As news outlets create headlines such as "A Cloud & A Prayer," "The Cloud Is the Computer," and "Leveraging Clouds to Make You More Efficient," many readers have been left with cloud confusion. Many definitions exist for cloud computing, and a uniform definition is hard to find. In its most basic form, cloud…

This report delineates the theory and terminology of data compression. It surveys four data compression methods--null suppression, pattern substitution, statistical encoding, and telemetry compression--and relates them to a standard statistical coding problem, i.e., the noiseless coding problem. The well defined solution to that problem can serve…