I think it is a strength of Europe going forward. It’s a pain at the beginning but once education levels pick up to a point where being bilingual at least is a standard, it becomes an advantage — and remains one.
I was recently at the kiosk at an Odeon cinema in Norway and I noticed that their popcorn buckets were helpfully labeled S, M, and L. Stor, Middels, Liten. No X-sizes in that case though. At least with popcorn you can plainly see that S is much bigger than L is when you pick it up yourself.
Ah, yes, for foodstuff one does often use S, M and L as localized sizing labels, Burger King does the same, I think. However, in the context of localizing XS as being extra large, and XL being extra small, that's still wrong. Anecdotally, wherever XS to XL sizing labels are used it's always been direct counterparts. XS bring extra small, and XL being extra large.
eXtremely Late to the party: JPEG was so preoccupied with trying to generate revenue streams that they were totally blindsided by WebP/AVIF which made "generate revenue streams" an explicit non-goal.
JPEG XL is a royalty-free codec and "generating revenue streams" was never a goal for the project. You can see this already in the very first draft call for proposals from 2017: https://jpeg.org/downloads/jpegxl/jpegxl-draft_cfp.pdf
(see section 5 on page 7)
Which is my point: "JPEG XL" is "too little too late" after JPEG tried to monetize its brand with various other, pretty much failed initiatives:
- JPEG 2000 is popular in the medical imaging space but everywhere else shunned like the patented abomination it is until the patents fizzled out.
- JPEG XR is covered by Microsoft's patents that are supposedly defused under a "covenant not to sue" (but not really).
- JPEG XT builds on JPEG 2000 with all its money-grubbing problems.
- JPEG XS is a pretty particular beast regarding its use cases, but nevermind, there's a patent pool. As such it won't become popular before 2040.
Only with JPEG XL (2017) did they _finally_ acknowledge that they're working on standards that everybody avoids to the best of their abilities due to the licensing situations JPEG optimized for. 20 years for naught.
At that point WebP (whose ancestry makes it explicitly a part of the "avoid the patent mess" movement) was already out for 7 years.
JPEG and JPEG 2000 were based on the principle that the core codec was royalty-free but there might be patent-encumbered optional things (such as arithmetic coding, in the case of JPEG) that could be just left out if you want a royalty-free codec. Eventually it became clear that basically a de facto standard would always emerge that just skipped the patent encumbered things; JPEG XL doesn't have any (known) patent-encumbered ingredients for that reason: it's a bit pointless to add things to the spec that nobody will want to use anyway.
I don't think patents played a big role in the (lack of) adoption of JPEG 2000 and JPEG XR; more likely, in my opinion, the main problem was that good FOSS implementations were not readily available at the right time. The core codec of J2K has been royalty-free from the start, but it took quite a while before good FOSS software (like OpenJPEG) was available. Computational complexity was also an issue in its early days.
For JPEG XR, even today there is no well-maintained FOSS implementation available; this is probably a bigger reason for its lack of popularity than potential patent issues. Compare for example with h264 (and x264), which had more substantial patent issues but nevertheless became very popular.
JPEG XT builds on JPEG, not JPEG 2000.
JPEG XS has a very specific niche use case (ultra-low latency, as a mezzanine codec for video production workflows), it doesn't have the goal of 'becoming popular' as a general-purpose codec.
JPEG is not MPEG. While both are working groups of ISO, which does have a policy that is not exactly "avoid the patent mess" but rather "don't talk about IP", there is quite a big difference in membership composition and attitudes between those two groups. Having a royalty-free baseline codec (and more recently, having just a completely royalty-free codec) has been something JPEG has been pursuing since the beginning (1980s), while in MPEG they're only recently coming to that conclusion (with EVC, no doubt due to pressure from initiatives like AOM).
Not op, but I usually use the web form or an email address provided by the company. An email is great for having a "paper trail." Realistically, though, they either will comply or else there's not much you can do.
I include a snippet like this one, which is for paper mail:
I'm writing to request that you please remove me from your postal mailings list. I no longer wish to receive your mailings. Please, also, do not rent or sell my name or address to other organizations.
I'm glad for this article and these comments. How I've never heard of Satellaview or Sega Channel before now I'll never know, but fascinating to find out about!
It used to be extremely common in Denmark a few years ago, with even the official ID system NemID (like BankID in Norway I assume) using nemid.nu.
I can't remember when I last saw a .nu domain advertised recently, they seem on the way out. But it seems business domains in general are also disappearing in favor of Facebook pages or Instagram accounts.
Sweden as well used .nu a lot, because of the restrictions for .se
I don't feel we in Norway did that a lot. There were some restrictions on .no, but mainly that you needed to be an organization of some sorts, which was fairly easy to do if you just wanted (could make a dormant single person company). Those not bothering just used .com
I get the same result[1], and I'd have expected that if I still live in the Arctic, but I'm a lot further south and see the sun out the window right now.
navigate the UI disaster to read about the UI disaster...
I don't consider this story a UI disaster. Generating different 4-digit codes across terminals for the same object, and recycling those codes regularly... that's a data handling disaster.
