Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 19:50:02 +0200 From: Eduardo Morras <nec556@retena.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Another slightly OT q... Message-ID: <4635BEF8002F9929@> (added by postmaster@resmaa03.ono.com)
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At 23:22 08/05/2007, you wrote: >>> >>> see: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Sloot >>> >>> about the " Sloot Digital Coding System". great stuff. >>> >> >> Danke. > >that seems to be German, in Dutch "Bedankt" would be appropiate. i >appreciate the effort though. > >>I found the english wkik entry so I could understand the >> piece. Since Sloot is dead, no way of knowing. > >actually there is. the Dutch wiki-article has much more detail about the case. > >this Sloot guy claimed he could compress any movie into 1kb ( 1024 >bytes ). he stored this 1kb movies on smartcards, which he would feed >into his magic machine to show the movies. > >in The Netherlands there was press-coverage about this, and he was >able to attract investors and even a ( up to then ) reputable IT-guru >assiocated with Philips to back him. they found silicon-valley >investors who were interested. > >he died / killed himself / was murdered before his hoax could be uncovered. It's easily covered. Check usenet comp.compression faq. It's the "Counting Theorem". For a sequence of n-bits there are 2^n possible files (f.e. there are 256 files of 8 bits). Unfortunately there are only (2^n)-1 possible files lesser than the original (f.e. there are 128 files of 7 bits, 64 of 6, 32 of 5, 16 of 4, 8 of 3, 4 of 2 and 2 of 1 bits, total, 255 files) so using an algorithm you can't compress all n-bits sequences. For this case, you can easily check that using this guy algorithm, you can have only 2^8192 movies. Perhaps you think they are a lot, but nearly all are white noise movies. There are 1-2 monthly of this claims on comp.compression. Normally they are beginners to Information Theory / Compression but others are simply cheaters. >sounds a lot like the perpetuum mobile stories. In fact, it is. Information Theory uses entropy concept too and claims like this breaks the 2nd and 3rd principle. >>But this is the >> kind of leap forward that would save, oh, a few measley >> $Billions. And give millions of us faster and broader access. HTH
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