Cold? You call this *cold*? We haven't even *had* any real COLD yet this winter. I keep hoping. I think we're due. It's been entirely too long since the last big freeze, and it's high time we had one, the kind where the temperature drops to thirty below and the wind kicks up to 60 mph and blows the snow so you have white-out conditions and twenty-foot drifts. Why, when I was a lad, we had *real* winter...
Can you honestly say you've never had any desire to have a second hard drive in your computer, or add an internal Zip or Jazz drive or DVD-RAM or whatever? Expandability isn't all just about tinkering (though I must admit I have been known to tinker); it's about having the components you want.
That's available in the Mac world, but you gotta get a PowerMac.
The problem you run into shopping for Apple hardware isn't that the Apple hardware is much more expensive than equivalent PC hardware -- it's generally comparable. The problem is that there's an entire very important class of system (namely, the expandable midrange system) that Apple never supplies. Their low-end systems, such as the new Mini, but also the iMac, eMac, and so on, all have pretty much zero capacity to be expanded, enhanced, or upgraded. *Maybe* you can add another stick of RAM (but not two or three more), and external peripherals, and that's just about it. If you want to add another drive or two or replace the graphics card, you're fresh out. For that kind of thing -- which is no problem with $400 PCs and is rather important for anyone with even mild computer-geek tendencies -- you have to go all the way to the PowerMac tower systems, which start at some thousand and a half smackers. Granted, they're much higher-end than the $400 PC and are probably worth what they cost, but that's small consolation if you don't need all those extra GHz but do need the ability to add an extra drive next year or an expansion card.
In other words, Apple has to-date never tried to sell anything in the niche occupied by the Celeron-based mid-tower system.
But in the niches they *do* try to compete in, they generally are fairly price competitive (all else being equal), and the new mini seems to be a hit in that regard. To keep myself from buying one, I keep reminding myself that four computers in my bedroom, three of which are turned on pretty much all the time, is *enough*, darnit. Also, the one that's not turned on most of the time is the one that's not x86-family, which is probably not a coincidence (although, it's a bit on the old side as well and doesn't have TCP/IP installed, so there are more reasons than just architecture).
> automation of source code is much easier with the source as XML than as > a typical c-style syntax.
Bunk. I've written code that generates Inform code (which has a syntax very similar to C), and I've written code that generates XML, and the difficulty in either case is dependent on the inherent complexity of what you're doing, not the details of the syntax your code is generating.
> The upside is we then get to do the interesting work.
Writing code is the interesting work. Well, it is if you program in a fun language, such as Perl or Inform.
> Please, if you think you'd actually be typing the code yourself, you're > nuts! The point is to get as much of the grunt work done via automated > means as possible.
Indeed, I write code that generates XML. But somebody has to write the code that generates it, and that's what programming languages are for.
> Humans are not designed to do the same thing for 8+ hours strai[gh]t.
True. If your job involves enough different kinds of activities, this is in general not a problem. If your job is the same thing all the time, then it's a much more significant issue. There are some jobs where you just need to get up every hour or so and walk to the bathroom, the drinking fountain, the window, the boss's office, or _anywhere_, just to get away from what you were doing for five minutes. A good employer will understand this and provide you with things you can do to break up the monotony -- they may be on-the-job things, things useful to the company, but they'll give you something to let you get away from your usual routine for a few minutes now and again.
> I love C syntax, but it's stale and there are many things we can improve upon.
The problem with C is not the syntax; it's the semantics of the language that are stuck in the twentieth century. Sure, there are improvements that could be made to the syntax, but good syntax doesn't make a language good. C needs semantic things: automatic memory management, dynamic length strings, garbage collection, numeric types that automatically promote as needed, context-aware functions, mixins, unicode strings that automatically keep track of their encoding and know what a grapheme is, that sort of thing.
Yeah, but he's looking for *good* ideas. (And finding them. Perl6 is getting ideas from a wide assortment of languages, including Scheme, Smalltalk, Ruby, Python,... but somehow I don't see this one making it in. Perl6 will get its extensibility from such things as grammars, roles, continuations, and the Parrot cross-language calling framework.)
We all know how programmers like languages that require typing a lot of verbose and lengthy expressions. Y'ever notice how *popular* COBOL is? Did you notice how many more languages have copied Pascal's style of delimiters BEGIN/END versus the C style {/} or the lisp style (/), and how popular those languages are?
It's different for data, because you don't type them in by hand most of the time; you write a program that generates them.
> NAT leave you somewhat vulnerable it's a mapping address for address
Is anyone still using many-to-many NAT? I was under the impression most NAT these days is one-to-many, which does provide some protection. (Among other things, incoming ports are pretty much a non-issue unless you forward them explicitely. There is also, at least potentially, protection from malformed packets. Of course, it's still no substitute for safe computing practices.)
> > Everyone has to participate in the process, because > > you can't meet the kits if you don't go to St. Ives... > > That's fine: I'm allergic to cats, anyway.
This attitude is dangerous for the company. If you don't capitalize on your action opportunity to participate in the process, you won't be involved in the peer-to-peer issues collaboration eccosystem. By defaulting on your responsibility to be a team player, you undermine the holistic wellness of your department and of the company. I've taken the liberty of scheduling you some meetings with the process participation action group promotion committee, so that you can review your options with them.
> the key phrase here is "if the user's security settings are set low enough."
If the user's security settings are NOT set low enough, the user will be prompted with a dialog box that looks basically the same as the one you get when the search terms you're submitting to a search engine aren't encrypted in transit. (The fine print is different, but even computer geeks don't usually read that, much less normal people.) The default button (which I think is "Ok") will let the thing run.
The thing is, Microsoft doesn't try to hide this. They don't consider it a security issue. Their official line is that you should only run ActiveX controls that you trust. In other words, there's no security _hole_ in ActiveX per se, because there's nothing to have a hole _in_. ActiveX has no security model at all; it completely abdicates responsibility for that to the user.
The instructions probably say to be root because that's the easiest way, but I'm pretty sure it's not strictly necessary. You do, however, need to be able to install modules off the CPAN which, if you're not root may involve more messing around.
Maybe you never really needed a bug-tracking system. If you try using one of its various competitors, such as Jitterbug or Mantis, you'll understand why Bugzilla is so popular: it's just better.
Granted, there are some improvements that would be nice, and one of them is the ability, when it emails you notification of anything, to send an email reply back that does something useful with the bug in question, such as post an additional comment or change a field. Also granted, a mailing list can be more convenient for some projects -- but a mailing list does not work as well for getting a wider community involved. Mozilla is what it is in large part because of the enormous amounts of feedback, test cases, and so on that it received through Bugzilla from people who would not have subscribed to a developer mailing list.
> How many people were terrified by the power outages on the east cost of > the USA a while back?
Those were clearly accidental. Try making sure everyone knows it was done deliberately and letting them think it can be repeated at will. Additionally, those were in the summertime. The power outages we had after the ice storm here last week have people visibly shaken, and that's without a raving lunatic claiming credit and threatening to do it again.
> Terrorists kill people.
Murderers kill people. Terrorists terrorize. Often they do it by killing people, in which case they are also murderers, but just killing people is not in itself terrorism.
> Terrorism is not new
I'm quite aware of that.
> it wasn't even new when it started WWI.
Assasination started WWI. That's not terrorism.
> These days if you call someone a terrorist they are an outcast unprotected > by any rights at all, so it is convenient to widen the definition to avoid > that annoying due process.
Your conspiracy theories don't change anything: a terrorist has always been someone who employs terror as a weapon. Additionally, your logic doesn't even hold up internally; if it were convenient to label people as terrorists in order to get rid of due process, and if killing people were the primary defining factor in terrorism, then why do we still bother with murder trials?
> My pet peeve is that, when things go wrong, they're "issues"...
Oh, do you have issues with the issues? What you need is our enterprise class comprehensive issues remediation package. Our company, through serving the issues remediation needs of the community for over thirty years, has developed strategic core competencies that have enabled us, in collaboration with other leading issues remediation experts, to lead the industry in developing the improved processes and results-driven issues remediation services that we have combined into this enterprise class package that is especially tailored to suit the issues remediation needs of your business or organization.
Ah, but what do you want to leverage? Why, solutions, of course. What kind of solutions? Enterprise solutions, obviously. And why do you want to leverage these enterprise solutions? In order to set the company on a critical path to achieve total quality, monetize the bottom line, and raise the bar and set the standard for the entire industry, of course. Ah, but here's the real question: *how* do you leverage the enterprise solutions and set the company on a critical path to do those things? You need a gameplan, a gameplan to get everyone on the same page going forward in a fault-tollerant and robust expectations paradigm, that's how, because only with that kind of dynamic will you really out-compete the competition in the new ecconomy. So, we need to revisit our objectives and reorient our goals so that we -- all of us -- can accomplish this vision, this future, indeed, this destiny. Everyone has to participate in the process, because you can't meet the kits if you don't go to St. Ives...
Not necessarily. Well, usually, because that's pretty effective. But the key thing that terrorists do is terrorize, i.e., scare people out of their minds. There *are* other effective ways to do that besides killing. Arranging strategic power outages will do the trick nicely, for example. Some of the wilder Y2K propaganda also qualified; I know people who were more scared then than they were the day after 9/11. You don't have to actually kill anyone to make people fear for their lives.
> lets keep some perspective here.
Agreed. Domain hijacking is definitely criminal, but PANIX isn't major enough for it to qualify as international terrorism. (OTOH, if they were to hijack, say, CNN.com and post some alarming fake news, that could qualify as terrorism.)
Some people go through life paranoid. Personally I've never felt the need to own a gun. But then, we also don't lock our house at night or, for that matter, when we all leave for the day, and I don't encrypt my email either. We've never had any trouble as a result of not doing those things. My grandparents did have a break-in once, while they were out; it was a neighborhood teenager; he broke in a basement window, ignored all the Rockwell plates and stole some cheap costume jewelry. Kids.
Of course, this is Ohio; New Jersey (at least, a significant part of it) is somewhat more urban and generally quite a lot more screwed up;-)
> More components mean more points of potential failure.
So everyone (who uses guns) should use the ones with the fewest components, such as flintlock muskets?
This new technology is unreliable (10% failure rate, yikes!) at least partly because it's new and still needs to cook for a while. Give it some benefit of the doubt and assume it's going to be improved quite a bit before you ever hold one in your hands.
As far as the life-or-death situation argument, a 100% reliable gun, in terms of firing when the trigger is pulled, can still lose your life for you in a life-or-death situation if the wrong person fires it in the wrong direction. With this new technology in the state it's in now, that's with very few exceptions the better risk, because hopefully if you use some good sense in deciding where to keep the gun there's better than a 90% chance it will be you and not the other guy pulling the trigger. (Although, if you keep it loaded, there's always the neighborhood kid fooling around...)
But if the technology is refined quite a bit and reaches, say, a 99% success rate, or 99.5%, then that could be a different thing altogether.
Bleeding-edge not-yet-on-the-market-even technology is of course nowhere near as reliable as something proven.
I do think New Jersey's law puts an awefully short timeframe on adoption, but at least it measures from when the thing is commercially available; one hopes it won't be rushed to market too prematurely.
> I would have thought that rather than 'zipping' an existing image format > to create a new one just to save 30%, they'd be better off improving the > original image compression algorithm or coming up with a new one.
Indeed, and if JPEG were an efficient format, they wouldn't have been able to compress it 30% -- it is, after all, already compressed. It's not like when you gzip an.xcf and save 50% or more --.xcf isn't natively compressed at all, so you expect that (and, Gimp supports compressing/decompressing on the fly during save/load, for this reason). But.jpg is supposed to be already compressed. But it's compressed *poorly*.
The ability to losslessly compress JPEG images by 30% is proof of what I have said all along: JPEG compression is more lossy than it is compressive; that is, its compression is inefficient, substantially more lossy than other formats at comparable compression ratios. It has the worst and most noticeable artifacts, at any given compression ratio, of just about any format known to man. MP3 is almost as bad, and I wouldn't be surprised if a comparable study of that format found a way to compress it 30% or more too.
> Does anyone know what happened to fractal image format files (.fif) and > why they never took off?
Fractal compression is difficult to generalize for all possible images. It's in the same category with vectorization (e.g., make an.svg image and let it render to a bitmap for display --.svg is itself not very efficient with bytes, but it compresses really well, much better than the equivalent rendered bitmap would do) or raytracing (make a scene description and let it render to a bitmap for display): yeah, it's going to be a lot smaller than the resulting bitmap would be in any format, and look better than a lossily-compressed one such as a JPEG, but you can't easily take an arbitrary photo and turn it into one.
Slashdot Mirror
> Do you have ANY idea how cold it is ootside?
Cold? You call this *cold*? We haven't even *had* any real COLD yet this
winter. I keep hoping. I think we're due. It's been entirely too long
since the last big freeze, and it's high time we had one, the kind where
the temperature drops to thirty below and the wind kicks up to 60 mph and
blows the snow so you have white-out conditions and twenty-foot drifts.
Why, when I was a lad, we had *real* winter...
Can you honestly say you've never had any desire to have a second hard drive
in your computer, or add an internal Zip or Jazz drive or DVD-RAM or whatever?
Expandability isn't all just about tinkering (though I must admit I have been
known to tinker); it's about having the components you want.
That's available in the Mac world, but you gotta get a PowerMac.
The problem you run into shopping for Apple hardware isn't that the Apple
hardware is much more expensive than equivalent PC hardware -- it's generally
comparable. The problem is that there's an entire very important class of
system (namely, the expandable midrange system) that Apple never supplies.
Their low-end systems, such as the new Mini, but also the iMac, eMac, and
so on, all have pretty much zero capacity to be expanded, enhanced, or
upgraded. *Maybe* you can add another stick of RAM (but not two or three
more), and external peripherals, and that's just about it. If you want to
add another drive or two or replace the graphics card, you're fresh out.
For that kind of thing -- which is no problem with $400 PCs and is rather
important for anyone with even mild computer-geek tendencies -- you have to
go all the way to the PowerMac tower systems, which start at some thousand
and a half smackers. Granted, they're much higher-end than the $400 PC
and are probably worth what they cost, but that's small consolation if
you don't need all those extra GHz but do need the ability to add an extra
drive next year or an expansion card.
In other words, Apple has to-date never tried to sell anything in the niche
occupied by the Celeron-based mid-tower system.
But in the niches they *do* try to compete in, they generally are fairly
price competitive (all else being equal), and the new mini seems to be a
hit in that regard. To keep myself from buying one, I keep reminding
myself that four computers in my bedroom, three of which are turned on
pretty much all the time, is *enough*, darnit. Also, the one that's not
turned on most of the time is the one that's not x86-family, which is
probably not a coincidence (although, it's a bit on the old side as well
and doesn't have TCP/IP installed, so there are more reasons than just
architecture).
> Look, if you want Java then write in Java
I tend to prefer Perl.
> automation of source code is much easier with the source as XML than as
> a typical c-style syntax.
Bunk. I've written code that generates Inform code (which has a syntax very
similar to C), and I've written code that generates XML, and the difficulty
in either case is dependent on the inherent complexity of what you're doing,
not the details of the syntax your code is generating.
> The upside is we then get to do the interesting work.
Writing code is the interesting work. Well, it is if you program in a fun
language, such as Perl or Inform.
> Please, if you think you'd actually be typing the code yourself, you're
> nuts! The point is to get as much of the grunt work done via automated
> means as possible.
Indeed, I write code that generates XML. But somebody has to write the code
that generates it, and that's what programming languages are for.
> Humans are not designed to do the same thing for 8+ hours strai[gh]t.
True. If your job involves enough different kinds of activities, this is
in general not a problem. If your job is the same thing all the time, then
it's a much more significant issue. There are some jobs where you just need
to get up every hour or so and walk to the bathroom, the drinking fountain,
the window, the boss's office, or _anywhere_, just to get away from what you
were doing for five minutes. A good employer will understand this and provide
you with things you can do to break up the monotony -- they may be on-the-job
things, things useful to the company, but they'll give you something to let
you get away from your usual routine for a few minutes now and again.
BF isn't wacky. BF is just extremely minimalist. You want wacky, you look
at Unlambda or Threaded Intercal.
> I love C syntax, but it's stale and there are many things we can improve upon.
The problem with C is not the syntax; it's the semantics of the language that
are stuck in the twentieth century. Sure, there are improvements that could
be made to the syntax, but good syntax doesn't make a language good. C needs
semantic things: automatic memory management, dynamic length strings, garbage
collection, numeric types that automatically promote as needed, context-aware
functions, mixins, unicode strings that automatically keep track of their
encoding and know what a grapheme is, that sort of thing.
> Larry Wall might be listening
... but somehow I don't see this one making it in. Perl6 will get
Yeah, but he's looking for *good* ideas. (And finding them. Perl6 is getting
ideas from a wide assortment of languages, including Scheme, Smalltalk, Ruby,
Python,
its extensibility from such things as grammars, roles, continuations, and
the Parrot cross-language calling framework.)
We all know how programmers like languages that require typing a lot of
verbose and lengthy expressions. Y'ever notice how *popular* COBOL is?
Did you notice how many more languages have copied Pascal's style of
delimiters BEGIN/END versus the C style {/} or the lisp style (/), and
how popular those languages are?
It's different for data, because you don't type them in by hand most of
the time; you write a program that generates them.
> NAT leave you somewhat vulnerable it's a mapping address for address
Is anyone still using many-to-many NAT? I was under the impression most NAT
these days is one-to-many, which does provide some protection. (Among other
things, incoming ports are pretty much a non-issue unless you forward them
explicitely. There is also, at least potentially, protection from malformed
packets. Of course, it's still no substitute for safe computing practices.)
> > "Every home machine that's been cracked has been cracked through a router"
> No it hasn't.
Almost 100% of the attacks have to go through multiple routers. The only
other way is for the hacker to physically go to the machine's location.
A router does not protect you in any way from being cracked, unless it is
more than just a router (e.g., if it also has NAT or firewalling features).
> > Everyone has to participate in the process, because
> > you can't meet the kits if you don't go to St. Ives...
>
> That's fine: I'm allergic to cats, anyway.
This attitude is dangerous for the company. If you don't capitalize on your
action opportunity to participate in the process, you won't be involved in
the peer-to-peer issues collaboration eccosystem. By defaulting on your
responsibility to be a team player, you undermine the holistic wellness of
your department and of the company. I've taken the liberty of scheduling
you some meetings with the process participation action group promotion
committee, so that you can review your options with them.
> the key phrase here is "if the user's security settings are set low enough."
If the user's security settings are NOT set low enough, the user will be prompted with a dialog box that looks basically the same as the one you get when the search terms you're submitting to a search engine aren't encrypted in transit. (The fine print is different, but even computer geeks don't usually read that, much less normal people.) The default button (which I think is "Ok") will let the thing run.
The thing is, Microsoft doesn't try to hide this. They don't consider it a security issue. Their official line is that you should only run ActiveX controls that you trust. In other words, there's no security _hole_ in ActiveX per se, because there's nothing to have a hole _in_. ActiveX has no security model at all; it completely abdicates responsibility for that to the user.
The instructions probably say to be root because that's the easiest way, but
I'm pretty sure it's not strictly necessary. You do, however, need to be able
to install modules off the CPAN which, if you're not root may involve more
messing around.
> I've always hated bugzilla, don't know why.
Maybe you never really needed a bug-tracking system. If you try using one of
its various competitors, such as Jitterbug or Mantis, you'll understand why
Bugzilla is so popular: it's just better.
Granted, there are some improvements that would be nice, and one of them is
the ability, when it emails you notification of anything, to send an email
reply back that does something useful with the bug in question, such as
post an additional comment or change a field. Also granted, a mailing list
can be more convenient for some projects -- but a mailing list does not
work as well for getting a wider community involved. Mozilla is what it
is in large part because of the enormous amounts of feedback, test cases,
and so on that it received through Bugzilla from people who would not have
subscribed to a developer mailing list.
> How many people were terrified by the power outages on the east cost of
> the USA a while back?
Those were clearly accidental. Try making sure everyone knows it was done
deliberately and letting them think it can be repeated at will. Additionally,
those were in the summertime. The power outages we had after the ice storm
here last week have people visibly shaken, and that's without a raving
lunatic claiming credit and threatening to do it again.
> Terrorists kill people.
Murderers kill people. Terrorists terrorize. Often they do it by killing
people, in which case they are also murderers, but just killing people is
not in itself terrorism.
> Terrorism is not new
I'm quite aware of that.
> it wasn't even new when it started WWI.
Assasination started WWI. That's not terrorism.
> These days if you call someone a terrorist they are an outcast unprotected
> by any rights at all, so it is convenient to widen the definition to avoid
> that annoying due process.
Your conspiracy theories don't change anything: a terrorist has always been
someone who employs terror as a weapon. Additionally, your logic doesn't
even hold up internally; if it were convenient to label people as terrorists
in order to get rid of due process, and if killing people were the primary
defining factor in terrorism, then why do we still bother with murder trials?
> My pet peeve is that, when things go wrong, they're "issues"...
Oh, do you have issues with the issues? What you need is our enterprise class
comprehensive issues remediation package. Our company, through serving the
issues remediation needs of the community for over thirty years, has developed
strategic core competencies that have enabled us, in collaboration with other
leading issues remediation experts, to lead the industry in developing the
improved processes and results-driven issues remediation services that we have
combined into this enterprise class package that is especially tailored to
suit the issues remediation needs of your business or organization.
Ah, but what do you want to leverage? Why, solutions, of course. What kind
of solutions? Enterprise solutions, obviously. And why do you want to
leverage these enterprise solutions? In order to set the company on
a critical path to achieve total quality, monetize the bottom line, and
raise the bar and set the standard for the entire industry, of course. Ah,
but here's the real question: *how* do you leverage the enterprise solutions
and set the company on a critical path to do those things? You need a
gameplan, a gameplan to get everyone on the same page going forward in a
fault-tollerant and robust expectations paradigm, that's how, because only
with that kind of dynamic will you really out-compete the competition in the
new ecconomy. So, we need to revisit our objectives and reorient our goals
so that we -- all of us -- can accomplish this vision, this future, indeed,
this destiny. Everyone has to participate in the process, because you can't
meet the kits if you don't go to St. Ives...
> Terrorists kill people
Not necessarily. Well, usually, because that's pretty effective. But the
key thing that terrorists do is terrorize, i.e., scare people out of their
minds. There *are* other effective ways to do that besides killing.
Arranging strategic power outages will do the trick nicely, for example.
Some of the wilder Y2K propaganda also qualified; I know people who were
more scared then than they were the day after 9/11. You don't have to
actually kill anyone to make people fear for their lives.
> lets keep some perspective here.
Agreed. Domain hijacking is definitely criminal, but PANIX isn't major
enough for it to qualify as international terrorism. (OTOH, if they were
to hijack, say, CNN.com and post some alarming fake news, that could
qualify as terrorism.)
Some people go through life paranoid. Personally I've never felt the need to
;-)
own a gun. But then, we also don't lock our house at night or, for that
matter, when we all leave for the day, and I don't encrypt my email either.
We've never had any trouble as a result of not doing those things. My
grandparents did have a break-in once, while they were out; it was a
neighborhood teenager; he broke in a basement window, ignored all the
Rockwell plates and stole some cheap costume jewelry. Kids.
Of course, this is Ohio; New Jersey (at least, a significant part of it) is
somewhat more urban and generally quite a lot more screwed up
I like Weird Al's song, "Trigger Happy".
> More components mean more points of potential failure.
So everyone (who uses guns) should use the ones with the fewest components,
such as flintlock muskets?
This new technology is unreliable (10% failure rate, yikes!) at least partly
because it's new and still needs to cook for a while. Give it some benefit
of the doubt and assume it's going to be improved quite a bit before you ever
hold one in your hands.
As far as the life-or-death situation argument, a 100% reliable gun, in
terms of firing when the trigger is pulled, can still lose your life for
you in a life-or-death situation if the wrong person fires it in the wrong
direction. With this new technology in the state it's in now, that's with
very few exceptions the better risk, because hopefully if you use some good
sense in deciding where to keep the gun there's better than a 90% chance it
will be you and not the other guy pulling the trigger. (Although, if you
keep it loaded, there's always the neighborhood kid fooling around...)
But if the technology is refined quite a bit and reaches, say, a 99% success
rate, or 99.5%, then that could be a different thing altogether.
Bleeding-edge not-yet-on-the-market-even technology is of course nowhere
near as reliable as something proven.
I do think New Jersey's law puts an awefully short timeframe on adoption,
but at least it measures from when the thing is commercially available; one
hopes it won't be rushed to market too prematurely.
> I would have thought that rather than 'zipping' an existing image format
.xcf and save 50% or more -- .xcf isn't natively compressed at .jpg is supposed to be
.svg image and let it .svg is itself not very efficient with
> to create a new one just to save 30%, they'd be better off improving the
> original image compression algorithm or coming up with a new one.
Indeed, and if JPEG were an efficient format, they wouldn't have been able to
compress it 30% -- it is, after all, already compressed. It's not like when
you gzip an
all, so you expect that (and, Gimp supports compressing/decompressing on
the fly during save/load, for this reason). But
already compressed. But it's compressed *poorly*.
The ability to losslessly compress JPEG images by 30% is proof of what I have
said all along: JPEG compression is more lossy than it is compressive; that
is, its compression is inefficient, substantially more lossy than other
formats at comparable compression ratios. It has the worst and most
noticeable artifacts, at any given compression ratio, of just about any
format known to man. MP3 is almost as bad, and I wouldn't be surprised if
a comparable study of that format found a way to compress it 30% or more too.
> Does anyone know what happened to fractal image format files (.fif) and
> why they never took off?
Fractal compression is difficult to generalize for all possible images. It's
in the same category with vectorization (e.g., make an
render to a bitmap for display --
bytes, but it compresses really well, much better than the equivalent
rendered bitmap would do) or raytracing (make a scene description and let
it render to a bitmap for display): yeah, it's going to be a lot smaller
than the resulting bitmap would be in any format, and look better than a
lossily-compressed one such as a JPEG, but you can't easily take an arbitrary
photo and turn it into one.
I'll have you know, my parents were married for over a year before I was born.