Comment Bandwidth is NOT the point; archiving is the point (Score 1) 648
The point is easily seen by considering who developed this. Allume Systems (StuffIt) is a company which compresses files for archive purposes. In such a situation - and only in such a situation - is the time/space trade-off we see here worthwhile. In a digital camera, if it could work at all, it would likely not be worth the battery power. On the Internet, bandwidth (which is already cheap) could be better saved using JPEG 2000, which is much likelier to catch on than this proprietary format. For computer photo albums, one would not wish to wait a few seconds before viewing every picture.
This is not just a gimmick, but neither is it a real breakthrough, either technologically or in terms of the market. What it will mean that StuffIt will compress much better (assuming you have a fair number of images) and that's good news (especially for Allume). All else - whether this is a better-predictive context-based arithmetic code or a "rehuff," whether this will eventually be efficient enough to be useful for other applications, whether JPEG 2000 will eventually make this obselete - is mere speculation.
This is not just a gimmick, but neither is it a real breakthrough, either technologically or in terms of the market. What it will mean that StuffIt will compress much better (assuming you have a fair number of images) and that's good news (especially for Allume). All else - whether this is a better-predictive context-based arithmetic code or a "rehuff," whether this will eventually be efficient enough to be useful for other applications, whether JPEG 2000 will eventually make this obselete - is mere speculation.
