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Yes, it recodes it into Huffman after extraction. Here is Aladdin's white paper on how they do it.

Yeah, because there are no backup solutions available for the Mac...

Take your FUD elsewhere.

If you even take the most basic/well studied Lempel-Ziv and Huffman algorithms you'll quickly find cases where each would be preferred over another.

And since different algm's identify different patterns in the file their compressing, certain files will be compressed better by different algorithms and do much worse on the next file. Besides, we're not even getting into any discussion of lossy/lossless algm's here. (Think jpeg vs bmp).

According to Maximum Compression, which is basically the best site for compression testing, Stuffit's new version is the best for lossless jpeg compression. I've got it and I can confirm that it does a much better job on jpegs than anything else I've tried. Unfortunately, it is only effective on jpegs not gifs, pngs, or even pdfs which seem to use jpeg compression. And, outside of the mac world, it is kind of rare.

While it's more common on Macintosh, I use Stuff Expander for Windows. It opens almost anything thrown at it, and it doesn't need the proper extension so it can open mystery files as well. It works in the background and the only time you see any windows from it when you explicately open it, or when it's decompressing.

I used to use WinZip back in the day though, and it was realible, and quick, so maybe it's time to re-evaluate it.

Having had to deal with RAR and SIT a lot lately, I decided to go with http://www.stuffit.com/win/deluxe/. I had purchased a WinZip license, but I just got sick of trying to deal with MAC folk who couldn't zip to save their lives.

I don't work for them. I had to find a solution recently and this was just the ticket.

http://www.stuffit.com/win/index.html

Also there is:
"Stuffit Expander"
  Yes it is far from perfect. Yes, it does only decompress and Stuffit Standard, which will compress. Stuffit Expander will decompress many types of files. However, to get Stuffit Expander you have to give up your e-mail address and they will send you at least some spam, but Allume, the developer, from my previous experience is at least not totally scum.

First, you need to extract the .sit file: I got the demo of stuffit expander

Then you need something that can burn the .dmg file, or something to convert it to an .iso: I used dmg2iso (the perl script seems to work better).

Then I burned the .iso, but it's a mac file system, so you need something that can read mac filesystems. I grabbed the demo of macdrive.

With that I can grab all the .aif files from the "The Hand That Feeds 1.0.band\Media" directory and import them into my audio program of choice! I couldn't find anything to convert the garageband "projectData" file into another format (it's xml, but with a weird encoded data block), but the .aif files are a good enough place to start playing with the sounds.

I'm sure there's equivalent utilities for linux, as well, but I don't know about them.

even though it's not free, i'm quite fond of Stuffit's sitx format. the expander is availble as a free (not as in beer) download from http://www.stuffit.com/, as well as being included on the mac platform.

The linked page shows average decompression times of 6-8 seconds for 600-800 KB files, rising with the size of the file. Who would benefit from this? It's obviously too slow to speed up web pages, and would be far too CPU intensive for consumer cameras. Professional photographers would have no use for this since they would use RAW images.

I mean, it's cool and all to be able to compress JPGs by that much more, but the size gains are negated by the time it takes to decompress them. This seems just like those super high compression algorithms that have rather amazing compression rates, but take -forever- to compress or decompress, making them unusable. The difference is those are obviously and labeled as simply for scientific research into compression, but Aladdin seems to be trying to market this product for public consumption. The listed uses ( http://www.stuffit.com/imagecompression/ ) seem trivial at best.

Who's gonna be buying this?

-Cliff Spradlin

Stuffit Expander is free and supports more formats that Winzip.

As opposed to Apple innovation, which has touted such advanced features as

Fast User Switching, just two years after Windows XP introduced it.

Video conferencing, which Microsoft introduced years ago with NetMeeting.

File extensions, once they realized that not everyone on the Internet uses a Mac.

Support for zip files in Finder without the need for third-party shareware, years after Microsoft supported them in Windows ME.

Mac OS X has many useful features, but don't start claiming that Apple only innovates and Microsoft only copies. Nobody's hands are clean there.

#include <xerox.rant.h>

Nope, free as in freeware. Only the compression programs cost money.

and for those not using windows and winzip?

StuffIt Expander is available for Linux/x86, Solaris/Sparc and Solaris/x86.

It's just compressed. Use Stuffit Expander (free) to see the enclosed tiff.

we're getting pretty far off target from a family home computer here but, here are some of my favorite alternatives to the above list;

mozilla - if prefer MyIE2
ws ftp - i much prefer filezilla
PuTTY - try transparent putty
vnc - if you're running xp or 2k you should go with ultravnc
gnu-emacs - yikes!if you must have a unix style text editor under windows, may i recommend cream for vim
free-av - i'd probably go with AVG anti virus
boingo - don't forget netstumbler

here are a few more i install before i ever run a new system;

foobar2000 console2
divx player
stuffit expander
trillian
and if you need an email client try popcorn

i've got links to lots more free windows software at my links page

Windows:

Kerio /or Sygate for firewall (both are good)
Aladdin's free StuffIt Expander (unpacks a lot of different compressed files, including SIT and Gunzip's)
AVG antivirus (free for personal home use)
QuickClear lite (deletes IE cookies/cache/empty's trash)
StartPro (well, it used to be free. Gives you a nice list of programs set to load at bootup, including registry keys.)
Ad-Aware everybodies favorite adware/malware answer.

Mandrake is (of course) easy:

Got the Easy Urpmi and follow the directions to install all the different media sites. Once you do that (its just a cut and paste job) you can fire up rpmdrake and search for software by name/description/type/etc. Mandrake installs with a lot of the right stuff already. I'd recommend maybe installing nano (easy command line text editor if you hate VI/VIM/EMACS/ETC) and of course if you running a system with a NVidia card get the NVIDIA drivers (rpmdrake, but if their not listed NVidia will have them).

Fortunately Mac OS X comes with gzip pre-installed, but for those moment when I insist on a GUI, I use StuffIt, just for the puerile name it got saddled with. StuffIt (WinZip) where the sun don't shine...

Here's a GPL'd one that that seems to work pretty well for those old games: Basilisk II

You'll need an OS, but Apple is giving one away for free use (apparantly): OS 7.5.3

So far, AFAIK, this is all legal (or at least uncontested). The tricky part is finding a ROM that works. The only way to get one is to rip it from your own mac - included is software to do that, though. You might be able to find one on the net if you look hard enough, though. (it won't be legal)

And then, of course, you need to find software for it if you don't already have some.

Another tricky thing is dealing with mac programs you download on the net. The mac filesystem has a concept that FAT/NTFS doesn't really have, which is each file has potentially two parts - resource and binary or something like that. I don't really understand it. But if you download an executable directly, then you probably will only get one part and it won't work, so you need to get them in BINHEX'd (HQX) mode, and then use something like HFVExplorer (Win32) to decode it properly when you copy it into your Mac disk image. It took me a while to figure out that HFVExplorer would do this for me, as I had a binhex'd version of Stuffit Expander, and I had no idea how to decode it once it was on the mac disk image, so I could decode other programs.

Good luck!

-If

Hmm... how to get StuffIt on the G3.... download it... nope because it's a .sit. Put it on a floppy? Nope. No floppy. I finally had to BURN A DAMN CD just to copy it over.

Hmmm, that sure is strange, considering StuffIt has been part of the goddamned system for at least two years prior to the G3's introduction. Plus, Aladdin has a handy guide for people just like you. Try a little harder next time, maybe?

I ended up buying a USB floppy driver for her because I got sick of that kind of crap.

Yeah, it must suck to be an idiot.

Er, excuse me, but Stuffit Expander is available for Mac, PC and Linux for free, and it's all you need to unstuff _any_ .sit file.

dalamcd

P.S. No, stuffit.com is not a porn site...

It's a self-extracing zip, so you can decompress it on any platform with your favorite unzipper. For Mac, Linux and Solaris, you might try out Stuffit Expander.

Y'know, there is Stuffit Expander for Linux.

Actually, many compression algorithms are patented (not that I agree with this, I dont; but Apple is not the first). For example, LZW compression, used in GIFs, is patented, by Unisys. I believe the algorithm used by the Aladdin StuffIt program is, also.

Am I missing something here, or did anyone else notice that the printable-image files of their mascot are in proprietary formats in proprietary compressed archives?