The Hitchhiker's Guide to Compression
I have mixed feelings about this. It's always good to teach people things they don't know, and compression is a worthy subject.<p>But the author seems to lament that not much of interest is happening in lossless compression. That's true, but there's a good reason for it: Lossless compression is just about as good as it's ever going to get, and it's easy to prove that. Seeking dramatic improvements in general lossless compression is like seeking faster-than-light travel: Ain't gonna happen. Except for specialized niches, any improvements to lossless compression are going to be tiny and incremental. Tiny and incremental might well matter for petabyte data stores like Google manages, but it won't matter for most people.<p>Lossy compression is a different story. There's still lots of unexplored territory in finding an optimum bit rate that matches the information processing capabilities of human eyes and ears.