gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) (08/28/86)
I have noticed a recent upsurge in people who take ordinary files
full of text and run them through compress or arc, then uuencode
or atob or some such, before posting them to the net. Please don't;
here's why:
(1) 99% of news links already compress every article that goes over
them. If you've ever tried it, you'll notice that compressing something
twice causes it to get BIGGER than compressing it once. Since the
uuencode or atob has already grown the file by 15-25%, you would have
kept costs lower by just posting the source as plain ascii text.
(2) Many people who get the article will be confused and will not be
able to extract the text from it. This will fill your mailbox with
letters from confused people, and will prevent many people from even
bothering to look at your article since it's too much work for them.
I think this applies to binaries too. You have to run them through
atob or uuencode or binhex or whatever, so they will only contain ascii
and be sendable through our translucent network, but you may as well
let the news links compress it as they send it, rather than compressing
it yourself before you run the ascii-izer on it.
Thanks for listening.
--
John Gilmore {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu jgilmore@lll-crg.arpa
May the Source be with you!