English Dictionary: compression | by the DICT Development Group |
3 results for compression | |
From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]: | |
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From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]: | |
Compression \Com*pres"sion\, n. [L. compressio: cf. F. compression.] The act of compressing, or state of being compressed. [bd]Compression of thought.[b8] --Johnson. | |
From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (15Feb98) [foldoc]: | |
compression 1. storage space or transmission time. Although data is already coded in digital form for computer processing, it can often be coded more efficiently (using fewer bits). For example, {run-length encoding} replaces strings of repeated characters (or other units of data) with a single character and a count. There are many compression {algorithms} and utilities. Compressed data must be decompressed before it can be used. The standard {Unix} compression utilty is called {compress} though {GNU}'s superior {gzip} has largely replaced it. Other compression utilties include {pack}, {zip} and {PKZIP}. When compressing several similar files, it is usually better to join the files together into an {archive} of some kind (using {tar} for example) and then compress them, rather than to join together individually compressed files. This is because some common compression {algorithm}s build up tables based on the data from their current input which they have already compressed. They then use this table to compress subsequent data more efficiently. See also {TIFF}, {JPEG}, {MPEG}, {Lempel-Ziv Welch}, "{lossy}", "{lossless}". {Compression FAQ (ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/compression-faq/)}. {Usenet} newsgroups: {news:comp.compression}, {news:comp.compression.research}. 2. making quiet sounds louder and loud sounds quieter. Thus, when discussing digital audio, the preferred term for reducing the total amount of data is "compaction". Some advocate this term in all contexts. (2001-01-30) |