The Pigeonhole Principle, also referred to as the Counting Theorem, is a handy tool for mathematicians, and naturally, computer programmers.
The loose version of this principle says “After placing n pigeons into m compartments, if n is greater than m, you will find that some compartment must contain more than one pigeon.”
Seems obvious, and perhaps it […]

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Jeff Bezos Hawks the Kindle

It’s still not clear whether electronic books are the wave of the future or a consumer products cul-de-sac. Technology continues to improve, and there are certainly lots of good reasons for a device like Amazon’s Kindle to be the leading edge of a major wave of adoption. A few of the […]

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The IEEE has announced its list of medal winners for 2007, and this year’s Richard Hamming medal was awarded to Dr. Abraham Lempel:
For pioneering work in data compression especially the Lempel-Ziv algorithm.

This is a timely award, because it comes on the 30th anniversary of the publication of the first of two seminal papers by […]

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It looks like Forgent’s long run of JPEG lawsuit revenue has now officially dried up. The Austin American Statesman has an article (registration required) that says the remaining JPEG lawsuits have all been settled, with a grand total of less than $8 million from somewhere fewer than 20 defendents.
Apparently, the whole JPEG lawsuit run that […]

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The eminently quotable Samuel Johnson had a very pragmatic view about writing, and was quoted by Boswell as having said:
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”
Personally, I think Johnson is pretty close to the mark on this one, but I will add one caveat. Ask any writer about their first book, […]

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Ownership of the Zip file format has always been a tenuous thing. Back in the day, PKWare’s founder Phil Katz (shown) didn’t publish an official document or specfication, but hobbyists such as those with the Info-ZIP project did eventually have the Appnote.txt file that shipped with PKZip to provide a pretty good road map […]

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Euclid Discoveries continues with their modus operandi, talking big and showing nothing. Now it’s a 5X improvement in compression over standard MPEG-4, at least in a press-release-ware.

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Data compression is of course more than just a hobby of mine, it’s a way of life. And now I have an inspirational poster that I can frame for cubicle wall or use as wallpaper while I engage in my passion. Thanks to the photoshop pranksters at b3ta.com for helping!
 

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A recurring question that I see in my inbox, or in a comp.compression post is: “Can’t I write a program that figures out in advance what the best compressor will be for a given file?”
Of course, what the question implies is that there ought to be a good way to do this without actually […]

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Marcus Hutter has put up a 50,000 euro prize for anyone who can break the existing record for compression of a 100 MB extract from the Wikipedia. Although the prize is ostensibly about data compression, the Hutter Prize seems designed to spur work in the field of Artificial Intelligence, based on the notion that superior compression of written text will require some understanding of the semantics of the text.

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