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From: ergo@netcom.UUCP (Isaac Rabinovitch)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: PKZIP does zip on uuencoded files?
Message-ID: <11537@netcom.UUCP>
Date: 4 Jul 90 02:30:43 GMT
References: <26910564.5118@petunia.CalPoly.EDU>
Distribution: usa
Organization: UESPA
Lines: 22

In <26910564.5118@petunia.CalPoly.EDU> jdudeck@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (John R. Dudeck) writes:



>I have been trying to archive to diskette a bunch of the uuencoded software
>that I have collected off of the net news, and I was surprised to find that
>PKZIP 1.10 gives a compression ratio of 0% on uuencoded files.  This seems
>curious, since obviously uuencoding decreases the information density.

A wild guess:  your files were compressed before they were uuencoded.
Since a compressed file has relatively uniform infodensity, so will
its uuencoded version.  Don't some compression algorithms choke if you
give them data with uniform consistency?  They need un-subltle
redundancy to squeeze out.
-- 

ergo@netcom.uucp			Isaac Rabinovitch
atina!pyramid!apple!netcom!ergo		Silicon Valley, CA
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	"I hate quotations.  Tell me what you know!"
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