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> I tasked my 16 yo daughter to implement an lzw compression as a part of her programming education Kudos, to the both of you. I'm sad we're starting to rapid
by qup 4y ago
> I tasked my 16 yo daughter to implement an lzw compression as a part of her programming education
Kudos, to the both of you.
I'm sad we're starting to rapidly lose so many of our titans.
- londons_explore 4y agoIn other industries, the death of the inventor of a technology often marks the start of a further wave of innovation. For all kinds of reasons, the inventor (who is sometimes by now rich and/or powerful), may have a specific vision or path they want to proceed down. When they die, other people start investigating other paths, often with more success. I wonder if tech will see the same?
- colechristensen 4y agoNo. In tech when the creator quits or dies they’re replaced by MBAs that squeeze every penny out of the creation. (Like authors whose grandchildren direct the trusts which own the copyright a century after the work was written) New creations in tech have to wait for patents to expire and the incumbents to crumble to the point where they don’t have the cash to buy out the competition any more.
- qup 4y agoTo be fair, Ayn Rand said basically the same thing about industry long before tech bros existed.
- kortilla 4y agoA bit tone deaf considering the thread is about algorithms that are open.
- londons_explore 4y agoPlenty of things are totally open, yet innovation is still directed by the inventor.
- kortilla 4y agoStill not at all relevant to this case. Algorithms have no such gate keeping because there is no barrier to entry. Algo developers aren’t fighting for some tiny pot of NSF money allocated to particle physics to build a 100 million dollar algorithm detector.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y agoThis is only partially true. A great example is Arithmetic coding in compression where research pretty much stalled for almost 40 years (from the mid 1970s until the 2010s) due to patent concerns.
- pizza 4y agoWell, plenty of compression algorithms have been patented or attempted to be patented - e.g. arithmetic codes and Microsoft's rANS patent
- vintermann 4y agoLZW was claimed by Unisys for many years. It wasn't Ziv's fault, it wasn't even Welch's, but it does highlight that compression has historically been a garbage fire of patent harassment. I certainly think it has held the field back. The patent harassment might even be a factor in the curiosity mentioned elsewhere in this thread, that a lot of practical progress in file compression has been published in a Russian web forum.
- xxs 4y agoI personally wrote an implementation of lzw in Assembly in my late teens. It could deal with gifs... that was before 1999, when Unisys[0] claimed the patent (for all kind of uses) and had the patent for many a year, PNG was created not to use lzw since it was patented. The algorithm was patented for the encoding part but not decoding. [0]: https://eng.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Electrical_Engineering/Signal_Processing_and_Modeling/Information_and_Entropy_(Penfield)/03%3A_Compression/3.05%3A_Dynamic_Dictionary/3.5.01%3A_The_LZW_Patent https://eng.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Electrical_Engineerin...