Week 4 Readings - Corrected

After that mix-up with assignments, here is my redone posting on the CORRECT subject material. . .

As a disclaimer: this post may be smaller than my usual posts, as I'm on a tighter deadline due to work and other class responsibilities. My apologies to my peers if this doesn't help as much as usual.


Data Compression Wiki

I've seen my fair share of file types, but I never understood what most of them stand for, or the major differences between them. This article clears that up a bit by explaining the process of compressing data, denoting various file extensions and where they originally came from and what their purposes are.

I did like the explanation that the encoder and the receiver need to understand each other in order to decompress the files; I just lumped it with it being a necessary program function instead of a "language problem" of sorts. Beyond that, nothing else in this article really stood out.



Data Compression Basics

This is a beast of a reading assignment, covers a variety of compression methods/algorithms, starting with losless before moving into the lossy methods, and makes a valid point about lossy data compression providing accurate although minutely different data. One of the most valid points made (to me, anyway) was the concept of generational loss, which was often seen as making a copy of a copy in older media. Instead, we have to worry about how many times data was compressed and decompressed (and with which methods) to determine loss. Additionally, the third section had some useful information on the concept of streaming video, and video encoding. I'll need to look into that last part in a bit more detail when I start using various camcorders again.


Imaging Pittsburgh

This article covered an idea that I am not unfamiliar with, as my colleagues at work have been preparing to do something similar with old photos from Berks County. The purpose is not very new, either, as it shows not only the history of the location, the people and shifts in style, but the changes in the environment as a whole.

One thing I can relate to is the concept of the challenges. Website design is always a challenge, especially when one must consider metadata restrictions. Metadata can make searches easier, but as anyone who's ever used a tag-based search would know, it can be horribly unreliable as everyone prefers different terms.


YouTube and Libraries

I found this to be a dead link. Did anyone else have the same problem?