10x compression factor

[Steve Butler]

Which is why I knew to go looking for this special case.  But, it is fun to
pull our the corner cases and watch folks eyes glaze over!

Back in the beginning of FidoNet (remember FidoNet?) one of the lead
developers had somebody dialing into his site every few hours to look for
updates.  Complained if none were found.  So, a special update was prepared
for him.  <<grin>> They hand generated the compressed version of a really
big file.  Big enough to ensure that the recipient couldn't decompress it on
their box.

My understanding is that this person wanted the "big" update so bad they
went out and bought a new system with enough disk space.

Now my system at home has more RAM than fit on the hard drive I used back
then.



-----Original Message-----
From: David Shaw [mailto:dshaw at jabberwocky.com]
Sent: Tuesday, February 10, 2004 10:29 AM

On Tue, Feb 10, 2004 at 08:32:24AM -0800, Steve Butler wrote:
> Plain text should have lots (and even more than lots) of spaces.  Many of
<<snip>>

So, bzip2 compresses 1 gigabyte to less than 1 kilobyte. :) Of course,
this is an really artificial situation (all spaces) that plays
directly into a major strength of bzip2, but it's amusing nonetheless.

<<snip>>

Compression ratios like this make for decompression bombs...

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