Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83 (MC840302); site boring.UUCP
Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!mcvax!boring!ken
From: ken@boring.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.sources.mac,net.news
Subject: A modest proposal
Message-ID: <6529@boring.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 23-Jul-85 17:16:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: boring.6529
Posted: Tue Jul 23 17:16:35 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 25-Jul-85 01:01:55 EDT
Organization: CWI, Amsterdam
Lines: 45
Xref: linus net.sources.mac:430 net.news:2900
Summary: reducing net costs
Apparently-To: rnews@mcvax.LOCAL

References:
Sender: ken@mcvax.UUCP (Ken Yap)
Reply-To: ken@mcvax.UUCP (Ken Yap)
Followup-To: net.news
Distribution: net
Organization: Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica, Amsterdam
Keywords: 

[There are more flames in net.news than net.flames now :-)]

Amidst the net.flame brouhaha, I read in mod.newslists that this week
net.sources.mac accounted for 10% of total net traffic thru seismo,
twice that of the next volumous newsgroup.

Curious as to how much redundancy remained in Mac Binhex postings, I
tried the following script on 4 large articles (actually Rick Jansen's
TeX stuff).

	tr -d '\012' < hex | compress | encode | fold -72 > newhex

and obtained reductions between 15 and 30%. (Encode is not uuencode
but a program by Robert Elz (?) to map 8 bit data to 7 bit printable
ASCII.)

The reverse transformation would be:

	tr -d '\012' < newhex | decode | uncompress | fold -64 > hex

Questions: It it worth applying this compaction to postings to reduce
net traffic? Would it cause problems? Is there already a new Binhex
format that optimizes packing?

Problems I can see: Everyone would need compress (which is PD),
encode/decode (which if not PD are simple enough to recreate) and fold.
This format would be sensitive to small errors but Binhex already is
anyway.  Lines starting with ~ could upset mailers. Some links already
apply compression to net news.

Comments welcome. Flames to /dev/null.

	Regards,
	Ken
-- 
UUCP: ..!{seismo,okstate,garfield,decvax,philabs}!mcvax!ken Voice: Ken!
Mail: Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica, Kruislaan 413, 1098 SJ, Amsterdam.