Q&A With: Jack Hidary

A founder of two successful Internet start-ups spoke with Spectrum Online about today's entrepreneurial environment, Net technology, and being your own boss

5 min read

Jack Hidary is currently an entrepreneur and philanthropist, through the Prism Fund and the Hidary Foundation, respectively. As the former cofounder and chairman of Vista Research, he continues as an advisor to Standard & Poor's and Vista (now a McGraw-Hill company). He has also served as the former CEO and chairman of EarthWeb, an Internet software provider, based in New York City.

Spectrum Online: As a leading Internet entrepreneur, how would you describe the current environment in which those who would like to start their own technology company find themselves?

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From WinZips to Cat GIFs, Jacob Ziv’s Algorithms Have Powered Decades of Compression

The lossless-compression pioneer received the 2021 IEEE Medal of Honor

11 min read
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Photo of Jacob Ziv
Photo: Rami Shlush
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Lossless data compression seems a bit like a magic trick. Its cousin, lossy compression, is easier to comprehend. Lossy algorithms are used to get music into the popular MP3 format and turn a digital image into a standard JPEG file. They do this by selectively removing bits, taking what scientists know about the way we see and hear to determine which bits we'd least miss. But no one can make the case that the resulting file is a perfect replica of the original.

Not so with lossless data compression. Bits do disappear, making the data file dramatically smaller and thus easier to store and transmit. The important difference is that the bits reappear on command. It's as if the bits are rabbits in a magician's act, disappearing and then reappearing from inside a hat at the wave of a wand.

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