The "Magno" is a non-SI unit of information which is characterized by time and location. It records the properties of the electromagnetic spectrum in that time and space.
The Magno is based on the SI units of meter, second, hertz and degree. It uses the XML-based Magno DTD to store it's information in gzip compressed Tape ARchive (tar) files.
gzip uses the Lempel-Ziv algorithm used in zip and PKZIP. The amount of compression obtained depends on the size of the input and the distribution of common substrings. [XML IS MOSTLY COMMON SUBSTRINGS!] Typically, text such as source code or English is reduced by 60-70%. Compression is generally much better than that achieved by LZW (as used in `compress'), Huffman coding (as used in `pack'), or adaptive Huffman coding (`compact').
Compression is always performed, even if the compressed file is slightly larger than the original. The worst case expansion is a few bytes for the `gzip' file header, plus 5 bytes every 32K block, or an expansion ratio of 0.015% for large files. Note that the actual number of used disk blocks almost never increases.
tar is an archiving program designed to store and extract files from an archive file known as a tarfile. A tarfile may be made on a tape drive, however, it is also common to write a tarfile to a normal file.