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From: leonardr@svc.portal.com (Leonard Rosenthol)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: StuffIt Deluxe (Compactor)
Message-ID: <1990Aug29.210453.24025@svc.portal.com>
Date: 29 Aug 90 21:04:53 GMT
References: <1990Aug29.093732.7927@cs.UAlberta.CA> <4390@sage.cc.purdue.edu>
Sender: news@svc.portal.com
Reply-To: leonardr@svc.portal.com (Leonard Rosenthol)
Organization: Software Ventures Corporation.
Lines: 39

In article <4390@sage.cc.purdue.edu>, ar4@sage.cc.purdue.edu (Piper Keairnes)
writes:
> What kind of popular compression methods are there? Stuffit uses the LZW and
> Huffman compression methods. By the way, what does Stuffit do to make the
> difference between the the Faster-Fast-Better modes? And is it possible for
> someone to make an external customized compression that will out-perform
> Stuffit Deluxe?
> 
	Without going into the proprietary details, let it simply be said
that difference in the modes has to do with the accuracy/precision used 
in the compression as well as some special 'checking' that is done on the
data in the file.

> I hear about Compactor being faster and more efficient than Stuffit. Has
> anyone taken to finding out why? I think that Raymond Lau's products look
> very useful and very well designed. Now all he needs is a little kick in the
> read-end to improve the compression technology.
>
	It is really interesting to see the comparisons of these two products
because every time I see a new one, it always has results which are 
conflicting with the last one ;-)  The reasons for a lot of this are that the 
compression is ENTIRELY dependant on the type of data that is compressed.
The 'comparer' choose data which was important to them, and not so much a
good statistical sample.  Compactor has shown to currently be better at 
certain file types (code/binaries) while Stuffit excels at data type files
(text, graphics, sound, etc.)  Also, some of the comparisions have been
between Compactor and Stuffit 1.5.1, and NOT Deluxe which give MUCH better
compression and is faster.
	Another point is that Ray is certainly not sitting still, and although
I can not comment on details, let it simply be said that the next version
of Deluxe will KICK *SS in terms of both compression size and speed at which
it can create such archives.

Leonard Rosenthol
Stuffit Javelin Catcher
--
Leonard Rosenthol
Software Ventures Corp.
MicroPhone II Development Team