I love these 'protocol-teardown' posts. They really bring back the obsession over the details which has been disregarded more and more as technology progresses. They're refreshing. :)
I was thinking I'd write the same thing: "I love these 'smallest X' posts". I was thinking of the Muppetlabs "smallest ELF file" article, in particular, and Russ Cox's Zip file that decodes to a zip file (turtles all the way down).
But won't there always exist a few people who just happen to have a talent or obssesion for the details? What name do we give those people? The word "hacker" is taken, and has a more impish, generalist connotation. "Engineer" has way too formal baggage associated. We need another word that means about the same thing as "docent", I reckon.
I agree. I'm always amazed when a compression protocol omits a "do nothing" option, or doesn't use that as its base reference, progressively moving away from it as it makes sacrifices to save space (computing overhead for lossless, quality for lossy). Is it even possible to encode a lossless MP3 of John Cage's 4′33″?
A particular performance of it, probably not. The space of possible lossless MP3s is quite tiny and I suspect consists of pure or close to pure tones, not the more complex spectra you get for the coughs and page turning you usually hear is 4'33".
