[OSGeo-Discuss] Open File FormatsandProprietaryAlgorithms[SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

[Landon Blake]

Paul,

I was wondering the same thing.

It seems a little like choosing to drive a Honda Accord, or a Ferrari.
The Ferrari is a lot faster and comes with a better looking trophy wife
(or husband), but the Honda is a lot easier to fix. (Try finding an
affordable Ferrari mechanic in Stockton, California.)

To tie this back into our original discussion, it seems like the
government should be choosing to drive a Honda Accord when it can,
instead of the Ferrari.

I guess you'd really have to crunch the numbers and see if the savings
in bandwidth/disk space costs were really worth the compression savings
that result from a proprietary compression scheme ("wavelet black
magic").

The problem with this is a lot of the benefits that come from the Honda
Accord (open image format + open compression algorithm) aren't easily
calculated in dollars and cents.

Still, this speaks to an important truth I have discovered in open
source development: Simple is better, even when it isn't necessarily
faster and smaller.

I'd rather have code that I can understand, or a file format that a
programmer in 20 years will understand, than a Ferrari you can't drive
unless you have a PHD and did a thesis on wavelet compression. :]

Landon
Office Phone Number: (209) 946-0268
Cell Phone Number: (209) 992-0658
 
 

-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at lists.osgeo.org
[mailto:discuss-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Paul Ramsey
Sent: Friday, August 21, 2009 10:36 AM
To: OSGeo Discussions
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Open File
FormatsandProprietaryAlgorithms[SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

So hung up on wavelets, we are.

Internally tiled TIFF with JPEG compression and similarly formatted
internal overviews can achieve 10:1 compression rates without
noticeable image quality reductions, and as an added bonus can be
decompressed a heck of a lot faster than wavelet-based formats. The
wavelet stuff is k00l, in that there is no need for an overview
pyramid (it's implicit in the compression math) and much higher
compression rates can be achieved. But operationally, you can go a
long way with the more primitive (open image format + open compression
algorithm) approach.

P.
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