From: billp@jupiter.cse.utoledo.edu (Bill Parquet) Subject: Re: Stacker like file system Date: 29 Aug 1992 03:38:23 GMT
mfp+@CS.CMU.EDU (Michael Polis) writes:
: |> Having a /usr/compressed/pics directory with on-the-fly compression would be
: |> a dream come true.
: How about storing them as GIF's, which are inherently compressed using
: the LZW algorithm (the one used by compress).
There's a few disadvantages to using GIF format. Most namely is the
restriction to 256 colors.
What kind of compression technique do those
programs [stacker/doubledisk/etc] use? (Hopefully this isn't the start of
a completely unrelated discussion) ... The only thing that I think gets
really ugly about those programs if you have a file that contians a block
of zeros in the middle, then you have a program that fseeks to that block
and writes a block of random data over it. The compression program has
to deal with expansion in the physical file size.