That is amusing. I've thought about having a.sig that says "bzip2, saving disk space on servers by using twice the disk space". Yes, bzip2 is a better compressor, but is it really significant today? I rarely if ever come across bandwidth problems. Disk space on my end is cheap. Bandwidth on my end is cheap. In fact, I don't keep commonly available archives on my computer any more in any compression format. Odds are if I need the copy again, I can download and have it on my harddisk in less than 5 minutes either at home or work. Many times the copy will be updated and new and improved.
You're right, it doesn't make sense, but I'm going to have to disagree with you. The reason you can have that file on your harddisk "in less than 5 minutes" is because of bz2/gz/zip. Disk and band are cheap for you because you're not saturated, you have more than you need of both. If i'm going to be providing this data for $0, I need to do everything I can to save myself as much band and disk as possible. Right now disk is cheaper than transfer, so it doesn't matter if I keep 2 or 3 or 5 copies of something for compatibility, the amount of transfer that having that smaller copy will save me is enough to justify it.
If I have a 10MB gz file that gets downloaded a thousand times, that's 10GB transfer. I could also store an 8MB bz2 version of the same thing, and if half of the people get that one instead of the 10MB version, that's only 9GB transfer. Since storage is cheap versus transfer, and since my storage:transfer ratio is going to be low, it makes much more sense to "waste" some extra disk space to save myself as much bandwidth as possible. Also from a server-load point of view, I can serve 111 more files in the same amount of time if I make both available, since i'm essentially saving 10% of transfer time too.
One point of this thread which I forgot to put in the description actually is: If the consensus is to use what's out there now (.zip,.tar.gz and.tar.bz2), then my question becomes Within the decompression spec of each of these, how do I get the most compression?
7-Zip claims 2-10% better compression on the same source data for zip and gz formats, so gzip -9 xyz will be slightly larger than 7z a -tgzip xyz.gz xyz -mx9. What do you all know that can do better than that?
Interesting, and true. The only problem is that no spell-checker will get everything right, so it may "correct" words to the wrong thing, and that could make a huge difference in meaning.
Don't forget the concept of letter order in English (and some foreign) text, it might be possible to alpha-sort the interior of words and still present readable text, although there is an example included that shows it might not be the best idea:
There isn't any such thing, unless you use a very narrow definition of "general purpose." To me, general purpose would imply that I could throw any sort of data at it I please, and it would do well, provided the data is not just random data. Since we're working with very vague definitions I can only give very vague suggestions.
My "general purpose" is exactly what you said, without the "would do well" part, or substituting "would not do horribly" in its place. I know that all algorithms have strengths and weaknesses, i'm just looking for what has the fewest weaknesses and the most strengths. My definition is vague because I have vague data to compress; I don't have all audio or all images or all text, i've got a mix. As I said (and I believe you implied), I don't expect to get optimal compression using one or two algorithms, but I would like something that's pretty good all-around.
The image filters you mention, AFAIK are only available in conjunction with PNG. Nothing exists today that could work like
There is no common set of transform filters that can be used as a front-end for generic coders (gzip/bzip2). I might end up creating them, with something like a Java interface to make it instantly cross-platform, with the hopes that the filters would be included in some major distros down the line.
What does "everyone" have? It seems to me that if you're starting a mass data archival site, you can boost the number of algorithms by making them available on your site. At the bare minimum I would expect people to support zip, flate, bzip2, jpg, flac.
As with your previous post, this is exactly what i'm looking for: what does everyone have, what is commonly supported. If all I needed was an OSS implementation of my compression, I'd bastardize gz, bz2, 7z and ppm together with some filters, some Rice, Huffman, Shannon, Fano, Lempel, Ziv and Welch and a bit of Burrowes and Wheeler to make "Best... Compressor... Ever" and unleash it upon the world. =)
Is lossy compression an option, or not an option?
Both, actually. Some stuff like language samples will probably end up as MP3, some of the video sequences will probably be MPEG and most images will end up JPG. Anything where minute details don't matter will probably be lossy, but probably 80% or more will be text, code and other data that needs to be lossless. That's what i'm looking for here, since lossy formats for audio/video/images are pretty standard MP3/MPG/JPG, and I can tweak the loss to get the size where I want it, at least to some point.
The various types of data you mention are not uniformly compressable by any single algorithm. Therefore your "compression ratio" criterion is dubious. Compression ratio on what sort of data?
Compresison on any sort of data. Give me a good general-purpose compressor. Give me a good one just for audio, just for video, just for text, whatever. I have no idea what kinds of data i'm going to get, or how much of each kind there might be. A custom compressor for audio (FLAC) will almost always outperform a general-purpose compressor (gzip) because it uses specialized knowledge of the data to make better guesses as to how to compress it, but if only eight people in the world use FLAC versus 8 million for gzip, I had better use gzip.
What's a good dictionary-based compressor? What filters are generally available? Bzip2 is a block-sorting arithmetic compressor, what do you recommend I use that on versus using gzip, compress, etc.? I know what I can find on Google, and I know what I use, I just don't know what "everyone" has. There are hundreds of algorithms and formats out there, and I need to pick the right two or three.
There's no really simple way to get everything you are asking for. Do you want to distribute archives of multiple, compressed audio files? Then the files should be compressed individually, then archived. OTOH, if you want to distribute a bunch of.txt files, you should do the opposite -- archive first, and THEN compress.
This is exactly the kind of thing i'm looking for. I've nearly always used the arc-then-comp method to get the best compression, I wouldn't have thought that individual files compress better than shared datasets.
RAR at least has error correction built in, StuffIt isn't the only thing out there.
In this case, corruption is not an issue. I intend to keep redundant backups of the original datasets, so even if the web-based archives get corrupted I will be able to recover the data.
If the point of this is to make data available, then cross-platform availability needs to be my primary concern.
I can spec and write and offer to the public the SuperXtreme Archive format, and make my data available only in that format. Unless there is a compeling reason to switch to SXA for other purposes (general adoption), then it's essentially proprietary to my site and won't really be of any use to anyone.
OSS is not the be-all and end-all of utility or availability, only of portability.
My other comment is to do some experiments with *your* data -- which format actually yields the best compression rate, and how much more time do you spend doing the compression / uncompression. Is the extra time you spend worth the 5% you get?
My data doesn't exist yet, that's part of the problem. I need one or a few good general-purpose archive formats, the particulars of which may perform better on one dataset than another. Decompression time matters because it will affect end-users, but compression time can almost be discounted as free: compress once, keep forever. That extra 5% means 5% less bandwidth, forever again, so an extra 20% on compression time might be worth it to me. It also depends on the size of the dataset, 5% of a meg is nothing, but 5% of an ISO is significant.
Is using a less popular format (like tar.bz2) worth the time you'll spend leading a Windows user through the uncompression process over and over again?
In general, the people who would use the data would be relatively savvy since they're already doing development / testing, but I would try to make it as idiot-proof as possible. Whatever formats I use would have decompressors available on-site, probably with binaries for the usual suspects (well, for Windows at least).
Lossy = very bad, i'm looking for a few general-purpose archivers. I'm sure there will be some MPEG stuff up there if for nothing other than a file format sample, but most stuff isn't going to be lossy-able and still make sense.
I'd be perfectly happy to have separate archivers for different formats, but my main concern is universiality, even above compression ratio. FLAC or Monkey's for audio sounds great, but I need to be sure that everyone will be able to handle it. That's why I might be stuck with.zip or.tar.gz since they're the most universal, but i'll consider anything that's cross-platform or available as source.
The WinRar license states: Neither RAR binary code, WinRAR binary code, UnRAR source or UnRAR binary code may be used or reverse engineered to re-create the RAR compression algorithm, which is proprietary, without written permission of the author.
and the source code: The unRAR sources may be used in any software to handle RAR archives without limitations free of charge, but cannot be used to re-create the RAR compression algorithm, which is proprietary. Distribution of modified unRAR sources in separate form or as a part of other software is permitted, provided that it is clearly stated in the documentation and source comments that the code may not be used to develop a RAR (WinRAR) compatible archiver.
So the guy is basically paranoid about keeping his "trade secret" a secret, which makes perfect sense from a business perspective. As far as FOSS is concerned, he even presents decompression code free for all to use.
How much of a problem is a proprietary compressor if the end-user never has to deal with it? Is it a problem if you can't create the archives, as long as you will have free access to use them?
I see it like gzip: gzip is defined by a couple of RFCs, and it's just a file format and a specification for decompressing the data. As long as you end up with something in.gz format, it doesn't matter if you use an open algorithm or a supersecret-proprietary-patented-licensed algorithm to get there. The decompressor is the same in either case, and you already said that you have a LGPL version of the RAR decompressor.
...handle 2 or 3 of the more popular and widely available formats...
That's where i'm leaning, something like.tar.gz for universiality and RAR or similar for those that can handle it. I might offer "hot" sets in other formats, so the most popular stuff would be the most accessible but random, esoteric stuff would only come in one or two flavors.
I've used it on Windows forever, and I know I obtained unrar for Linux and AIX, bow cross-platform is RAR, really? Does it come standard in most distributions? I think if it does then it's probably an excellent choice, I've compressed some stuff almost 2:1 over bzip2 using RAR...
Probably a good idea in general, but: 1. No obvious support on Windows for cpio 2. These are going to be test files, so I shouldn't have to worry about special devices / links / sparse files.
I know our admin here at work switched the backups from tar to cpio for exactly that reason, but it's just not universal enough to justify the departure from "normal".
I think for the transition we're in for, it probably would be appropriate to compare the transition to the sort of change we saw between the fake 3D of Duke Nukem 3D to the [more] real 3D of Quake.
This has the whole database (in bz2 format) at 538MB for current and 27GB for old. You can get the old in 1.9GB pieces if you like, too, but 6 * 1.9 != 27, so something must be missing.
I've noticed that people without an education generally seem to view education in one of two ways: Either they wish they had more education, or they denounce education as a waste of money/time
What about those who agree with both views?
I wish I had it only because it's how others will judge me on my resume. I don't have a BS, so 80% of jobs that I would want can be ruled out just from that requirement. Doesn't matter if it's from MIT or from East Podunk Community College, it's just a boolean. I wish I had it for some of the really esoteric stuff that's interesting to me, but has no practical application in the real world. I'm interested in compression algorithms, but I plan on using gzip and bzip2 because I don't have the time to concentrate on making something better. I might learn how to do it, but I never actually will.
I think it's a waste of time because of the number of morons that have degrees. Yes, there are some really bright people out there with degrees that simply confirm their credentials, but there are an awful lot of graduates that are simply worthless, even in their field of study.
It's also a waste of time because I've already learned this stuff out of necessity. For the non-CS people here, imagine going back to learn your multiplication tables again, and having to sit through the entire class waiting for Timmy to figure out "what do you get when you multiply six by nine?" when you're already doing algebra and trig. That's what college feels like to me.
How bizarre... my brother just asked me about another of their products (Detour) yesterday.
Anyone know if there is an equivalent product for Windows? I know I can reroute audio as a whole under Control Panel, but I haven't seen anything to give this level of per-program control.
What company do you know of that has a 40 year planning horizon? Or even ten?
All of them.
If a company doesn't have a long-term plan, it's not likely that it will last in the long-term. Some might not be 40 years, but EVERYONE has a five year plan and most have ten and twenty year plans. The extended plan might not be anything more than a line or two of business-ese (i.e. grow market share through increased account penetration), but it's written down somewhere.
MS has almost the same thing: Your "Security Updates" are MS patches or bugfixes, your "major Updates" are MS Service Packs.
A servic pack will update everyone to a common base, but don't include the security updates. It's the equivalent of a version upgrade alone, without the "combo" security rollup.
Service Packs almost always add functionality to the core OS, it's just that this time around the added functionalty counteracts the way that some software has been written in the past. Using feature XYZ directly has never been officially supported (you're always supposed to do ABC before XYZ), but until recently it's worked just fine because the OS didn't pay attention to the ABC feature.
As of SP2, XP started paying attention to ABC, so now everyone who has used XYZ without it is up a creek.
There are another couple pieces that are causing the "huge fuss", mostly for the same reason: programs relied on the previous default behaviour, but that default has now been changed.
The license has a duration of one year and is the second of its kind given by Britain, the first country to officially sanction human cloning research.
These would be invaluable in things like health clinics, where a wealth of information could suddenly be made available, for much less than the cost of purchasing a set of books on medicine and diseases.
I'm actually looking to set something like this up for a clinic in Baltimore, just some crappy old P2 with a monitor and a printer to let them print out PDFs with health information in English and Spanish. I would absolutely donate a hundred bucks to set them up with a laptop instead, just because it would reduce the footprint in an already overcrowded office. I set my brother up with a $500 laptop from WalMart (mentioned before on/.) because it suited his needs perfectly and was pretty cheap. If the price went down to $100 I could see a hundred uses for one of these things.
I realize that MANY people have tried to make such a thing with VERY limited success, but I don't understand why it's such a problem. 5-10 year-old technology can do 99% of what someone with a $100 laptop would need: e-mail, web browsing, databases, spreadsheets, presentations, even programming. Is the marketing machine that is Intel, AMD, Dell, etc. so powerful that nobody realizes that my Pentium Nothing laptop from 6 or 7 years ago could do all of these things and more, and could be had on eBay for under a hundred?
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If I have a 10MB gz file that gets downloaded a thousand times, that's 10GB transfer. I could also store an 8MB bz2 version of the same thing, and if half of the people get that one instead of the 10MB version, that's only 9GB transfer. Since storage is cheap versus transfer, and since my storage:transfer ratio is going to be low, it makes much more sense to "waste" some extra disk space to save myself as much bandwidth as possible. Also from a server-load point of view, I can serve 111 more files in the same amount of time if I make both available, since i'm essentially saving 10% of transfer time too.
One point of this thread which I forgot to put in the description actually is:
If the consensus is to use what's out there now (.zip,
7-Zip claims 2-10% better compression on the same source data for zip and gz formats, so gzip -9 xyz will be slightly larger than 7z a -tgzip xyz.gz xyz -mx9. What do you all know that can do better than that?
Interesting, and true. The only problem is that no spell-checker will get everything right, so it may "correct" words to the wrong thing, and that could make a huge difference in meaning.
Don't forget the concept of letter order in English (and some foreign) text, it might be possible to alpha-sort the interior of words and still present readable text, although there is an example included that shows it might not be the best idea:
A dootcr has aimttded the magltheuansr of a tageene ceacnr pintaet who deid aetfr a hatospil durg blendur
My "general purpose" is exactly what you said, without the "would do well" part, or substituting "would not do horribly" in its place. I know that all algorithms have strengths and weaknesses, i'm just looking for what has the fewest weaknesses and the most strengths. My definition is vague because I have vague data to compress; I don't have all audio or all images or all text, i've got a mix. As I said (and I believe you implied), I don't expect to get optimal compression using one or two algorithms, but I would like something that's pretty good all-around.
The image filters you mention, AFAIK are only available in conjunction with PNG. Nothing exists today that could work like There is no common set of transform filters that can be used as a front-end for generic coders (gzip/bzip2). I might end up creating them, with something like a Java interface to make it instantly cross-platform, with the hopes that the filters would be included in some major distros down the line.
What does "everyone" have? It seems to me that if you're starting a mass data archival site, you can boost the number of algorithms by making them available on your site. At the bare minimum I would expect people to support zip, flate, bzip2, jpg, flac.
As with your previous post, this is exactly what i'm looking for: what does everyone have, what is commonly supported. If all I needed was an OSS implementation of my compression, I'd bastardize gz, bz2, 7z and ppm together with some filters, some Rice, Huffman, Shannon, Fano, Lempel, Ziv and Welch and a bit of Burrowes and Wheeler to make "Best... Compressor... Ever" and unleash it upon the world. =)
Is lossy compression an option, or not an option?
Both, actually. Some stuff like language samples will probably end up as MP3, some of the video sequences will probably be MPEG and most images will end up JPG. Anything where minute details don't matter will probably be lossy, but probably 80% or more will be text, code and other data that needs to be lossless. That's what i'm looking for here, since lossy formats for audio/video/images are pretty standard MP3/MPG/JPG, and I can tweak the loss to get the size where I want it, at least to some point.
The various types of data you mention are not uniformly compressable by any single algorithm. Therefore your "compression ratio" criterion is dubious. Compression ratio on what sort of data?
.txt files, you should do the opposite -- archive first, and THEN compress.
Compresison on any sort of data. Give me a good general-purpose compressor. Give me a good one just for audio, just for video, just for text, whatever. I have no idea what kinds of data i'm going to get, or how much of each kind there might be. A custom compressor for audio (FLAC) will almost always outperform a general-purpose compressor (gzip) because it uses specialized knowledge of the data to make better guesses as to how to compress it, but if only eight people in the world use FLAC versus 8 million for gzip, I had better use gzip.
What's a good dictionary-based compressor? What filters are generally available? Bzip2 is a block-sorting arithmetic compressor, what do you recommend I use that on versus using gzip, compress, etc.? I know what I can find on Google, and I know what I use, I just don't know what "everyone" has. There are hundreds of algorithms and formats out there, and I need to pick the right two or three.
There's no really simple way to get everything you are asking for. Do you want to distribute archives of multiple, compressed audio files? Then the files should be compressed individually, then archived. OTOH, if you want to distribute a bunch of
This is exactly the kind of thing i'm looking for. I've nearly always used the arc-then-comp method to get the best compression, I wouldn't have thought that individual files compress better than shared datasets.
RAR at least has error correction built in, StuffIt isn't the only thing out there.
In this case, corruption is not an issue. I intend to keep redundant backups of the original datasets, so even if the web-based archives get corrupted I will be able to recover the data.
If the point of this is to make data available, then cross-platform availability needs to be my primary concern.
I can spec and write and offer to the public the SuperXtreme Archive format, and make my data available only in that format. Unless there is a compeling reason to switch to SXA for other purposes (general adoption), then it's essentially proprietary to my site and won't really be of any use to anyone.
OSS is not the be-all and end-all of utility or availability, only of portability.
My other comment is to do some experiments with *your* data -- which format actually yields the best compression rate, and how much more time do you spend doing the compression / uncompression. Is the extra time you spend worth the 5% you get?
My data doesn't exist yet, that's part of the problem. I need one or a few good general-purpose archive formats, the particulars of which may perform better on one dataset than another. Decompression time matters because it will affect end-users, but compression time can almost be discounted as free: compress once, keep forever. That extra 5% means 5% less bandwidth, forever again, so an extra 20% on compression time might be worth it to me. It also depends on the size of the dataset, 5% of a meg is nothing, but 5% of an ISO is significant.
Is using a less popular format (like tar.bz2) worth the time you'll spend leading a Windows user through the uncompression process over and over again?
In general, the people who would use the data would be relatively savvy since they're already doing development / testing, but I would try to make it as idiot-proof as possible. Whatever formats I use would have decompressors available on-site, probably with binaries for the usual suspects (well, for Windows at least).
Lossy = very bad, i'm looking for a few general-purpose archivers. I'm sure there will be some MPEG stuff up there if for nothing other than a file format sample, but most stuff isn't going to be lossy-able and still make sense.
.zip or .tar.gz since they're the most universal, but i'll consider anything that's cross-platform or available as source.
I'd be perfectly happy to have separate archivers for different formats, but my main concern is universiality, even above compression ratio. FLAC or Monkey's for audio sounds great, but I need to be sure that everyone will be able to handle it. That's why I might be stuck with
The WinRar license states:
.gz format, it doesn't matter if you use an open algorithm or a supersecret-proprietary-patented-licensed algorithm to get there. The decompressor is the same in either case, and you already said that you have a LGPL version of the RAR decompressor.
Neither RAR binary code, WinRAR binary code, UnRAR source or UnRAR binary code may be used or reverse engineered to re-create the RAR compression algorithm, which is proprietary, without written permission of the author.
and the source code:
The unRAR sources may be used in any software to handle RAR archives without limitations free of charge, but cannot be used to re-create the RAR compression algorithm, which is proprietary. Distribution of modified unRAR sources in separate form or as a part of other software is permitted, provided that it is clearly stated in the documentation and source comments that the code may not be used to develop a RAR (WinRAR) compatible archiver.
So the guy is basically paranoid about keeping his "trade secret" a secret, which makes perfect sense from a business perspective. As far as FOSS is concerned, he even presents decompression code free for all to use.
How much of a problem is a proprietary compressor if the end-user never has to deal with it? Is it a problem if you can't create the archives, as long as you will have free access to use them?
I see it like gzip: gzip is defined by a couple of RFCs, and it's just a file format and a specification for decompressing the data. As long as you end up with something in
doh... bow = but how
...handle 2 or 3 of the more popular and widely available formats...
.tar.gz for universiality and RAR or similar for those that can handle it. I might offer "hot" sets in other formats, so the most popular stuff would be the most accessible but random, esoteric stuff would only come in one or two flavors.
That's where i'm leaning, something like
I've used it on Windows forever, and I know I obtained unrar for Linux and AIX, bow cross-platform is RAR, really? Does it come standard in most distributions? I think if it does then it's probably an excellent choice, I've compressed some stuff almost 2:1 over bzip2 using RAR...
Probably a good idea in general, but:
1. No obvious support on Windows for cpio
2. These are going to be test files, so I shouldn't have to worry about special devices / links / sparse files.
I know our admin here at work switched the backups from tar to cpio for exactly that reason, but it's just not universal enough to justify the departure from "normal".
It's English, just not American:
English: A 17-year-old girl called Panna Felsen
American: A 17-year-old girl named Panna Felsen
Or you could change your user agent to Googlebot and see the tweaked titles live if you want. Would that be sufficient evidence?
This has the whole database (in bz2 format) at 538MB for current and 27GB for old. You can get the old in 1.9GB p i e c e s if you like, too, but 6 * 1.9 != 27, so something must be missing.
Anyone have a torrent of these?
I wish I had it only because it's how others will judge me on my resume. I don't have a BS, so 80% of jobs that I would want can be ruled out just from that requirement. Doesn't matter if it's from MIT or from East Podunk Community College, it's just a boolean. I wish I had it for some of the really esoteric stuff that's interesting to me, but has no practical application in the real world. I'm interested in compression algorithms, but I plan on using gzip and bzip2 because I don't have the time to concentrate on making something better. I might learn how to do it, but I never actually will.
I think it's a waste of time because of the number of morons that have degrees. Yes, there are some really bright people out there with degrees that simply confirm their credentials, but there are an awful lot of graduates that are simply worthless, even in their field of study.
It's also a waste of time because I've already learned this stuff out of necessity. For the non-CS people here, imagine going back to learn your multiplication tables again, and having to sit through the entire class waiting for Timmy to figure out "what do you get when you multiply six by nine?" when you're already doing algebra and trig. That's what college feels like to me.
How bizarre... my brother just asked me about another of their products (Detour) yesterday.
Anyone know if there is an equivalent product for Windows? I know I can reroute audio as a whole under Control Panel, but I haven't seen anything to give this level of per-program control.
Does it matter which way it's spun if it's the same topic? This should just be a comment in the previous thread(s), not another front page entry.
If a company doesn't have a long-term plan, it's not likely that it will last in the long-term. Some might not be 40 years, but EVERYONE has a five year plan and most have ten and twenty year plans. The extended plan might not be anything more than a line or two of business-ese (i.e. grow market share through increased account penetration), but it's written down somewhere.
MS has almost the same thing: Your "Security Updates" are MS patches or bugfixes, your "major Updates" are MS Service Packs.
A servic pack will update everyone to a common base, but don't include the security updates. It's the equivalent of a version upgrade alone, without the "combo" security rollup.
Service Packs almost always add functionality to the core OS, it's just that this time around the added functionalty counteracts the way that some software has been written in the past. Using feature XYZ directly has never been officially supported (you're always supposed to do ABC before XYZ), but until recently it's worked just fine because the OS didn't pay attention to the ABC feature.
As of SP2, XP started paying attention to ABC, so now everyone who has used XYZ without it is up a creek.
There are another couple pieces that are causing the "huge fuss", mostly for the same reason: programs relied on the previous default behaviour, but that default has now been changed.
So who got the first one?
If any of those people, except Walter Concrete, were posting on /., we'd have bigger problems than what the GP does or does not want in their sig.
I'm actually looking to set something like this up for a clinic in Baltimore, just some crappy old P2 with a monitor and a printer to let them print out PDFs with health information in English and Spanish. I would absolutely donate a hundred bucks to set them up with a laptop instead, just because it would reduce the footprint in an already overcrowded office. I set my brother up with a $500 laptop from WalMart (mentioned before on
I realize that MANY people have tried to make such a thing with VERY limited success, but I don't understand why it's such a problem. 5-10 year-old technology can do 99% of what someone with a $100 laptop would need: e-mail, web browsing, databases, spreadsheets, presentations, even programming. Is the marketing machine that is Intel, AMD, Dell, etc. so powerful that nobody realizes that my Pentium Nothing laptop from 6 or 7 years ago could do all of these things and more, and could be had on eBay for under a hundred?