Xref: utzoo comp.sys.mac:16964 news.admin:2500 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!cs.utexas.edu!ut-sally!utastro!werner From: werner@utastro.UUCP (Werner Uhrig) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,news.admin Subject: Re: some (should-be) ground-rules for submissions to comp.binaries.* Summary: compressing files can't be bad! Keywords: * XBIN FILENAME FIX * Message-ID: <2758@utastro.UUCP> Date: 10 Jun 88 11:40:49 GMT References: <2689@utastro.UUCP> <8604@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> <1381@uokmax.UUCP> <643@vsi1.UUCP> Organization: U. Texas, Astronomy, Austin, TX Lines: 25 In article <643@vsi1.UUCP>, lmb@vsi1.UUCP (Larry Blair) writes: > while flipping through I saw the word "compress" and that disturbed me. > The vast majority of news is transported site to site compressed. Applying > compression to postings will most likely result in an increase data transfered will this baloney-argument never stop? are you telling me that when I reduce the size of a text file (or whatever) by 40% by compressing it, here comes the transmission program trying to compress it, only to double it back in size? I'd be surprised if the worst case of negative pay-off of having integrated compression into the transmission protocols are more than a few % at most; otherwise, there must be something terribly wrong with it. If it can't be smart about supporting people who want to reduce disk-usage for all these articles queueing up on thousands of USEnet machines (well, give it a little help with an additional header "Compressed-Article: " if you must) then I can't understand why we bother at all .... If it could be shown that, overall, so many articles are now precompressed that transmission-integrated compression no longer buys anything - then we have reached the ideal state where compression on-the-fly during transmission is no longer needed ... but I don't buy that "proof-unseen"! if someone has studied actual data and can present ideas/suggestions based on the analysis, I'm sure that's worth discussing. otherwise, ....