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Mr TIFF

inventingthefuture.ghost.io

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Re: Mr TIFF

#61

Post by jack1243star »

hellojohnbuck wrote: post #55
jack1243star wrote: post #53

Please do not let my comment take away your enjoyment of the article. I hate to nit-pick on such a beautiful story but that it ended with a faux-Ghibli profile picture is just sad. How can someone working so hard to humanize technology and preserve history, justify this soul-less commodification of art? Do the animators deserve to get treated as anonymous model trainers without their consent, names and frames lost in…

my kids made the avatar so...sorry if it triggers

I understand, and I apologize for the rant.

Thank you for all the efforts that went into preserving the memories of those that built the world around us.

Re: Mr TIFF

#62

Post by righthand »

hellojohnbuck wrote: post #30
righthand wrote: post #2

Crazy this information would have probably been lost in time if one single person on this planet didn’t give a shit like the rest of us. What a journey and congratulations to SC (don't want to spoil it) on your 15 minutes and rightful restoration as inventor of TIFF, take your place in history.

thanks righthand, i guess it was just curiosity that led me down the path. most people do give a sh## but i hear you. i also had the time to search, as i wasn't super busy with work.

Thank you so much again for your efforts, I sound brash but this really is inspiring and as you demonstrated and have indicated, we can all use our free time to easily make the world a little more accurate and better.

Re: Mr TIFF

#63

Post by flomo »

4ndrewl wrote: post #57

The great thing about TIF was it's extensibility. Flexible (data could be stored as tiles or in stripes), multiple compression options etc. Well documented spec, easy to bolt on extras either as public tags - GeoTIFFs added projection metadata - or private, for your own needs. Back in the day, to improve a desktop application's performance I found it was simple to create a custom reader and writer to handle cases whe…

Perhaps the greatest thing about TIFF, but also the most horrible things, and probably why TIFF is mostly historical. It was so extendable that no two programs ever accepted the exact same TIFF extensions. (omitting the war story)

edit: forgot about byte order...

Re: Mr TIFF

#64

Post by TacticalCoder »

Back when I was working in the book publishing industry (writing and typesetting computer books using Quark XPress [1] on the old MacOS [version 7, 8 and 9 IIRC], before Adobe's InDesign [2] ruled the earth), TIFF was all the rage. Probably still is.

I think the reason TIFF was so prevalent was it already had support for CMYK color space (even though many books were printed in black and white) and for lossless compression (as TFA mentions).

It was a "one size fits all" format and so our 100 or 250 MB (!) Zip drives [3] exchanged between authors/publisher/typesetters often contained TIFF files.

> For as long as I have published my books, one of my overarching goals was to give credit to those who actually invented the hardware and software that we use.

So thank you Mr. Stephen "TIFF" Carlsen!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuarkXPress

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_InDesign

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive

Re: Mr TIFF

#65

Post by yread »

flomo wrote: post #63
4ndrewl wrote: post #57

The great thing about TIF was it's extensibility. Flexible (data could be stored as tiles or in stripes), multiple compression options etc. Well documented spec, easy to bolt on extras either as public tags - GeoTIFFs added projection metadata - or private, for your own needs. Back in the day, to improve a desktop application's performance I found it was simple to create a custom reader and writer to handle cases whe…

Perhaps the greatest thing about TIFF, but also the most horrible things, and probably why TIFF is mostly historical. It was so extendable that no two programs ever accepted the exact same TIFF extensions. (omitting the war story) edit: forgot about byte order...

But most of these variations were part of the spec (endianness with II or MM, later magic 43 for bigTIFF 64bit extension). I work with tiff and tiff-derived formats in digital microscopy where its very much not historical. And the alternatives (DICOM supp 145, vendor-specific garbage ... and thats it) are worse.

I quite like the format, the only thing I would change is to have the option not to store directory information in a linked list spread throughout the file but in a simple array. Duplicate it at the beginning and end of the file and you've got resilience too (important in the age of floppies)

Re: Mr TIFF

#66

Post by darkwater »

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...

Hindsight is 20/20 and I loved TFA and I don't want to ruin it but... that comment was there from 2007 and the Wikipedia user bio was pretty clear since the beginning (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Scarlsen&old...)

Re: Mr TIFF

#67

Post by bambax »

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...

(Also: 42 is the answer to everything because it's the ascii code for *).

Re: Mr TIFF

#68

Post by jakub_g »

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...

And interestingly, the person he replies to is taviso [0][1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=taviso

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tavis_Ormandy

Re: Mr TIFF

#69

Post by Rygian »

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

Based on the same algorithm as https://xkcd.com/221/

Re: Mr TIFF

#70

Post by vanderZwan »

svat wrote: post #43
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 mor…

Ok so then we could technically edit it back in since he's a primary source, right?
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