On Jan 30, 2008 10:46 AM, Brian Mathis brian.mathis@gmail.com wrote:
I once knew a guy who bought a really cheap PC with an AMD CPU in it. Despite the fact that the power supply was underpowered, and everything else on the machine was just as cheap as possible, he blamed the AMD chip for all of the problems the PC had. To this day he refuses to buy AMD CPUs, "because they don't work right" -- despite the fact that millions of people use bzip2^H^H^H^H^H AMD chips every day without any problem at all.
Heh heh - cute.
I was going to respond in re the AMD issue when I re-read that last part.
I had this problem with several files over a period of about six months. I suppose it could have been something else (AMD CPU, bad disk, power spikes, yada, yada), but:
1) The problem never showed up anywhere else, under my P4, same or different disks, same power conditions as other processes, yada, yada, yada.
2) I never saw this problem with using zip/unzip/pkzip, which I still use.
3) I also never saw enough of a significant advantage of bzip2 over zip, but none of my files were all that large, either.
My impression was that the larger (and more binary) a file was, the better the results with bzip2.
Like I said, YMMV.
mhr