(Beta Test version .4.01; please do not distribute this product, or
any documentation)
Forward
-------
Before I begin, I would like to apologize for the crudeness of the
documentation, and some holes in the program. I shall address them
below in the documentation.
What began as a pet theory has turned into another competitor in the
seemingly absurd challenge to establish the new archive standard, since
the SEA vs PKware affair. On the one hand, I am leary of muddying the
waters with yet another standard, but on the other, I feel the public
interest is served by this latest addition into the frenzy.
I hope you take this little offering into stride.
Roberto Gahdja, Ph.D., SLAC Research Center
(Please direct correspondences to the board from which
you downloaded this file.)
The Idea
--------
Compression is, to me, a very fascinating thing. In physics, one has
many forces at work that keep matter from collapsing on itself, and yet,
matter is largely empty space. It is a simple matter to compress a gas
until it condenses to a liquid, but some things resist such compression.
Without embarking on a dissertation on the strong and weak nuclear forces,
and all the complications that subject can introduce, suffice it to say
that nothing on earth is nearly as compressed as it can be; neutron stars,
and the ever-glamorized "black holes" are cases where matter has been so
condensed, that a cubic centimeter of this matter would weigh several
thousand tons.
I have often wondered if data could similarly be compressed in a like manner,
without loss of specificity. Is there a barrier -- likened unto these
nuclear forces, if you will -- that data compression strives to achieve; a
barrier that, once acheived, allows much greater compression factors than
are currently available.
To this end, I have dabbled with some of the many published algorithms,
examined public domain compressors, and I have an observation I think is
of worth. While most of the compression techniques look at the data in
a macro sense, I have looked at it in the micro sense; this is akin to
looking at cubes of ice as replications of each other, and note them as n
ice cubes, or by physically trying to make the n ice cubes take up less
space. Two different mind sets.
In honor of this different mind set, I have named four variations of a
compression technique after four types of quarks, themselves rather
glamorized sub-nuclear particles. These four compression techniques are
the basis for NABOB, which I hope you find useful.
The Program
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NABOB follows the same sort of command-line syntax that most of the other
entries in the compression race use, so you should feel right at home in
its use. The syntax is
NABOB command bob-file fileset
where command is any of the following: A, E, M, U, V, X
bob-file is the file containing the compressed information
fileset names the files to be added to, extracted from, etc the bob-file
Here is a summary of the commands available
A - Add the fileset to the bob-file.
E - Extract the fileset from the bob-file
M - Behaves like 'A' above, except it deletes the files from disk if the
operation is successful. [NOTE FOR BETA-TESTERS: M does not delete,
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