Unnecessary tar-compress-uuencodes
Sean Casey
sean at ms.uky.edu
Wed Jul 11 03:14:22 AEST 1990
doug at letni.UUCP (Doug Davis) writes:
|Actually this is a very incorrect assumption, very few newsfeeds any
|more are not compressed in some way. Compressing/uuencodeing/etc
|a posting neatly circumvents any compression. The minimal savings
|on disk space doesn't justify doubleing the phone time it costs
|the article to get to the site. Disk space is cheap, Memory
|is cheap, in line compression is cheap. However *PHONE TIME* is
|expensive. A lot of usenet is in the dialup world, and extra
|phone costs that are needlessly added on, are not appreciated.
Compressing an article reduces phone time. If compress finds a file
is bigger after compression, it doesn't compress it. So the phone
costs really aren't increased by users doing their own compression.
Plus, Lempel-Ziv is not the ultimate compressor for certain kinds
of data. There's ways of compressing bitmaps, for instance, that
are a lot more effective.
I don't see what the problem is. Compress is smart enough to not
expand files, and it *does* save disk space on the remote site, so
why complain?
Sean
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