Microsoft's HD Photo to Become JPEG Standard? 369
Mortimer.CA writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Microsoft has submitted their HD Photo to the JPEG committee: 'Microsoft's ongoing attempt to establish its own photo format as a JPEG alternative (and potential successor) took another step forward today when the JPEG standards group agreed to consider HD Photo (originally named Windows Media Photo) as a standard. If successful, the new file standard will be known as JPEG XR.' Microsoft has made a 'commitment to make its patents that are required to implement the specification available without charge.' While JPEG 2000 exists, HD Photo has several advantages (not the least of which is a lot less CPU power is needed). Is this a big of an issue as ODF/OOXML?"
can this be the only solution? (Score:4, Interesting)
I can't for my life figure out how Microsoft or why Microsoft introduces evil into this format and standard, other than Microsoft's track record. Unfortunately, that is sufficient... I'd vote no on any of their proposals.
The future and potential for photography is huge. There are:
Microsoft makes their promise to make this free. Somehow, that just rings a tad hollow. Must we continue to be the Charlie Brown to Microsoft's Lucy?
Re:can this be the only solution? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:can this be the only solution? (Score:5, Informative)
So 1) you can't use code based on the specification in a GPL V2 or GPL V3 program, because you can't satisfy the patent clause, and 2) you can't write any program based on the specification, because Microsoft only promises not sue you for implementing the specification, not for any supporting code that you would need to write to implement the specification.
See http://fussnotes.typepad.com/plexnex/2007/01/anal
The "evil" in MS's actions: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:can this be the only solution? (Score:5, Informative)
Still, there are still ways to game an RF grant, for example, nothing stops Microsoft from supporting slightly off-standard formats in its own software and refusing to grant an RF license covering those changes to other implementors, using the argument that the original RF grant does not cover any extensions. I suppose the big question is, are other implementors free to extend the format also or does the RF grant evaporate as soon as an implementor extends the standard, perhaps in an effort to match Microsoft's own extensions? In which case the playing field would be far from level, and we have seen all too many times what happens when Microsoft manages to tilt the playing field. I simply haven't drilled into this enough to know what is true here, and no doubt, close readers will find other aspects of the grant to worry about.
Remeber FAT (Score:2)
MS has a track record of submitting its specs/patents to standards bodies and then trying to gouge people later. Look at FAT and SmartMedia for instance.
Re:can this be the only solution? (Score:5, Insightful)
They say, "One important aspect regarding the standardization of HD Photo is Microsoft's commitment to make its patents that are required to implement the specification available without charge."
"Alright, fair enough," I think, but then I wonder: "So, what's the application process like, and what are the licensing requirements?"
Might they say something like, "Oh, it's available free of charge, but you can't use it in an OpenSource / FreeSoftware project, because that's uncontrolled, there's no telling what liabilities we'll be exposed to, for letting you implement this,
Maybe that's "the trick" here?
Deja GIF. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Deja GIF. (Score:4, Interesting)
Websites still use gif quite a bit. And the patents have expired, so there's no real reason not to anymore...Personally, I prefer png, but for some reason png hasn't really caught on. I imagine because graphic design schools break web graphics up into 2 categories, full-color jpg, and line-art gif.
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Where does PNG fit into the paraidgm? I mean, I know it's got more advanced alpha transparency than gif, and I think that it's based on plain ol' bitmaps as opposed to compression, so it seems like a strict successor to GIF...
However, gif still has some legs up on it, namely ubiquity and the fact that animated PNGs support doesn't seem to be remotely common.
So is this basically correct? Anything I'm missing?
Re:Deja GIF. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Deja GIF. (Score:5, Informative)
PNG was only ever intended to be a format to store image data, not animation data. The use of GIF animations wasn't very widespread when the GIF LZW patent crisis prompted a group of developers to work on the PNG specification. MNG is the sister format, is specifically intended to cover animation applications, and builds upon the PNG specification. (Without glancing at the specs, I recall that a PNG is more-or-less a valid MNG file, but not the other way around -- MNG is therefore a superset of PNG. Although I worked on the PNG spec, I have no real connection to the MNG folks.)
APNG was an effort that originated outside the PNG/MNG group, and it failed to be ratified as an extension to PNG -- mainly because it goes contrary to the mission of PNG, which is to be a standard for storing single images. The rejection of the APNG proposal happened earlier this year, according to the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]. Apparently undaunted, the Mozilla folks stuck APNG support into Firefox, but who knows if it'll stay there. The format extensions for APNG are officially unsupported and non-standard, making Firefox the lone holdout on this. Why they couldn't just support MNG is anyone's guess.
Basically, by the time animated GIF became a serious issue, the PNG spec was very close to frozen, and the core spec authors and library developers successfully argued that PNG should be kept solely for image storage. (During PNG development, a THMB chunk was proposed to store a thumbnail version of the full image. This was killed for similar reasons to the APNG extensions.) I tend to agree that stuffing animation features into a file format intended for still images makes the decoder more complicated, and doesn't offer a very optimal solution for animation. The whole notion of animated GIFs never sat well with me either, even though they proved to be popular with HTML jockeys.
Further reading seems to indicate that Mozilla's developers had MNG support, but yanked it in favor of APNG support. I can only guess the motivations, but sounds to me as though they wanted to blaze their own path for political/personal reasons, not necessarily sound technical reasons.
Re:Deja GIF. (Score:5, Informative)
PNG was always intended to replace GIF and be a "better GIF than GIF." PNG is also a more-than-adequate replacement for most common TIFF variants, because you can do almost everything that TIFF can do, but with less complexity (fewer choices for implementation, simpler format, and no optional format features you can't live without that some readers may choose to ignore) and less ambiguity in the spec. The less ambiguity bit is important, since the TIFF spec's ambiguity is one of the main reasons that TIFF files written by one application may not be readable by another application -- even if both apps support the same TIFF extensions.
PNG has compression -- it uses deflate (LZ77 + Huffman coding) instead of GIF's formerly-patent-encumbered LZW algorithm. The key here is lossless compression, so unlike bog-standard JPEG, PNG images are great for archiving exact image data. Radiologists like the fact that PNG can store grayscale images with 16-bit-per-pixel accuracy, in complete image fidelity.
Yes, PNG has better alpha channel support than GIF (although it has a special palette-based transparency feature similar to GIF89's transparency, mainly to ease the transition from GIF to PNG). It also has a better interlacing scheme, for progressive rendering of images when your data pipe is constrained. Set-top-box developers like this feature.
Where PNG fails with high def photos and the like is the lack of floating point representation of pixel data, which limits the kind of High Dynamic Range stuff you can do with it. PNG has chunk types which can contain many of the kinds of meta-data that you would care about for digital photography and scanned artwork, but much of the reader code out there does nothing with this meta-data.
Actually, PNG doesn't support animation at all. The animated sister format is MNG. Animated GIFs are kind of a poor animation format anyway, but they're great for small-size effects on web pages. MNG support in browsers is non-existent, so this has paradoxically limited PNG's uptake (and made GIF more difficult to kill).
Re:Deja GIF. (Score:4, Interesting)
And this was known (because I posted it) back when PNG was becoming a new standard. The design of PNG would even make it easy to have a rudimentary animation facility (that's all that would have been needed to bump GIF). Yet it wasn't done. What a missed opportunity. What a historical screwup. Well, OK, it wasn't your fault, I presume. Do you know whose fault it is?
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Not supporting clipping paths (vectors) seems to fall well short of "almost all" that TIFF can do. It's a pretty major omission. Another question - does PNG handle CMYK images? Color profiles? Those are a pretty big deal, too.
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I don't have the most recent version of Photoshop, but from my own observation, Fireworks has always seemed to handle PNG better than Photoshop...maybe because it uses PNG as it's native file format.
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Hey, it only took them 10 years...what do you expect from Microsoft...
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Why would someone who chose a Mac, then choose to use Internet Explorer?
Actually, I don't understand why microsoft supports mac os at all... They've not supported linux.
Well Apple paid them. :) Yes, they paid MS to code IE for Mac and stuff I detail below could have something to do with it.
If MS coded IE/Windows like they did as IE/Mac, sitting in its own directory, not messing system and tries to comform current standards as much as possible, Mozilla wouldn't exist now.
IE for Mac has nothing to do with Windows version except name and couple of text encoding (win-1252) evil MS tricks. To explain you better, it came with a full feature download manager, colorsync support a
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I think we could all do with a few less file formats going the way of the GIF format...
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These days one is always wary of new image formats (or any new fo
Re:can this be the only solution? (Score:5, Interesting)
The current licence is *much* more liberal, and I think Microsoft deserve credit for the move. I still don't trust them, but they did make a move in the right direction in this case.
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I wish I could mod you up.
nntr
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Re:can this be the only solution? (Score:5, Insightful)
I won't speak to the potential for "legal wrangling", but regarding "politics", if this does get bogged down in politics then you can bet that it'll be the anything-but-Microsoft folks that are to blame. Hell, this very subthread starts with a post saying that this format should be rejected just because it comes from Microsoft, regardless of the merits and regardless of how liberal the license is. In other words, the format should be rejected on the basis of politics. The same BS that goes on in the ODF vs OOXML debates (the reality is that 90% of that debate is politics BS, not technical merits).
Re:can this be the only solution? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:can this be the only solution? (Score:4, Insightful)
OTOH, this political matter, lack of openness, drags in technical problems as well. A spec which is not open must be reverse engineered (and even then there is dubious legality), so only those who have access to the closed spec will necessarily be able to implement it correctly. This tilts the playing field for the software market heavily in favor of those with access to the closed spec. Any competitors will find that either their software fails to function correctly, or they have to do a lot more work to get correctly functioning software. The result: either a monoculture/monopoly in software using this spec, or a variety of incompatible attempts at implementing the spec, resulting in inability to carry files from one computer to another and expect them to still work.
So, a technical matter in the OOXML spec results in political wrangling, which wrangling is motivated by technical reasons anyways. Dig a little bit deeper than most people are willing to, and you find that it really isn't a matter (for most people) of Anything-But-Microsoft. It may look that way, because MS offerings are so consistently rejected, but nearly always, it is actually for technical reasons (perhaps technical by way of political in the middle, but technical at both ends (motivation for objection, and object of objection)).
Now, the OP who said "we should reject this just because it is from MS" might be a true Anything-But-Microsoft person. That would certainly explain the remark. OTOH, caution, a look at history, and an understanding of the technical matters involved in said history would also explain the remark quite easily. The reference to MS' "track record" suggests to me that perhaps the latter explanation is the right one. But then again, I'm an eternal optimist, always seeking to think the best of people until I actually have a real reason to think otherwise.
Re:can this be the only solution? (Score:4, Informative)
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Microsoft has never done the crap you claim.
Holy Cow. We just lived through a decade of that kind of behavior and you didn't notice? mp3Pro (so what) is licensable just like MP3, JPEG and everything else. Thomson never offered MP3 encoders up for free then suddenly demand royalties once MP3 got traction. Thomson always required a license. They did, however, suddenly demand a license for MP3 decoders. They're all greedy bastards. Submarine ransom demands are a great side business for Microsoft as well and everything they release is another opportuni
As long as anyone can implement it ... (Score:5, Insightful)
If the specification is as free as ASCII, to use one example, then there is nothing wrong in adopting that as a standard.
Re:As long as anyone can implement it ... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is Microsoft's dream because you can't contest it in court. The agreement you're violating if you mix this technology with GPLv3 code is NOT the agreement with Microsoft, but the GPLv3! You would have to sue the FSF in order to use Microsoft's image format in your GPLv3 code.
For all that I despise the tactic, I have to admit that it's a clever little hack.
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I'm not seeing how they would cleanly construct such an attack. The patent license restrictions in GPLv3 are very specific - I don't think that Microsoft can come up with a licensing setup that would run into trouble with the GPL and still be considered distributable by "Open Source" type vendors.
Even if they did come up with such a patent license, the vendors can simply ship libjpegxr as a platform library and still not have any trouble with the GPLv3.
Re:As long as anyone can implement it ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Begun the license wars have.
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I imagine you are implying by this that the GPL proponents are trying to tie developers' hands?
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You imagine I'm implying that? That was explicitly my point!
You should have your sarcasm detector checked: it seems not to be working.
The goal of the GPL started as simplicity, and over time it's been evolving into a scheme to trap developers, distributors and users of libraries. The great-grandparent's point illustrates it perfectly, even if he blames the wrong party.
There is no scheme to trap anyone: it is quite simple: if you do not want to accept the conditions I impose on my code, then write your own. If you are not willing to comply with my licence for my library, then do not use it. It is not that hard, really...
How on earth can that be construed as a scheme to trap anyone? And how is it different from anything else (apart from the fact that the GPL allow the party accepting it to do t
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For all that I despise the tactic, I have to admit that it's a clever little hack.
Yeesh, could you use "hack" more pretentiously?
Pretentiously?
I mean the word in exactly the same way that I mean it when I say that the GPL is one of the cleverest hacks ever perpetrated on the copyright system. It uses the system itself as leverage to bypass the design goals of the system, which is not only smart, but hadn't been done in the 200 years of US copyright law that preceded it. c.f. the Jargon File's "The Meaning of 'Hack'" [catb.org]:
Hacking might be characterized as 'an appropriate application of ingenuity'. Whether the result is a quick-and-dirty patchwork job or a carefully crafted work of art, you have to admire the cleverness that went into it.
It's A Trap. EULA to view the specs (Score:5, Informative)
1. 1. You may review these Materials only (a) as a reference to assist You in planning and designing Your product, service or technology ("Product") to interface with a Microsoft product, specification, service or technology
Mac/Linux/BSD? Nope. So, that appears to rule out web-based stuff. Fortunately, I'm only working on Windows, so I'll read on.
Okay I won't. But how does my engineering group work with the spec if I can't duplicate it?
any Feedback you voluntarily provide may be used in Microsoft Products
Okay, I won't provide any feedback. It was once believed that developers were Microsoft's focus. Apparently not anymore.
Without going into specifics because the EULA prevents it, there are proprietary elements hidden inside this spec.
It's clear they are *very* late to the pro-photo fight that is on now between Apple and Adobe. Each of those companies has a proprietary "pro photo" format.
Sadly most pro photographers won't think about the consequences of adopting proprietary formats until it is too late. For example, some legacy proprietary raw images as provided by the camera manufacturers are not backward compatible. I've read it in the mailing lists already.
Re:It's A Trap. EULA to view the specs (Score:4, Interesting)
There's PLENTY wrong with Microsoft spearheading a format and being very active in getting it consumed as a world standard. We'd do well to avoid it since it's basically steps two and three of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish." Why should they embrace something when the rest of the industry will handle the leg work of getting the Embrace phase down?
It's bad on it's merits alone. FUDing it up doesn't help anyone.
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Sorry, game over. The TIFF format won a while back. (.psd is in second). There is no real reason to change this for the foreseeable future. These are manipulation and storage formats, have been so for the past decade and do what they need to do.
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What's wrong with JPEG2000? (Score:2)
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Quite frankly, I think JPEGs as they stand are too far along now for something that, with modern CPU power, offers an almost imperceptible advantage, to get any traction. Ten years ago, when computers and the Internet were slower, they might have had a chance, but now, no way.
There are too many real things to hate and fea
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Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Standardized like Microsoft has standardized on monopolistic practices.
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Public Domain (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's really that easy.
Specs look good, what about the license? (Score:2)
Are we going to have the same initial jpeg 2000 issues with licenses? Sounds like another license scam, its not free for consumers, there are submarine patents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_2000 [wikipedia.org] check the License Issues section...
transfer all control or forget it (Score:5, Insightful)
What we don't know is the problem (Score:2, Troll)
Patented? Yes, so it's a problem
If patented, Royalties or License restrictions? We see no royalties, but what about license restrictions? Is it OSS friendly or will it not work within Firefox legally?
Is it effective or does it offer anything we don't already have? I don't know...
Whatever is the next big format (Score:2)
MS patents (Score:4, Informative)
PNG (Score:3)
How does this compare to OpenEXR? (Score:2)
http://www.openexr.com/ [openexr.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenEXR [wikipedia.org]
Is OpenEXR more computationally expensive? (In other words, would the Microsoft format allow for longer battery life and shorter time interval between taking pictures?)
Actually, are there any cameras available that can capture to OpenEXR? If not, perhaps that's a clue.
it's A Trap (Score:2)
The API that provides
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Honestly, MS are behaving oddly with this one. It's technically a good standard, they've backed down from a restrictive licence scheme they were going to use, and they've showed everybody how to use it. I can't help wond
Not really suitable for raw camera images (Score:5, Interesting)
In a digital camera, a pixel is red, green, blue and sometimes additional colors laid out in a pattern that can differ from camera to camera. A pixel is not RGB (unless it's a Fovon sensor), so standard lossless formats like PNG or TIFF won't work. HDPhoto supports N color channels and more than 8 bits per color, but I do not see support for the raw CCD data, which is usually not RGB, but R, G, or B (sometimes with additional colors).
I like to preserve my pictures in RAW format since as time goes by, the algorithms to convert the image to a RGB image suitable for displaying keep improving. Also, when editing my photos, some of the processing is done on the raw data before converting it to RGB. Raw data helps for things like noise filtering, for example, since the noise filtering software can be aware of the camera's CCD properties (Noise Ninja, for example, has profiles for my camera at different ISO settings).
The only problem with current raw photos is that each manufacturer seems to have their own format which is incompatible with other manufacturers, or even incompatible between different cameras. It would be nice if they could standardize on something like OpenRAW [openraw.org].
Now, as much as I dislike Microsoft, I think this could be good for regular photos since the compression is about as good as Jpeg2000 (assuming Microsoft isn't spreading FUD) but with a much faster encoding/decoding speed. This could also be a good format for most people taking pictures (who are happy with JPEG).
-Aaron
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Yes, actually. The cat does "got my tongue." (Score:2, Insightful)
> specification available without charge.'
Ok
> While JPEG 2000 exists, HD Photo has several advantages (not the least of which is a lot less CPU power is needed).
Has anybody checked that the more efficient algorithms are among those in the patents to be released? What if they're hiding a patentable, very efficient decompression version, which they'll "discover" and patent, after this becomes the standard?
Good for microsoft (Score:4, Interesting)
But yeah, good for microsoft. Yeah, I said it. On slashdot, no less, and I mean it.
The trouble is that jpeg2000 is a patent minefield, and no one has made any promise not to sue or charge fees on it. Which is why, despite being dramatically better technically, we are stuck with blocky JPEGs. Microsoft's proposal is better than jpeg2000, because the IP is all in one place, and they are interested in giving it away for free (or so it seems).
So, to sum up, technically HD Photo is about the same as JPEG2000, both of which beat JPEG.
But licensing wise, JPEG > HD Photo > JPEG2000
So, this is a death knell for JPEG2000, which is a good thing. Of course, it'd be even better if there was a good patent-free solution for a next generation format, but I suspect just about everyone will continue using JPEG anyway.
Re:"Nothing for you to see here; please move along (Score:4, Funny)
Wow! The image compression used by Microsoft's HD Photo format is so good that it can reduce any image down to 0 bits!
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That's easy... (Score:5, Funny)
It's decompression that's always been the sticky part.
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I think you might be mistaking irony for despair. Whatever Microsoft does Microsoft does for Microsoft; and that means what will make them money. Why would they have gone to the bother of making a (very good, i hear) new image file format... for our benefit? I don't think so....
This can only end badly.
Look, I dislike Microsoft just as much as anyone else, but that comment is just ill informed. Just because M$ might stand to make money off a deal does not mean it will "end badly." In the vast majority of industries, consumers gain when companies do something just to make money. Just because M$ in the past has found ones of making money that have been harmful to us doesn't mean it will be the case this time.
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I'm saying it's highly unlikely Microsoft is doing this out of the good of their heart.
Maybe you're anti-capitalist because you don't understand how capitalism works. Of course they aren't doing out of the kindness of their heart. The point of capitalism is that the self-interest of each party works to the eventual benefit of the other, because they each have something the other wants. In this case, Microsoft has a potentially useful file format. Consumers have money. Micro
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What are the actual specs? Are they already out?
If yes, let's have a look. If not, we can just brace and wait; discussing would be meaningless (oh wait, this is /. !!)
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352 pixels x 288 pixels x 3 bytes/pixel = 304,128 bytes uncompressed!
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It's not like I care about compression when I'm dealing with 500kb image files.
OK, how about a 1GB file? (8 megapixel * 32 bits/CYMK)
Or how about 5,000 500KB images?
Don't forget that most pictures taken with digital cameras these days are full of noise, and generally crap.
Re:could someone enlighten me? (Score:4, Informative)
You won't get to CMYK or 32 bits per channel from a source image and if you're sane then you won't ever store this image (unless you're exporting for a print fun), you'll store the sequence of transforms on the original image. Destructive editing is a quaint idea, but not a good one.
Re:could someone enlighten me? (Score:4, Insightful)
Most importantly, lossless compression might mean that you don't need to shoot in RAW all the time, and be at the camera manufacturer's mercy.
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Most importantly, lossless compression might mean that you don't need to shoot in RAW all the time, and be at the camera manufacturer's mercy.
Actually, RAW has a number of advantages over simple lossless compression. My camera's RAW format stores the raw data that the sensor recorded (along with a slew of camera settings), which is more than a simple RGB value. After the photo has been taken, I can change the values that the sensor interpreted, which allows me much more freedom than only being able to adjust the color and/or brightness. For example, the RAW format gives me the ability to change a day scene to night and vice versa without blow
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Yes, the "vast majority" of users won't be affected. They also shouldn't be reading up on this or posting in this thread. Indeed it doesn't concern them. But there's an important minority of users (photographers, artists, other designers) who actually care about image formats.
The same can be said for music, video
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Out of curiosity, exactly when did MS submit a standard and then sue over patent infringments?
Re:It's a 'standard', right? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, mutually understood usage eventually becomes the standard. This, however, is not a reason to simply throw up our arms and say "oh well, popular usage eventually becomes the standard, LOLz!" It's a reason to recognize the fact that words and phrases already have commonly accepted documented meanings, and that if we wish to be understood clearly, we would do well to follow that established usage until it limits our ability to express things.
Abandoning the nuance of "to beg the question" in order to turn it into an ugly synonym for "to raise the question" doesn't expand our expressiveness. It doesn't create a new, useful sense for the phrase. It only discards the accepted meaning of the phrase, offers no replacement, and in the end, dilutes the expressiveness of our language.
As you point out, it is popular usage that will eventually decide the issue. That is all the more reason that we should actively resist those who would throw meaning in the garbage out of a simple unfamiliarity with the words they use. Teaching others how we use our language is an important tool for preserving its expressiveness.
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Using the phrase correctly, and encouraging others to do so is one thing. Being
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Trauma to the groin
Nothing's quite as funny
As a trauma to the groin
There is no wit more pretty
There is no joke divine
Or limerick as witty
As a trauma to the groin
- Heywood Banks
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It's entirely possible that Microsoft could offer reasonable patent licensing terms. They do, for example, with the SOAP specification.
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Standard enough for Linux and BSD to implement and use? Where's your standard?
Want to bet ISO and JPEG (the group) would not even give it the once over if that was the case?
Right, just like they did with the bitmap and DIB format. Oh, but you're cynical. I forget.
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Yes, they did. I remember this software, Irfanview, that allows you to read JP2 files. Oh, but to write them, you had to license ($buy$) the extension to be able to write in formats bigger than 640x480.
The result: Nobody gave a dime for Jpeg2000.
To put it in other words, patents (or licensing restrictions, actually) are the bane of image formats. Put a tiny restriction on the format, and people will go for a free unencumbered one. Like what happened with GIF and PNG.
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Most people didn't care about the GIF patents. Adobe paid the licensing fee so Photoshop could write GIFs and most people didn't notice.
People switched to PNGs when internet connections got faster and the average user started using high color depths, 256 color GIFs unattractive compared to true color PNGs.
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Re:Grammar nazis (Score:4, Funny)
Fixed.
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Fixed.
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Fucked.
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as opposed to having his IQ correctly underestimated?
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Ditto what wamerocity said.
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