Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the take-that,-winzip dept.
n8willis writes: "There's a project called lzip at SourceForge that lets you compress your files down to 0% of their original size. How's it work? The "L" stands for "lossy.""
Batten down the hatches and hide the women and children -- April 1st is here again. The Register is already in the spirit. Believe nothing you read until, oh, say, Wednesday, just to be safe.
BTW, I wonder if I could use lzip's license on my next source distribution?
hmm... this makes me wonder if it was a good idea to compress my home directory with this thing...
(peter@mustard)-(/dev/tty1)-(~/lzip)
(Sat Mar 31)-(10:23pm) 13 > strings./lunzip
Goldfinger.
He's the man, the man with the midas touch.
A spider's touch.
Such a cold finger.
Beckons you to enter his web of sin
But don't go in.
Golden words he will pour in your ear,
But his lies can't disguise what you fear,
For a golden girl knows when he's kissed her,
It's the kiss of death from
Mister Goldfinger.
Pretty girl beware of this heart of gold
This heart is cold.
Golden words he will pour in your ear,
But his lies can't disguise what you fear,
For a golden girl knows when he's kissed her,
It's the kiss of death from
Mister Goldfinger.
Pretty girl beware of this heart of gold
This heart is cold.
He loves only gold,
Only gold.
He loves gold.
He loves only gold,
Only gold.
He loves gold.
(peter@mustard)-(/dev/tty1)-(~/lzip)
(Sat Mar 31)-(10:23pm) 14 >
It's a picture of a sock monkey holding a bunch of bananas. Hence the "sock monkey wranglers" credit in the CREDITS file. It's just a JPEG, as far as I can tell.
reminds me of the gtk+ frontend to the unix 'true' prog.
If I devise a way to get back the info that is...er... 'compressed,' could that be a DMCA violation if someone else distributes their movies after being lzip'ped?
Re:hahah.. love that algorithm name
by
unitron
·
· Score: 2
Has anyone searched Professor Lirpa's work for prior art?
--
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
The nice thing about it is that the "lzip" and "lunzip" utilities work on all modern platforms. I've tested them on Linux, Win32, MacOS and a WebTV so far.
Similar work being done in cryptography.
by
Wayfarer
·
· Score: 2
FOR RELEASE: April 01, 2001
Contact: Foonly Bar Baz
Office: 810 McGraw Tower
E-Mail: fbb00@cornell.edu
CORNELL UNIVERSITY, ITHACA NY USA--Cryptographic 'Holy Grail' discovered!
Researchers at the U. Ezra Hardware Cryptography Facility at Cornell University have created a completely unbreakable means of cryptography that may be used in a wide variety of applications.
"It's all done in hardware," says Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky IV, chief researcher at the facility. "We discovered that it is possible to mass-encrypt any magnetic media through the use of electrically-induced magnetic fields."
Unlike a simple kitchen magnet, the hardware developed by the team can generate encrypted data on the entire surface of a disk at once, speeding up what can be a laborious process on modern desktop computers.
"The idea came to us when Lain started generating Morse code with the bulk eraser and the floppy containing our research data," says Tivrusky. "We tried our darndest to get our data back, even set some grad students loaned from the math department on the problem, but nothing seemed to work. And that's when we realized we had something here."
The U.S. Department of Defense is considering the technology for use as a secret weapon against evil hacker terrorists.
"This is a watershed event in the war against hackers," says a colonel who wishes to remain anonymous. "If we can adapt this to encrypt network transmissions, we could protect our network traffic against rogue Russian teenagers, miscreants in black trenchcoats, and Keanu Reeves."
"Widespread use of this technology has the potential to change the way we use computers," says Tivrusky. "It's a story I'll be able to tell my kids someday."
-W-
"Is it all journey, or is there landfall?"
--
-W-
Is it all journey, or is there landfall?
--Ellison & van Vogt, 'The Human Operators'
here's the new source, it's much faster than the original, and the math is much more simple.
#!/bin/sh
rm -f $1
#end
Enjoy. Remember that the syntax is now lzip [filename]. I removed the need for the compression level, and hope to add recursion soon, though that will increase the size of the app.
Actaully, this is probably not the right forum for this, I'll put a page up on sourceforge.
-- "Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
Unisys and Compuserve have just announced that they also hold the patent for lossy compression and will be collecting royalties from all open and closed source implementations.
-- -- Just my $0.02 worth...
Re:On a related note...
by
DanThe1Man
·
· Score: 2
Can they be sued when people loose 99% of their data with this product?
reminds me of sorting algorithm from college
by
gsfprez
·
· Score: 2
We went to a small small school, and so we got the same teacher all the time, and this guy had a total hard on for two things in life.. addition chains and sorting algorithms
well, after writing bubble sort in our 15th language, my friend gracefully went up to the VT101 which was hooked to a BarfoVision, and fired up his new, totally original sorting program..
the bars just kept flying across the screen.. and after about 15 seconds of this (it should have taken not much longer than a hit of the return button) he informed us that bogosort, while not efficient in the execution phase, was very efficient in the coding phase and theoretically would sort any array in n!/150 seconds...
randomizing is a cool way to cut down coding time.
-- guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
A practical use for Lzip
by
uncleFester
·
· Score: 2
what about those lame proposals upper management gives you for implementing Project Impossible with its overly-adequate budget of $4.62?
Or long-term storage of disaster recovery plans?
"Oh, I though/dev/null was long-term storage! You mean that was a joke?"
1. What is lzip?
Lzip is the most advanced file compression utility ever conceived. It is literally years ahead of gzip (though admittedly gzip was around first), and makes use of mathematical transforms the bzip developers have never even heard of.
So the lzip people know, exactly, the contents of the bzip developers heads? They'll be telepaths then.
2. What makes lzip different from gzip/bzip2?
The second is that the performance is vastly improved.
Tell me it takes longer to MP3 encode than it does to gzip or bzip2. (MP3 being the most used lossy codec, to slashdotters).
We're talking about a constant-time algorithm that can reduce a file down to 0% of its original size. What's not to like?
Contsant time - not linear. In otherwords, give it a large enough file, and it can compress it before it reads it all off the disk.
Compress down to 0% - I reffer the reader to the comp.compression FAQ, point 73. It's impossible.
3. What do you mean I can't restore my files?
On the reassuring side, it is important to note that the compression algorithm used by lzip only discards the unimportant data.
An algotithm that works on generic files, but can identify the important data in them. Guess all the compression research just got made useles then - identfying what parts of the data is important is impossible, only a human can do that [0].
8. What is the Lessiss-Moore algorithm?
It utilizes a two-pass bit-sieve to first remove all unimportant data from the data set. Lzip implements this quiet effectively by eliminating all of the 0's.
Uh-hu. Removes all the 0's. Do I really need to elaborate on that one.
Oh, and thier liscence is the FOOL liscence. Go figure.
[0] In MP3, a human came up with the psychoacoutstic model. The codec just applies that model. --
If someone ran Jon Katz through lzip, would anyone notice?
I believe that would require lbloat, not lzip.
First, let me point out the remarkable progress the new lbloat engine has made since it was demoed exactly one year ago. Read down toward the end of those reviews and you'll see one of the many quirks that have been fixed.
lbloat is great for anyone who needs to create long documents utilizing big words without having any real content to base them on. Students and advertisers are sure to find this "if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit" strategy to be extremely useful.
lbloat is also capable of using its advanced Sensationalizing Technology(tm) to turn any small story into the perfect target for today's media. Witness the story a single geek, relentlessly persecuted by his peers, blossom into a 15,000,000-part "Hellmouth" series. Note how the title instils an instinctive sense of fear, dread, and anticipation in the reader, without needing any of that precious commodity known as content.
lbloat can be using in conjunction with lzip when it becomes necessary to misquote statements by a reliable source in order to further a contrasting viewpoint. Zip that Constitution down to nothing, and then bloat it up to the Communist Manifesto instantly! It's obviously the same document, since all we've done is compressed and decompressed it.
JonKatz is an advanced lbloat beta running on a limited distribution basis. In the meantime, check out WindowsME and Windows98, which take all of the three useful features of Windows95 and double the size and slow it down, all without providing any noticeable new features.
-- --
Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
Re:Introducing Microsoft ActiveLZip
by
SMN
·
· Score: 2
No, no, no, no! You have it all wrong!
If Microsoft were to embrace a technology, they would need to then extend it. Any proper Microsoft satire is meaningless if it lacks the absurdly logical extension.
Try this instead:
Gates also announced that
Microsoft(R) ActiveLZip(R)(TM) would feature enhancements making it far superior to the Open Source Industry's offerings.
"Microsoft(R) ActiveLZip(R)(TM) is capable of creating compressed files significantly larger than the original, thanks to our meticulously designed Gigantitron technology," said Gates, refering to the code name for Microsoft's latest innovation. "Larger file size means files are a negative percent smaller than the original, and everyone knows that a negative size is smaller than the numbers that those "other" guys put out. Their claim of superiority is just another "Linux Myth." As usual, Microsoft's superior products give consumers another huge incentive to upgrade."
Gates also claimed that the new Microsoft(R) ActiveLZip(R)(TM) technology would be imployed in the next version of Windows, which would explain the amazingly small mere 2 gigabytes of memory used by recent beta versions of Microsoft(R) WindowsXP(R)(TM). Gates did not, however, offer an explanation of the seemingly random pairings of letters being used by Microsoft(R)'s Marketing Department to distinguish between the company's many offerings.
-- --
Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
There was a great MS-DOS program which claimed to be a "compression utility." It would simply save pointers to the sectors upon which the original files existed, the file lengths and random data some 10% of the original size.
"Compressing" your files, erasing the originals and uncompressing again generally worked, as it seemed to have some intelligence about recovering deleted files instead of overwriting.
I found this program when a gullible friend lost most of his girlie porn collection to the thing and was crying for help.:)
I just compressed my huge college Thesis with it. I won't need any back up when its that small! Now I'm just haveing a bit of trouble uncompressing it....
echo date | lzip | lunzip
by
tomschuring
·
· Score: 2
>echo date | lzip | lunzip
>32 march 2001
Re:Their licensing agreement is hilarious
by
mach-5
·
· Score: 2
"This license may not be revoked, redistributed, photocopied, or discussed without the express written consent of the parents."
Your post violates the licensing agreement:-P
Actually, it's quite upsetting
by
DebtAngel
·
· Score: 3
I mean, this story isn't nearly as good as the "Apache on PalmOS" story from last year. Now *that* was a good April Fool's story.
If someone ran Jon Katz through lzip, would anyone notice?
Or...
lzip 1.0 bug found - when I ran a Jon Katz article through lzip and the file size INCREASED. I suspect it has to do with an entire file being composed of worthless bits but I'm not sure.
Or...
The US Government has been using this for months now, witness speeches by the Pres...
I am pretty sure this is a joke, as unless the data is somewhat specialized (sound, pictures, moving pictures, to name a few), then it is very difficult to quantify which parts of the data to get rid of when compressing.
You can't just take some random file, drop a few bits here and there, and expect it to be usable on the other side. It works for JPEG, MPEG video, and MPEG audio because they know precisely how human senses work. -----
The "lzip" executable is a jpeg. "lunzip" is text
by
Temporal
·
· Score: 2
From the site:
It utilizes a two-pass bit-sieve to first remove all unimportant data from the data set. Lzip implements this quiet effectively by eliminating all of the 0's. It then sorts the remaining bits into increasing order, and begins searching for patterns...
The algorithm could be made faster by eliminating the sorting step. After all, once you remove the zeros, all you have left is ones. Thus, there is nothing to sort. I don't know about the rest of you, but I wouldn't trust my data to anything written by anyone who could miss such an obvious optimization.
One down, eighteen thousand three hundred seventy-four more projects to go.
Umm... It's quite buggy...
by
bero-rh
·
· Score: 2
I've just downloaded this thingy - since we're constantly running out of space on our CDs, I thought of lzip-compressing the emacs packages to save space (come on, any change to emacs including an exit(1); right after main() { makes this thing better;) )
Unfortunately, it doesn't work as expected.
I've hacked up a quick fix based on the same lossy algorithm. It's not quite as advanced as lzip (it's just kind of a preprocessor for gzip and bzip2), but it's quite efficient nevertheless...
It's shell code for now, if I have the time I'll optimize it by rewriting it in C.
#!/bin/sh
# lzip preprocessor
# (c) 2001 Red Hat, Inc.
#
# Released under the FO2L license, see
# lzip.sourceforge.net for details
#
if [ -z "$1" -o -n "$2" ]; then
echo "Usage: lzip filename"
exit 1
fi
dd if=/dev/zero of=$1 bs=1 \
count=`stat $1 |head -n2 |tail -n1 \
|cut -d" " -f4
echo "Preprocessing done. You can now gzip or bzip2 the file $1."
-- This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
For those of you having trouble running the exe
by
xant
·
· Score: 2
Try this:
ee lzip --
-- It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
They rejected my application for a Register Tariff 2001 Diamond+ card!
Our Liberian credit-checking agency has rejected your application. Please try again when you are solvent.
And I just found out what an evil company M$ is. I bet I was rejected because M$ bought them out. And worst of all, there TOS says that they can hand out my data to anybody if I use their service. AND I'VE BEEN USING IT FOR OVER A YEAR!
It all boils down to those damned Linux zealots. They keep making jokes about M$ and how bad it is, and it is so insane that it sounds like satire. They should have told me they were serious!
I can't be karma whoring - I've already hit 50!
-- SIG: HUP
"The 'L' Stand for Lossy"?!
by
grape+jelly
·
· Score: 2
I think it should be named rzip. The "r" stands for rm!;-)
Ladies and Gents, before you get your panties all in a wad, please note that this is an APRIL FOOLS joke.
Come on... it is sooooo easy to spot too! If a file were compressed to 0% of its size, you would have no file. Thus, the compression scheme would be lossy.... it would LOSE the entire file! It could also be therefore constant time, since it can just assume each file is lost before doing any work. Come to think of it, this sounds sortta like del (or rm, depending on what OS and/or shell you like)
-------
-- russ
"You want people to think logically? ACK! Turn in your UID, you traitor!"
-- Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Nothing new here . . .
by
DeadMeat+(TM)
·
· Score: 3
Another case of open-source programmers stealing ideas from Microsoft. Heck, Windows has been doing this kind of compression to random files on my hard drives for years!
Re; Sourcecode That explains...
by
einhverfr
·
· Score: 2
Why I keep getting parse errors when I try to compile a Windows version using VC++ 6.0!
Too bad... I was looking forward to backing up all our Windows NT Server machines. On their forum, it claims that you can lzip Windows to 0KB and then lunzip it to just over 30KB because it removes all information that is not useful!
Introducing Microsoft ActiveLZip
by
Bonker
·
· Score: 5
REDMOND (A.P.)
Founder of Microsoft Corproation, Bill Gates, announced today the release of a new compression engine for use in Microsoft Windows compressed volumes based on the popular Open Source LZip compression format.
"ActiveLZip will enable Windows users to achieve the kind of file compression they've always wanted and needed. Also, we've added several new features to the compression format you won't find in that low-end Open Source crap," Gates Said in an interview.
Gates went on to list the new featuers of ActiveLZip, including MicrosoftShred, a feature designed to encrypt documents before they are compressed, and MicrosoftIPRights, a feature designed to allow music distributors to designate rights on whate files can and cannot be compressed using ActiveLZip.
Initial usage reports from industry critics indicate that ActiveLZip doesn't quite compare to the open source products. Exhaustive testing on the lossy compression algorithm indicates that it is not capable of reproducing the 0% file-reduction size offered by the Open Source application. When questioned about this discrepancy, Microsoft Chairman, Steve Ballmer responded, "Leave me alone, Damnit! I'm trying to make sure that the Sate of New York is paying for all their Windows 2000 licenses".
-- The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
RIAA settles: NAPSTER to use LZIP
by
fmaxwell
·
· Score: 3
April 1, 2001, Redwood City, CA -- Representatives of the Internet music sharing service Napster announced today that they have reached an agreement with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Under the terms of the agreement, all music files shared via Napster will pass through Napster servers where they will undergo LZIP compression. As part of the agreement, the RIAA and all of its members will drop all pending lawsuits against the music sharing service and will grant Napster licenses to distribute their extensive catalogs of copyrighted music via LZIP compressed files. At today's press conference, Napster founder Shaun Fanning hailed the decision as being "good for the record companies, good for the artists, and good for Napster users -- who will experience much faster downloads while needing far less hard disc storage." Mr. Fanning went on to say that Napster will continue to offer MP3 downloads of music by artists that no one wants to hear and that users should "keep an eye out for the latest single from The Flaming Pit Bulls -- an accordian power trio that skillfully blends punk, country, hip-hop, and new age."
steganographic compression techniques
by
deran9ed
·
· Score: 3
While tinkering recently with Outguess, I took a simple image about 28k and used a 1k text file to combine it into a new image (steganography owns). Well in certain instances depending on what I decided to embed into the image, the image would drop in size to about 7k some times, and other times it would still drop in size. Only once did it ever go over 28k which was when I embedded about 50k worth of text into the image, which still looked crisp to the naked eye.
Just thought I would share this. At one point I was thinking about making a script to lower the sizing of the many pics I have on my porn section, but I never bothered.
I also noticed there were other tricks to saving space on files but again, never got around to mentioning them, maybe some time I will who knows.
...it makes me wonder if non-graphical applications of lossy compression might be worthwhile. I imagine the first time anyone suggested the idea, the response was something like: "lose data *intentionally*??? are you nuts?" But JPEGs are pretty durn popular.
Hmmm, let's see... I could LZIP my Perl code by taking out the comments and insignificant whitespace; that would probably render it every bit as understandable, so no problem there...
HTML pages? Get rid of every tag other than 'H*' and 'P'. Think of the possibilities: we could all go back to using NCSA Mosaic!
.o/.a files could be stripped of symbols. Debuggers are for wimps anyway (personally, I debug with printf()s and lots of coffee).
Mail messages could be stripped of
sigs and anything other than raw readable
text.
...and/. archives could be stripped of idiotic musings like this, of course.
This is a stupid joke. I was expecting a better joke from the slashdot community. It must be because the author stayed up late. A good April Fools day joke should be harder for people to guess. Stuff like "Duke Nukem Forever has gone gold!" or "John Romero is dead" (topic in #quake on efnet) just don't cut it.
Slashdot Mirror
Batten down the hatches and hide the women and children -- April 1st is here again. The Register is already in the spirit. Believe nothing you read until, oh, say, Wednesday, just to be safe.
BTW, I wonder if I could use lzip's license on my next source distribution?
The "lzip" is actually a jpeg of a stuffed monkey and some bananas...takes all kinds I guess. :-)
and since you work for VA Linux you should delay your april fools jokes until not just New England but headquarters hits April 1.
hmm... this makes me wonder if it was a good idea to compress my home directory with this thing...
./lunzip
(peter@mustard)-(/dev/tty1)-(~/lzip)
(Sat Mar 31)-(10:23pm) 13 > strings
Goldfinger.
He's the man, the man with the midas touch.
A spider's touch.
Such a cold finger.
Beckons you to enter his web of sin
But don't go in.
Golden words he will pour in your ear,
But his lies can't disguise what you fear,
For a golden girl knows when he's kissed her,
It's the kiss of death from
Mister Goldfinger.
Pretty girl beware of this heart of gold
This heart is cold.
Golden words he will pour in your ear,
But his lies can't disguise what you fear,
For a golden girl knows when he's kissed her,
It's the kiss of death from
Mister Goldfinger.
Pretty girl beware of this heart of gold
This heart is cold.
He loves only gold,
Only gold.
He loves gold.
He loves only gold,
Only gold.
He loves gold.
(peter@mustard)-(/dev/tty1)-(~/lzip)
(Sat Mar 31)-(10:23pm) 14 >
reminds me of the gtk+ frontend to the unix 'true' prog. ...er... 'compressed,' could that be a DMCA violation if someone else distributes their movies after being lzip'ped?
If I devise a way to get back the info that is
Has anyone searched Professor Lirpa's work for prior art?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
#!/bin/sh
/dev/null > $1
See? Optimization!
The nice thing about it is that the "lzip" and "lunzip" utilities work on all modern platforms. I've tested them on Linux, Win32, MacOS and a WebTV so far.
Contact: Foonly Bar Baz
Office: 810 McGraw Tower
E-Mail: fbb00@cornell.edu
CORNELL UNIVERSITY, ITHACA NY USA--Cryptographic 'Holy Grail' discovered!
Researchers at the U. Ezra Hardware Cryptography Facility at Cornell University have created a completely unbreakable means of cryptography that may be used in a wide variety of applications.
"It's all done in hardware," says Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky IV, chief researcher at the facility. "We discovered that it is possible to mass-encrypt any magnetic media through the use of electrically-induced magnetic fields."
Unlike a simple kitchen magnet, the hardware developed by the team can generate encrypted data on the entire surface of a disk at once, speeding up what can be a laborious process on modern desktop computers.
"The idea came to us when Lain started generating Morse code with the bulk eraser and the floppy containing our research data," says Tivrusky. "We tried our darndest to get our data back, even set some grad students loaned from the math department on the problem, but nothing seemed to work. And that's when we realized we had something here."
The U.S. Department of Defense is considering the technology for use as a secret weapon against evil hacker terrorists.
"This is a watershed event in the war against hackers," says a colonel who wishes to remain anonymous. "If we can adapt this to encrypt network transmissions, we could protect our network traffic against rogue Russian teenagers, miscreants in black trenchcoats, and Keanu Reeves."
"Widespread use of this technology has the potential to change the way we use computers," says Tivrusky. "It's a story I'll be able to tell my kids someday."
-W-
"Is it all journey, or is there landfall?"
-W-
Is it all journey, or is there landfall?
--Ellison & van Vogt, 'The Human Operators'
here's the new source, it's much faster than the original, and the math is much more simple.
#!/bin/sh
rm -f $1
#end
Enjoy. Remember that the syntax is now lzip [filename]. I removed the need for the compression level, and hope to add recursion soon, though that will increase the size of the app.
Actaully, this is probably not the right forum for this, I'll put a page up on sourceforge.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
Unisys and Compuserve have just announced that they also hold the patent for lossy compression and will be collecting royalties from all open and closed source implementations.
-- Just my $0.02 worth...
Good one...
We went to a small small school, and so we got the same teacher all the time, and this guy had a total hard on for two things in life.. addition chains and sorting algorithms
well, after writing bubble sort in our 15th language, my friend gracefully went up to the VT101 which was hooked to a BarfoVision, and fired up his new, totally original sorting program..
the bars just kept flying across the screen.. and after about 15 seconds of this (it should have taken not much longer than a hit of the return button) he informed us that bogosort, while not efficient in the execution phase, was very efficient in the coding phase and theoretically would sort any array in n!/150 seconds...
randomizing is a cool way to cut down coding time.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
what about those lame proposals upper management gives you for implementing Project Impossible with its overly-adequate budget of $4.62?
/dev/null was long-term storage! You mean that was a joke?"
Or long-term storage of disaster recovery plans?
"Oh, I though
-'fester
In order, from the FAQ:
1. What is lzip?
Lzip is the most advanced file compression utility ever conceived. It is literally years ahead of gzip (though admittedly gzip was around first), and makes use of mathematical transforms the bzip developers have never even heard of.
So the lzip people know, exactly, the contents of the bzip developers heads? They'll be telepaths then.
2. What makes lzip different from gzip/bzip2?
The second is that the performance is vastly improved.
Tell me it takes longer to MP3 encode than it does to gzip or bzip2. (MP3 being the most used lossy codec, to slashdotters).
We're talking about a constant-time algorithm that can reduce a file down to 0% of its original size. What's not to like?
Contsant time - not linear. In otherwords, give it a large enough file, and it can compress it before it reads it all off the disk.
Compress down to 0% - I reffer the reader to the comp.compression FAQ, point 73. It's impossible.
3. What do you mean I can't restore my files?
On the reassuring side, it is important to note that the compression algorithm used by lzip only discards the unimportant data.
An algotithm that works on generic files, but can identify the important data in them. Guess all the compression research just got made useles then - identfying what parts of the data is important is impossible, only a human can do that [0].
8. What is the Lessiss-Moore algorithm?
It utilizes a two-pass bit-sieve to first remove all unimportant data from the data set. Lzip implements this quiet effectively by eliminating all of the 0's.
Uh-hu. Removes all the 0's. Do I really need to elaborate on that one.
Oh, and thier liscence is the FOOL liscence. Go figure.
[0] In MP3, a human came up with the psychoacoutstic model. The codec just applies that model.
--
First, let me point out the remarkable progress the new lbloat engine has made since it was demoed exactly one year ago. Read down toward the end of those reviews and you'll see one of the many quirks that have been fixed.
lbloat is great for anyone who needs to create long documents utilizing big words without having any real content to base them on. Students and advertisers are sure to find this "if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit" strategy to be extremely useful.
lbloat is also capable of using its advanced Sensationalizing Technology(tm) to turn any small story into the perfect target for today's media. Witness the story a single geek, relentlessly persecuted by his peers, blossom into a 15,000,000-part "Hellmouth" series. Note how the title instils an instinctive sense of fear, dread, and anticipation in the reader, without needing any of that precious commodity known as content.
lbloat can be using in conjunction with lzip when it becomes necessary to misquote statements by a reliable source in order to further a contrasting viewpoint. Zip that Constitution down to nothing, and then bloat it up to the Communist Manifesto instantly! It's obviously the same document, since all we've done is compressed and decompressed it.
JonKatz is an advanced lbloat beta running on a limited distribution basis. In the meantime, check out WindowsME and Windows98, which take all of the three useful features of Windows95 and double the size and slow it down, all without providing any noticeable new features.
-- Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
If Microsoft were to embrace a technology, they would need to then extend it. Any proper Microsoft satire is meaningless if it lacks the absurdly logical extension.
Try this instead:
-- Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
Mea culpa. Remembering things like that is apparently beyond mine.
All your bytes are belong to us!
There was a great MS-DOS program which claimed to be a "compression utility." It would simply save pointers to the sectors upon which the original files existed, the file lengths and random data some 10% of the original size.
"Compressing" your files, erasing the originals and uncompressing again generally worked, as it seemed to have some intelligence about recovering deleted files instead of overwriting.
I found this program when a gullible friend lost most of his girlie porn collection to the thing and was crying for help. :)
---
My opinions are mine.
I love the "lossy" logo image, on which they obviously tested their code.
I just compressed my huge college Thesis with it. I won't need any back up when its that small! Now I'm just haveing a bit of trouble uncompressing it....
>echo date | lzip | lunzip
>32 march 2001
"This license may not be revoked, redistributed, photocopied, or discussed without the express written consent of the parents."
:-P
Your post violates the licensing agreement
I mean, this story isn't nearly as good as the "Apache on PalmOS" story from last year. Now *that* was a good April Fool's story.
Is this post not nifty? Sluggy Freelance. Worshi
If someone ran Jon Katz through lzip, would anyone notice?
Or...
lzip 1.0 bug found - when I ran a Jon Katz article through lzip and the file size INCREASED. I suspect it has to do with an entire file being composed of worthless bits but I'm not sure.
Or...
The US Government has been using this for months now, witness speeches by the Pres...
... How many of the other stories today are hoaxes.
The first post was before i had read the link. so don't trash me just because i wasn't totally sure at first.
I just think it's an amusing prank, is all.
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I am pretty sure this is a joke, as unless the data is somewhat specialized (sound, pictures, moving pictures, to name a few), then it is very difficult to quantify which parts of the data to get rid of when compressing.
You can't just take some random file, drop a few bits here and there, and expect it to be usable on the other side. It works for JPEG, MPEG video, and MPEG audio because they know precisely how human senses work.
-----
From the site:
The algorithm could be made faster by eliminating the sorting step. After all, once you remove the zeros, all you have left is ones. Thus, there is nothing to sort. I don't know about the rest of you, but I wouldn't trust my data to anything written by anyone who could miss such an obvious optimization.
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One down, eighteen thousand three hundred seventy-four more projects to go.
I've just downloaded this thingy - since we're constantly running out of space on our CDs, I thought of lzip-compressing the emacs packages to save space (come on, any change to emacs including an exit(1); right after main() { makes this thing better ;) )
Unfortunately, it doesn't work as expected.
I've hacked up a quick fix based on the same lossy algorithm. It's not quite as advanced as lzip (it's just kind of a preprocessor for gzip and bzip2), but it's quite efficient nevertheless...
It's shell code for now, if I have the time I'll optimize it by rewriting it in C.
#!/bin/sh
# lzip preprocessor
# (c) 2001 Red Hat, Inc.
#
# Released under the FO2L license, see
# lzip.sourceforge.net for details
#
if [ -z "$1" -o -n "$2" ]; then
echo "Usage: lzip filename"
exit 1
fi
dd if=/dev/zero of=$1 bs=1 \
count=`stat $1 |head -n2 |tail -n1 \
|cut -d" " -f4
echo "Preprocessing done. You can now gzip or bzip2 the file $1."
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
ee lzip
--
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
#! /bin/sh
echo "calculating dependencies"
echo "creating compression libraries"
echo "loading compression libraries"
echo "#### done(1)."
echo "#### done(2)."
echo "#### done(3)."
echo "#### done(4)."
echo "#### done(5)."
echo "#### done(6)."
echo "#### done(7)."
echo "#### done(8)."
echo "#### done(9)."
echo "linking...done."
echo "installation complete."
April Fools perhaps? It doesn't do a thing?
--
--
I like to watch.
Yes, but was it tested on any anymals?
You can't handle the truth.
Scientists at Los Alamos comment:
"The line between compression utility and deletion utility JUST GOT FUZZIER!"
Los Alamos is currently compressing their entire archives with LZIP, as a theft deterrence system.
More at 7.
(sorry, someone had to say it).
--
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I downloaded the beta version and it works! It even timestamps the files properly. This is amazing!
rr
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
I just ported LZip over to Win32 and used it on my system files... man am I seeing a true performance hike! This utility is great!
I'm going to LZip the firmware instructions on my SCSI card and GeForce accelerator next... stay tuned.
"After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." - Tao of Programming
Take a look:
The Free Object-Oriented License
That was the sound of this joke falling flat.
I hope this isn't an omen of the quality of the 4/1 jokes this year.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I know there has to be a really dumb joke about MS in there someplace.
really.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
1 = "You had data"
0 = "Now you don't"
very efficient under some situations :P
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
It all boils down to those damned Linux zealots. They keep making jokes about M$ and how bad it is, and it is so insane that it sounds like satire. They should have told me they were serious!
I can't be karma whoring - I've already hit 50!
SIG: HUP
I think it should be named rzip. The "r" stands for rm! ;-)
though some of the backlist Ask Slashdots are pretty good too.
sulli
RTFJ.
This article is a year old. It's dated April 1 2000.
The truth shall set you free!
Ladies and Gents, before you get your panties all in a wad, please note that this is an APRIL FOOLS joke.
Come on... it is sooooo easy to spot too! If a file were compressed to 0% of its size, you would have no file. Thus, the compression scheme would be lossy.... it would LOSE the entire file! It could also be therefore constant time, since it can just assume each file is lost before doing any work. Come to think of it, this sounds sortta like del (or rm, depending on what OS and/or shell you like)
-------
-- russ
"You want people to think logically? ACK! Turn in your UID, you traitor!"
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Another case of open-source programmers stealing ideas from Microsoft. Heck, Windows has been doing this kind of compression to random files on my hard drives for years!
Too bad... I was looking forward to backing up all our Windows NT Server machines. On their forum, it claims that you can lzip Windows to 0KB and then lunzip it to just over 30KB because it removes all information that is not useful!
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
REDMOND (A.P.)
Founder of Microsoft Corproation, Bill Gates, announced today the release of a new compression engine for use in Microsoft Windows compressed volumes based on the popular Open Source LZip compression format.
"ActiveLZip will enable Windows users to achieve the kind of file compression they've always wanted and needed. Also, we've added several new features to the compression format you won't find in that low-end Open Source crap," Gates Said in an interview.
Gates went on to list the new featuers of ActiveLZip, including MicrosoftShred, a feature designed to encrypt documents before they are compressed, and MicrosoftIPRights, a feature designed to allow music distributors to designate rights on whate files can and cannot be compressed using ActiveLZip.
Initial usage reports from industry critics indicate that ActiveLZip doesn't quite compare to the open source products. Exhaustive testing on the lossy compression algorithm indicates that it is not capable of reproducing the 0% file-reduction size offered by the Open Source application. When questioned about this discrepancy, Microsoft Chairman, Steve Ballmer responded, "Leave me alone, Damnit! I'm trying to make sure that the Sate of New York is paying for all their Windows 2000 licenses".
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
April 1, 2001, Redwood City, CA -- Representatives of the Internet music sharing service Napster announced today that they have reached an agreement with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Under the terms of the agreement, all music files shared via Napster will pass through Napster servers where they will undergo LZIP compression. As part of the agreement, the RIAA and all of its members will drop all pending lawsuits against the music sharing service and will grant Napster licenses to distribute their extensive catalogs of copyrighted music via LZIP compressed files. At today's press conference, Napster founder Shaun Fanning hailed the decision as being "good for the record companies, good for the artists, and good for Napster users -- who will experience much faster downloads while needing far less hard disc storage." Mr. Fanning went on to say that Napster will continue to offer MP3 downloads of music by artists that no one wants to hear and that users should "keep an eye out for the latest single from The Flaming Pit Bulls -- an accordian power trio that skillfully blends punk, country, hip-hop, and new age."
While tinkering recently with Outguess, I took a simple image about 28k and used a 1k text file to combine it into a new image (steganography owns). Well in certain instances depending on what I decided to embed into the image, the image would drop in size to about 7k some times, and other times it would still drop in size. Only once did it ever go over 28k which was when I embedded about 50k worth of text into the image, which still looked crisp to the naked eye.
Just thought I would share this. At one point I was thinking about making a script to lower the sizing of the many pics I have on my porn section, but I never bothered.
I also noticed there were other tricks to saving space on files but again, never got around to mentioning them, maybe some time I will who knows.
360 degrees of Karma
...and /. archives could be stripped of idiotic musings like this, of course.
I'm a bloodsucking fiend! Look at my outfit!
This is a stupid joke. I was expecting a better joke from the slashdot community. It must be because the author stayed up late. A good April Fools day joke should be harder for people to guess. Stuff like "Duke Nukem Forever has gone gold!" or "John Romero is dead" (topic in #quake on efnet) just don't cut it.
Just my $0.04 (adjusted for inflation)