News!!!!

[sumdumguy]

I highly doubt it was well.. I remember a guy by the name of Peter St. George
who claimed he cound get 100:1 ratios.. I posted about it here a long time ago.

as it (of course) turned out.. he was scamming to try to get investors.
his site.. http://www.zeosync.com/ is now nothing but a page under construction.

here's an article that talked about him..
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,86986,00.asp

the guys at slashodot did a lot of talking about this guy and compression in general
http://slashdot.org/science/02/01/08/137246.shtml

[XTC46]

Ill believe it when I see it. NO cmpany is stupid enough to only offer a few thou for something that incredible, so it makes it impossible to believe.

[tekno]

believe nothing of what you hear and only half what you see.

[r8devil]

I have to agree with most here in saying that it seems to be BS. 20GB to 1.44MB seems a little too good to be true. And if it really works then Winzip would be idiots to only offer a couple of thousand, or maybe they are just stingy b@st@rds.

even after saying that, I would really like to look under the hood since he is putting it up under GPL. Most of the guys who say its not possible might want to wait until there is more news on it before commenting. The normal way of compression might not allow for compression ratios like this. But this might be something totally different and it will allow the kind of ratios mentioned. Also it might only work for certain files. That's why winzip only offered a couple of thousand.

But i still thinks it sounds a little fishy to me.

[creative_32X_mx]

Ah i'm not gonna cast my opinion, but i think that it would be good if all this speculation is true!
I gonna search around alil bit and hopefully find some info on this.
Because it DOES sound a lil bit to good to be true.
But on the other hand, it might just be possible, i mean with all this technology around, it might just be possible.
But hey it could just be a scam like that guy Peter St. George did?
Who know's, but im gonna be waiting to get a peak under the hood of this program, and yeah
Cheers

[Turmoil]

OMG! 20 gig into 1.4 mb! Somehow I doubt that! even if this guy is the best programmer.. thats a huge compression.. and this could change the way we compute forever... with compression like that.. there isn't any need for CD's and stuff like that... just think about it... Are you sure that info is correct??

[Tedob1]

right!

[etruscan]

"a little too good to be true" ... no way he developed "algorithm" to compress in this ratio... that's BS ... maybe a different physical storage method.. but that's physics... this thred should suicide...

[alphabetarian]

I'd be half curious to see what kind of data he allegedly compressed. Plain text? Pictures? Though with with apparent impossibility, I guess it doesn't really matter.

alpha

[dynamoo]

20Gb made of of zeroes or ones only would compress just fine.

But are we talking about lossless compression like LZ, Zip, GIF or lossy compression like JPEG or MPEG? Compressing data or images? Sure, I could sample down music to fit in 1.44Mb but it would sound like crap.

Compression ratios depend on the data being compressed, what you're prepared to lose and how you're going to do it. For lossless compression, variants of the old Lempel-Ziv subsitutional compression algorithm thought up in the '70s are still the best and most widely used.

The only way in my view you could get lossless compression of that magnitude would be to work out a complex mathematical algorithm that would generate the data from the algorithm itself. A little like working out a formula to fit a curve in mathematics, but much more complex. Sure you could fit that on a 1.44Mb floppy, but it's way beyond the computational power of anything we have today.