From eichin at paycheck.cygnus.com  Fri Jul 23 19:05:53 1993
From: eichin at paycheck.cygnus.com (Mark W. Eichin)
Date: Fri, 23 Jul 93 19:05:53 PDT
Subject: Macpgp 2.3
In-Reply-To: <9307230531.AA12653@netcom5.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <9307231610.AA03543@paycheck.cygnus.com>


>> one file. Mostly the compression is a waste, as the Internet already
>> compresses (so I have been told), and for sure when I "sz" the
	You have been mislead; while Usenet News feeds are sometimes
compressed, Internet connections in general are not. I have a citation
of a paper somewhere (mentioned on the com-priv mailing list) which
(if I recall correctly) said that less than 1/3 of the traffic over
the NSFnet backbone used any kind of compression...

>> compresses (so I have been told), and for sure when I "sz" the
	The compression is only *partly* for the benefit of reduced
transmission time -- more often files at ftp sites are compressed to
save disk space at the ftp site, and possibly to reduce ftp transit
time to remote sites. (That said, there are some versions of ftpd,
namely the wuarchive one, that given a foo.Z if you request foo it
will automatically decompress it for you in case you don't have
compress; I think the same support for gzip exists (is trivial in any
case), though I don't know if many sites have it installed.
				_Mark_ <eichin at paycheck.cygnus.com>
				... just me at home ...