Doesn’t that have as much to do with battery life and software engineering effort than anything? Those sensors could already log data in much more detail by streaming into an off-the-shelf compressor like xz, but they don’t because good compression inherently requires a lot of computation/battery-life and adds complexity compared to naive methods. There don’t seem to be many use-cases where people having already plugged in zpaq but that just isn’t enough and they need even better compression.
I think translating accerlerometer data into steps is effectively a way of data compression. But it’s a way of data compression that’s not optimized for leaving important features of the data intact but about trying to give users a variable they think they understand.
Doesn’t that have as much to do with battery life and software engineering effort than anything? Those sensors could already log data in much more detail by streaming into an off-the-shelf compressor like
xz, but they don’t because good compression inherently requires a lot of computation/battery-life and adds complexity compared to naive methods. There don’t seem to be many use-cases where people having already plugged in zpaq but that just isn’t enough and they need even better compression.I think translating accerlerometer data into steps is effectively a way of data compression. But it’s a way of data compression that’s not optimized for leaving important features of the data intact but about trying to give users a variable they think they understand.