These little things...

[Alan McKinnon]

On Monday 10 April 2006 04:56, Shawn McMahon wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 10, 2006 at 03:19:21AM +0200, Vincent Trouilliez said:
> > Anyway, I rarely get to deal with RAR files in practise, no it
> > never bothered me that much.
> > I wonder why this format is still around. With broadband and
> > cheap large disks, inventing a new compression format just to
> > compress maybe little bit more, is hardly worth the trouble IMHO.
>
> The thing about RAR is, it can compress some things that ZIP can't.

That's a new one to me. Care to elaborate?

<snip>

> I once wrote an article for Fidonews about
> the various archivers available at the time, which was shortly
> after RAR was introduced.  My conclusion was that Fidonet should
> switch to ZIP because the benefits of it over ARC were significant,
> but the benefits of other formats weren't compelling enough to
> change.  Last I checked, they were still mandating ARC
> compatibility for all members.  

Is that Fidonews as in Fidonet? AFAIK the whole problem with ARC was 
patent issues from SEA, so Phil Katz developed ZIP and made the 
format public domain, effectively obsoleting ARC in one fell swoop


-- 
If only you and dead people understand hex, 
how many people understand hex?

Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five