Thoughts on Readings for Week 5

I myself think that data compression is very cool, with a perfect example of that being the online museum with images of Pittsburgh in the past. Now granted anyone could travel to a museum and see the same images in person, but think of how cool it is that we can leaf through 100's of years of history with the click of a button. None of that ofcourse is possible without the use of data compression to get these photos uploaded to the web. YouTube is another fine example that is used in the readings of data compression, which I use quite frequently myself. There is a wealth of data information uploaded to YouTube waiting to be used by anyone that wants it. I never took into consideration it being beneficial for a library to use such as suggested, but now that I read that I can definitely see how it could benefit me as a student.

On a side note, the only thing that sometimes irks me about doing data compression is like when I tried to compress my digital photos. My photos were so huge that were taken by my camera that compressing them into a thumbnail sized photo caused considerable data loss. I determined that this could be considered lossy compression after reading these articles.