Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site looking.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!looking!brad From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) Newsgroups: net.news Subject: What a good news compressor should do Message-ID: <138@looking.UUCP> Date: Tue, 20-Mar-84 00:00:00 EST Article-I.D.: looking.138 Posted: Tue Mar 20 00:00:00 1984 Date-Received: Wed, 21-Mar-84 03:35:38 EST References: <149@forcm5.UUCP> Organization: Looking Glass Software, Waterloo, Ont Lines: 21 A good news compressor would save a lot of people a lot of money, at the expense of a fair amount of cpu time. Great for vaxes with cpu to burn at night, not a good idea for my Onyx. There are various huffman encoders out there, you could ask around for one in public domain, I am sure you will find one. They're pretty easy to write. But a news encoder could do a lot better than a typical huffman. First of all, the news header can be reduced a great deal in size. All Header prefixes, such as "Relay-Version", could be reduced to almost nothing. Dates and such can be reduced easily. Then if you know you are talking about English text, you can do a lot by keeping a small dictionary of words - say the most common 1000 which you keep in ram. Of course, everybody has to keep the same list. You could add a few hundred common site names too. Overall, I could see this cutting the news phone bill down to 1/3 of what it is now. If your site pays for news, it is worth your time and the salary you get for it to write such code for your company! -- Brad Templeton - Waterloo, Ontario (519) 886-7304