| Re: 5.4 [message #22101] |
Mon, 23 October 2000 00:00 |
mole6e23
Messages: 31
Registered: December 1998
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Member |
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> I personally guaranty you that if it would have been this trivial, it
> would still be there. They put tools like IDL into a different category
> than utilities like Adobe where they do have very reasonable fees.
I guess I figured that there had to be a reason...that's partially why I
posted what I did, to see if I could flush that reason out. =)
> P.S. You'll have a tough time blaming Kodak for this one.
I'm not blaming Kodak directly - the only "blame" I'm giving them is being
a big enough target for Unisys to care about. Unisys is the 'bad' company
here, and I'm completely aware of that - enforcement of a patent after
however many years and after it's really really popular is just a bad
idea.
However, I'm pretty sure that IDL 5.3 came out after the Unisys patent was
enforced, but it still supported the GIF/LZW compression schemes. How it
seems to a silly end user who doesn't know about these things in detail is
that as soon as Kodak owned RSI, the suport for GIF/LZW stopped, so a
correlation is implied. (And please, people, don't flame me for my
statistics on a single data point! ;-)
Todd
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| Re: 5.4 [message #22102 is a reply to message #22101] |
Mon, 23 October 2000 00:00  |
promashkin
Messages: 169
Registered: December 1999
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Senior Member |
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Or, you could put it on the "top 10" list to have it put back in version
6.0 :-) I am sure that *you*, David, are using it every day. But i am
afraid, to show how *not* to do things, which gets you in trouble :-(
Cheers,
Pavel
David Fanning wrote:
>
> Did I read this correctly?
>
> "The Insight application has been removed from IDL."
>
> Wow! I may just have to stick with IDL 5.2 along with Craig. :-)
>
> Cheers,
>
> David*
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| Re: 5.4 [message #22112 is a reply to message #22101] |
Sun, 22 October 2000 00:00 |
Harold Cline
Messages: 13
Registered: September 2000
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Junior Member |
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Hi Todd,
you wrote:
> As far as I
> recall, the licensing for LZW is not all that extreme (I recall a number
> of $1/end user, but I could be wrong), and given the cost of IDL, it
> doesn't seem that would "break the bank", per se.
I personally guaranty you that if it would have been this trivial, it
would still be there. They put tools like IDL into a different category
than utilities like Adobe where they do have very reasonable fees.
Just for entertainment, you might note that our competitor has an
identical message, because they had an equally difficult time coming to
an agreement with Unisys who patented both GIF and LZW compression:
http://www.mathworks.com/support/solutions/data/7388.shtml
Harold Cline
IDL Product Manager
P.S. You'll have a tough time blaming Kodak for this one.
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| Re: 5.4 [message #22118 is a reply to message #22112] |
Fri, 20 October 2000 00:00 |
davidf
Messages: 2866
Registered: September 1996
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Senior Member |
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Did I read this correctly?
"The Insight application has been removed from IDL."
Wow! I may just have to stick with IDL 5.2 along with Craig. :-)
Cheers,
David
--
David Fanning, Ph.D.
Fanning Software Consulting
Phone: 970-221-0438 E-Mail: davidf@dfanning.com
Coyote's Guide to IDL Programming: http://www.dfanning.com/
Toll-Free IDL Book Orders: 1-888-461-0155
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| Re: 5.4 [message #22119 is a reply to message #22118] |
Fri, 20 October 2000 00:00 |
Craig Markwardt
Messages: 1869
Registered: November 1996
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Senior Member |
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"J.D. Smith" <jdsmith@astro.cornell.edu> writes:
... other nice details deleted ...
>
> I hope they made the parser smart though -- I'm sure there are some
> variables called "break" in routines out there.
>
Oooo. Probably smart enough to tell the difference between statements
and variables. But anybody with procedures named BREAK or CONTINUE
will be hosed now.
Overall it sounds very promising though.
Craig (still "mostly" at IDL 5.2, or below)
--
------------------------------------------------------------ --------------
Craig B. Markwardt, Ph.D. EMAIL: craigmnet@cow.physics.wisc.edu
Astrophysics, IDL, Finance, Derivatives | Remove "net" for better response
------------------------------------------------------------ --------------
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| Re: 5.4 [message #22122 is a reply to message #22118] |
Fri, 20 October 2000 00:00 |
mole6e23
Messages: 31
Registered: December 1998
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Member |
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> can't say enough how much adding break and continue, and switch also,
Those three are probably what I'm looking forward to most. I hated some of
the things I did in place of these (can you say "goto"?... I hate goto!)
As for the complement in where and the nbins keyword to histogram, it's
sure nice to have them, but truly I think most of us that use IDL
regularly have already implemented them in some form or another as our own
routine. I still don't know why these weren't there with the original
versions of these functions!
A fast array_equal is definitely welcome!
> Printing with C-style formats? Say bye-bye
> FORMAT='(A,T25,A,T36,A,T50,A)'
This is perhaps my second favorite. I learned C well before I ever saw
Fortran, and I've hated fortran ever since the first day I saw it,
partially because of the (IMHO) horrible looking handling of strings. I
like C-style much, much better!
I personally think the whole thing with not supporting LZW compression
(GIF and compressed TIFFs) is kind of silly, both on behalf of Compuserve
(and whatever their parent company is...I can't remember), and on the part
of RSI (actually, it's Kodak that did this one, I'm sure). As far as I
recall, the licensing for LZW is not all that extreme (I recall a number
of $1/end user, but I could be wrong), and given the cost of IDL, it
doesn't seem that would "break the bank", per se. And now you have to get
a special license (albeit free) to make MPEG movies? OK, we'll do it
because we make MPEG movies, but why? And if you're going to do that, why
not do the same thing for LZW? Rant, Rant, Rant....
> Thoughts, reactions, uninformed rantings?
Well, other than the 300+ page "what's new" manual, I'm definitely part of
the "uninformed" group. =)
Todd
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