Now Bill wants your digital camera. Introducing .HDP pics

Unfortunately, if they get HP, Kodak and the other P&S vendors and more importantly cell phones to start saving in the format, it will only be few years before it becomes dominant. But that being said, with so many other legacy formats out there, I don't think JPG is going anywhere.

 

I would be suspicious of anything Microsoft does. There is always and ulterior motive, usually not with the consumers best interest in mind, and nothing they put out works until after it has been on the market with tons of updates using the consumer as their beta testers.

 

I think they'll have a really hard time getting HDP widely accepted. I'll be interested to see how well it performs, but to tell the truth I want nothing more than for it to fail miserably, like their attempt to have WMA compression replace mp3.

I'm exceptionally unhappy with what MS has done with Vista. This isn't the place to get into a discussion about it, but I'm convinced that 90% of their development effort went into nothing but extremely intricate DRM (digital rights management) technology which does nothing to help the average user. They're trying to get their proprietary technology accepted worldwide, so that they can then begin reaping the rewards of the lack of open competition.

To speak specifically of HDP, their thinking is clear. They want it to be widely adopted. The reason is that their terms for licensing the technology are that it can't be used in any open source product. This is part of their method. Some technical aspects of the DRM system used in Vista seem poised to force hardware manufacturers to make new PC components closed, with no documentation to allow open source developers to use it on other operating systems. In other words, no more Linux, death of the PC open source world.
But back to HDP... That would mean it couldn't be used in any open source browsers (such as the Firefox browser, through which I'm typing this post), or image editors.. or anything. Imagine a new dominant graphics standard that can ONLY be used in commercial software. It's not that I've seen any sign that they intend to seek money from all the users of the system, but that I think they'll use it to try to kill the open source movement by locking them out of what they hope to become the major image format in use worldwide.

Seeking to build a software monopoly isn't enough. They feel the need to eliminate competition that doesn't even exist on a commercial level. People who develop software and release it to the world, for the good of everyone, are seen as a threat to be destroyed. It makes me sick.

 

God protect us from anything Microsoft introduces as a new "standard."

All they have to do is make a deal with Kodak or Canon to include HDP on all of their camera lines, and the standard will take over and edge JPG out. That's how MS got to be #1 in the operating system market - they made deals with computer manufacturers to include MS DOS and later Windows on all new PCs, and pretty soon all of the competition died out, because when something comes "free" with the computer, why go out and spend more money on a competing product, unless it's way, way better; and in the DOS and Windows 3.1 days, the competition wasn't that much better.

If MS makes a deal with any of the major camera manufacturers, or several, to include HDP support on new cameras instead of JPG, then JPG is doomed. Consumer digital cameras are the prime motivating force behind this sort of standards war these days, with home scanners second and web graphics third. If the cameras and scanner move toward HDP, the rest of the world will follow out of fear of being left behind.