Daily Photo

I must admit, I’ve cheated on this one — the original is indeed 3.2 kilobytes of severely overcompressed demotivator.

JPEG compression is a wonderful idea. The discrete cosine transform turns a series of points into a series of sine waves, which add up to form your image. You can drop higher-frequency components as you wish when making the image, thus meaning you can get a good-enough approximation at way better compression than you’d ever manage with lossless (as with PNG). The same sort of compression is used with video (MPEG) for the same reason: you’re basically not going to really see the difference.

The minus point is for things with sharp edges, such as line drawings or text. In which case PNG is going to be what you need to resort to.

Of course, there’s saving space … and there’s severely overdoing it.

Photo: provenance unknown. Clever, though.