MS Proposes JPEG Alternative 633
automatix writes "Microsoft's new competitor to the omnipresent JPEG format has been shown at WinHEC and is discussed on CNET. The Windows Media Photo format has many promises associated with it. The program manager is claiming 'We can do it in half the size of a JPEG file.'. While 'the philosophy has been that licensing should not be a restriction', it is interesting that the specification requires a click-through agreement to even read it."
Ummmm why? (Score:5, Interesting)
But the fundamental issue is that if Microsoft was being truly open and supportive of commonly used standards, this compression format would not require any click through agreement whatsoever to implement and would not require Windows Media Photo.
Steven Wells, quoted in the article as saying "Licensing can kill this" is absolutely correct.
Re:Ummmm why? (Score:5, Insightful)
DRM.
(Oh, and expect PNG support in IE7 to be downgraded)
Re:Ummmm why? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's hard to see how even MS's third-rate programmers could make the PNG support worse than it is in IE6.
TEE
Re:Ummmm why? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Ummmm why? (Score:5, Informative)
I only did one Google search, but easily came up with this [macnn.com] old article from last October. I haven't really followed the case, but it's one reason why MS may have done this.
Re:Ummmm why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ummmm why? (Score:3, Informative)
There's just too many software patents out there (and too many broad ones) for MS to work their way around all of them, forgent will just buy up some company with a patent on entropy encoding & turn around & sue MS.
If jpeg patents are MS's fear, a new ima
Re:Ummmm why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ummmm why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ummmm why? (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, this explains why PNG has been crippled for so very long in IE. They didn't want PNG to gain a foothold before they could introduce their unwanted Microsoft version.
I don't know what Microsoft is thinking. Their own image format? That's the last thing they should be introducing right now. This company is full of lunatics.
Re:Ummmm why? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Ummmm why? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:not really (Score:5, Funny)
Marketing vs. Technical Gore (Score:5, Informative)
If you click on the "I accept this agreement and want to download the Windows Media Photo Specification" button, it submits "I accept this agreement and want to download the Windows Media Photo Specification", and should take you to http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/wmphotodwn.mspx? [microsoft.com]. However, I didn't verify that.
Instead, I chose to look at the HTML, and manually submitted my own prefered value via manually entering the URL: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/wmphotodwn.mspx? I_Reject_The_Agreement_Terms_and_Suspect_Bill_Gate s_Blows_Goats [microsoft.com]. I also got taken to the download page. This page contains the notice "By installing, copying, or otherwise using the software, you agree to be bound by the terms of the license agreement [microsoft.com].", and a download link to the actual specification document at http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/6/a/16acc 601-1b7a-42ad-8d4e-4f0aa156ec3e/WMPhotoSpec_v09.do c [microsoft.com]....
Oops.
Now, while I Am Not A Lawyer, I submitted my rejection of their license terms, so I'd argue in court I shouldn't be bound by them; and since this is a specification, and not itself software, I would also argue that the notice on the page I reached is moot. I suppose the case could be made that since Word macros are a turing-complete programming language, the word document is software, so I thought I'd look through using "less" to be on the safe side. Lo and behold, there is another license embedded:
Of course, if someone at a unix command prompt incanted something clever (say, curl -o Bill_Blows_Goats.txt -C 8261 http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/6/a/16acc 601-1b7a-42ad-8d4e-4f0aa156ec3e/WMPhotoSpec_v09.do c [microsoft.com] — and don't forget to remove the Slashdot inserted spaces) the Microsoft server would only give them the meaty parts (albeit in a form even OpenOffice would probably gag on), and omit the license. I'd be amused to hear the opinion of a Real Lawyer as to how binding the agreement co
Re:Marketing vs. Technical Gore (Score:3, Informative)
So, you know it's a loophole, Microsoft knows it's a loophole -- I bet the judge will know too, and shoot it down. I don't really know the answer, but I suspect that you would stand up and say,
Re:Ummmm why? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Ummmm why? (Score:5, Funny)
Someone should change that to: "By accessing, using or providing feedback on these materials, or attempting to sue anyone over these materials you agree to the to give the person who altered this document $37,000,000,000 in US currency." And then promptly distribute it widely.
By the way, anyone replying to, reading, commenting about, or in any way accessing the material in this post; including but not limited to moderating, meta-moterating, storing in a database, retrieving from a database, viewing in a web browser, including it in or making a reference to it in a legal document, or accidentially glancing at this post agrees to send $100 to me for each occurance.
Re:Ummmm why? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ummmm why? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ummmm why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Like, duh.
Re:Ummmm why? (Score:5, Informative)
If anyone is interested and wants some not-so-light reading, check out http://foulard.ece.cornell.edu/publications/chand
It'd be awesome if someone made a compressor for regular images using this technique.
Re:Ummmm why? (Score:5, Informative)
Imagine you have a back and white image which is pure white noise. Consider what a single horizontal line of that image would look like if you drew it as you would a sound wave, with the bright pixels being high, and the dark pixels being low.
As you step from one pixel to the next, you could have a change of up to 255. There's no predictable pattern. The "frequency" of this noise is high, because the potential difference from one pixel to the next is great.
Now imagine that you apply a smoothing filter to this line of noise, and bring the changes from one pixel down. That is what you get if you blur an image. Now the max differences from one pixel to the next is much lower. The frequencies in a blurry image are low.
There's other ways to consider the frequencies of an image as well. In Wavelets, you would scale the image down to 2x2, and this would be one layer of the image. Then you'd scale it down to 4x4, and scale up the 2x2 image with bilinear filtering and subtract it from the 4x4 image. The 4x4 difference image now represents a different set of frequencies than the 2x2 image did. You store the difference because what you're interested in is the frequency of the 4x4 layer. You want to add that frequency on top of the 2x2 layer when you reconstruct the image, and if you have that "frequency" seperated out, you can compress the data better.
Another way of looking for frequencies in an image is to seperate the image into bitplanes. I think TIFF does this, because it comrpessed the image about the same as seperating the image into bitplanes then compressing with zip. Anyway the idea here is to take all the first bits of each pixel and stick them one after another, and then stick the second bits of all the pixels one after the other... You'll end up with 8 images this way, and you'll find that the image with the highest bits is easily recognizeable and has clear sharp edges, but when you get to the image with the lowest bits, all you have is noise. If you discard that noise when reconstructing the image then you will get banding in the image, but you could in theory interpolate the values of the band above to fill in the noise. You'll lose noise in the image though so stuff will look smoother than it did. Wavelet does somethign similar when it discards the differences and smooths the portions of the image that are in between sharp edges.
Re:Ummmm why? (Score:3, Insightful)
It is easier to explain with sound first.
Imagine how a recording of your voice looks, when converted to an image of a sound wave.
This waveform has peaks and valleys. If we take a triangle wave (
Re:Ummmm why? (Score:3, Interesting)
Generally when you're talking about signal processing and you mention a circular transform it means that the transform assumes your last sample and first sample are adjacent... like the old video games where if you flew off the right side of the screen you'd appear back on the left side.
Fourier (and DC) transforms are circular (they're basically circular convolutions). That can obviously lead to artefacts on the edges of the patch you're transforming because
Re:Ummmm why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not?
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with proposing another file format. The current formats we have now or in the future are never going to be good enough and there will always be room for improvement.
Having said all that, I agree with the parent comment in the fact that licencing will make or break this format and the click-through agreement doesn't bode well.
Half right (Score:3, Informative)
Or they wanted alpha channels and greater bit depths and better compression options.
ZIP is good enough. RAR and 7z (and bz2 and
WAV is not a compressed format. Apples and oranges.
Damn straight
MP3 is good enough. AAC is evil. (hint - the difference isn't quality, it is control)
AAC is MP4, a patented but open standard - just like MP3. Apples use of AAC in ITMS wraps the Fairplay DRM around that
Re:Ummmm why? (Score:5, Informative)
No. MP3 is MPEG-1 audio layer 3. It was part of the initial MPEG specification. It was about as good as could be done with the processing power available at the time, but used a fairly primitive psycho-acoustic model and had noticeable artefacts. The MPEG-2 specification introduced an additional way of encoding audio, the Advanced Audio CODEC (AAC), which gave significantly better compression. This was refined (new profiles were added) in MPEG-4. All of these provided significant improvement over the original.
bzip2 serves a different purpose to zip and is more of a pointless replacement for gzip
No. Gzip is a stream compressor. Bzip2 is a block compressor. You can add gzip to a stream with minimal latency. Bzip2 requires blocks of 100-900KB to work with. If you sent an IM session through bzip2, then it would add huge delays. Gzip would not. This is why gzip is used for things like HTTP - you can just add it into the output stream and decompress it at the browser's end. Bzip2, however, gives significantly better compression ratios on files, for precisely the same reason. They do not serve the same purpose (although some people do seem to persist in using gzip as if it were a block compressor).
Re:Ummmm why? (Score:4, Informative)
Objectives for Introducing a New Still Image Format
Today's file formats for continuous tone images present many limitations in maintaining the highest image quality or delivering the most optimal system performance. Windows Media(TM) Photo was designed to remove these limitations. The design objectives include:
Windows Media(TM) Photo is the only format that offers high dynamic range image encoding, lossless or lossy compression, multiple color formats, and performance that enables practical in-device implementation.
Re:Lossless AND Lossy (Score:2, Informative)
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
JPEG-LS Vs JPEG (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not
Re:JPEG-LS Vs JPEG (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, no-one supports Jpeg2000.
Re:JPEG-LS Vs JPEG (Score:5, Informative)
Re:JPEG-LS Vs JPEG (Score:5, Funny)
don't forget the hooks to allow an image to format your hard-drive/ run executables as root and maybe even give it facilities to copy your secure account/bank details and mail them out.
Re:Lossless AND Lossy (Score:4, Funny)
That's far too much work, let's just invent an entire new standard, just so our image directories look neat.
Re:Lossless AND Lossy (Score:5, Interesting)
The primary reason to favor jpg and gif over png on web pages is that png support in MSIE has not been very good. Go figure.
I mostly use Paint Shop Pro (v8.x) for image development (I started with PSP more than a decade ago). The lossless png format with layers, alpha, etc appears to be a solid format for use during image manipulation and for archiving-- but it is less convenient than PSP's proprietary format so I haven't done much with it. Yet. As I'm in the process of a very slow migration to GIMP, I expect I'll be using png more "in house". Converting my archived development images (that can run to 12 MB or more, what with all the layers, etc) to png will probably be the best way to move them from PSP to GIMP. If I can do all my development in png, then I'll be pretty certain that I can access my archived images from any image manipulation software I'm likely to use in the future (it is unlikely that I'd ever use an MS product... but PhotoShop, or something from Canon or Kodak might be in my future).
But to get back to your question-- I can't think of any reason except poor browser support for not using the png format. And poor browser support is increasingly a thing of the past (Firefox, Opera, etc are continually improving png capabilities and rendering speeds).
Re:Lossless AND Lossy (Score:3, Interesting)
PNG is really only suitable for line art...
Others in this discussion have pointed out that PNG has a truecolor mode as well as the 256 color and lower modes. The only differences I've noticed when I've been working with portraits and landscape photos in PNGs rather than JPGs are
Big claims indeed! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Big claims indeed! (Score:2)
yes, that's why gif, flash, pdf, and real audio aren't popular.
Re:Big claims indeed! (Score:5, Interesting)
Flash and Real Audio are crap.
The PDF format is completely open and documented, and you arent required to agree to any licenses to use it or to write software that reads or writes it (And in fact there is quite a bit of software that does just that - you could go an entire life using PDF *without* using any software from Adobe)
Re:Big claims indeed! (Score:4, Interesting)
PDF may be open, but until it stops sucking I will continue to open a google cache version of a pdf before I will open one directly.
You seem to be confusing the crappy software you are running with a file format. Internet Explorer sucks at properly rendering HTML and is full of security holes. Is that the fault of HTML or the fault of MS who wrote the program and users who don't download a better browser?
Download a decent PDF reader already.
Re:Big claims indeed! (Score:3, Informative)
Is JPG open? (Score:2)
However, JPG isn't an open standard, is it? Isn't it controlled by proprietary licenses as well?
Re:Is JPG open? (Score:3, Informative)
JPEG [wikipedia.org] is a standard, created by the Joint Photographic Experts Group. The problem with it is that it's entirely lossy. It's great for final images but any time you edit an image you'll lose more and more of the detail.
PNG [wikipedia.org] is a newer open standard that was created in part to address the issue of loss. Prior to PNG many people used the GIF format, which is losless as well, but GIF has licensing/patent issues. M
Re:Big claims indeed! (Score:2)
RTF seems to be open, but is not really documented, from what I know (or am I wrong here?). Any other candidates?
Alternative or Replacement? (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyway, shouldn't they be concentrating on finishing Vista?
Re:Alternative or Replacement? (Score:3, Informative)
first reaction, second reaction (Score:3, Insightful)
GIF, JPG, and PNG do everything I need -- why a new image format?
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.
Conclusion: No thanks.
boxlight
Re:first reaction, second reaction (Score:2)
Well, we were supposed to migrate to JPEG2000 a few years ago. That hasn't happened yet, for some reason. Is there even a free libjpeg-like C library for it?
*digs around in /var/lib/dpkg/*
Oh yes. libjasper. But the only major software which depends on it seems to be ImageMagick.
Re:first reaction, second reaction (Score:3, Informative)
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 --
Re:first reaction, second reaction (Score:4, Informative)
My other reaction is regarding the photography side of it. Professional photographers aren't going to stop using tiff/raw formats anytime soon, and non-pros are happy enough with jpg because they don't know or care about the format, and really just want something they can get at easily and share/print easily.
Oh, and I don't trust MS not to mess up a potentially good format (if it is that) with licensing issues or other such trickery.
Re:first reaction, second reaction (Score:3, Insightful)
Better image quality for lossy format?
Better compression for lossless format?
More than 32bit colour depth?
Layers?
There's lots of reasons for new formats.
Re:first reaction, second reaction (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, until your relatives start emailing you
I note in the license agreement that:
So you can download the spec to comment on it or to:
Obvious statement (Score:3, Insightful)
Since the above is about as likely as duck being joined by a flying pig...
I object to that (Score:2)
Another Debate (Score:5, Insightful)
But seriously, is anyone else smelling that special scent of Microsoft imperialism where their current markets aren't satiating their need to dominate? I mean, they used to make only operating systems (which took them a while to perfect) and then they made Office (which took them a while to perfect) and then they made the Xbox and now they want us to use a new photo format?
I don't mind my JPEGs taking up 2 ~ 3MB each, in fact I prefer PNG [wikipedia.org] which are small and widely supported. Granted, they're not half the size of a JPEG but--you know what?--PNG doesn't have a lawsuit history like JPEG [wired.com] & GIF [gnu.org] have.
PNG is only lossless compression so I suppose it's only natural to switch to a file format that can be either lossless or lossy & will adequately adjust performance of the 'decoding' of the file if you select lossy. After reading the articles linked in the story, it sounds like Microsoft did a good job in the algorithm for this one
Re:Another Debate (Score:3, Informative)
"Government funding should be for work that is available to everybody."
Even this is MS classic twisting of words.
Open Source work *is* available to everybody. It is so available that no one (commercial company or not) is allowed to take it and lock it up into something that is NOT available to everybody.
"The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source."
You c
Re:Another Debate (Score:3, Informative)
You do realize that JPEG can be lossless, right? Just completely skip the quantization step (or, equivalently, use a quantization matrix of ones) and you've got lossless. It's all in the Q matrix.
Re:Another Debate (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft never made only operating systems. Go learn about BASIC.
Re:Another Debate (Score:3, Informative)
*) PNGs are nice and work a lot of places, but things like their alpha channel aren't properly supported on Windows, meaning that they don't work properly eveywhere.
*) All of GIF's patents have expired by now, or were held by IBM, never enforced, and are due to expire in ~2 months. Its lawsuit history is largely irrelevant now, except as historical anectdote. You should feel free to evaluate
Even a better one (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Even a better one (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Even a better one (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Even a better one (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Png [wikipedia.org]
it exists already (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:it exists already (Score:4, Informative)
Embrace and Extend (Score:5, Insightful)
We've been down similar roads before (ActiveX, WMV etc)
No thanks.
Re:Embrace and Extend (Score:5, Funny)
Atl least they didn't call it... (Score:2, Funny)
If they can keep from killing it with DRM and licensing, I for one would love to have a photo format where the quality doesn't degrade as much as JPEG does at high compression.
Back to basics... (Score:3, Interesting)
MS has become quite big by raping standards. They're basicly picking up a product, pay for it if they have to, and start to reverse-engineer it (or something like that) and eventually come up with an own variant, thus hoping to push the original competitor out of the market (and they succeeded with that quite a couple of times, just check the history). Naturally we don't have open standards, thus tieing even more people to their products.
So my biased conclusion? Vista is going to pieces right now, the development costs are becoming staggering and new money is needed. But with big competitors like Google and Sun (to name my 2 favorites) the market has become hard. What to do? Once again copy a famous (or widely common) standard, promise to make it "bigger, better and faster" and tie the copy to your own product line. Most of the media will call it better and smoother (but they again; they'd do that with anything new) and the circus can start all over again.
One has to wonder how long MS can manage to play this game.
Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
The dominant image formats that we have are just fine: JPEG, GIF and PNG. Each one has its specific use (JPEG for photos, GIF for 8-bit or animated images, and PNG for alpha or lossless images.)
Currently, I can't think of anything new that this WMP (wimp?) format can do. Unless they can pack all this into ONE format:
1) Compression without introducing artifacts.
2) Accurate color, contrast and brightness.
3) Animation.
4) Alpha channel.
If they can squeeze that into one format, we wouldn't need 3 different formats anymore.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd really like MNG to become a widely-used standard, but I doubt that will happen. People
It is TIFF hijacked (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It is TIFF hijacked (Score:5, Insightful)
What a hack job. I would recommend anybody to stay (far, far) away from supporting this format until there is a (very) strong business case for it (Be pragmatic -- don't loose money over it, but don't help this become standard).
In summary, the MS we've come to know and love is here in full force.
Re:It is TIFF hijacked (Score:4, Informative)
Only one problem (Score:5, Funny)
Cool (Score:5, Interesting)
Jpeg sucks, this should be clear to anyone who tried to compare it [compression.ru] to Jpeg2000, for example. Unfortunately, J2k seems to be stuck, and since most browsers don't support it by default (even the upcoming IE7 and Opera 9), using this format on web is suicide.
So, if this new format performs at about J2k level, and uses less resources to do so, I'm happy MS introduced it. Due to relative suckiness of jpeg, a lot of space and bandwidth is wasted in everything from cameras to online image galleries. If MS gets the licensing right, it could be a very welcome addition to the image compression methods.
Of course, a stupid/evil license can kill either the format, or whoever tries to use it
Image quality ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Windows Media Photo processes images at 16x16 macroblocks.
Microsoft claims that Windows Media Photo offers a perceptible image quality comparable to JPEG 2000
If you use blocks, you will get block effects. While JPEG2000 don't use blocks. So I'm sceptical about that image quality claim... It might be true when you take speed rather than size into account, however.
So how are they going to force us to use it? (Score:3, Insightful)
And I don't beleive for one second that this is really "open". Microsoft would never do anything unless it benifited them somehow.
pretty pathetic (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, compression really isn't an issue with digital cameras or image storage. Among other things, the fact that most serious photographers store RAW images is a good indication of that.
Second, lumping together JPEG and JPEG 2000 as "JPEG" doesn't make sense; JPEG 2000 already has all the advantages that Windows Media Photo claims, but it's an open standard. Microsoft should implement it, as should electronics manufacturers.
Third, Microsoft is overestimating their market position and significance in the digital imaging market.
I suppose you can't fault them for trying, but this particular attempt at monopolizing the market looks pretty pathetic.
Re:pretty pathetic (Score:3, Insightful)
All that tells you is it isn't an issue for serious photographers. For me as a consumer with my £100 camera and £20 storage card it certainly is an issue
NO, no, a million times NO (Score:3, Insightful)
these two ideas, core to the net, means that Microsoft and its eely, oily ways should be barred from submitting the spec.
No EULA needed (Score:5, Interesting)
Not true. Look at the source of the page. You'll see that the "I accept" button is at actually a simple GET request to here [microsoft.com]. If you paste that into your location bar and then click the link on the right hand side of the page that comes up, you get the the spec.
I'm not sure of the legality of direct linking to their .doc file without agreeing to some nonsense EULA, but they put it on the web, so they have to expect a link here and there.
-B
Adoption is the key, so its dangerous (Score:5, Insightful)
But when MS bundles decoders with the OS, it automatically gets a huge installed base. Now how will an open format compete with that, which the users will have to download? The MS format might get adopted even if it is proprietary. Which is very very bad.
jpeg2k has no adoption is for the same reason.
Interestingly, this is where a "platform" like Firefox becomes more important. As a delivery channel, of open formats. If Firefox ever becomes the dominant browser, that will solve a lot of the distribution problems. Of course, the Firefox team will decide what to bundle, but I am sure they are nice people.
Open Arms... (Score:3, Funny)
click-through agreement (Score:3, Informative)
"MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND"
"If
"Microsoft may freely use, reproduce, license, distribute, and otherwise commercialize Your Feedback"
"You will not give Microsoft any Feedback (i) that You have reason to believe is subject to any
"Microsoft has no obligation to maintain the confidentiality
"You waive any defenses allowing the dispute to be litigated elsewhere"
"If any part of this Agreement is unenforceable, it will be considered modified to the extent necessary to make it enforceable"
from "Windows Media Photo Specification license agreement [microsoft.com].
priorities much? (Score:3, Insightful)
we have plenty of image formats that work for us, and most of us have broadband anyway.
We already have an alternative... (Score:4, Insightful)
We don't need cameras supporting an MS image format, no sir, we need cameras supporting state of the art standards in image formats, for which MS brings nothign new with this move.
**shrug** for real (Score:3, Interesting)
The amazing, unbelievable thing made me "shrug" is they have the face to use "professional" word. I shouldn't RTFM really.
Professionals use RAW. RAW you hear me Microsoft? Also they use TIFF for transport. That is the established non lossy standard with some weird extensions, file variations. That is also why professional photographers will be the first Blu Ray recorder customers.
Nobody, nobody can dare to lose a PIXEL, single PIXEL. That is how you work in professional World.
Dear BillG if you are reading this: FIRE whoever came with that idea. Even Microsoft does not deserve to be robbed like that.
And people here (at geek sites) joked when Allume managed to come up with a lossless jpeg compressor. The camera manufacturer and memory manufacturer CARTEL insists on using JPEG , that is how you sell people 1 gigabyte memory cards but it is up to customer asking for jpeg 2000 format on equipment they buy.
So, there is still JPEG, one company (one of their interns I heard) managed to compress it by 30% levels and people joked about them. http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01
Here is World's billions of dollars company coming up with a lossy format for PROFESSIONALS. I can only *shrug* sorry.
Please Microsoft, introduce your "format" to professionals who has nothing to do with your businesses and watch them laugh at you.
Even end users know RAW format.
Yeah, Mk... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yeah, Mk... (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/ip/tech/fat.asp [microsoft.com]
Will we need compression in the future (Score:3, Interesting)
Licensing should not be a restriction? Try FAT (Score:4, Informative)
MS Open 'pick your product name or service' (Score:4, Interesting)
It would be an interesting list to see just how often Microsoft claims one if its products are "open" or names a product/feature with the "open" name...
Microsoft Open Packaging
Microsoft Office Open XML Formats
Microsoft Open License Program
Microsoft Open Volume Licenses
Microsoft Open Academic MS Open License 6.0 Academic Edition
Microsoft Open Database Connectivity ( might be ODBC related and might not count )
Microsoft Open License Value
MICROSOFT OPEN SQL SERVER 2005 ENTERPRISE EDITION
Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Open Text ( included since they seem to be VERY close to MS )
Microsoft Open Source Software Lab ( explains why MS Marketing Corp is using 'open' so much )
There's probably much more but wow, I really didn't think it had gone THIS far.
LoB
SAT question (Score:4, Funny)
A) Pitbull : Beelezebub
B) 9mm : Howizter
C) Dog shit : Milwaukee Sewage System
D) All of the above.
Hello new feature, same as the old. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:JPEG 2000 (Score:5, Informative)
JPEG 2000 is not widely supported in present software due to the perceived danger of software patents on the mathematics of the compression method, this area of mathematics being heavily patented in general. JPEG 2000 is by itself not license-free, but the contributing companies and organizations agreed that licenses for its first part - the core coding system - can be obtained free of charge from all contributors.
So basically, it's free for the moment, but who knows if it'll stay that way.
Re:JPEG 2000 (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:People are voting for Microsoft! (Score:3)
I was right there with you up until your final example. When I read, "...I can, for example, edit text files far quicker in Vi than I can in Notepad." I thought to myself, "What?" Obviously a user can download vi, or VIM or some such variant or even a completely different text editor for Windows that will give them the same functionality, of the text editor, that you have. Now there are real benefits to running Linux over Windows. You could have said, "when editing text, I'm edit text more quickly using Vi,