From: Chris Shea <cmshea@...>
Date: 2007-03-30T12:55:04+09:00
Subject: Re: Just for fun...

On Mar 29, 9:44 pm, Chad Perrin <per...@apotheon.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 30, 2007 at 11:47:33AM +0900, Kristoffer Lund??n wrote:
>
> > Or just witness the huge popularity out there for the RAR format - a
> > format that is popular only because it once got popular - and the only
> > reason for that was that it made it easy to split archives into many
> > small parts. This was important (especially for the pirate market, of
> > course) in the days that a huge download could be corrupted. RAR
> > allowed people to only redownload  one small part when that happened.
>
> > Today, with torrents and hashes in all major protocols, this is
> > essentially a moot issue, and the slightly better compression than
> > some other formats is also negligible as in no user would actually
> > notice any difference except for byte count in the file manager...
> > Today it's just one big bad hassle, because people use it a LOT and
> > this means installing an extra program on every computer you use if
> > you want to participate - a non-free program at that, for those of us
> > who care.
>
> > Using RAR amounts to Cargo Cult Compression in my opinion, as it's
> > only invoking the old ritual of times past because "we have always
> > done it this way" with no understanding on why and no actual benefits.
>
> > Not that it's really the best solution for many reasons, but if you
> > want to be really practical, people should use zip for all their
> > compression needs - because that's the only format all modern OS:es
> > can open with no extra software, at least that I know of.
>
> In general, I agree with your assessment of the situation, but I'm not
> entirely sure about one thing you said.
>
> Is zip format really available with all OSes without extra software?
> I'm pretty sure MS Windows requires one to install additional software
> still, and I don't seem to recall zip being standard on all major Linux
> distributions.  I haven't bothered to check whether it's available on
> FreeBSD, mostly just because I haven't needed an unzipper in quite a
> while.
>
> --
> CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [http://ccd.apotheon.org]
> Leon Festinger: "A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell
> him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts and figures and he
> questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point."

Zip has been handled by the base Windows install since the first
release of XP.  In fact, I think since about that same time, I've
never had the need to install anything for handling zip files across
Windows, Linux, and Mac.

Chris