Unisys Cracks The Whip 280
Their GIF patent expires in 2003, so Unisys is
getting while the getting's good, according to CNET.
They're not commenting on the record, but it seems they'll be kicking up their licensing fees. According to one source, they asked Accuweather for US$3.8million. Instead, AccuWeather forecasts switching to
PNG
next month (insert sound effect of
burning GIFs.)
Update: 04/19 09:44 by J : I just checked the bug log for Mozilla's lack of PNG alpha transparency (which has been registered and debated for over a year, and which I gather is the major factor standing between Mozilla and PNG compliance).
Three days ago, after a little tweaking, Greg Roelofs reported significant progress on the latest build:
http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/pngs-img-moz.html
It's gorgeous! Aside from the interlacing bug (bug 3195), it's the equal of MacIE 5.0. Well done, Tim and Pam! It's truly a lovely thing to behold. I look forward to seeing this bug closed out at last.
Re:Silly (Score:1)
No, it's fairly obvious that Micros~1 owns the rights to every file that has eight letters, followed by a dot, followed by a three letter extension.
Re:Silly (Score:2)
Feel free to switch to a different compression algorithm, or to use uncompressed GIFs. But don't compress your BAT files with Unisys LZW unless you've bought a license.
LZW - not just for GIFs (or breakfast) (Score:2)
It will be nice to see the LZW patent die once and for all in 2003. Celebration over the expiration of the RSA patent will probably be winding down about then
Re:Link to the patent itself (Score:2)
If anyone has any doubts about how long the life of software patents should be, read this patent; this is all obsolete.
However, it is a good argument for (a) writing new formats; (b) not writing their code in legalese.
Hmm. Sounds like a hash table to me... I wonder if there was any "prior art" for this claim, eh? Or does UNISYS own the patent on hash tables too, so they can sue my File Org. class....
<HUMOR>
See, that's the problem: since UNISYS insists on writing patents instead of software, their next-generation OS is going to be *really amazing*, but it's currently 3 billion lines of source, and loosely based on MULTICS Technology (MT):
</HUMOR>
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].
Looks like they just screwed up then... (Score:2)
Seems like Unisys is charging way too much now and everybody is sick of it. I expect GIF to be phased out by major sites that actually have to purchase a license for it. Smaller sites will probably continue to use them just because they are unlikely to be noticed by Unisys. With Mozilla supporting png, and MSIE probably supporting it too (I have no idea what the status is on MSIE, does it support png already?), sites won't have to use the GIF format anymore and Unisys will have just priced itself out of the game for the remaining years of its patent.
"upgrading" (Score:2)
You're going to send me the extra memory and a faster processor to use the newer browser? And a patch to include the features removed from older broswers?
Netscape 4 or later is laughable on this machine. BUt even with enough memory and speed, I stick with netscape 3. It's much faster. It crashes less.
Furthermore, everything after netscape 3 and the last mosaic removes featrues I regularly use: auto-image loading by window (rather than all or nothing in a slow preferences setup), and the alt- sequence to go back pages.
I don't care about newer java and javascript. I have yet to see anyone do anything useful with either of these on a web page.
Even so, I'd rather see a slightly updated netscape 3 than the bloated successors. When mozilla runs on my machine I'll try it again. Until then, it's lynx with an occasional netscape3.
Re:Yes, upgrading (Score:2)
Let's put this simply: Netscape 3 doesn't suck *as bad* as later versions of netscape and IE. As I mentioned, I don't normally use it, nor opera; they're both too bloated. I use lynx for nearly everything. Once I reconfdigured for a light background and for . on a link to open it with another copy of lynx, I was set.
and "pentium head?" . . . This obsolete thing under my desk is the first pentium I've ever been around. And it doesn't seem able to keep up with my 486/50 laptop. I doubt it could match my powerbook 180, either, but since that hasn't been assembled for years . .
\troll{ob ebay-dork: anyone want to buy the pieces
ANd I won't get into your luxurious resources; those machines that come fully assembled, include keyboards and a crt output, cycle times under a microsecond, etc . .
hack, more of a curmudgeon than usual . . .
Re:Why GIF? (Score:2)
>5.x they removed "Redneck" language from the installation program.
>(I bitterly miss the opportunity to "emmalate three clickers" and
>"floormat" my hard disk... <sigh> those were the days... )
Well since RedHat is located in North Carolina,they most likely got tired of it after being exposed to it on a daily basis.
Re:Patents (Score:2)
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Re:Please understand UniSys's position (Score:2)
Unisis did not invent and does not own GIF. They do hold the patent for LZW which was used in GIF and which was patented after being published in a journal with no notice of patent pending (legal but dubious). No action was taken for years until GIFs got popular, then actions were taken against commercial graphics programs, now individuals.
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Re:Due Diligence? (Score:2)
Re:Why AccuWeather... (Score:3)
= )
Re:Why GIF? (Score:2)
Fast forward to today. In the computer business, things that work are never changed until something new comes along. There was such a huge infrastructure in gifs that other formats have taken a while to catch on. jpegs have been well implemented for a while now in most browsers, as have other image formats. It is only recently that UNISYS has started to see gold and is trying to enforce its patents. At first they were too meak and everybody blew them off, just like everybody blew them off when they tried to enforce the patent against compress(1). Well, they didn't completely blow them off, some people went out and wrote other, non-patented algorythms in what would become gzip(1). Now that the internet is more visible, it seems that they have desided to be more agressive in trying to milk money out of this cash cow. I predict that a new format will displace .gifs in the next few months/years. It may be a format we already have, or it may be a new one.
So that's why people still use .gif files. They've been around for ever, there are a zillion tools and they are about the best supported format in a wide range of browsers. Times will change.
Re:What about /. and GIFs? (Score:2)
Re:Because it's tiny (Score:2)
No mention of JPEG format?? (Score:2)
When I see pictures and photographs posted on web sites, they're usually in JPEG format. After all, illustration programs and photo-editing programs can output to
As for PNG graphics, the issue up till now is that older web browsers will not display them. Fortunately, Netscape Communicator 4.05 and later, Internet Explorer 4.0 and later, and the upcoming Opera 4.0 will display PNG graphics files with no problems.
Re:PNG support lacking (Score:3)
It's likely that Netscape 6.0 (the final release version) will have it, and I think Internet Explorer 5.5 for Windows 95/98/NT4/2000 may have it also. IE 5.01 will display
PNG lacks animation (Score:2)
The fact is, the lack of animation in PNG is going to be the biggest obstacle to eliminating GIF. Browser support is no longer really a problem, as soon as Mozilla ships - as Microsoft provides enough PNG support to get by (though both have trouble with alpha right now, a sexy feature that gif never supported anyway). What to do? What we really should have done is be ready with MNG [mirror.ac.uk], the animated network graphics format, but it just didn't happen - I suppose it's still not ready, for some reason completely incomprehsible to me, and even if it were it's not supported in Mozilla (yet:) and certainly not in in IE.
What then to do? It's possible to use javascript to animate PNGs, but (1) not everybody surfs with Javascript enabled (2) that's not exactly a trivial change to make to a web page. Ideally we'd just want to replaces GIFs by equivalent PNGs but that's just not possible with animated GIFs.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, what to do??? I sure don't know the answer to this, but I know something needs to be done. Not only does Unisys suck with it's abusive royalty policy and sleazy submarine tactic, GIFs suck too: (1) only 256 colors (2) poor compression (3) very difficult to scale dynamically.
Suggestions?
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Re:Why GIF? (Score:2)
Incorrect. I recall reading discussions about Unisys and GIF just like this one on local BBSes in the late 1980s. Go ask Adobe how long they've been licencing LZW from Unisys so that they can support the "open" GIF format -- my guess is that it's been at least 12 years, if not more.
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Re:GIFs are Dying (Score:2)
I've noticed something... (Score:3)
Re:No mention of JPEG format?? (Score:2)
Opera [opera.com] has had PNG support since about version 3.50. The current stable version is 3.62, which has decent PNG support, and better CSS than Netscape 4.72.
Cause and Effect (Score:2)
Eventually, one must make a decision:
Should virtuosity determine popularity?
or
Should popularity determine virtuosity?
It looks like Malda has chosen the second option. I must admit, that makes it harder to respect him. Perhaps he has a reason for wanting the current "top" browsers on top? (Ownership in Microsoft and/or Netscape/AOL?) I have been using browsers with PNG support since 1995.
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Re:why go to the trouble of complaining to Malda.. (Score:2)
The issue isn't old browsers; it's shitty browsers. Browsers have supported PNG for as long as PNG has existed.
Under conditions like that, it is not unreasonable to expect people to toss their defective browsers and either upgrade them or switch to another one. If your browser is new enough to support frames and Javascript 1.0, then there's no reason it shouldn't have PNG too. (Yes, PNG is really that old, and has been supported by some browsers for that long.)
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Yes, upgrading (Score:2)
No, because you don't need them.
I currently run a web browser that includes full PNG support (including alpha transparency) on a 50 MHz processor. And it is fast. Back in '95 I ran a web browser that included partial (not full featured) PNG support, but it was a 25 MHz processor and 16 MB of RAM. So don't talk to me about hardware requirements, Pentiumhead! ;-)
PNG does not require a fast processor or a bloated browser. PNG only requires that the browser author be thoughtful enough to include it. In other words, it helps if you're not using a shitty browser made by people to whom quality doesn't matter.
This will probably explain things better, so I'll spill the beans: I'm an Amiga zealot (and the browsers I refer to are Amiga Mosaic along with the PNG datatype in 1995, and AWeb in modern times). Whoa, whoa, take it easy -- put down the fireplace poker -- this Amiga zealot isn't going to make a scene. But now maybe that will help you understand what I meant by "upgrading." Hell no, I wasn't suggesting that you switch from Netscape 3 to Netscape 4. I am suggesting that you ditch the "big two" browsers altogether and go looking around at the fringe projects (Opera?), where you're likely to find much higher quality. That's upgrading.
Me too. I included the comment about Javascript to put it into a chronological context. If your web browser can do Javascript (even though everyone disables that "feature") then it is new enough to have no excuse for lacking PNG. Javascript is newer than PNG! That's why I can't help but smirk when you sing praises about Netscape 3. And my Amiga background just widens the smirk into a full-fledged grin when you bring up the topic of bloat.
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Reminder: tool for making PNG from GIF (Score:4)
Re:Patents (Score:2)
Companies exist to maximize profit. That's the nature of the beast. People are motivated to acquire capital gains and other people are motivated to provide it. Without it, very little economy will exist. Unisys board members, chairman, and officers would all be subject to being kicked out by the stock holders (mostly institutional ones like banks, mutual funds, retirement plans, etc.) if they didn't make reasonable attempts to maximize returns. I suspect much heat has already been generated within the company for having failed to gain even better revenues on this in the past (especially for having been so ignorant about even knowing its potential in the 1980's).
The real culprit is a broken patent system. This broken patent system is responsible for every patent holder having to do the things they do, mostly because the opportunity exists. In theory, US patent law is supposed to maximize the public good through an appropriate body of laws. In practice it appears to be a drain on the economic flow, diverting huge funds into efforts, such as law suits, legal threats, and just plain negotiation, for massive numbers of trivial patents that are handed out almost as fast as AOL CDs.
The LZW patent is, perhaps, a poor example. I know how LZW works because I once wrote my own implementation of it from scratch from nothing more than Terry Welch's paper. In hindsight it might seem obvious, but at the time it was issued, I don't think it was all that much obvious.
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands or even tens of thousands, of other patents that are at least trivial, and perhaps downright phoney. Those are the patents that need to be used as examples to show that the patent system is currently practiced in a way that contradicts the national good. Patents should be reserved as a reasonable reward and profitable return for those who do put in the effort and investment to bring intellectual wealth to the nation (trade secret being an available mechanism for those who prefer not to divulge their results). There should be a genuine and beneficial gain from that invention that is likely not to have been for some time later than when it was invented. Most of the patents issued today in the US benefit only intellectual property lawyers and allow large and/or monopolistic companies to bully smaller businesses (who, incidentally, are also trying to maximize their own returns on investment no different than any other business).
Focus. This is political. The change that needs to take place is a revision of the patent law. A proper patent law in the US will reduce lawsuits, increase sharing, and make legitimate and genuine patented ideas available to all for a fair and just reward to the inventors.
Re:/. Hypocrites? (Score:2)
PNG = "Please No GIFs"
Re:off topic, but... (Score:2)
Re:.GIF Does Support More Than 256 Colors (Score:2)
The examples are here [ipal.org]. And, yes, the file sizes, especially when not compressed due to no LZW, get huge. This is not the best way to do true-color imaging, but if it needs to be done, it can be.
Re:Delay payment :) (Score:2)
Re:Unisys, gif, png, etc. (Score:2)
An agreement on how to interpret such file by Microsoft, Netscape, and Opera Software, when displaying them via web browsers, as well as by Adobe and The GIMP development team in Photoshop and The GIMP for importing purposes, suggests to me that there is a prevailing concensus that the pallette change opinion has lost out to the full color rendering opinion. Remember that neither interpretation was ever standardized by the GIF89A specification. But the defacto standard seems to be clear. Even those programs that do not apply the full color method still don't do the pallette change method either. In fact I haven't seen any such program, ever. While I will stipulate that people certainly can interpret it to mean a pallette change, I have no doubt that today the prevailing intrepretation will be the one that is actually useful for something.
Re:Please understand UniSys's position (Score:2)
The creation of an uncompressed GIF does not imply the requirement of the LZW algorithm to uncompress it. The opening of the file is irrelevant to whether actually creating an uncompressed GIF is or is not using compression. The fact that you can open the file without LZW code allows the creation to be legal since it can be used entirely without any LZW implementation. The creator is not responsible for how the viewer opens it. You could open it with a text editor or a hex dump program, for all I care. Not using LZW is not using LZW, plain and simple. If you choose to use it on your end, that's your business.
Re:Unisys, gif, png, etc. (Score:3)
No, it does not restrict you to 256 colors. That limit came about back when the best graphical displays were 256 colors and indexed, and happened to match up exactly with the number of colors GIF could encode in a single image block. So the practice came about to use exactly one image block for a whole GIF image. There is nothing preventing you from using multiple image blocks (without the animation extension which isn't part of the official GIF standard). IE 3-5, NS 3-4, Opera, and Mozilla all display things correctly (IE fails to print correctly).
There are plenty of reasons not to use GIF, but a limit of 256 colors is not one of them. Such limits exist only in those programs (the majority, unfortunately) that implemented GIF by reusing tired old code over and over from the 256 color display days (e.g. 1989).
You can see non-compressed and true-color GIFs here [ipal.org] and get free GPL non-LZW code to produce your own here [ipal.org].
Why AccuWeather... (Score:5)
It just dawned on me. Unisys [unisys.com] and AccuWeather [accuweather.com] are competing providers of weather data, such as value added weather radar feeds. So my suspicion is that this may be more than just trying to get huge royalties. It may also be to try and cripple a competitor. I didn't see any mention of this in the CNET article [cnet.com], but I think it's important enough to bring up. It may even be relevant and further show why so many patents are really bad tools to put in the hands of business. It could help explain why they wanted so much from AccuWeather [accuweather.com].
PNG has no animation support (Score:2)
Nope. You're thinking of the wrong thing. PNG doesn't multi-images. Take a look at the PNG web site's intro page [cdrom.com]. It says:
You want animations, you want MNG. Of course, animations should go away completely and totally for all time, but that's just my opinion...
-B
Re:why go to the trouble of complaining to Malda.. (Score:2)
This is so NOT true. You're thinking of trademarks, which must be vigorously defended or they can fall into the public domain (like yoyo, or aspirin). If you hold a copyright or a patent, you own it until it expires or you willingly give it up. You can not lose it through nonenforcement. If what you say were true, then Unisys could not now enforce their patent now after years of letting everyone think it was in the public domain.
As usual, IANAL, but I recently consulted with one over this very issue, and this is what he told me.
why people don't use arithmetic coding (Score:2)
it's true that AC is closer to optimal than huffman coding. but by optimal we're talking about a particular kind of information theoretical optimal, having to do with generating output bits with maximal entropy, that is completely different from "generates the smallest files" optimal.
why people still use huffman coding instead of arithmetic coding in almost all applications:
(1) AC is slower and more complicated than Huffman
(2) the patent issues suck hard (eg JPEG can use AC instead of Huffman as a backend, but nobody bothers because of licensing)
(3) the gain is small enough that it's usually not worth the effort
the idea that people should start with AC or Huffman coding and then build a statistical model is profoundly silly. while it's true that a statistical model *exists* that will give you theoretically optimal compression, determining what it is, let alone computing it, is far, far more trouble than it's worth in even mildly complicated cases. instead, you put the data through an invertable transform first, to 'decorrelate' it and simplify the statistical model into something you can deal with. it's much easier to put the transform before the entropy coding instead of inside the statistical model.
this is how all modern compression algorithms that I can think of work (transforms in parenthesis): gif, pkzip, gzip, and friends (lempel-ziv), bzip (burrows-wheeler), jpeg (2d discrete cosine), mp3 (filterbanks and scalefactor tricks), aac (filterbanks, modified discrete cosine, prediction, and other tricks),
of course there's extra magic that happens inside lossy formats.
damn, i'm offtopic. must be late.
What about /. and GIFs? (Score:5)
GIFs from the front page:
http://images.slashdot.org/title.gif
http://images.slashdot.org/greendot.gif
http://images.slashdot.org/topics/topicmozilla.
http://images.slashdot.org/topics/topichumor.gi
http://images.slashdot.org/topics/topicprivacy.
http://images.slashdot.org/topics/topicbe.gif
etc...
--
GroundAndPound.com [groundandpound.com] News and info for martial artists of all styles.
Re:New software shouldn't use GIF (Score:2)
* Macromedia Fireworks (uses PNG as its internal format but still lets you save to GIF)
* Corel PHOTO-PAINT 9 (the GIF format doesn't appear in the File Format box unless you convert to 256-colors, which in some cases ruins em, and also allows users to get used to not using GIF)
* The GIMP (same as Corel PHOTO-PAINT, as you need to convert to 256 colors before GIF will be ungrayed)
--
Vote for mind21_98 this November!
Look at it ANOTHER way... (Score:2)
Yes.. I personally think they are being silly.. BUT...
EVERYONE KNOWS that unisys has a patent on
People use it ANYWAY, defiantly, saying 'they won't come after me'. Well.. YOU KNEW! So if it seems like 'aww.. that's not fair, for them to ask for payment now..' well.. go ASK YOUR LAWYER! It *IS* totally fair. That's how it works.
Perhaps I'm clued out but.. (Score:2)
As long as the tools that made the gifs were legit, and the tools that display them are too.. it's just data.
That's not the point. (Score:2)
Re:Let me guess... (Score:2)
Unisys didn't develop the GIF format. Compuserve did. However, Unisys owns the patent to LZW compression, which the GIF format uses to make image files smaller. FWIW, the compression algorithm used in PNG is unencumbered by patents and is better to boot.
You point is valid though -- I doubt the negative press of holding the web hostage for infringement is worth the price.
Re:Patents (Score:3)
I disagree. PNG is at least as easy to implement as GIF or JPEG with the libpng [acid.org] library. It is available as source, compiles out of the box for just about any platform. The license is very unrestrictive -- similar to the BSD license.
Re:Does anyone know what the hell Unisys does anyw (Score:2)
Worked for them over the summer... Banged head with all sorts of corporate types over the Linux/Free Software set of ideals and they just couldn't seem to comprehend. They don't even realize the screwing they're taking from Microsoft (at the corporate/upper management levels, at least). They're "Enterprise Partners" w/M$. Supposed to have access to the NT source code last May. They didn't get it till the day I left in August and even then, only two people in the whole division was "licensed" to look at it...
-------------
/. Hypocrites? (Score:2)
(PNG == "Good Thing")
Jesse
Re:I've noticed something... (Score:2)
Me, I use netscape 4.7. I can't be bothered with 4.72 (where is the Changelog??) and as for mozilla / NS6b1, eurgh!!
That said, both the above support PNG to some extent. (Check the image at the TL of my homepage. If it's "broken" or a solid pink block then your browser doesn't understand transparent PNGs. Mozilla and IE4/5 appear to, though.)
And of course, lynx supports png! (Through the 'alt' modifier
~Tim
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Re:GIF won't die without an animation replacement (Score:2)
And I do think one or more wrongly displayed images can hurt the usefulness of a site. If transparency fails all over the page, it looks ugly. And unnecessary, such a bug shouldn't be too hard to fix.
GIF won't die without an animation replacement (Score:3)
The only way to really let GIF die (IMHO) is to create a free MNG library that can be easily included everywhere (like libpng) and put it into all free or semi-free browsers like Netscape, kfm, whatever. Once web site creators start using it, users will ask for MNG support (Ma, the animation doesn't display!) and IE will have it as well. Best thing would be a free GIMP-like animation editor...
Re:Why GIF? (Score:2)
Take a look at that page with both Netscape and IE5. I had to switch _back_ to
This is a problem for any overpriced producer... (Score:2)
GIF is unimportant in the long run. Let them thrash; we'll invent better, and freer, formats.
Cheers,
KenB
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Re:Why AccuWeather... (Score:2)
In addition to this, Unisys will be losing its bread and butter in the weather area at the end of September when its contract with NOAA expires to be one of three exclusive providers of radar data from the NEXRAD system[NOAA's doppler radars]. NOAA is going to start providing the data free on the net at that time. Unisys, WSI and Kavouras contracts all expire at the same time. They all made boatloads of money off of this. AccuWeather will be in the weather business long after this. Unisys may slowly bow out.
Unisys is evil (Score:5)
As my library is freely available and the entire project is non-profit, I figured I might be able to get a license at no cost, as the Unisys page on LZW implies this is possible. So I e-mail off my license request. They send me back a questionaire about the nature of my software. I fill out and send it back. They e-mail me back, saying yeah we can license it to you for a fee, just tell us where to fax the forms. I reiterate the non-profit nature of my software and ask just how much the licensing fee actually is. They e-mail back 5000$, and that a) they can't license it to me anyway as they are only allowed to license to companies, not individuals and b) that users of my library, in order to be legal, would also need to license their use of LZW seperately (most likely for another 5000$).
So there you have it. Unisys is evil and this damn patent nonsense must stop.
Re:Unisys is evil - so nail them (Score:2)
Patent issues are civil issues, copyright (when more than 10 programs are involved) can be criminal -- thanks to the SBA (which Unisys helps fund)
Re:Unisys is evil (Score:2)
for that matter, I thought any GIFs produced with a licenced editor were themselves licenced - unless the goalposts were moved again. in any case, here is a good time to push for better PNG [cdrom.com] support in browsers....
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Re:PNG support lacking (Score:3)
1) A squid (or other www proxy) plugin that converts all pngs it encounters to uncompressed gifs on the fly, allowing all browsers to see the images, but also allowing web developers to start using pngs now without worrying. Once browsers catch up, the new plugin can be deleted.
2) A squid plugin that converts all gifs to pngs. Meaning nobody will be able to see any images and pressure will increase on the browser developers to improve png support.
Okay, so point 2 wasn't serious, but point 1 _could_ help if enough people did it.
Re:What about /. and GIFs? (Score:2)
When has slashdot advised anyone to burn gifs? Slashdot has reported burn all gifs day. They've reported Microsoft's anti-trust trial too, but that doesn't mean they're advising you to violate anti-trust laws.
Re:Hope for PNG? (Score:2)
//rdj
GIF is silly anyways (Score:2)
*shrug* it's late, I shouldnt be posting
-GuS
Re:Look at it ANOTHER way... (Score:2)
The fact is, Unisys has abused the patent system beyond all hope of sympathy.
Hopefully this will encourage standards organizations such as ISO and the IETF to adopt policies whereby only open, unencumberd algorithms can be specified in a standards document. Both RSA and MP3 have caused similar problems, though at least Fraunhoffer was never (IMO) dishonest about their patent and license restrictions.
At a higher level, a fundamental truth is that "whatever the Internet wants, it takes". This is not meant to imply any moral tone, it is just a fact of life. web browsers, MP3, IM, Linux, and streaming media are all examples of components that in some anthropomorphic way, the internet decided it needed. Where those technologies were freely given (Linux, IE, ICQ, WinAmp, WMP) they flourished. Where people attempted to withold them (Netscape, RSA/SSL, MP3, Real) they were taken anyway, and usually to the detriment of the companies behind them.
The moral of the story is, right or wrong, legal or not, if you try to keep something from the internet whose time has come, you are doomed to failure. Unfortunately, people want to make money, and in general, the people who gave their stuff away haven't made a whole lot of money off of it (exception: MS, who can include the R&D costs in their OS) However, the people who give stuff away have a lot more fun in the process, and eventually get bought by AOL for millions in its continuing progress towards being the only provider of content *via* those technologies on the internet...
Re:Patents (Score:2)
Yes, but governments exist to insure the betterment of their citizens. Questions of the effectiveness of any given instance aside, one way that we found works pretty well is to allow companies to compete in an open market under profit maximization goals. However, when this does not coincide with the best interests of the citizenry as a whole, people should take precidence.
High-ranking members of large corporations would love to make us think that things work the other way around, and that the goal of whole excercise is to (in the paraphrased words of a promenent software company executive) "Allow and encourage every company to compete as hard as it possibly can". This is because on an individual level, allowing large companies to stomp on the rights of "ordinary citizens" maximizes the value for those same executives, who while counting at least 7% human, do not count as a majority opition. People other than those executives who still repeat the mantras have been brainwashed into missing the point that this whole country was founded on the principle of making life better for them (along with the rest of the population)
A real problem is that in the interest of fairness, every tool the goverment has come up with to allow individuals or small companies to compete fairly against the giants (patents, copyrights, lawsuits, class action suits) has been designed to be equally available to everyone. Unfortunately, time has proven over and over, all other things being equal, a large company has the resources and influence. to more effectively use such legal tools against the very people they are (were) meant to help.
What we need to do is to stop giving the Goliaths of the world slingshots. Here is an idea for balancing out legal costs in lawsuits:
Following a suit, regardless of who wins, each party must pay to the other party an ammount equal to their total legal expenditures related to the suit. This means that
1) if I am involved in a lawsuit against any company, I am guaranteed able to afford legal costs of half that of the company.
2) If both sides of a suit spend the same amount (roughly) it all works out to a wash
3) If a company files a frivolous lawsuit against a person to annoy and harras them, then tries to spend a huge amount on insuring a favorable decision in spite of law and precident (in order to make an example of someone or set a new precident), either the individual can afford a legal defense, or they may *make* money off of it if they don't requre such substantial legal effort to avoid losing the case.
4) There would be a much higher incentive to reduce overall legal costs, reducing the load on our judicial system and hopefully allowing cases with merit more consideration by the courts.
It also would be good if patents and copyrights could only be assigned to an individual, rather than a corporation (and only the original creator or inventor), and the patent/copyright holder would be able to grant or sell non-exclusive licenses to anyone they choose. Stipulations rendering contracts requiring sale or exclusive licensing invalid, could be added. If that is too harsh, we could allow exclusive licenses, but only lasting the duration of the IP holders' employment with the licenser. This would force companies to compete for the right to license something from a person, and would reduce the desire to patent trivial ideas.
Another huge idea would be 100% socialized medical care + abolishments of all forms of insurance. If socialized medical care could be made effective, removing insurance would save more pain and suffering than anything else I can think of. It might even restore personal responsibility and reduce the "sue it" reflex in so many people.
I recognize that both of these ideas have major flaws, but perhaps they could be worked on to provide a system where David and his slingshot *could* compete with Goliath and his battle axe.
Now if someone can find a way to prevent lawyers from getting rich off of friviolous class action suits while the member of the class get nothing...
Re:Reminder: tool for making PNG from GIF (Score:2)
Re:Look at it ANOTHER way... (Score:2)
We're angered by two things:
1) While it may be legally right as of now, a patent shouldn't have been awarded for something so simple and straightforward as palleted RLE encoding with a GIF header smacked on it.
2) Even if GIF was somehow deserving of a patent, the moral issues surrounding slapping patents and extracting fees for a format that forms a good part of the Internet are quite debatable.
3) Unisys also has been known to slap companies which have used legal software with licenses for GIF to pay in turn, claiming that Internet use constitutes enough reproduction to deserve buying their own license. They're effectively charging two license fees for the same image.
So, we know very well the legal issues involved. We're saying that Unisys deserves to be cast in the same steaming sack of shit as Microsoft for unethical means of making green for corporate.
Just a few comments (Score:2)
(1) AC is slower and more complicated than Huffman
Actually good implementations are very evenly matched in terms of speed. The BIG bonus is that in arithmetic coding the statistical model only has to supply the coder the interval of the symbol to be encoded, in Huffman the statistical model is linked to the encoder so it is _much_ harder to make adaptive. Huffman sucks big time when there's one symbol, which has a probability near 1, which I can imagine happening with a good statistical model.
2) the patent issues suck hard (eg JPEG can use AC instead of Huffman as a backend, but nobody bothers because of licensing)
This I won't deny, but only in the US.
(3) the gain is small enough that it's usually not worth the effort
This is only true when you're trying to do a typical compression task with a fixed distribution and then compare AC to Huffman. In dynamic situations AC is clearly superior.
[about statistical models]
You could apply the MDL principle and use the model that gives the best compression when you take into account the space of the model and the space of the model error. This is computationally expensive.
[transforms]
The decorrelating transforms are as much ad hoc as is finding the statistical model. The transforms are actually a form of statistical model. For instance with the DCT it states that the data can be compactly expressed with the basis vectors of the DCT. The optimum linear transformation Principal Component Transform (PCT) is data-dependent. Estimating the best transform is also a statistical modeling task. Using a DCT may work well for audio/video, but it is not a general solution.
The LZW algorithm (Score:3)
LZW is a general purpose adaptive compression algorithm that can achieve the information theoretic maximum compression for a suitable source. It is based on LZ78 by Lempel and Ziv (IEEE trans. on inf. theory in -78) and modified by Welch (IEEE computer, sometime in the 80's)
The basic idea is to keep an indexed dictionary of strings seen so far (initially contains the alphabet) and then encode the index of the longest string that can be found in the dictionary starting from the current position. Then a new string consisting of the found string and the first unknown symbol (ie. not a suffix to the string) is inserted into the dictionary. So it is basically a method of replacing a string with a single symbol which references the dictionary (thus the name dictionary methods for LZ77 and LZ78). There are a number of modifications to this algorithm, for instance freezing the dictionary and flushing it at certain intervals... in practice the strings could be stored in a trie (you read right: a trie, not tree, but trie is a kind of tree).
LZW is old, nowadays people should use arithmetic coding (which is nearly information theoretically optimal in practice). IMO arithmetic coding and statistical modeling is the way to go. Basically you've got the best engine room possible (arithmetic coding) and then the problem is to add the intelligence (statistical modeling). BTW from what I gather arithmetic coding is also patented, but I don't give a fsck since I live in Europe... AC is pretty old, but it is based on an unpublished work by Elias... so finding prior art might be possible.
Re:PNG support lacking (Score:2)
Do any Windows or Linux browsers? (Honest question)
manual option (Score:2)
Granted the logo and adds (if you don't block adds them) are still there, but you can't get everything the way you like it I guess.
Re:PNG support lacking (Score:2)
How do you do that on Windows? I have the
--
Re:Please understand UniSys's position (Score:2)
Moral of the story:
(Score: -1, Offtopic)
Re:Why GIF? (Score:3)
The point he was trying to make is a) it's damn near impossible to break into the PC OS market and b) just because something is free of cost doesn't mean it's going to immediately smother the other expensive options.
#include <std_freebeer_freespeech.h>
PS. Okay, yeah, we all know the zillions of places you can buy computers with Linux installed, or FreeBSD or some multi-boot variation. But he wasn't talking to
PPS. Of course, the real enemy is NS and MS for putting piss-poor PNG support in their browsers. If they had done it right back when PNG was introduced, or at least in the 4.0 browsers when they had no excuse but their own laziness, and Unisys had already been making a fuss about the patent, so everyone knew that GIF was a dead-end. Not to mention the nerve-grating limitations of GIF. And you'd think that, in the heat of the "browser wars" someone would point out how much of a selling point full PNG support could be. But NOOOOO, It was more important to have fancy animated buttons! And adding all these ridiculous panes so we could all browse in a tiny window with an effective size of a postage stamp, which is entirely filled with an ugly, flashing, patented, animated GIF! AAARRRGGHHH!!!!
But then, maybe we should encourage Unisys. All those banner ad mongers will find that it's no longer cost-effective to pollute our screens with their bloated, garish, animated crap. Unisys could license all the banner ads off of the internet. Woo-Hoo!
(off to take my medicine)
Re:No mention of JPEG format?? (Score:2)
PNG support lacking (Score:5)
I don't think support for PNGs will become a priority for browser vendors until enough sites use them, but until the browser support is there, all those sites are potentially disfigured. There's no way I can tell a client I'm going to use an image format that might mess up their webpage. It's a catch-22, and browser developers are the ones best situated to get out of it. All that to say, PNG support needs to made a priority now.
As far as "political" considerations go, using GIFs has always been a little distasteful, but it wasn't as big an issue as it is now. Now that Unisys is pressing the issue, it't time to leave the GIF format behind.
Re:Patents (Score:2)
In early 1995, responding to the initial announcement that Unisys would be enforcing its patent (which resulted in GIF support being dropped from RIPScrip 2), Telegrafix distributed an open letter [gatech.edu] suggesting the creation of a patent-free GIF replacement using LZHUF compression, and claimed to have implimented such. Perhaps not a terribly useful idea now that PNG exists, but an interesting little historical footnote none the less.
Peace,
vilvoy
Does anyone know what the hell Unisys does anyway? (Score:2)
Because it's tiny (Score:2)
PNG has a lot more overhead than GIF. The benefits outweigh this pretty quickly, but when things get small, nothing is better than GIF. A single pixel white GIF is 35 bytes. PNG is 132. It's a small amount of data, but it adds up.
Besides, by 2003, we might be getting decent color net connected cell phones. Bandwidth will be a major issue with these.
But this isn't worth the licensing fees. The only thing worth the licensing fees is backward compatibility, and (miracle of miracles) 3 years is about the longest anyone could expect this conversion to take. Well, about 2 years before you can use PNGs everywhere, with no worries. More like 2 decades to irradicate all the GIFs from the web, but that patent's up before then.
--Kevin
Link to the patent itself (Score:2)
Unisys would like to force licensing on a much wider range of activities than they in fact can. I don't know how anyone could claim that distributing a GIF file infringes their patent. I mean, if you are not in possession of any software which implements LZW, how can you infringe?
If anyone is unsure whether this actually hurts anyone, I used to work tech support at a clip art company. We used to get people using cheap software all the time who would say, "it says unsupported file format" when they tried to import an LZW compressed TIFF.
--Kevin
Re:Patents (Score:5)
GIF is pretty simple to implement (compared to JPEG or PNG at least). So if Unisys doesn't bother enforcing the patent at first, a lot of people will pick GIF as their standard format. Then, once everyone is using GIF, and no one could even think of not supporting it, they jack up the prices.
The moral of the story: patent law needs to be amended so that you must enforce it, or lose it. You shouldn't be allowed to hide the patent until you can extort a fortune from everybody and his brother who implemented what they assumed was a free algorithm.
Incidentally, it may be possible to generate GIFs without using LZW. Supposedly, you can create a run length encoded file without using LZW that will magically get decompressed correctly by an LZW decoder. It depends on the scope of the patent.
If you used a licensed program (program that paid unisys' licensing fee, I mean, not "non-pirated") to create the GIF, you are fine. I assume accuweather is creating GIFs on the fly from a CGI script.
--Kevin
Due Diligence? (Score:3)
What I question is whether exercising this patent really does constitute due diligence. Especially exercising it the way they are now, asking $3,000,000 fees. Strikes me that there's more publicity advantage to being The Makers of the Graphic Format That The Whole Internet Uses, (akin to Cisco's "90% of the internet runs on the systems of one company, Cisco Systems" ads) than there is financial advantage gained by charging these fees.
Just my random $0.02CDN.
Johnath
Good (Score:4)
yeppers (Score:2)
Now the really big thing, from what I gather is that the
Why GIF? (Score:2)
Anyway, I have some questions maybe someone here can answer. Why hasn't everyone switched to PNG if it's free? Why pay for these licenses? Does GIF have advantages that PNG doesn't that makes it an option worth considering despite the costs? Are we just being witnesses of another marketing influenced stupid decision by IT managers or whoever is responsible for paying these licenses to Unisys?
And what about the current state of PNG? How's browser support? Graphics apps support?
p.s. I'm posting this with Mozilla M15, and yes, it seems faster to me.
Re:Why GIF? (Score:2)
But you seem to imply that switching operating systems is just as easy (and costs the same) as changing the graphic format I use on my website.
So, in this same line of thought, I guess when I draw something in Photoshop and then decide to export it to GIF or PNG I am making the same simple (or transcendental, you tell me) choice that I'm doing when I buy a new PC and decide what OS to install or, maybe, when I write something in C and then start thinking, gee, should I compile this for Win32 or for Linux? Sarcasm aside, it's clearly not the same thing! So, I concede my question should have been: Why, if it's a relatively easy thing to do AND it's free, hasn't everyone switched to PNG?
Re:What about /. and GIFs? (Score:2)
- Boycott Amazon.com!
- Open source, open source, open source
- Linux IPO frenzy and rah rahing
All these were corrected eventually, but not until after much reader ranting and sour words from Cmdr. Taco. If you really want gifs removed from
====
Re:Haven't used GIFs in years (Score:2)
[GIF is] almost as old and outdated as Microsoft BMP Bitmaps.
News flash: The GIF format is older than the BMP format. The GIF specification was originally drafted in 1987, and the current GIF specification was drafted in 1989.
The BMP format, on the other hand, debuted with Microsoft Windows 3.0 in 1990. (Previous versions of Windows had the MSP "Microsoft Paint" format. I still have some old .MSP files sitting on a moldy old 5.25" floppy disk somewhere. Ahh, memories.)
While BMP "technology" (simple raw or RLE only) is unquestionably far more outdated than that used in GIF, the BMP format itself is newer.
The real problem here is... (Score:2)
We really need to see these companies stop using file formats as weapons, and start utilizing them as ways to communicate. File formats should be open, period. It seems to me that gaming companies tend be way ahead of the rest of the industry in most trends, and the trend toward open file formats seems to be one of them. In Q3 the sounds are WAVs, the graphics are like TIFFs or something (don't remember exactly), the map format is open, and even the format they use as a container is open (in this case, uncompressed ZIPs). We'll get the rest of the industry there, but it's gonna take awhile.
Re:Unisys is evil (Score:5)
I've heard that the resulting GIF files are a bit larger than usual, but it beats paying $5K.
Re:That's not the point. (Score:2)
Obviously, you forgot to pay attention in economics class :)
Everyone uses GIF because it's convenient. Everything supports it, everyone is happy. Now, Due Dilligence requires that the officers of a corporation do what is in the best interest of the shareholders. That means making profit. If you make something more expensive, at a certain point, it STOPS being profitable, because the expense outweighs the convenience, and people switch to cheaper alternatives (PNG). This assumes, of course, that you don't have a monopoly. Therefore, it is NOT always in the best interest of the shareholders to increase prices ad nauseum, since after a point, it would be less profitable. It's in the interest of the shareholders to find the exact maximum price / maximum profit combination.
Re:Why GIF? (Score:2)
Okay... let's have a little fun with that quote, shall we?
Why hasn't everyone switched to Linux if it's free? Why pay for these licenses? Does Windows have advantages that Linux doesn't that makes it an option worth considering despite the costs? Are we just being witnesses of another marketing influenced stupid decision by IT managers or whoever is responsible for paying these licenses to Microsoft?
And what about the current state of Linux? How's browser support? Graphics apps support?
~~~~~~~
Okay, we've had enough fun...
As for PNG browser support, Netscape's supported the format since late 4.x at least, and in the graphics apps arena, both Photoshop and the GIMP support PNG images.
Re:Why GIF? (Score:2)
(I bitterly miss the opportunity to "emmalate three clickers" and "floormat" my hard disk... <sigh> those were the days... )
Re:Why GIF? (Score:2)
"Well since RedHat is located in North Carolina, they most likely got tired of it after being exposed to it on a daily basis."
I laughed my ass off when I read this one... rare is the comment that is both funny and insightful yet still languishes at (Score: 1). It's too bad moderators almost never cull through yesterday's news... :-(
Re:What about /. and GIFs? (Score:2)
Because Netscape still can't display PNGs with transparencies correctly. Except for this issue, the PNG support is pretty good.
I don't know about Internet Exploder since I don't use it...
(PNG supports transparency just like GIF does. Actually it's better since you can specify the amount of opacity any given pixel will have. This allows for some really neat effects that weren't possible before.)
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Re:What about /. and GIFs? (Score:2)
I suppose that's true. However, the current GIF images do use transparency. And what if Taco gets a wild hair up his ass and decides to change the background to green or something? Oops, gotta redo all the GIFs.
It's called an "alpha channel" and, yeah, it rocks.
Yeah, I was trying to think of that. I haven't done any graphics work in a while. But it's obvious from a design standpoint that if the /. graphics were PNGs, the shading behind the icons could be done using the alpha channel so that the background, whatever color it is, will show through. That would save a lot of work when making certain types of design changes to a site...or changing the background colors...or placing the icons somewhere they've never been before...the possibilities are endless.
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Re:Patents (Score:2)
Uncompressed GIF's are possible. LZW uses a system wwhere a number greater than 256 means a compressed or control code, and a number less than 256 means a plain colour. Uncompressed GIF's just use values less than 256. Its actually anti compressed because it needs at least 9 bits to store each value.
Don't mention it, or it'll take longer (Score:4)
I get a nice flamey email about once a week from some ass who calls me a hypocrite and slams me for not getting out a new release. My usual response is to tell them that I delay replacing GIFs with PNGs by 24 hours each time someone asks me when I'm going to do it. They'll be replaced when they're finished. And if you ask me again I'll postpone it again.
(the original quote is here [slashdot.org])
OT: What exactly does Unisys do these days? (Score:3)
Re:Patents (Score:2)
You may be pleased to know that patent law has had this feature for many a long year (it's known as "no selective enforcement"). If you believe Unisys to be guilty of this, and you care enough about it, then I suggest you try to bust their patent. This is done by means of "litigation" in what we call a "court".
Since you clearly know not one tiny thing about intellectual property law, perhaps, as a service to the community, you'd be so kind as to post links here to your other ill-informed public pronouncements, so I can audit them for stupidity. I, a lawyer, have never written a line of code in my life, for the very good reason that I don't know anything about the subject. In future, perhaps IT geeks would display the same courtesy.
Re:Patents (Score:2)
Not true on both counts -- patent law was never meant to help "little people" against "big corporations". Secondly, when "little people" have a good, patentable idea, they tend to turn into "big corporations" quite fast, through the medium of "getting rich".
It also would be good if patents and copyrights could only be assigned to an individual, rather than a corporation (and only the original creator or inventor), and the patent/copyright holder would be able to grant or sell non-exclusive licenses to anyone they choose.
This would do serious violence to the actual process of invention in teams, sponsored by companies. If you plan on developing cancer in the next fifty years, you ought to hope that those companies with enough capital to invest in developing treatments have the incentive to do so. There are many good arguments for the abolition of intellectual property rights and, indeed, for socialism. But you appear to have threaded a path between them.
Re:Patents (Score:2)
Thank you for the first death threat I have received on this or any other Internet discussion forum.
Please understand UniSys's position (Score:4)
Yu Suzuki