🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <643@vsi1.UUCP>, lmb@vsi1.UUCP (Larry Blair) writes:
> while flipping through I saw the word "compress" and that disturbed me.
 
> The vast majority of news is transported site to site compressed.  Applying
> compression to postings will most likely result in an increase data transfered

will this baloney-argument never stop?  are you telling me that when I reduce
the size of a text file (or whatever) by 40% by compressing it, here comes
the transmission program trying to compress it, only to double it back in size?

I'd be surprised if the worst case of negative pay-off of having integrated
compression into the transmission protocols are more than a few % at most;
otherwise, there must be something terribly wrong with it.  If it can't
be smart about supporting people who want to reduce disk-usage for all these
articles queueing up on thousands of USEnet machines (well, give it a little
help with an additional header "Compressed-Article: <algotrithm used>" if
you must) then I can't understand why we bother at all ....

If it could be shown that, overall, so many articles are now precompressed
that transmission-integrated compression no longer buys anything - then
we have reached the ideal state where compression on-the-fly during transmission
is no longer needed ... but I don't buy that "proof-unseen"!

if someone has studied actual data and can present ideas/suggestions based
on the analysis, I'm sure that's worth discussing. otherwise, ....