do for a living, so they may have something up their sleeve.
The thing is, their browser doesn't even support PNG properly yet (even ie7 I believe), so why would I believe that a) they could support this properly or b) everyone else would.
The range of quality between Microsoft products is huge. It's a big company. Besides, it not closed-source code but a spec, everyone can pick it apart.
My problem with it (haven't read much yet)--it tries to do everything, like TIFF. That makes implementations complex and the format harder to support. I would have kept it simple. Mixing lossy and lossless in one format is also bad. It's hard enough already to teach people which is the format with loss of quality after saving and which isn't. If you mix the two approaches, confusion will be much bigger.
I think you're confusing JPEG with JPEG-LS.
I'm not confusing anything. As the page you linked to for JPEG-LS says in its first sentence, there is a lossless coding mode in JPEG. It's not that good, but neither is JPEG--the lossy part--if you compare it to state of the art lossy compressors. That's natural after about 15 to 20 years.
My first reaction is:
GIF, JPG, and PNG do everything I need -- why a new image format?
There are patents on certain parts of JPEG. Including the ones everyone uses, where the claim is highly disputed, by Microsoft and others are already paying licensing fees.
My second reaction is:
Ok, I'm innovative, so maybe there is a good reason for a new image format. Maybe I'll read more. But then I re-read it's from Microsoft and it's got called Windows in it's name, and I think I've got enough MS and Win in my life -- I really don't want more.
If they came up with a great file format I see no reason why MS would be a problem. Microsoft also helped defining TIFF, so what.
If you look at JPEG, the Wikipedia article states:
In computing, JPEG (pronounced jay-peg) is a commonly used standard method of lossy compression for photographic images.
And now you see that it only supports lossy. There are other lossless formats out there but I don't think there is another popular MIME file format that is widely used to support both lossy and lossless.
Actually, JPEG can do both lossy and lossless, no matter what the Wikipedia article might say (I haven't read it).
But what does that have to do with a kernel competition and whether that makes sense?
It seems that a real world challenge would put an "end" to this story.
How? Those who value performance over security will prefer the monolithic kernel approach, those who value security over performance will go with the micro kernel. In a nutshell, how slow is too slow?
Use the minimum font size setting in firefox
But that doesn't change the fact that larger fonts lead to broken layouts with these designs (as someone else pointed out, I haven't tested this myself).
I doubt that. The countries are too diverse within themselves. Typically German, typically French, what does that mean (leaving aside clichés)? The differences are more along the lines of social classes and origin (immigrants or not, which part of the country exactly a person comes from, and so on).
%SUBJECT% is the real problem. Yahoo + MSN search isn't twice as good as each of those two alone. What makes Google a better search engine? That's what they have to find out--together, or each on their own. I'm constantly running queries against the Google competitors only to come back to Google to get the real answer. Not for trivial queries, but the interesting ones. I'd like to see better competitors because Google knows too much about everyone already.
This all depends on if the students are sharing inside the school LAN privately like the i2hub did, or if students are hooked up to the outside world sharing illegal files via bittorrent and gnutella protocols.
Why should that make much of a difference? Three to four thousand students only sharing files within their LAN are also infringing on someone else's copyright. If it's the usual stuff. If it's only Linux ISOs, I apologize.
Does anybody remember when the MPAA was bitching and moaning about VCRs back in the day? Ohhhh nooo peple aren't going to buy movies any more. Guess what, people still buy movies because they're superior format and quality.
However, with HDTV AVI rips and DVD ISO images there is no or almost no difference.
The RIAA should be imbracing file sharing instead of trying to squash it. If they had brain one over there then they would be trying to spin this to their advantage.
They are selling files over the Internet already. See iTunes etc. There are Bittorrent-like services where you download something you just bought and at the same time upload it to other legitimate clients. Students just sharing files on the university LAN are customers lost to this branch of their business. And as much as I like the anecdotes about people finding stuff on file sharing systems and then buying them, that is by and large an exception to the rule.
Look, I'm no stranger to campus file sharing systems, so I know about the convenience and I'm pointing no fingers. And the RIAA's tactics are sometimes downright illegal. But it's pretty much a no-brainer why unlimited file sharing is a threat to them. You sound like students are just victims here.
Business is a well-understood term world-wide. It's even been included in quite a few languages, although the spelling is sometimes altered: bisness, bisnis, and so on.
Having said that, I don't see the necessity for any new TLDs.
IIRC that guy who sued Google for his Usenet postings recently also included a RICO charge.
Ghost of Usenet Postings Past.
Now, you and I can certainly agree that Usenet, by definition, is a way of publishing a work. Joe posted his magnum opus to alt.fan.furries or whatever, and that's his right. What Google has done is to take an ephemeral work and make it available: 1) permanently, 2) in a different medium (the web, not Usenet), and 3) in a way that makes money. Part (3) is not necessary to show a copyright violation, but I'm sure it helps.
(3) is true for every commercial news server like Easynews, Giganews and so on. Yet nobody would try to call their copy-and-forwarding copyright infringement.
Let me give another example. Joe creates a web page with his opus. You could certainly argue that Joe wants his work seen. You might even say that technology makes it easy and likely that Joe's page will be copied (by visitors and by web crawlers). Does Joe, by publishing to the web, lose his copyright? Does someone who copies his work suddenly have the right to redistribute it forever, and in a different medium, in a way that makes them money?
The analogy is flawed because Usenet by its definition works via copying other people's material, while the Web does not function that way.
Is there some AVI/ASF file behind it with a URL I can feed to wget? That page doesn't work for me (Firefox).
That book is not about the grail. It's a crime story in a medieval monastery where monks are killed over some mysterious book.
While I enjoyed the novel immensely it is not an easy read as Dan Brown. My copy (German translation of the Italian original) is full of Latin phrases and historic references which are only partially translated and explained. There are many digressions to philosophical and theological questions. It's a novel written by a scholar, and he lets you know that on almost any page. And it's quite a tome.
NotR--stripped down to its core story--was made into a terrific movie with Sean Connery and Christian Slater. If I understand it correctly that movie is not so well-known in the US.
A bit off-topic, but whatever. Is there a Windows Postscript viewer with a better GUI than Ghostview?
Converting the ps files to pdf and then using a PDF viewer isn't a good solution for me.
A 1.2 Petabyte Hard Drive?
No, 640 TB should be enough for everyone.
Google hopes to use this as an opportunity to help bring global censorship into the spotlight of American politics.
/. and similar places, let's not kid ourselves--the general public isn't aware and probably doesn't care either.
The spotlight of politics is mostly on the matters that the general public are aware of as well. And while Google/China is debated at length here at
That's the dry theory. For the more entertaining practice, see this amusing editorial.
That's not amusing, that's Ann Coulter, which spells annoying.
With the usual mixture of misleading, irrelevant and plain false statements, leaving out more important clues.
Looking at the Web logs, recently everyone and their brother seems to have started crawling the Web. And the little ones are usually not as good-behaved as the major crawlers.
now mail, what will they drop next? The Web? Bah, all overrated anyway.