MS theme song

Despite the promise of JPEG XRs open status, Microsoft does nothing that does not they do not believe will ultimately be a inroad to domination and excessive profit. As another poster mentioned, Microsoft simply has to sit on the sidelines like a trapdoor spider waiting until there is enough market penetration of the format to pounce on an unsuspecting public. Given that the Borg (Microsoft) are involved I think that the story of the scorpion and the fox is quite apt.

Microsoft has proven over the course of their existence that they cannot be trusted to do anything that does not benefit the company and only the company. I find the position of the Joint Photographers Expert Group to be consistent with that of those few less than intelligent persons, or those with a less-than-noble vested interest in allowing the status quo, that continue to support a certain politician regardless of how much he screws up even when his core contingency no longer favors him.

Nothing coming out of Redmond should ever be adopted by a standards committee, period. JPEG is opening the door for millions of people to be royally extorted in the future.

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“Cannot run out of time. There is infinite time. You are finite. Zathras is finite. This is wrong tool.” 2.3GHz Power Mac G5/4GB/500GB HDD/OS X 10.4.11/30-inch ACD, 60GB iPod (Color)

Microsoft aside, the need for compressed file formats will be around for quite some time. The points you bring forth are true for desktops connected to the Internet via broadband, but that is one instance. With the growing number of handheld devices holding music, photos and video, something has to be in place to get as much content as possible into limited storage capacity, preferably with little to no (perceivable) loss of quality. Even the top-of-the-line hard drive-based 80GB iPod is of limited capacity in the Content Age.

Place uncompressed music on an 80GB iPod at an average of 10MB per song and suddenly you can only store about 8000 songs are so. While that is more than enough for a great many people, most people do not buy the top-of-the-line highest capacity iPod. Also, the iPods buffer would always be quickly exhausted requiring the hard drive to refill it more often and therefore quickly diminish battery life. Laptops, which are very popular amongst the younger computer users that are more likely to have more content, are also limited in terms of storage. While 2.5-inch hard drives are available in capacities up to 250 GB, most laptops sold today have anywhere from 60 to 120 GB of hard drive storage and unlike an iPod that space is occupied by more than just entertainment content.

Our need for more storage capacity tends to scale with what is available at reasonable cost. Twenty years ago a 20 MB hard drive was considered to be near infinite storage in the minds of those few of us with home computers. We now have key-sized flash drives that have substantially more capacity than those old hard drives. So until the capacity of the average storage device used in handheld devices greatly exceeds the capacity required by the average user, there will always be a need for data compression.

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“Cannot run out of time. There is infinite time. You are finite. Zathras is finite. This is wrong tool.” 2.3GHz Power Mac G5/4GB/500GB HDD/OS X 10.4.11/30-inch ACD, 60GB iPod (Color)