Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!steinmetz!davidsen
From: davidsen@steinmetz.ge.com (William E. Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Comparison of compaction routines
Message-ID: <10564@steinmetz.ge.com>
Date: 25 Apr 88 20:10:20 GMT
References: <483@csccat.UUCP>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 29
Keywords: good data, bad (biased) conclusion

In article <483@csccat.UUCP> loci@csccat.UUCP (Chuck Brunow) writes:
| >                Tests performed 4-21-88 by Erik Talvola
| >
| >                 Article Copyright 1988 by Erik Talvola
| 
| 	provided a cursory look at programs by name. It would be well
| 	to specify what the method of compaction used in each case was.
| 	Setting that aside, the author misses the principle point of
| 	compaction: to make it small. Speed is not a good measure of
| 	this function except as it relates to transmission speed, ie.
| 	how small is it. The 16-bit compress clearly blew everything

  Excuse me? I don't disagree that transmission speed is important, or
that it must be the most important thing to you. However, I think there
are a number of us who use archivers for a number of things other than
sending files, such as saving them on our hard disk.

  I thought the article was useful, although there were a few points
which I communicated to the author by mail. I don't think the author
misses the point at all, DOS software is not a background item where you
don't care about how long it takes.

  I'm really mistified about why compress was so slow. On Xenix it runs
slightly faster than zoo. I'm rerunning some tests and will share the
results with the original author for his next posting.
-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu@ge-crd.arpa)
  {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me