> to the ubiquitous software utility PKZip Huh? Ubiquitous?
The utility program might vary between platforms, but the algorithm is definitely ubiquitous.
A student’s desire to get out of a exam led to a compression algorithm
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Re: A student’s desire to get out of a exam led to a compression algorithm
#42Caches drive the internet. They are orders of magnitude more important than compression. 99.99% of requests hit a local cache. (1) Compression is important too. (1) I worked in a telco. Check it out for yourself!
I don't think your caches would help very much if all media were sent uncompressed. Everything is already compressed, so you might not think about it much, but I'd say that it is at least as important as caching.
Compression is so ubiquitous that people tend to forget it's there. I still encounter people wondering why zipping their movie files does not result in a smaller file size
Re: A student’s desire to get out of a exam led to a compression algorithm
#43Re: A student’s desire to get out of a exam led to a compression algorithm
#44On a related note, I got an email today saying that Cloudflare will automatically turn on Brotli compression later this month. Does anyone know if Brotli really makes a difference beyond gzip?
It does. That's why we're turning it on automatically. We've supported it since 2017 and we have made a bunch of changes recently that make it better.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/results-experimenting-brotli/
https://blog.cloudflare.com/brotli-compression-using-a-reduc...
Re: A student’s desire to get out of a exam led to a compression algorithm
#45Please pardon my ignorance... My understanding is that there are 1000s of different compression algorithms, each with their own pros/cons dependent on the type and characteristics of the file. And yet we still try to pick the "generically best" codec for a given file (ex. PNG) and then use that everywhere. Why don't we have context-dependent compression instead? I'm imagining a system that scans objects before compre…
I listened to a talk once where they said that this is sort of how AV1 compression works, where there are many possible ways to compress a block, and you can choose the best one at runtime by computing each and seeing which is best.
Re: A student’s desire to get out of a exam led to a compression algorithm
#46Re: A student’s desire to get out of a exam led to a compression algorithm
#47Caches drive the internet. They are orders of magnitude more important than compression. 99.99% of requests hit a local cache. (1) Compression is important too. (1) I worked in a telco. Check it out for yourself!
Is it still? Afaik now with everything HTTPS, caching proxies on the ISP end are completely useless.
We instead now see (proprietary?) cache boxes by big players like YouTube and Netflix that ISPs can install in their DCs, but that seems less elegant, even though it gives the content providers much greater control over what, when and how much gets cached. Still, as a smaller fish, without going with cloudflare, there's no caching involved anymore, probably not even if I decide to run my site on HTTP only.
Re: A student’s desire to get out of a exam led to a compression algorithm
#48Interesting refresher. I do remember in college we had to build the lookup tree for some word as an exercise. Obviously the name Huffman stuck in my brain. But for the love of god, I can't even remember if the lecture mentioned Fano. Seems he was just as important in the design process of what we only refer to as Huffman encoding today.
Re: A student’s desire to get out of a exam led to a compression algorithm
#49Quanta magazine and all these pop science websites need to be stopped. (Not because popular science is bad, but because they do it badly, and the clickbait is insufferable)
I agree. They have a breathless tone to them that's quite annoying to me (I work in data compression as an academic, and I found this article uninspiring.) By the way, there was an old Soviet magazine called "Kvant" (Russian for Quantum, I think). I do not know Russian, but I have 2 collected volumes of selected articles from them. [1] [2] Their quality is astonishingly good, and high-level. The difference is this: T…
Yeah you have a good point - not sure if there’s a name for what you’re referencing but it’s tough to be an expert in something and read a bunch of cringe pop sci articles on your field. This topic comes up frequently with my partner who is a researcher - Ed Yong recently wrote a piece on some work by their lab and it was “tolerable”.
Not a huge fan of Quanta myself but Aeon frequently has articles written by researchers/experts and are higher quality in my opinion.
Interesting to hear about Kvant!
Re: A student’s desire to get out of a exam led to a compression algorithm
#50Interesting refresher. I do remember in college we had to build the lookup tree for some word as an exercise. Obviously the name Huffman stuck in my brain. But for the love of god, I can't even remember if the lecture mentioned Fano. Seems he was just as important in the design process of what we only refer to as Huffman encoding today.
A nice reversal of the meme where "the supervising professor takes all the credit and the army of grad students do the real work".