Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2000 16:07:27 -0600 From: "G. Adam Stanislav" <zen@buddhist.com> To: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: On "intelligent people" and "dangers to BSD" Message-ID: <3.0.6.32.20000324160727.00a3b6c0@mail85.pair.com> In-Reply-To: <200003242018.NAA08726@usr09.primenet.com> References: <Pine.LNX.4.20.0003241431470.6944-100000@theory3.physics.iisc.ernet.in>
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At 20:18 24-03-2000 +0000, Terry Lambert wrote: >> So are they wilfully deceiving the public? > >No, not really. They are selling an idea, and the public is buying >it for non-logical reasons. > >The public is willfully populated by morons, whose right to >reproduce and vote is willfully protected by politicians, whose >only possible chance of election is to maintain the population >of morons. It's called a feedback loop. The worst thing they successfully intimidated Thomas Boutell (who is certainly NOT a moron) into recalling his gd and changing it to a PNG manager rather than GIF manager. The code in gd did NOT use LZW compression. But Unisys acted as if they held patent on the GIF file format. They used a very lame argument that gd tricks decoders into "thinking" they are LZW decoders even if they are not. What a crock! First of all, computers do not think. They just do what they are told. Even if they did think, Unisys does not have patent on thinking, they have patent on a very specific piece of technology, the LZW compression. If some software does not use that specific compression, then Unisys has no say about it. But they act as if the did. To illustrate the non-sense of their argument by analogy, suppose you got patent on a wall plug. You turn your lamp on by plugging it in, turn it off by pulling the plug, and everyone has to pay you for it. Then someone else invents a switch in the middle of a cord. You hardwire your lamp (connect it to electricity without a plug). Now you can turn it on or off by flipping a switch. It would be absurd to argue you are breaking a patent because though you are not using a wall plug, your lamp "thinks" you do. Unisys' argument against the use of GIF even without the LZW algortihm makes about the same amount of sense. Cheers, Adam To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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