ken@boring.UUCP (07/24/85)
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
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[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.