🚀 go-pugleaf

baliord@vixen.com (Baliord) writes:

> Greets,
>     Just wondering, do you strip the high bits off of Usenet messages 
> when storing them on your local system?  It strikes me that 16G/day of 
> binaries suggests that if you did, you'd save 2G of storage / day...
> 
>     I'm *pretty* sure (although I haven't yanked up the RFC to tell) that 
> 8bit messages aren't required to be supported, and certainly almost no 
> newsreaders care about them...

The transmission path is not required to be eight-bit clean, but it
generally is.  The two major flaws in your proposal:

     The operating system that Chris uses almost certainly expects a
     byte to be eight bits.  The performance hit in encoding eight
     bytes into seven would be significant, and he'd get better
     results with a real compression algorithm.

     Articles encoded as 8bit are not uncommon.  Converting to 7bit
     would be acceptable, but would impose a performance penalty and
     screw up PGP and other digital signatures.  Simply stripping the
     high bit would change the body, which is something that MUST
     NEVER be done by a server.
-- 
I've always wanted to be a dilettante, but I've never quite been ready
to make the commitment.