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From: heiby@cuae2.UUCP (Ron Heiby)
Newsgroups: net.sources.d
Subject: Posting compressed info
Message-ID: 
Date: Tue, 26-Aug-86 11:47:47 EDT
Article-I.D.: cuae2.2315
Posted: Tue Aug 26 11:47:47 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 27-Aug-86 20:33:39 EDT
Expires: Tue, 30-Sep-86 20:00:00 EDT
References: 
Reply-To: heiby@cuae2.UUCP (-Ron Heiby)
Organization: AT&T - /app/eng, Lisle, IL
Lines: 37
Keywords: cost, compress, uuencode
Summary: Post CLEAR Text.  It's CHEAPER!

This article is in response to an article in net.sources which is just
one example of a misguided trend.  That is, the use of compression and
uuencoding by posters of "large" text information.  I'm sure that the
posters who do this have the best of intentions, and I don't blame them
for not understanding how the net works.

A recent posting of the adventure source was compressed on the poster's
machine, then uuencoded into ASCII.  This actually reduced the number
of characters being posted by a fair amount.  I presume that the same
is the case with the above referenced article.  There are two (at least)
factors working against doing this.  The first is that many sites don't
have the uudecode program or the compress program, so can't read the
posting at all.  This means that they are paying to transmit "less" (see
below) bytes, but none of them are usable by that site.

The other factor against the scheme is that it doesn't actually save any
money.  I took the bodies of the adventure source articles and put them
together in a directory.  I recorded the total size of the files, then
ran them through uudecode (which I had a heck of a time getting, see above),
and then through uncompress.  I noted that the files were now a fair amount
larger.  (Looks pretty good, huh?)  The rub is that many/most news feeds
that are concerned with phone costs or dialer time are already using
compress on the batches of news being sent, so what really needs to be
compared is the size of the original text (compressed) and the compressed
uuencoded files (compressed).  When I checked the adventure source, the
original files, when compressed individually, totalled just under 300
blocks of disk space.  The files as actually posted (original | compress |
uuencode), when compressed individually, totalled about 375 blocks, an
*increase* of 25% over the very links that are concerned enough about
costs to use compress on their news links.

The "bottom line" is, "Post CLEAR text.  Let the transmission mechanism
worry about compression."  Thanks.
-- 
Ron Heiby {NAC|ihnp4}!cuae2!heiby   Moderator: mod.newprod & mod.os.unix
AT&T-IS, /app/eng, Lisle, IL	(312) 810-6109
"'Cause there's lots of things in this world that need to BE turned around."