How does this magical compression scenario work?

[Yeagdrasil]

So I Just had a thought....

Windows 7 Retail disk fits inside a DVD disk (4gb) very nicely.....

so how come when you install it it takes up 10gb at least?

Even if it's NTFS block head and such I just dont get it....

[WorldDominator]

Compressed files? Iunno.

[pspfreak]

Chuck norris helped them compress it.

[DirkaFat]

Let's just keep it at magic. After all for $100, Microsoft better be giving us some magic.

[xToFxREAPER]

Take windows 8 for example. 4.7GB and when you install a fucking 27GB!

the iso that you can download of their site is even smaller then 4.7gb actually.. its more like 3.2gb and thats the 64bit variant 

[Night]

Winrar.

[Lil Chillbil]

Microsoft knows how many gigs you take up

 

 

i'm not even joking...

[Night]

Winrar.

[Wferr]

Microsoft is making compression bombs or something.

[Samdb]

Sorcery. And some insane compression.

[T.Vengeance]

Magnets, how do they work right? Bunch off Hard drive magnet magic.

[bradscoolio]

2 handy vids that should help you wrap your head around it ;)

 

 

[Wferr]

Cant wait till they can compress everything onto a 1/2gb :D fastest downloads ever for a OS

[Wferr]

Someone sat on the files and made them tiny.

[Yeagdrasil]

I already know about compression algorithm and the dictionary database thing

but even with that..... thats some magic done on method of compression to be cutting the size by half

[alpenwasser]

Just a side note: I kept an archive of all the stats files from Folding @ Home for

a while (I downloaded the complete stats every hour for a few months). They were

already compressed by F@H.

But, wanting to get the most out of it, I de-compressed them after each day, made

one archive for the whole day and recompressed that. I got each daily archive file

down to around 13% of its original size, from ~900 MiB to ~120 MiB (.xz compression

on Linux). If I had made larger archives the percentage would have been even better

(I did test one monthly archive, but can't recall the specific numbers, it was just

too unwieldy, although even better compressed).

Now, of course there is a lot of redundant data in all of those files (the usernames

stay more or less the same throughout all files, and probably make up about half

of the data, and since there are lots of inactive users there are also lots of numbers

which don't change) but still, it shows what can be accomplished with data that is well-

suited for compression.

Anyway, just FYI, it's really not that unusual. ;)

[Eric1024]

You have to remember that when you install windows, it reserves a ton of space on the disk that has nothing on it. There's a file that's made that matches the size of your system memory that is basically empty until you put your computer into hibernation. There are all sorts of other files that reserve disk space like that but I don't know enough about the OS to give a complete list.

 

Tl;DR, your '20GB windows install' isn't 20GB of actual stuff; it's mostly fluff.

[Eric1024]

[...]

 

Also what @alpenwasser said.

[Midnight]

It's probably compressed data and multiple programs/scripts executed to write more data. Idk for sure because Microsoft is secretive.

[rashdanml]

Guild wars 2 compresses from over 50GB to a 15GB .DAT file. It's not difficult to compress files.

[iAsuno]

Guild wars 2 compresses from over 50GB to a 15GB .DAT file. It's not difficult to compress files.

really? i didn't know that. i hope they can use that skill to optimize the game better. :/

[alpenwasser]

Guild wars 2 compresses from over 50GB to a 15GB .DAT file. It's not difficult to compress files.

I get what you mean, but I'd just like to point out that compression algorithms

(especially the good ones) can be extremely complex both in their theoretical

foundations as well as in their implementations in code (at least as far as I can

make out, I'm no compression guru). After all, there is an enormous amount of resources

being poured into research in compression, and has been for many decades. So I would

say that compressing files is very difficult, but gets good results for many types of

data.

</pedantic mode> ;)

EDIT: Just realized that you might have been talking merely about the end

user deploying compression on his/her data. Then yes of course it is very easy.

[rashdanml]

really? i didn't know that. i hope they can use that skill to optimize the game better. :/

It was one of the first things people did during the beta events, using similar tools to extract the .dat file from GW1.

As for optimizing the game, that's an ongoing process that they're working on. No game is perfect on release, or even up to a year or two after release. Especially MMOs. I haven't played it on older hardware much, so can't say. Going to try playing it again on my old computer back home; I only used that during the beta events before switching to my new gaming rig.

 

EDIT: Just realized that you might have been talking merely about the end

user deploying compression on his/her data. Then yes of course it is very easy.

Yup. Compression from a programming standpoint is more difficult, and kudos to ArenaNet for accomplishing it.

[Eric1024]

I think some people are forgetting that a lot of what's being compressed in games and OSs is basically just config files with a lot of white space and a lot of repeated words, lines, and characters. Same goes with games.