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Mr TIFF

inventingthefuture.ghost.io

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Re: Mr TIFF

#41

Post by throwaway314155 »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #40
hellojohnbuck wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thanks adam

Hey John, I'm just curious how people find these comments about "would be nice if X saw this" on HN. I don't think there's any pinging behavior. Did somebody message you? Did you just happen to read it? Do you have an eldritch curse that summons you when called by name?

Not who you're asking for, but generally I think it's just a case of the author also being an HN regular. Although, I suppose you could set up some Google Alerts for mentions of your blog posts.

Re: Mr TIFF

#42

Post by Tempat1 »

adzm wrote: post #16
nullhole wrote: post #9

Don't have much to add except to mention again that the magic number for TIF is 42, and it's 42 because of the meaning of 42: https://web.archive.org/web/20210108174645/https://www.adobe... Bytes 2-3 An arbitrary but carefully chosen number (42) that further identifies the file as a TIFF file

And here is the author himself confirming that in the Wikipedia talk page for TIFF! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:TIFF/Archive_1#h-Source_f...

Great find! And oh no, it’s complete with the customary blissfully unaware user replying to say he’s wrong!

Re: Mr TIFF

#43

Post by svat »

lookingdesk wrote: post #4

I checked the TIFF talk page and found comments from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Scarlsen Turns out the answer was on Wikipedia already :).

Thanks! If you look at his (logged-in) edits on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Scarlsen ), then apart from the lone comment on the talk page (about the reason for "42") and creating that user page, he has two edits to the TIFF article:

- one of them clarifies the (non-)involvement of Microsoft: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=TIFF&diff=prev&ol...

- and the other is even more interesting: though he is being scrupulous and removing a sentence that has no published citations, in his edit summary he confirms that it is basically true:

> The author of the original TIFF specification wanted TIFF to stand for "The Image File Format", but he was overruled by Aldus' president Paul Brainerd on the grounds that it sounded presumptuous.

(The edit summary says: Removed the "The Image File Format" sentence, since it only has eye-witness support (me, for one), but no published citatations)

Re: Mr TIFF

#44

Post by qingcharles »

oidar wrote: post #22
qingcharles wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think of all the content we've lost already. MySpace files are lost. Friendster archives are gone. So many YouTube videos lost to time.

And Geocities, Vine, Google+, Anglefire, Tripod, Xoom, Homestead, Lycos communities, AOL Hometown, MSN Groups, 50megs.com, etc, etc.... not to mention small specialty sites like em411.com. All that content/history, just poof.

They found the Vine archives recently. Doesn't mean they'll get uploaded as Musk wants the new Vine to just be AI waifus. But the files still exist on a disk or tape somewhere.

I just remembered Orkut. Though I suspect Google has backups or Orkut and Google+ somewhere. I wonder if Yahoo Answers is still on a tape somewhere?

Re: Mr TIFF

#47

Post by burnto »

Beautiful essay. So much of the tech we use today originates from quiet humble builders and creators like Mr TIFF.

Re: Mr TIFF

#48

Post by hellojohnbuck »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #40
hellojohnbuck wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thanks adam

Hey John, I'm just curious how people find these comments about "would be nice if X saw this" on HN. I don't think there's any pinging behavior. Did somebody message you? Did you just happen to read it? Do you have an eldritch curse that summons you when called by name?

Somebody subscribed to my blog with ref to hacker news so i just poked my head in :-)

Re: Mr TIFF

#49

Post by hellojohnbuck »

OisinMoran wrote: post #33
andrehacker wrote: post #24

Am I missing something ? The article is great but the web site is supposedly related to a book "inventing the future".. which is nowhere to be found. Other than a big, slowly loading graphic, 3 posts and indexes for the book... the site doesn't provide a clue about where to acquire the actual (PDF only?) book. I assume you have to sign up to find out more ? On the web I can only find articles about the book. So.. wha…

I had a similar issue, clicking the author's name gets you to a decent page, but yeah I'd actually prefer if he made it a bit easier to buy the book! I'll have to get it now after such a nice article

i didn't want to push the book too hard, given the tone of the story. thanks for the feedback.

Re: Mr TIFF

#50

Post by hellojohnbuck »

qrush wrote: post #11

RIP Mr. TIFF. Hoping we continue to document these incredible engineers and their work before it's lost to the sands of time/pits of LLM muck.

i've interviewed 100 folks in this space, in part because they are older than us.
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