FEAD Compressing Compressed Files by 50-75%?

An anonymous reader asks: "I just installed Acrobat Reader and found that it was using FEAD which claims - 'FEAD© Optimizer© significantly reduces the size of application programs on average by 50% (in some cases up to 75%, depending on the specific software), even when they are already compressed with common compression technology like ZIP or CAB.' . It seems that they optimize each application individually at thieir labs. But an average of 50% compression on already compressed binary files seems to be too good to be true. Anyone familiar with how someone may be able to achieve this?"

Comments

This is a common hoax.

[Futurepower(R)]

This is a common hoax. Maybe 2 years ago, another Slashdot editor posted this hoax. So, it's a repeat hoax for Slashdot, too.

It's not compression

[photon317]

The thing they tout as FEAD is basically a load-over-network-on-demand thingy. They haven't actually developed anything that does compression, they're just storing some of the app on a server somewhere to be downloaded on demand. The hype at their site mislead you, like it was meant to do.

Re:It's not compression

[bobbozzo]

When you download Acrobat, it usually will download an "Adobe Download Manager" or something like that.

That is NOT what is being discussed here.

Even if you bypass using the download manager, it still uses FEAD to decompress and install AcroRead.

One could easily disprove your theory by unplugging their net connection during the FEAD decompression... Done... no adverse affect.

Nonetheless, the installer is VERY slow, and is still bigger than the AcroRead 5.1 installer, which did not use FEAD.

Making users go through this many steps (download the download manager. run it. wait for it to download. wait for fead...) and slowness is insane.

EXE compressor?

[almightyjustin]

Sounds to me like an EXE compressor like UPX - they can compress EXE files better than a ZIP archive can (by taking advantage of known aspects of executable files); so by unzipping, EXE-compressing, and re-zipping, one can reduce the size of an already existing ZIP archive.

Re:How to do anything

[natmsincome.com]

I ready the white paper and it looks like they are actually providing a number of products:

Download on demand:
Think Quicktime/IE/etc. Download a small download then download the components they want. I expect they'd also use a protocol similar to rsync which makes downloading alot faster.

Code Inspection:
This is where they say then can decrease to size of the executable. If you've done progaming then you know that you can make executables alot smaller. Here's some examples: Remove inline macros and make them functions, remove debug information.

Ziped executables:
You can have realtime zipped executables. There are about 5 different forms of this that I've seen - they zip/encrypt the executable this makes it about the same size as if it was zipped but you don't have to unzip it to run it(It still uses the space in memory) You also have to break the encryption before you can reverse enginer it. The overhead is about 5 - 20% loading times.

Basically the provide servers that campanies could do themselves but get someone with experiance to do instead.

If I did the following:
*Used realtime compresion on the exe
*Optimized my code so that it didn't incluse useless code.
*Moduralised my code (reuse etc)
*Made the code more plugin like.
*Added a bootstrap downloader.
*Make the software come in three versions Lite, Full and express.

If I did all of this I'd easily be able to half the bandwidth needed for a file without really changing it that much.

As for the CD the data has to be over 700MB before they can decrease the size so I'm fairly sure they'd be able to optimse it.

The service they provide isn't unique. It's just a convient package of 10 or more technologies to make life easy for other companies.