Back in 1987 Alexander Trevor worked with the GIF format’s creator, Steve Wilhite, at CompuServe. 35 years later Fast Company tech editor Harry McCracken (also Slashdot reader harrymcc) located Trevor for the inside story:

Wilhite did not come up with the GIF format in order to launch a billion memes. It was 1987, and he was a software engineer at CompuServe, the most important online service until an upstart called America Online took off in the 1990s. And he developed the format in response to a request from CompuServe executive Alexander “Sandy” Trevor. (Trevor’s most legendary contribution to CompuServe was not instigating GIF: He also invented the service’s CB Simulator — the first consumer chat rooms and one of the earliest manifestation of social networking, period. That one he coded himself as a weekend project in 1980.)

GIF came to be because online services such as CompuServe were getting more graphical, but the computer makers of the time — such as Apple, Commodore, and IBM — all had their own proprietary image types. “We didn’t want to have to put up images in 79 different formats,” explains Trevor. CompuServe needed one universal graphics format.

Even though the World Wide Web and digital cameras were still in the future, work was already underway on the image format that came to be known as JPEG. But it wasn’t optimized for CompuServe’s needs: For example, stock charts and weather graphics didn’t render crisply. So Trevor asked Wilhite to create an image file type that looked good and downloaded quickly at a time when a 2,400 bits-per-second dial-up modem was considered torrid. Reading a technical journal, Wilhite came across a discussion of an efficient compression technique known as LZW for its creators — Abraham Limpel, Jacob Ziv, and Terry Welch. It turned out to be an ideal foundation for what CompuServe was trying to build, and allowed GIF to pack a lot of image information into as few bytes as possible. (Much later, computing giant Unisys, which gained a patent for LZW, threatened companies that used it with lawsuits, leading to a licensing agreement with CompuServe and the creation of the patent-free PNG image format.)

GIF officially debuted on June 15, 1987. “It met my requirements, and it was extremely useful for CompuServe,” says Trevor….
GIF was also versatile, offering the ability to store the multiple pictures that made it handy for creating mini-movies as well as static images. And it spread beyond CompuServe, showing up in Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, and then in Netscape Navigator. The latter browser gave GIFs the ability to run in an infinite loop, a crucial feature that only added to their hypnotic quality. Seeing cartoon hamsters dance for a split second is no big whoop, but watching them shake their booties endlessly was just one of many cultural moments that GIFs have given us.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – The Untold Story of the Creation of GIF At CompuServe In 1987

“Rolling Rhino is a tool long ago created by Martin Wimpress, who until recently was part of the Canonical team,” one Linux blog pointed out recently. “What it does is basically change the repositories of the DailyLive developers….”

Neowin sees it as a competitive advantage. After more than 17 years, there’s a way to get a Ubuntu distro offering the same “rolling” release cycles that helped popularize Arch Linux:

While there are many positive qualities that would draw a user into the world of Arch, its headlining feature would be the one that remains the most relevant in today’s world of continuous integration and delivery and that’s its rolling release strategy. While I don’t think Judd Vinet could have predicted the proliferation of DevOps or the massive shift to cloud computing, it must be interesting to see that the entire industry is following the Arch strategy in all sorts of different places. One could even argue that Microsoft Windows has become a rolling release.
While many of Arch’s contemporaries have joined the fray, one notable open-source giant has yet to make the leap.

Rolling Rhino looks to change that by converting Ubuntu into a rolling release.
Thanks to Slashdot reader segaboy81 for submitting the story…

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – ‘Rolling Rhino’ Tool Converts Ubuntu Into a Rolling Release

Neowin reports that after more than 17 years, Ubuntu is finally switching to the same “rolling” release cycles that helped popularize Arch Linux:

While there are many positive qualities that would draw a user into the world of Arch, its headlining feature would be the one that remains the most relevant in today’s world of continuous integration and delivery and that’s its rolling release strategy. While I don’t think Judd Vinet could have predicted the proliferation of DevOps or the massive shift to cloud computing, it must be interesting to see that the entire industry is following the Arch strategy in all sorts of different places. One could even argue that Microsoft Windows has become a rolling release.
While many of Arch’s contemporaries have joined the fray, one notable open-source giant has yet to make the leap.

Rolling Rhino looks to change that by converting Ubuntu into a rolling release.
Thanks to Slashdot reader segaboy81 for submitting the story…

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Ubuntu Finally Switches to Rolling Releases

The non-profit Creative Commons (founded by Lawrence Lessig) opposes a new anti-piracy bill that “proposes to have the US Copyright Office mandate that all websites accepting user-uploaded material implement technologies to automatically filter that content.”

We’ve long believed that these kinds of mandates are overbroad, speech-limiting, and bad for both creators and reusers. (We’re joined in this view by others such as Techdirt, Public Knowledge, and EFF, who have already stated their opposition.)

But one part of this attempt stands out to us: the list of “myths” Sen. Tillis released to accompany the bill. In particular, Tillis lists the concern that it is a “filtering mandate that will chill free speech and harm users” as a myth instead of a true danger to free expression-and he cites the existence of CC’s metadata as support for his position.
Creative Commons is strongly opposed to mandatory content filtering measures. And we particularly object to having our work and our name used to imply support for a measure that undermines free expression which CC seeks to protect….

Limitations and exceptions are a crucial feature of a copyright system that truly serves the public, and filter mandates fail to respect them. Because of this, licensing metadata should not be used as a mandatory upload filter-and especially not CC license data. We do not support or endorse the measures in this bill, and we object to having our name used to imply otherwise.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Creative Commons Opposes Piracy-Combatting ‘SMART’ Copyright Act

As viewership drops for Hollywood’s annual Academy Awards ceremony, “Everyone has a theory about the decline…” argues an opinion piece in the New York Times.

“My favored theory is that the Oscars are declining because the movies they were made to showcase have been slowly disappearing.”

When the nominees were announced in February, nine of the 10 had made less than $40 million in domestic box office. The only exception, “Dune,” barely exceeded $100 million domestically, making it the 13th-highest-grossing movie of 2021. All told, the 10 nominees together have earned barely one-fourth as much at the domestic box office as “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” Even when Hollywood tries to conjure the old magic, in other words, the public isn’t there for it anymore…. Sure, non-superhero-movie box office totals will bounce back in 2022, and next year’s best picture nominees will probably earn a little more in theaters. Within the larger arc of Hollywood history, though, this is the time to call it: We aren’t just watching the decline of the Oscars; we’re watching the End of the Movies….

[W]hat looks finished is The Movies — big-screen entertainment as the central American popular art form, the key engine of American celebrity, the main aspirational space of American actors and storytellers, a pop-culture church with its own icons and scriptures and rites of adult initiation…. The internet, the laptop and the iPhone personalized entertainment and delivered it more immediately, in a way that also widened Hollywood’s potential audience — but habituated people to small screens, isolated viewing and intermittent watching, the opposite of the cinema’s communalism. Special effects opened spectacular (if sometimes antiseptic-seeming) vistas and enabled long-unfilmable stories to reach big screens. But the effects-driven blockbuster, more than its 1980s antecedents, empowered a fandom culture that offered built-in audiences to studios, but at the price of subordinating traditional aspects of cinema to the demands of the Jedi religion or the Marvel cult. And all these shifts encouraged and were encouraged by a more general teenage-ification of Western culture, the extension of adolescent tastes and entertainment habits deeper into whatever adulthood means today….

Under these pressures, much of what the movies did in American culture, even 20 years ago, is essentially unimaginable today. The internet has replaced the multiplex as a zone of adult initiation. There’s no way for a few hit movies to supply a cultural lingua franca, given the sheer range of entertainment options and the repetitive and derivative nature of the movies that draw the largest audiences. The possibility of a movie star as a transcendent or iconic figure, too, seems increasingly dated. Superhero franchises can make an actor famous, but often only as a disposable servant of the brand. The genres that used to establish a strong identification between actor and audience — the non-superhero action movie, the historical epic, the broad comedy, the meet-cute romance — have all rapidly declined…

[T]he caliber of instantly available TV entertainment exceeds anything on cable 20 years ago. But these productions are still a different kind of thing from The Movies as they were — because of their reduced cultural influence, the relative smallness of their stars, their lost communal power, but above all because stories told for smaller screens cede certain artistic powers in advance.
The article argues that episodic TV also cedes the Movies’ power of an-entire-story-in-one-go condensation. (“This power is why the greatest movies feel more complete than almost any long-form television.”) And it ultimately suggests that like opera or ballet, these grand old movies need “encouragement and patronage, to educate people into loves that earlier eras took for granted,” and maybe even “an emphasis on making the encounter with great cinema a part of a liberal arts education. ”

In 2014 one lone film-maker had even argued that Ben Stiller’s spectacular-yet-thoughtful Secret Life of Walter Mitty “might be the last of a dying breed.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Are Movies Dying?

“Wannabe innovation hubs from coast to coast have been slavering over the prospect that the work-from-home revolution triggered by the COVID pandemic would finally break the stranglehold that California and Silicon Valley have had on high-tech jobs,” writes a business columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

“Here’s the latest picture on this expectation: Not happening.”

That’s the conclusion of some new studies, most recently by Mark Muro and Yang You of the Brookings Institution. They found that although the pandemic brought about some changes in the trend toward the concentration of tech jobs in a handful of metropolitan areas, the largest established hubs as a group “slightly increased their share” of national high-tech employment from 2019 through 2020. (Emphasis theirs….) “[T]he big tech superstar cities aren’t going anywhere,” Muro told me. “There’s a suggestion that we’re on the brink of an entirely different geography. I don’t think recent history or the nature of the technologies point in that direction…. ”

“The California metropolises really do retain their irreplaceable depth and strength,” Muro says. “That’s not to say there won’t be some movement. Early in the period we saw some exiting, especially from the Bay Area, but it turned out that much of it was within California, rather than to Kansas.” This shouldn’t be too surprising. The value of concentrated ecosystems in nurturing innovation has been documented for decades….

The pandemic-driven shift to remote work does seem to have opened entrepreneurs’ eyes at least to the potential for doing away with centralized workforces. In a recent survey of tech startup founders, the share of respondents saying they would prefer to start a firm with an entirely remote workforce from Day One rose to 42.1% in 2021 from only 6% in 2020. Among physical locations where the founders said prefer to launch their businesses, however, San Francisco still dominated, at 28.4%, with New York a distant second….

Unlike service industries such as leisure and tourism, most tech industries experienced barely a hiccup in their long-term growth trends during the pandemic.

The column also questions when, “if ever,” work-from-home jobs will become a significant share of the workforce. “Full-scale work-from-home only applies to about 6% of workers, UC Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti says. That’s triple the 2% level of the pre-pandemic era, but still an exception to the rule.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – That Big Tech Exodus Out of California? It Didn’t Happen

Wikipedia points out that America’s two largest-circulation publications are the two magazine sent out to over 38 million members of massive non-profit AARP (originally the American Association of Retired Persons).

It’s now starting its own social network to compete with Facebook (which according to a recent survey is being used by over 72 million Americans over the age of 50), Ars Technica reports:

The nonprofit funded the creation of Senior Planet Community, a social media network that encourages users to join pre-existing groups around shared interests, including gardening, travel, fitness, food, and technology. In that way, it feels more like a pared-down version of Reddit or a small collection of forums….

Besides its focus on the 50-plus set, Senior Planet Community stands apart from Facebook in that it’s not commercial. The site has no advertising or membership fees. Unless the cost to run the site grows substantially, that probably won’t present much of a problem. AARP isn’t saying how much it has put into Senior Planet Community, but the organization is famously well-capitalized, with $2.3 billion in net assets and $1.7 billion in revenue in 2020.

At present, the site is bare-bones when compared with Facebook. There’s no mobile app yet, though OATS [the affiliate organization that built the social network] says it hopes to develop one. The site is mobile-friendly at least, and all the requisite features are there, including groups, photo sharing, @-mentions, notifications, and direct messaging.
As with all social networks, a looming question is how Senior Planet Community will handle moderation. The site has a relatively extensive list of “house rules” that encourages users to “be courteous” and “cite your sources.” Posts about politics aren’t forbidden, but the rules say posts can’t stray off-topic, and users can’t “attack individuals, social, ethnic, or political groups and figures.” Users can report posts they think violate the rules. Currently, the user base is relatively small, so policing it should be straightforward.

“The moderating team keeps an eye on all comments, posts, and updates added to the platform from the backend…. ” Suzanne Myklebust, OATS’s director of communications, told Ars.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Watch Out, Facebook. American Non-Profit Creates Social Network for Older Adults