Must Be Some Great Compression

[furrbear]

Comments

[gryphons-hole.livejournal.com]

I've been wondering where I put it...

Thanks for finding it!

[putzmeisterbear.livejournal.com]

I hope it's the version with all the internet mistakes corrected. I spent all night fixing them last week!

[cipherpunk.livejournal.com]

If that were an LS-120 and the disk’s date of manufacture was ’93 or so, I might actually believe it. :)

[cubziz.livejournal.com]

Oh my god. And I thought I was the only one who remembered those!

[furrbear.livejournal.com]

Nope. Not the only one.

No one mentioned ZIP and Jazz formats...

[cubziz.livejournal.com]

Oh come on. We could've started with Bernoulli and Syquest drives too. ;) But I think we were going with the Jeopardy question of "What looks like a floppy?" *giggle*

[cipherpunk.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, the text on the disk reads —

• Surf quickly and easily with no need [to/for] [undecipherable]
• Millions and millions of websites on one 3.5” disc
• Take The Internet with you wherever you go — it fits in your pocket!

Other people’s blur-fu may be better than mine, but that’s how I read it.

[texaspenguin.livejournal.com]

With no need for ISPs.

[cipherpunk.livejournal.com]

Ah, thank you.

I’m doing some ROME here. Assuming 1.25 bits of entropy per byte of HTML, that means a page can be compressed down to 15% of its original size. That means 9.6Mb of data can be packed onto a 1.44Mb floppy… meaning that the average size of a website, assuming Microsoft is being honest about “millions and millions” (which I’m reading to be four million, each instance of “millions” being two million), is…

…2.4 bytes.

Yeah. Color me skeptical.

[texaspenguin.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure this reply is greater than 2.4 bytes.

[cipherpunk.livejournal.com]

It was actually created by a random output generator seeded with 20 bits of entropy.

Oh, crap. That’s 2.5 bytes.

Damn it. Okay, you got me.

[ursusarctos.livejournal.com]

I'm sure that even on a floppy you'd get the full "Internet" experience, starting with multiple BSODs.

[furrbear.livejournal.com]

You are still with us! You're so darn quiet.

[westwind-mv.livejournal.com]

Pfft. I can get the entire internet down to one bit:

1 = The current contents of the Internet
0 = Something else

There, easy.

;-)

[cuboz.livejournal.com]

You must must must must MUST watch this video!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRmxXp62O8g

(Bloody embedding disabled!!!)