ietf-822
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Re: Massive Content-Type definition ideas & Gopher

1993-06-08 05:50:33
At  1:09 AM 6/8/93 -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
Some people do seem to think that using twice the bandwidth to transmit a
file is a significant amount.  And for disk storage, $.50/megabyte does
seem a lot cheaper than $1.00/megabyte.

Certainly, compression seems very attractive if you ignore the costs it
incurs and only look at the costs it saves.

There is cpu and wall time spent [de]compressing, there is decreased
interoperability, there is increased complexity in the protocol; all these
things have costs, too.

The current version is 1.8 megabytes.

I'm sure you could squeeze that down by more efficient coding, removal of
extraneous features, etc.  Don't you want to save bandwidth and storage? 
Or are the savings you would gain outweighed by the effort it takes to make
them?

Perhaps compression really is a net gain, but it's not quite so simple as
"some people think $.50 is cheaper than $1".

--
Steve Dorner, Qualcomm Inc.
Oldthinkers unbellyfeel IngSoc.