pokey@well.UUCP (Jef Poskanzer) (07/02/88)
It occurred to me that any of you folks who don't read comp.sources.d
might want to read this article too. So far there has been no reply.
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From: pokey@well.UUCP (Jef Poskanzer)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: mahjongg tiles
Message-ID: <6407@well.UUCP>
Date: 29 Jun 88 07:08:22 GMT
Reply-To: Jef Poskanzer <jef@rtsg.ee.lbl.gov>
Organization: Paratheo-Anametamystikhood Of Eris Esoteric, Ada Lovelace Cabal
Lines: 38
Well, the last part of mahjongg2 has finally arrived. Thirty-eight parts,
about 50K per part, total size 2,011,435 bytes. It took a week to dribble
out. Amazing. And now for the next few weeks, those two megabytes will
sit around in EVERY SPOOL PARTITION ON THE NET taking up space. Whether
anyone on that system wants to play mahjongg or not. Whether they have
a Sun or not.
On the other hand, if either the author, opus!markh, or the moderator of
comp.sources.games, billr@tekred.TEK.COM, had taken my suggestion of tarring
and compressing the tiles, things would have been noticeably different.
Instead of the tiles taking up 1.88 meg out of 2.01 meg, they would have
taken up 207K out of 340K. That's a factor of 9 compression for the tiles,
and a factor of 6 reduction in the total space used. Instead of 38
installments, there would have been 7.
Here's how it should have been done:
tar cvf tiles.tar tiles
compress tiles.tar
uuencode tiles.tar.Z tiles.tar.Z > tiles.tar.Z.uu
rm tiles.tar.Z
split -840 tiles.tar.Z.uu tiles.tar.Z.uu
rm tiles.tar.Z.uu
And here's how the files would have been unpacked on the receiving end:
cat tiles.tar.Z.uu?? | uudecode
zcat tiles.tar.Z | tar xvf -
rm tiles.tar.Z.uu?? tiles.tar.Z
Simple, eh? So why wasn't it done this way??? Is someone a BOZO???
And is it going to be done this way in the future????
---
Jef
Jef Poskanzer jef@rtsg.ee.lbl.gov ...well!pokey
If entropy is increasing, where is it coming from?