In the past couple of days, I have re-compressed around one hundred thousand pictures...
That took a while...
But it saved me over fifty gigabytes of disk space!
It's a strange world. My first computer, in 1995, had *half* a gigabyte of disk space.
Pascal tells:
A few years ago, former French President Jacques Chirac was visiting a computer show, and wanted to show he was savvy: "Oh, yes, one clicks here on the rodent, right?"
This is authentic. "Je clique sur le mulot" became the national joke for months.
My first computer was a ZX Spectrum: 16k ROM, 48k Ram (instead of just 16) because we chose the deluxe version. No hard drive. Softwares had to be loaded from audio cassettes, which sometimes took more than five whole minutes.
ReplyDeleteOn the plus side, it booted VERY fast. :-)
I hope you realize, mister rich capitalist, that you just saved more memory than I've had in my whole life, adding up ALL the computers I've owned. And my gaming consoles over that.
I feel like a stone age refugee in a space ship...
A few years ago, former French President Jacques Chirac was visiting a computer show, and wanted to show he was savvy: "Oh, yes, one clicks here on the rodent, right?"
This is authentic. "Je clique sur le mulot" became the national joke for months.
"It's a strange world. My first computer, in 1995, had *half* a gigabyte of disk space."
ReplyDeleteMy first computer, an Apple ][+, had a hard disk of the size of 5M (that's megabytes, not gigabytes). That was plenty.
My first computer had 3 Kilobytes of memory but only because I bought a RAM expansion. Got to love those ZX-81's.
ReplyDeleteFirst Hard drive was 200Mb on an Amiga with a Hawk Co-processor board. I used it to render fractals. Still have a soft spot for that machine.
"Oh, yes, one clicks here on the rodent, right?"
ReplyDeleteA mouse is a rodent. Not so funny to me.
Pascal,
ReplyDeleteI was playing Atic Atac and Jet Set Willy just last Friday on a ZX Spectrum Emulator I found on-line. There are a dozen or so out there, and you can find Java based Manic Miner etc.
Here I am on a Core2 Duo with 1GB ram, and it's emulting a 48K Speccy.
My second computer was a Spectrum Plus in '84, it had a real keyboard. My third, in 1994 was a ZX81.
The rodent is as funny as Hugh Laurie dressed as a policeman telling us that a policemans favourite food is Lancashire Hot Pot, because "Lancashire Hot Pot you in the name of the Law"...
Alex
I had an Apple IIe in high school with a 5 1/4 floppy, and I think 72K of RAM.
ReplyDeleteBut that's not why I'm stopping to make this note! I'm here to argue AGAINST compressing images. You lose detail and quality, every time you compress. Gigabytes of memory are cheap. Burn DVDs, or make backups, then only keep reductions on your HD. Save your images!
Good point, but these weren't mine, and the compression was conservative, and there's very little chance I'll ever have to use any of them.
ReplyDeleteAlex, please explain that joke. (I watched it a couple months back, but I can't remember the context.)
The Traditional Joke
ReplyDeleteQ. What's a policeman's favourite food?
A. Irish Stew, because Irish Stew in the name of the law.
Double entendre, or pun. "Irish Stew", sounds like "I arrest you".
The new joke, the police man is not the sharpest tool. Lancashire hot pot is a dish of cubes of lamb (or beef), veg and potato cooked in gravy. There is hardly any difference between this and Irish Stew, except that it doesn't sound like "I arrest you".
Radio Shack TRS-80 anyone? :)
ReplyDeleteI was wordprocessing in 1972, so there! (Dad's a newsman, test all new machines on the kid and if the kid can figure it out the staffers should be able to as well.)
There's a line in "Apollo 13," one engineer at space control says to another something to the effect of, "Wow, I can't imagine they'd have any trouble computing up there in orbit, the thing's got 32 K!"
Alex, thanks, yeah, that's the one.
ReplyDeleteOh, so this is the game you guys want to play, eh? How childish.
ReplyDeleteWell, mine was still smaller than yours, so there! :-)
Thanks for the info, Alex. I happen to have one such emulator, but can't find the time for it. Most of my gaming hours are on kiddie games. The requirements of baby-sitting in the 21st century... :-)
"Irish Stew"! Ah, now I get it! So Hugh Laurie was making second degree humour. This is excellent when one is able to grasp it.
The rodent would not "normally" be a very good joke, but it was hilarious because it was real and unwitting. And because a man like Jacques Chirac doesn't *usually* make Bushisms!
"Mulot" is French for a small field mouse, BTW. So J.C. appeared much more knowledgeable about rodents than about computers. Could as well have clicked on the "gerbil's ears"...
Final,
Please excuse me for not word-processing when I was one year old, in 1972. I was busy learning to walk. And tap-dance. And do the cartwheel. ;-)
It IS amazing, the fact that the first moon missions used computer power equivalent to a humble ZX-Spectrum. But I've seen that bold little beast do some amazing stuff with the right programmation.
And I've seen my super-duper, fangdangled, thingamajigged Pentium 3,1415926 do some pretty styoopeed things when run under Redmond OS. ;-P
"It's not the size that matters, it's how you use it." :-D
My Speccy came bundled with a program called "Make A Chip", it was a logic circuit design program, you could "drag and drop*" to build a circuit, then you could feed in ones and zeroes to see what came out the other side. Interesting to a 14yr old. I didn't realize that by the time I was 32 I'd be helping to design one of the fastest multi-DSP chips out there. (www.cradle.com) I've actually got my name in the hardware there!
ReplyDelete* I use the term loosely.
blankphotog cautioned: "I'm here to argue AGAINST compressing images. You lose detail and quality, every time you compress."
ReplyDeleteWell, he didn't mention what algorithm he was using to compress those images. If he, say, was using RLE, ZIP or LZW, the three lossless data compression algorithms supported in TIFF, then there's no problem. But if he was using any lossy algorithm, such as for example DCT (as used in JPG files) then I agree, this is a very bad idea.
What's particularly detrimental to image data is the "re-" part. Re-compressing an already lossily compressed image will retain the distortion caused by the original compress and add new distortion artefacts as part of the new compress.
Simple rule: Never subject the master copies of your images to any kind of lossy data compression.
1 Gigabyte of disk space costs less than half a dollar. Eolake's savings in disk space are therefore worth less than $25.
I think I read somewhere that the new JPEG-4 format gives a near-BMP quality while using markedly less memory than the classic JPEG.
ReplyDeleteIs this what you used, Eolake?
Disk space may be cheap, but it's harder to do when you find you have only one drive bay in your e-machine, or you have to add another router to add more NAS to your server closet. And who has the time to sit there and burn a few DVDs, oh I guess that ones not a problem...
ReplyDeleteMy first computer was a used Commodore 64.
ReplyDelete