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-boun...@lists.osgeo.org [mailto:discuss-boun...@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. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss Warning: Information provided via electronic media is not guaranteed against defects including translation and transmission errors. If the reader is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this information in error, please notify the sender immediately. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss