On Tue, 6 Jul 2010 20:40:53 +0000, Ted MacNEIL wrote: >>I'm a "results oriented" guy; formal proofs, elegant or otherwise, don't >>"float my boat" anywhere near as well as concrete results that I can >quantify. > You may safely disregard a formal proof that a technique will work, and operate as if it won't. It's less prudent to ignore a formal proof that for some input a technique will produce undesirable results.
>I tend to agree with you; without the time to do an empirical study on >compression what do you have? > >I've never had a compressed file come out larger than the original input. > OK. Here's your empirical study: dd bs=1000 count=10 </dev/random >foo compress <foo >foo.Z gzip <foo > foo.gz zip foo.zip foo ls -al foo* -rw-r--r-- 1 pg187608 scm 10000 Jul 6 15:23 foo -rw-r--r-- 1 pg187608 scm 14566 Jul 6 15:23 foo.Z -rw-r--r-- 1 pg187608 scm 10023 Jul 6 15:23 foo.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 pg187608 scm 10138 Jul 6 15:23 foo.zip -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
