Juno (free e-mail service) issued a new TOS effective March 13, 2001, which allows them to use their subscribers' equipment in a similar manner to the SETI@home project:
2.5. You expressly permit and authorize Juno to
(i) download to your
computer one or more pieces of software...
(ii) run
the Computational Software on your computer to perform and store the
results of such computations, and
(iii) upload such results to Juno's
central computers during a subsequent connection, whether initiated by
you in the course of using the Service or by the Computational Software... Juno may require you to leave your computer
turned on at all times, and may replace the "screen saver" software that
runs on your computer while the computer is turned on but you are not
using it...
Though interestingly, Pillsbury claims that the first use of the trademarked "Bake-Off" term was Mar 31st, 1995. IANAL, but could one argue that the term was already a commonly used/well known phrase in the English language.
It's in my 1976 Webster's 3rd International Dictionary, which identifies it as a "service mark".
A typical page of the British Museum rendition seems to be about 60kbyte JPEG, barely legible, with heavy JPEG artifacts. The German work is much higher resolution, typically 500 kbyte JPEG, and quite legible.
Here's a question: anyone know how to turn off the use of gamma on a PNG? I love png's (smaller and more color depths than gifs) but IE and Mozilla both use the gamma setting and it ends up looking totally different from Netscape or a non-gamma'd GIF, even on the same monitor. My only solution so far has been to save the image as a PNG, quit the gimp, edit.gimp/gimprc to set gamma-correct equal to 0.4, restart gimp, load the PNG, and then save it out again.
pngcrush -replace_gamma.4 -ext _g04.png *.png
If pngcrush isn't already on your system you can get it from
pmt.sourceforge.net
Fifteen minutes of voice compressed with realaudio is under a meg and sounds almost exactly like the original, while MP3 sounds very poor to get the file that size.
If you want poor quality, you could use a phoneme-based compression and compress about 15 hours in about a meg, assuming 2-byte phonemes, 10 phonemes per second. That would not be "voice compression" but "speech compression", though.
To be Obi-Wan and train some young jedi knights one can assume a mentor role instead of a management role. It doesn't help much with the paycheck but can be a lot more satisfying.
What has the open source community produced, especially recently, that could be patented? That is to say, what original inventions can OSS claim as its own?
PNG's 2D "adam7" progressive display
PNG signature that allows you to catch
and identify common transmission errors by the
time you've read the first 8 bytes (JPEG-2000
has adopted this method, too)
PNG's chunk safe-to-copy mechanism
DEFLATE compression, used in PNG and GZIP
Possibly PNG's adaptive filtering method
All published as RFCs to establish prior
art (RFC 1950, 1951, 1952, 2083)
How many of you really look over a binary before you install it? Do you just rpm a package and then run it? What do you have to lose from running this random binary?
1) IMO, It's not a good point at all. It's correct that only a minority of ppl care, but that's no reason to remove the choice. It is very important to some people. If there is to be one single standard (god forbid) then it should cater for everyones needs, not just most peoples.
Also, people who don't examine the source can take comfort from the fact that they are installing from a source that the public can examine for security problems.
As early as possible if not sooner. Have a look at pmt.sourceforge.net/exif (a project for storing Exif camera data in PNG files) which I released several days ago before writing a single byte of code. Code writing won't start until the project is specified.
My family's mail-order pharmacy has a similar notice.
CONFIDENTIALITY NOTE This e-mail contains confidential information from [snip], and is intended solely for the use of the individual named on this transmission. If you are not the intended recipient, you are notified that disclosing, copying, distributing or taking any action in reliance on the contents of this information is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail, to prevent future transmissions like this, please notify [snip] by forwarding this e-mail to the following address [snip]@[snip].[snip].
It appears at the bottom of the message (at the top would of course be better).
As another poster wrote, using PGP would make more sense.
Rootsweb provides free web hosting, subsidized by a banner that they insert at top and bottom of each page. It's for noncommercial/non"adult" use only. It started out being for genealogy but now allows material on most topics. See freepages.rootsweb.com
The PNG format has a new (January 1999) chunk called "iTXt" that conveys text in the Unicode UTF-8 character set.
What's different about Unicode? For one thing, at one point we were thinking of developing a chunk that could contain a graphical font (images of symbols) which would be easy to do in ASCII (256 pointers into the table) but was complex enough to do with large character sets that we gave up.
Partly because GZIP is under GPL. Mostly because CompuServe recognized the technical superiority of PNG and dropped their "GIF24" (gzip-based GIF) project and threw their support behind PNG in early 1995.
"MIME type - image/png. If PNG images on your server show up as broken images within web pages and as gobbledygook text when referenced directly (i.e., as standalone URLs), you probably don't have the MIME type set up correctly. On the other hand, if they show up correctly for MSIE and some versions of Netscape but not others, you're probably running Microsoft's IIS server. Technically it's a bug in older versions of Netscape (versions 4.04 through 4.5), but consider switching to Apache anyway..."
This is FUD. PNG's working in IE as opposed to Netscape when served by IIS is probably caused by a miss-configured web-server. And don't tell me that Apache can't be miss-configured either.
Like the article said, it's due to a Netscape bug. Specifically, it was due to a missing comma in Netscape's "accept" header, which caused IIS to refuse to serve PNGs. What Netscape sent, up to version 4.51, was
I don't know why (or if) apache wasn't affected by the bug, but perhaps apache was accepting whitespace as a separator when it interpreted the accept header.
I suppose it would also refuse to send image/pjpeg, which was also combined into the single "image/pjpeg image/png" acceptable item.
"alpha value" has been used for a long time as the name for the transparency value associated with a pixel (R,G,B,alpha). The PNG group did not make that up--see the book "Computer Graphics Principles and Practice" by Foley, van Dam, Feiner, and Hughes, for example.
The results bring up some more interesting questions: In what circumstances is GCC faster then MSVC, and why?
On a Pentium II/MMX, gcc 2.7.2.1 (fairly old now) generates a faster-running zlib (compression library) than MSVC++6.0 Standard Edition. I don't know how the Professional version fares, but I presume it would be a lot faster.
More to the point, why is PNG support so pitiful? Maybe if it was defined by standard PNG/1105/ISO-6011-GRAF everyone would have stood up and taken more notice of it. Heck, maybe the responsible thing for the committee to do would be to endorse PNG as it's favoured lossless compression format...
They did. There is an ISO/IEC spec in final draft:
FCD ISO/IEC 15948, Information Technology - Computer Graphics and image processing - Portable Network Graphics (PNG): Functional Specification
>What I always wanted was an addition to the tag in html where you specify an identically sized >greyscale JPEG as your alpha channel, so that img tag loads two jpegs, one with fill, one with >alpha, since JPEG doesn't support alpha channels it should.) > >is there any other format that supports jpeg compression and alpha channels? (besides.PSD, >which was never meant for -really- small file sizes...)
Yes, JNG (JPEG Network Graphics, a part of MNG) supports a JPEG image plus a PNG-encoded alpha channel.
Look for the JNG specification at http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/
Slashdot Mirror
www.juno.com/corp/news/supercomputer.html.
I couldn't find the TOS anywhere on their site; it's mailed to subscribers after they join.
2.5. You expressly permit and authorize Juno to
Though interestingly, Pillsbury claims that the first use of the trademarked "Bake-Off" term was Mar 31st, 1995. IANAL, but could one argue that the term was already a commonly used/well known phrase in the English language.
It's in my 1976 Webster's 3rd International Dictionary, which identifies it as a "service mark".
I wrote: A typical page of the British Museum rendition seems to be about 60kbyte JPEG, barely legible
My mistake. There are two levels of thumbnails. Click on the 60k JPEG to get a 900k JPEG which is indeed high resolution and legible.
A typical page of the British Museum rendition seems to be about 60kbyte JPEG, barely legible, with heavy JPEG artifacts. The German work is much higher resolution, typically 500 kbyte JPEG, and quite legible.
Here's a question: anyone know how to turn off the use of gamma on a PNG? I love png's (smaller and more color depths than gifs) but IE and Mozilla both use the gamma setting and it ends up looking totally different from Netscape or a non-gamma'd GIF, even on the same monitor. My only solution so far has been to save the image as a PNG, quit the gimp, edit .gimp/gimprc to set gamma-correct equal to 0.4, restart gimp, load the PNG, and then save it out again.
.4 -ext _g04.png *.png
pngcrush -replace_gamma
If pngcrush isn't already on your system you can get it from
pmt.sourceforge.net
Fifteen minutes of voice compressed with realaudio is under a meg and sounds almost exactly like the original, while MP3 sounds very poor to get the file that size.
If you want poor quality, you could use a phoneme-based compression and compress about 15 hours in about a meg, assuming 2-byte phonemes, 10 phonemes per second. That would not be "voice compression" but "speech compression", though.
To be Obi-Wan and train some young jedi knights one can assume a mentor role instead of a management role. It doesn't help much with the paycheck but can be a lot more satisfying.
and identify common transmission errors by the
time you've read the first 8 bytes (JPEG-2000
has adopted this method, too)
art (RFC 1950, 1951, 1952, 2083)
For example:
.net to .ne.us and .com to .co.us,
BERKELEY.CA.US
PORTLAND.WA.US
Last time I heard, Portland was in Oregon...
Or has this got something to do with plate tectonics?
No, it is to avoid confusion with portland.org. Similarly, to avoid confusion with the proposed relocation of
OMAHA.KS.US
DENVER.WY.US
How many of you really look over a binary before you install it? Do you just rpm a package and then run it? What do you have to lose from running this random binary?
1) IMO, It's not a good point at all. It's correct that only a minority of ppl care, but that's no reason to remove the choice. It is very important to some people. If there is to be one single standard (god forbid) then it should cater for everyones needs, not just most peoples.
Also, people who don't examine the source can take comfort from the fact that they are installing from a source that the public can examine for security problems.
Here's a small data point. I have fifteen figures in SVG format, of varying complexity,
which I rendered as PNG and also gzipped.
Total SVG size: 107944 bytes
Total PNG size: 66739 bytes
Total gzipped SVG size: 13510 bytes
> So how long until someone combines the two into
> one format, with the best of both worlds.
Take a close look at Paragraph 5.7 of the SVG
spec. It's already done.
On another note, the figures for the forthcoming ISO/IEC Standard for PNG were done in SVG, and will be converted to PNG for use on the Web.
As early as possible if not sooner. Have a look at pmt.sourceforge.net/exif (a project for storing Exif camera data in PNG files) which I released several days ago before writing a single byte of code. Code writing won't start until the project is specified.
It appears at the bottom of the message (at the top would of course be better).
As another poster wrote, using PGP would make more sense.
Rootsweb provides free web hosting, subsidized by a banner that they insert at top and bottom of each page. It's for noncommercial/non"adult" use only. It started out being for genealogy but now allows material on most topics. See freepages.rootsweb.com
The PNG format has a new (January 1999) chunk called "iTXt" that conveys text in the Unicode UTF-8 character set.
What's different about Unicode? For one thing, at one point we were thinking of developing a chunk that could contain a graphical font (images of symbols) which would be easy to do in ASCII (256 pointers into the table) but was complex enough to do with large character sets that we gave up.
"MIME type - image/png. If PNG images on your server show up as broken images within web pages and as gobbledygook text when referenced directly (i.e., as standalone URLs), you probably don't have the MIME type set up correctly. On the other hand, if they show up correctly for MSIE and some versions of Netscape but not others, you're probably running Microsoft's IIS server. Technically it's a bug in older versions of Netscape (versions 4.04 through 4.5), but consider switching to Apache anyway..."
This is FUD. PNG's working in IE as opposed to
Netscape when served by IIS is probably caused
by a miss-configured web-server. And don't tell
me that Apache can't be miss-configured either.
Like the article said, it's due to a Netscape bug. Specifically, it was due to a missing comma in Netscape's "accept" header, which caused IIS to refuse to serve PNGs. What Netscape sent, up to version 4.51, was
Accept: image/gif, image/x-bitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg image/png
I don't know why (or if) apache wasn't affected by the bug, but perhaps apache was accepting whitespace as a separator when it interpreted the accept header.
I suppose it would also refuse to send image/pjpeg, which was also combined into the single "image/pjpeg image/png" acceptable item.
If anyone could point me at some test images I'd gladly check out the "alpha transparency" issue
/
Besides the page mentioned in Greg's article, there is a very nice diagnostic set of images by Nick Lamb: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~njl98r/png-test
Also, there's my page for testing gamma support at
http://pmt.sourceforge.net/gamma_test/
"alpha value" has been used for a long time as the name for the transparency value associated with a pixel (R,G,B,alpha). The PNG group did not make that up--see the book "Computer Graphics Principles and Practice" by Foley, van Dam, Feiner, and Hughes, for example.
http://space.mit.edu/~davis/jed.html
The results bring up some more interesting questions: In what circumstances is GCC faster then MSVC, and why?
On a Pentium II/MMX, gcc 2.7.2.1 (fairly old now) generates a faster-running zlib (compression library) than MSVC++6.0 Standard Edition. I don't know how the Professional version fares, but I presume it would be a lot faster.
More to the point, why is PNG support so pitiful? Maybe if it was defined by standard PNG/1105/ISO-6011-GRAF everyone would have stood up and taken more notice of it. Heck, maybe the responsible thing for the committee to do would be to endorse PNG as it's favoured lossless compression format...
They did. There is an ISO/IEC spec in final draft:
FCD ISO/IEC 15948, Information Technology - Computer Graphics and image processing - Portable Network Graphics (PNG): Functional Specification
>What I always wanted was an addition to the tag in html where you specify an identically sized .PSD,
>greyscale JPEG as your alpha channel, so that img tag loads two jpegs, one with fill, one with
>alpha, since JPEG doesn't support alpha channels it should.)
>
>is there any other format that supports jpeg compression and alpha channels? (besides
>which was never meant for -really- small file sizes...)
Yes, JNG (JPEG Network Graphics, a part of MNG)
supports a JPEG image plus a PNG-encoded alpha
channel.
Look for the JNG specification at
http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/