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Comment by philsnow

7 months ago

A compressed file that is only one byte long can only represent maximally 256 different uncompressed files.

Signed, a kid in the 90s who downloaded some "wavelet compression" program from a BBS because it promised to compress all his WaReZ even more so he could then fit moar on his disk. He ran the compressor and hey golly that 500MB ISO fit into only 10MB of disk now! He found out later (after a defrag) that the "compressor" was just hiding data in unused disk sectors and storing references to them. He then learned about Shannon entropy from comp.compression.research and was enlightened.

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philsnow

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david422  7 months ago

> He found out later (after a defrag) that the "compressor" was just hiding data in unused disk sectors and storing references to them

So you could access the files until you wrote more data to disk?

  • thehappypm  7 months ago

    Strange to think that is approach would actually work pretty damn well for most people because most people aren’t using therefore hard drive space