[TAG] need information about sylpheed-claws

[Benjamin A. Okopnik]

On Wed, Apr 13, 2005 at 10:02:01PM -0400, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 12, 2005 at 10:42:08PM -0600, Benjamin A. Okopnik wrote:
> > Right on both counts. I wasn't expecting people to actually *do* this,
> > just to become aware of it. It _is_ an interesting sort of thing to play
> > with, though - 1GB shrunk to 700-some _bytes?_ Wow.
> 
> Depends on what you're compressing.
> 
> We use Microlite's BackupEdge on our Linux/filePro systems, and it's
> not uncommon for us to see 70-80% compression on the key (data) segment
> files, and I've seen over 90% on some.

This was %99.99993 compression, Jay. Don't know about anyone else, but
it impressed me. Now, yeah, you _could_ have a compressor/decompressor
that works like this:

("Compressed file" viewed with 'bvi'; last position is the value of the
repeated byte.)

``
00000000  33 62 39 61 63 61 30 30 00                      3b9aca00.
''

``
# "Decompressor"
perl -wpe's/(.*)(.)$/$2x$1/e' file>file.out
''

Then you'd get %99.9999991 compression with a 1GB file, and
%99.9999999991 with a 1TB file. Would _that_ impress you? :)

> There's a *lot* of air in the average database file.

Oh yeah. I recall getting the kind of compression ratios you're talking
about when I was DBAing in St. Thomas; made me wonder, until I actually
looked at those files (with Norton's DiskEdit, if I recall correctly.)
*Lots* of air.


* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://linuxgazette.net *