Thursday, July 18, 2002

UPDATE: I have mymacmail.com set up and I'm just waiting for the DNS entry to propogate. Right now I still have to create accounts manually. I plan to limit it to a few hundred users or less, not hundreds of thousands of users. If it gets too big I'll probably end up outsourcing it to Outblaze or one of the other email services. Right now it doesn't cost me anything to run (other than the $15/year to register the domain), so I can offer it as a free service. 8:34:10 PM    Comments []

Forgent to get rich from JPEG. Forgent Networks (formally known as VTEL) has posted a press release stating their claim to JPEG and their intention to pursue licensing revenue from companies who use it. They own United States patent... [Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)] First GIF, now JPEG. I guess the only safe graphic format is PNG. Several years ago, when I was working at SIRS, we were planning to switch the graphics format for our CD ROM products from TIFF to GIF to save some space when the licensing issue came up. We looked at JPEG, but since many of our graphics were maps or line drawings, they lost a lot of image quality with JPEG compression. We finally decided on PNG and I found some nice public domain code for reading PNG files. PNG files compress smaller than GIF with no loss of image quality for either photos or other types of graphics. 8:28:16 PM    Comments []