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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?
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(Also: 42 is the answer to everything because it's the ascii code for *).
Was that a happy coincidence or intentional?
"The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do' I typed it out. End of story." from the man himself[1]
...but let us not ruin a good story with the truth. Remember why earth was built. The "real" answer might then be flowing in the ether.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker%27...
Thank you John Buck for this article, it is so interesting to read how something so common was invented. RIP Mr Tiff
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...
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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...
TIFF is still very much alive in certain circles, see for example https://cogeo.org/ The format is basically a TIFF file with attached georeferencing information and with the data organized by geographical sector, enabling fast downloads of regional subsets.
I had downloaded the final Aldus TIFF specifications document, hoping to find the author’s name. However, the name is seemingly written in white text on white paper - making it invisible. What?
If you had told me an article ostensibly about a file format would have me teary-eyed by the end I wouldn't have believed you. This is beautiful, thank you!
Thanks oisin, it's a beautiful story and his ex-wife gave me permission to share.
And thanks for being the historian of our culture-that-eschews culture (or so it seems to me sometimes, that tech tries to exist in a perennial present without acknowledging it's roots and history)
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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...
TIFF is still very much alive in certain circles, see for example https://cogeo.org/ The format is basically a TIFF file with attached georeferencing information and with the data organized by geographical sector, enabling fast downloads of regional subsets.
I wrote a program processing GeoTIFF data. When I had started this project I chose GeoTIFF mostly b/c i wanted something simple. And I could load them in to Java's BufferImage class and manipulate them that way. But it seems all the pros exclusively use NetCDF and GeoTiffs are for noobs (working with atmospheric science data here)
GeoTIFF does extend "images" to cover more usecases, but a lot of stuff doesn't fit (like say a wind vector) and then you need some other container or metadata b/c you generally have many images. So I get the sense the complexity just ends up being moved elsewhere.
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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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research