Title basically says it all. I understand how photos and videos can trade quality for file size, but files like games or large folders can be shrunk into a .rar or .zip file, transferred, and pulled back out with no loss to functionality. How does that work? If nothing’s being taken away how is space being saved?
In: Technology
I think the easiest description is that you’re replacing something with a shorter description of it. So describing the Mona Lisa as a painting of a lady is an example of (extremely lossy) compression.
Turns out that so many documents we can find alternate ways to describe them without losing any information. Loss-less compression. For example, writing 1,000,000,000 as 1e9 is an example of loss-less compression.
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