Gaël DONVAL wrote: > Bob Proulx a écrit : > > There is a problem with the mashing and reformatting. It makes lzip > > appear to be 66M against xz being 65M and so xz is better, right? But > > wait the above says that gz is 99M. But ls says 100M. So the listed > > sizes are not 100% correct. So 66M is true if 100M is true. But it > > seems that something was truncating down to 99M and so perhaps that > > 65M is actually 66M? In which case xz and lz were actually the same > > for that sample. Or perhaps if they count 65M as true for xy then > > perhaps it should be 65M for lz too? > > > > I think you see the problem. I don't really know from the above data > > whether xz or lz is the same or worse or better. > > ... > Even if you are perfectly right, I wouldn't look at the long byte count. > A MB today is downloaded in 1s with most internet connection and if you You have a faster network connection than I do. Or rather I do not have as fast of a connection as "most people" do these days. :-) In my case I would like something faster but in my area while this is possible it is many times more expensive. I must wait. > take linux-2.6 archive or your whole / partition archive, you might see > that lz/xz performs worse/better that xz/lz considering file size. Agreed. > From my point of view, I see two programs performing almost equally well > on a big bunch of ascii files on this hardware. You are very observant! And by this you are not in the target audience I was talking about. I know people and many people will see 66M versus 65M as a strong indicator when it should not be taken as significant at all. These people would see 0.0000001% as being different, strictly one is measured at larger than the other, and make a conclusion which they should not conclude. That you observe this correctly shows that you are smarter than these other people that I worry about. :-) > So the next question would be "which one is faster?" and even before > that, I would wonder "Are these programs available on my cluster?" > > But once again you are perfectly right to ask for more precision, I just > say that there are high chances that you won't be able to conclude > anything. Agreed. My comment was directed toward the human element. :-) Bob
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