Talk:Optimal erasure codes with arbitrary parameters

Context please. --Several Times 20:19, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

Charles, you did help significantly, but the body of the article is still solely technical writing, with little-to-no contextualisation. Could you add a little more? jglc | t | c 01:02, 17 July 2005 (UTC)

delete/merge?
This seems like a pretty useless article to me. See erasure code for context. This article could either be merged there or deleted. Also, the text seems to refer to some diagrams that are not present--does someone want to make them? Could it mean that the article itself is copied from a textbook? Maybe it could be rewritten in terms of the Reed-Solomon code or an interpolation code. Feel free to incorporate from the following if it looks useful:

http://groups.google.com/group/sci.crypt/msg/4a24e0d1f2fcf099?dmode=source

Phr (talk) 03:38, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

(For info, I found the diagrams here: http://rational.co.za/fec/) 82.230.65.68 20:13, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

the text seems to refer to some diagrams that are not present -- yes, but I see from the history that diagrams *were* present in the original version of this page. Later they were deleted. I am glad they are still available at http://rational.co.za/fec/. Apparently that website and the first version of this Wikipedia article were the same. I guess that User:Nroets (who wrote that first version of this Wikipedia article) and the "nroets" of http://rational.co.za/ are the same person. What I find odd is that the http://rational.co.za/fec/ page has zero information on who the author is, what year it was written, etc. --68.0.120.35 03:19, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Don't delete and think before you merge !
The erasure codes page mentions only 2 other optimal codes. Parity and Reed Soloman codes are restricted to certain parameters (and RS codes are much more computationally intensive). So don't simply delete this page !

If you want to merge the two articles, I'd suggest that the first paragraph of the article express this idea (namely extrapolation in linear systems over finite fields) and subsequent paragraphs relate each of the schemes to this idea (mentioning size of finite field and number of dimensions). Writing the article this way will be VERY insightful, but I can only relate the parity scheme to this one, so don't ask me.

As for the images : I reuploaded them and inserted them into the article. From my website headers I deduce that I created them on 30 October 1999. -- Nic Roets 18:02, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

This is a useful introduction to the topic, but as far as I can tell this article is just a special case of Reed–Solomon error correction for some particular small parameter values. I think it's better off framed as a gentle introduction to Reed-Solomon. Dcoetzee 08:48, 21 June 2008 (UTC)