On Memory Hogs and Compression, Part 1.

A line I picked up from one of my high school Computer Science teachers: “Graphics are memory hogs.” Computers represent pictures as a big grid of colors. Each cell in this grid is called a pixel (short for “picture element”), and usually has an ordered triple of numbers representing what color it should be.  When these pixels are very small and numerous, the picture looks less like a collection of squares, and more like the picture represented.  A similar effect is used to shade and color graphics in newspapers; look closely enough and you’ll notice that the colors are made up of lots of tiny colored dots.  Let’s look at an example…