[LUNI] database question

[Martin Maney]

On Wed, Aug 07, 2002 at 07:53:12PM -0500, scott thomason wrote:
> space...but if you've got lotsa ink, or even scattered noise, on the page,
> the files get huge. For some reason I can't fathom, it isn't a smart
> enough algorithm to compress black.

Probably it was designed - well designed, it sounds like - to handle its
intended type of image: fairly clean black-on-white text.  If this is as old
as I suspect it might be, then one design constraint may have been what now
would seem like a really teeny ROM & RAM budget.  And the more something is
optimized for one specific environment, the less well it does in others,
sometimes even ones not greatly different from its home.  There's a name for
this that comes from biology, but obviously it's a pretty general principle.

In light of today's sad news, I would like to suggest a few quiet minutes in
memory of Dijkstra: spend them contemplating how this relates to Knuth's
famous complaint that premature optimization is at the root of much that
goes wrong in programming.

-- 
The people who are serious in the open source world
don't really think that making money is an evil process.
Not even Richard Stallman.  Where you get that from is your
cliche 12-year old on Slashdot who doesn't understand it. -- Bruce Perens