Programming: Ever wonder if...? (Comments)

the word “lossy” in scrabble?

Whitney - May 5, 2008

the word “lossy” in scrabble?

No, it’s the antonym of a(nother) jarg… HarryC - May 5, 2008

LOL!

No, it’s the antonym of a(nother) jargon word–lossless, which comes to us from the world of compression.

“Lossless” compression (like the Huffman coding algorithm in WinZip/Gzip) remove reduntant sections to make data smaller, but they can decompress back to a bit-by-bit replica of the original.

“Lossy” is…er…not that. JPEG is lossy, because it loses information as it compresses. MPEG-3 (MP3’s) does the same thing.

Lossless is perfect for machine use, and lossy works great for human consumption. People’s minds “fill in the gaps” as they perceive the information, be it visual, auditory, or txtual. ;-)

Yeah, it worries me how many people you come across who don’t know any low-level stuff at all, like pointers or binary or that ascii 7 and ctrl-g and tab are somehow related :-)

I had to modify some assembler in some startup routines to work around a compiler bug when I worked at the previous company and there was really no one around to give me any pointers. Held my breath for a few releases… :-)

And it’s not just computers. If there were suddenly no supermarkets, how many would starve? I could catch some fish and make a fire, but have never done the hunting thing, let alone field-dressed a deer, etc.