[fitsbits] Rice compression from the command line

[Mark Calabretta]

On Tue 2006/07/18 16:42:28 MST, Rob Seaman wrote
in a message to: fitsbits at nrao.edu

>> I now mostly use bzip2 (GPL, bzip.org), it usually outperforms gzip by
>> about 10% for binary data.
>
>It's quite a bit slower, however.

Of course, it does depend on the type of binary data - pure random data
should not be compressible.  I measured the 10% figure for the FLC
animations distributed from my web site.  If the files are intended
for download, especially very large files, the extra time taken to
compress/uncompress them is more than compensated by the faster
download time.

Mark Calabretta
ATNF