balance sheet
value of 1.6 G bytes
($200 IBM 20Gb drive, y2k) $12
value of 50 hours programming
($100 per hour, y2k) $5000
net gain (loss) to society
from the Zimm Buddism
("every byte is sacred"): ($4988)
The 2nd millenium is over. Save programmers, not bytes.
This is a misleading comparsion. There are circumstances where bytes can
be extremely costly, such as in the new wave of wireless devices, smart
cards, and other forms of portable electronics where every byte counts,
both for storage and for transmission. Not all uses of signatures will
have access to a 20 GB hard drive and megabit data transmission rates.
Furthermore, although any given optimization may save only a few bytes,
the net result of multiple such choices based on a philosophy of space
savings can add up to a substantial percentage reduction.
This is especially true when contrasted with the philosophy that space
doesn't matter any more. The end result of that philosophical approach
would be something like XML, with ascii rendering of data and verbose
tags to identify each field. PGP's signatures are probably 1/3 the size
you'd get if you used straightforward XML to represent the data.
So, yes, the second millennium is over, but no, there are still situations
where saving bytes makes sense.
Having said that, you can still look at the various optimizations
in the OpenPGP spec to see which give you the most space-saving bang
for the programmer-effort buck. Obviously using untagged binary data
is the biggest win. Beyond that, some of the optimizations, like the
string-to-key iteration count, are probably a lot more effort than they
are worth, since they're not used much.
Hal