Another slightly OT q...

[Eduardo Morras]

At 19:05 08/05/2007, you wrote:

>        Hey Guys,
>
>        Does anybody have any websites where I can look up the latest
>        in compression technology?  I've got a very thin ISDL link
>        so pulling streams over is like looking at postage-stamp images.

Depends on what you are trying to compress. You can look these pages for lossless compression:

www.maximumcompression.com

prize.hutter1.net 

www.cs.fit.edu/~mmahoney/compression/text.html

datacompression.info

If you are looking for zip/deflate try www.7-zip.com , it has the best zip/deflate engine, you can get zip standard files smaller than based zlib ones. It's for windows, but there is a unix port inside the web pages.

>        There were whispers about fractal-compression as being the golden
>        goal, but I can't find much about this one.  Anybody have any
>        clues here?

Depends on what you want to compress. Fractal compression for text can't work, text has no autosimetry. For images it is being developed, but results are bad. You can check citeseer for . Currently for video/image wavelets are the best (dirac, snow, jpeg2000 and more) codecs but there is no standard codec that uses them (no ISO-ITU, no mpeg consortium). For text, the best compressors are neural nets (paq family) or ppm.

>        thanks up front,
>
>        gary

HTH