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Re:Open-source could finally get the world’s microscopes spe... by michaelmior on Monday October 02, 2023 @03:13PM (#37742978)
> Some inventing custom compression codecs.

I'm probably not being cynical enough here, but this doesn't necessarily imply a desire for obfuscation.

Re:Open-source could finally get the world’s microscopes spe... by strangattractor on Monday October 02, 2023 @03:56PM (#37743599)
You are not being cynical enough - "Vendor lock in" would be a more appropriate term;)
Re:Open-source could finally get the world’s microscopes spe... by eternityforest on Monday October 02, 2023 @05:49PM (#37744936)
A custom codec seems like it could only be obfuscation or really, really bad design.

Codecs are hard, I doubt there are many which are better than the well known ones.

Re:Open-source could finally get the world’s microscopes spe... by michaelmior on Wednesday October 04, 2023 @02:57PM (#37769933)
When you're dealing with a specific subdomain, it's certainly possible you can exploit known properties of data in that domain to achieve better compression than a general purpose algorithm.

That said, it's certainly worthwhile benchmarking (de)compression speed and the compression ratio to see if the difference is actually meaningful enough to be worthwhile.