Comments on: Dream Data Compression Job

By: Sachin Garg

Sachin Garg — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 10:02:41 +0000

I received another mail today asking if the resume should be sent to me or directly to StuffIt.

I will be forwarding it to them anyway, so you can send it directly to Darryl, he left his mail id above.

By: Evangelist

Evangelist — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 12:30:03 +0000

“Recently” being something like a year and a half ago. I’m very disappointed with their progress.

I second that. Best of luck with whatever you are trying.

By: George

George — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 14:01:20 +0000

The credit-card tactics might have worked great for their MAC users, where they are the market leader. But in Windows world, where they are struggling to get some attention, they are shooting themselves in the foot.

By: Darryl Lovato

Darryl Lovato — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 17:59:02 +0000

Hello guys,

Yes we are looking for a compression research engineer.

Here’s some of the things our research and development staff value:

New Technology – We enjoy working with the latest technology whether it is operating systems, computers, devices or tools.
Creativity – Software development is an art form. We allow our developers to express their ideas in our works of art.
Ease of Use – We develop state of the art technology, and deliver it in a easy to use package.
Innovation – Doing new things that have not been done before. We are leaders not followers.
Market Leaders – We strive to be the leader in the product lines we create
Visibility – We create software & technology that is actually used by individuals on a daily basis.
Teamwork – We build software in small, sometimes virtual teams.
Risk Taking – High reward requires high risk. Allowing individuals to take risks and allowing for failure is part of our creative process.

If you have the necessary skill set, and find these values interesting - or know someone who does, please contact me.

- Darryl

dlovato at smithmicro dot com or darryl at lovato dot com

By: Matt Mahoney

Matt Mahoney — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 17:50:40 +0000

Stuffit does have the best compression on jpeg files,
http://maximumcompression.com/data/jpg.php
Yaakov Gringeler (author of Compressia, no longer available) is co-owner of a patent (pending) on the jpeg compression algorithm. It works by partially uncompressing the jpeg back to the DCT coefficients and recompressing it with a better algorithm.

But for text, 7zip and PPMd compress about 10% smaller than Stuffit at the same speed. http://cs.fit.edu/~mmahoney/compression/text.html

Likewise for WinRAR on a mix of file types. In fact, Stuffit failed to decompress properly in one test.
http://maximumcompression.com/data/summary_mf.php

The format might be more popular if they had a free version for noncommercial use. The last time I checked, you have to give a credit card number to download the free trial, and they would charge it if you forget to cancel.

By: Krisjohn

Krisjohn — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 03:14:43 +0000

“Recently” being something like a year and a half ago. I’m very dissapointed with their progress. Hopefully the recruiting means that we’ll actually see more than JPEG recompression offered some time soon.

By: George

George — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 11:08:47 +0000

They were never “dead”, but yes not very popular beyond MAC users. But with the JPEG recompression feat they accomplished recently, I think their researchers are upto something cool.

By: pieter

pieter — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 09:36:08 +0000

I compared some jpeg files which were compressed by stuffit to jpeg2000 files and the stuffit files clearly show more details than the jpeg2000 files. I believe that a stuffit image format can be very useable aspecially for webbrowsing and achiving.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 09:21:30 +0000

I thought StuffIt was dead. It still exits?