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.ZIP Standard to Fragment?
fudgefactor7 writes "As IDG.NET tells us, the venerable .ZIP compression standard is about to undergo a bit of a schism. PKWare and WinZip, the "big two" in the .ZIP format biz are (unfortunately) going to be making their respective releases incompatible (to an extent) and an archive made with one may not be accessible from another. The problem lies with PKWare not giving information to WinZip, thus making WinZip to go it alone."
What will my unix *zip programs be compatible with?
Trolling is a art,
I'm hoping that WinZip changes the file extension for their new format to make it clear to anyone who gets ahold of such a file that it is not a standard Zip file.
And how much time will it be before someone just writes a program that handles both formats natively? RAR, ACE, and all the other compressors already do handle Zip file just fine.
How much does this really matter? First of all, I bet most people are still using their unregestered shareware winzip from ages ago. Most people know that the zip encryption is pretty much worthless, so they don't bother. The people who want an encrypted zip file are probably going to encrypt it with a quality encryption program, such as gpg or pgp, AFTER they have it zipped. The person on the other end unencrypts it and then opens it. I know the article said "95% of the time it'll work", but I bet it will be more like "It'll work 99.9999% of the time".
Also, the basic format isn't changing. It's just the encryption part, so zip files will still be usuable by nearly everyone.
http://www.jsonline.com/news/State/may00/katz21052 000a.asp
Microsoft bashing aside for the moment, since Windows XP has built in support for .zip files, does this even matter? Your average windows user doesn't use encryption, and those in the know, use better formats of security.
It does ZIP, ACE, RAR, ...
.sit (I love the fact that OS X has tar.gz built in) Hell I never send Mac friends .sit files. tar.gz all the way baby!
tar zxvf
gzip
What else exists?
Oh yea I forgot
Frankly, with the popularity of Winzip, PKWare is making a grave error. PKZip, while perfectly good, is running a distant second in popularity based on my observations. Making their product produce incompatible ZIP files is a sure way of eroding their market share even further.
.DOC files that Microsoft would not be able to read. The result would be that Corel would lose their remaining six users of their word processor.
You do that sort of thing when you are the industry leader. This would be like Corel deciding that they were going to set a new standard for
That may be the unix way, but it's not the efficient way.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Maybe we should just use formats based on open standards. Then the actual software people use is irrelevant.
yep, and for a stupid reason
The company firewall will not allow certain kinds of files though (read things like source code and exes) - fair enough, but even if you zip the file, the block it. This not only occurs through the firewall, but inside the company too. So when we want to send a file, we zip with encryption. They can't open it to see what is inside, so they let it through
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
What I find funny is that PKWARE will basically die off from this, no one I know from the workplace, friends, or even home users use anything PKWARE related. They all use Winzip or another windows tool. Hell it's been 10 year's since I even used PKZIP from PKWARE, and back then I was on a 486 machine with DOS 5.
It's also funny how people are still using a archiving format thats been around since 1988 at least, it's OLD and compresses like crap. Especially when there are SUPERIOR and much better compression formats out there such as
ARJ
JAR
RAR
UC2
ACE
All of these formats compress better then ZIP, yet you are hard pressed to find ARJ/ACE/JAR/UC2 files on the net, RAR files you may find here and there.
You must master your joystick like a fisherman masters bait! - Gimpy
you mean like DeCSS lets users decrypt and watch dvd's in the roughly the same manner the licensed technology does?
You can stick with the tape archiver if you want. You'll have the pleasure of waiting for your massive single file to finish decompressing, so you can then sequentially search the resulting decompressed archive for the files you actually wanted.
In the meantime, I'll be plucking decompressed files right out of the middle of my zip archives, in a fraction of the time.
Incidentally, if you're so anal about your compression ratio, why not compress with a good compressor (like bzip2) and archive with a good archiver (like zip)?