Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ukma!sean
From: sean@ms.uky.edu (Sean Casey)
Newsgroups: alt.sources.d
Subject: Re: Unnecessary tar-compress-uuencodes
Message-ID: <sean.647630062@s.ms.uky.edu>
Date: 10 Jul 90 17:14:22 GMT
References: <15652@bfmny0.BFM.COM> <3114@psueea.UUCP> <11553@letni.UUCP>
Organization: The Leaning Tower of Patterson Office @ The Univ. of KY
Lines: 24

doug@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