Thu Jan 13 2000 06:42:
Blargh. My best current guess is that the JPGs are in some undocumented
format proponented (that's not a word) by a company called Pegasus,
which company is helpfully mentioned on the box the CDs come in.
Dan from Be says that the data might be encrypted somehow. That'd be
all I'd need.
I think that there are two factions within Be locked in a low-grade sort of mortal combat; one consisting of
people with dull American names like Mike and Dan; and
the other consisting of people with European names like Jean-Louis and
Benoît, and that this internal struggle is what gives the BeOS its distinctive flavor.
One day one side will triumph over the other, everyone on the losing
side will change their name, and the BeOS will be altered forever.
Thu Jan 13 2000 06:43:
That last entry was not intended to offend anyone at Be. The people
at Be can take it, I know, so I guess this entry is to stave off anyone
who thinks they need to be offended for the people at Be.
Thu Jan 13 2000 16:54:
OK, the mystery is solved. One byte of the JPEG was obfuscated; adding
16 to it fixed the whole file. Only problem is, the files on the CD
are encoded using arithmetic coding, a Super-Huffman-Coding technique
which is patented by IBM. According to the data compression FAQ, this technique
offers 5%-10% greater compression than the normal Huffman coding
technique. Well, I (or my mother) may have been bilked out of $70, but at least
I learned a lot about the JPEG file format.
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