Posts by Mark Tyndall

Ocarina makes waves with lossless image compression

interesting, not earth-shattering

Given the hardware requirements, and that they're apparently CPU-bound, and that it looks at groups of images, leads to the conclusion that they're just setting larger windows on how far back they look for similar data.

You can test this by compressing large numbers of almost-alike files. One file per archive, and you get a certain level of compression. Multiple files per archive, and you'll probably achieve a better compression ratio (assuming file size smaller than look-behind window).

You can also see this in action if you use pngout or kzip (see http://advsys.net/ken/utils.htm ), which uses a more exhaustive search of all compression methods (compared to normal png or zip producing apps). The output you get is (usually) smaller, and is a standard png/zip file to boot.

An unthinking programmer's guide to the new C++

Re: Operator Overloading

@A J Stiles:

overloading *should* be used to assist the user's intuition. So, a complex number class can use

a = b + c;

d = e * (b + c);

and not

a = b.addto( c );

d = e.multipliedby( b.addto( c ) );

which becomes a maelstrom of nastiness for even moderately complicated equations.