Are they mistaken?

[WildRhino]

There is a graphics demo on this site

http://chillblast.netfirms.com

under news for saturday (4th paragraph I think)and it says that it is only 64k but the program lasts about 10 mins.Can some1 explain what is going on,how they get so much into such a small program?It needs directx 8 and it is well worth the 10 second d/l >8}

 

[esung]

Well, if you play till the end, they'll explain how much data is compressed into 64K. It's probably somekind of fractal/recursive compression. According to their claims, they achieve 30000:1 ratio.

 

[WildRhino]

Does this mean that all software in the future is going to be greatly reduced in size, therefore reducing the amount of storage needed?

 

[WildRhino]

why isn't cs stored in this format then?

 

[esung]

in order to produce such compact executable, the code and data needs to be hand code/optimized. and take quite a while to produce such results. And currently the compression algorithm are still need some improvement, because AFAIK, one type of algorithm will only work with certain type of data, and there's a lot of constrains. MP3 vs WAV is a good example. it takes time to do it right. I still remember when the technology is out, a lot of people won't believe it's actually to achieve a 10:1 lossy compression on audio. but now everyone accept it as a standard.

but those demos demostrate that we are far behind on the software curve then the hardware. If you gather those scene people and have them write a complete OS package, it'll probably be 10x faster and 10x smaller.. (just guessing)