In an unsolicited advertisement, Publisher Program <TechSupport@jgc.com> writes:
You may have never heard of Johnson-Grace Company, but you have probably seen the benefits of our image compression technology in America Online and Apple's eWorld.
Two painfully slow online services.
In fact, ART formatted images transmit three times faster over conventional telephone lines than old-style GIFs and JPEGs.
This might very well be true for a restricted set of images, but I seriously doubt that arbitrary color photographic images take three times less space with this system than with JPEG given comparable retention of detail. Also, are we suggesting that images transmit exactly three times faster as both GIF and JPEG. This is somewhat odd, given that the difference in size between the two latter formats is often a factor of ten? If you can beat JPEG by a factor of three, you can beat GIF by about a factor of 30. If you really can do this, you should be working on MPEG-4, and not spamming our nice little list with advertising material. I should point out that neither Fractals, Lapped transforms, or Wavelets can beat JPEG by a factor of three, and neither, I suspect, can you. [Huge Self-Promotion and Wonders of the Product Elided]
For example, our proprietary Splash(TM) feature displays a full-size image in roughly one second; the image then becomes sharper as more detail is received and decompressed in additional layers, producing a high-quality final image within seconds.
JPEG can do this quite easily with either the progressive or hierarchical modes of transmission. Why reinvent the wheel? The engineering graveyard is littered with the bodies of various entities who announced spectacular image compression advances. In each case, reality dawned shortly after the hype died down.
Additionally, Johnson-Grace is in discussions with all the other major Web browser companies to include ART technology in their products. We expect broad support by the end of the year.
Translation: We've learned how to use the "associate" command in WinDoze File Manager.
For example, later this year you'll see news of ART speech compression technology that will enable publishers to author interleaved sound and images for real-time playback at 14,400 bits per second.
It's been done. Do the words "low bandwidth videoconferencing" ring a bell? I'll be truely surprised if you can beat PictureTel's complex proprietary algorithm for sound and image compression. [Silly Form Deleted] -- Mike Duvos $ PGP 2.6 Public Key available $ mpd@netcom.com $ via Finger. $