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New Winzip in the Works
flufster writes "Today WinZip released a public beta version of WinZip 10.0, the latest version of the popular archiving software. The biggest change in this version is that the software has finally been broken into two versions - Standard and Professional, offering paying users additional functionality in the Professional version, while allowing others to use the Standard edition without an annoying nag screen.
Version 10.0 has a revamped interface designed to mimic XP's Windows Explorer, and claims to zip archives faster. The software now supports the PPMd and bzip2 compression formats, and can burn from zip archives directly to writable optical media such as CDs and DVDs. The main addition to the Pro edition is an automation feature called 'WinZip Job Wizard' which allows scheduled archiving instructions to be set. Almost all the other features we're used to now come completely free in the Standard edition."
My favorite window archiving tool: http://www.izarc.org/
I guess 7-zip is popular too. Regardless, Winzip is yesterday's news.
Or you could just get WinRar. Free upgrades and a better format to boot.
Here's some good freeware ones:
7-Zip A free, open source Windows zip utility with support for several archive formats, and comparatively great compression. Small and fast too; it's my personal choice at the moment. IZArc Not open source, but supports a few more formats ICEOWS Formerly ARJFolder, integrates very cleanly into Windows Explorer.There's more out there, but really, I can't see how Winzip is as relevant today as it was during the Win3.x days when it was the only good zip GUI out there. I guess scheduling is nice, but then again, all operating systems come with a schedular these days anyway.
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Althought really obsolete, WinZip is extremely popular with uneducated computers users.
I, for one... recommend these alternatives: winrar and winace, wich are vastly superiors in performance, but shareware, and 7-Zip wich has good perfomance with a poor interface, but it's free.
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Agreed - 7-zip rocks. It seems to be able to open almost every archive format - I even use it under Linux sometimes (via Wine). What I'd like to know is why the hell it took so long for WinZip to get bzip2 support - I've found it really inconvenient, and it seems to be the last archiver to support the format.
Yeah, except for the fact that command won't work.
In other words, all of those people who were promised free upgrades way back when are now SOL. Yes, WinZip has the right to change their terms any time they want and have no obligation to continue to provide free upgrades, power to them.
But I don't have to continue to support their company. Their "upgrade assurance" program is cute, though... for an extra 20% you can receive assurances that if a new version of WinZip comes out within the next year you'll get a copy. They've been averaging a new version what, every two? three? years? How many people are going to fall for that one?
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
Perhaps this is because Opera is not a steaming pile of shit, while it could be argued to be the case for Winzip.
I have no problem with software evolving. The problem is that deflate64 is a proprietary, undocumented compression algorithm (unlike the previous ZIP algorithms.) The only way to make an interoperable implementation is through reverse-engineering, and given the state of copyright law in the USA today, that's a dangerous prospect for Free Software.
Stuffit is unneeded. It was a niche product to support the resource fork + data fork when transmitting/storing the file on mediums that do not support a resource fork(IE, putting it on a unix FTP server or sending it as an attachment to a usenet post, etc). Now that the resource forks are mostly unneeded, partially duplicated in a 'file' that tar can roll up, and becoming deprecated in general... Apple started using .dmg disk images to distribute stuff! ARRRGH! :P Admittedly, it's a wonderful installation method as far as end user experience goes, but it is hardly cross platform compatible.
I wrote my first archiver, called CompreXX, back in 1997. It had the exact "new" Explorer interface that's the big deal in WinZip 10 now, 8 years later.
In 1999 I added plug-in extensibility to the product, so it could be extended to support more archives while keeping the same UI.
In 2002, I made the product manage archives natively in Windows Explorer itself - just like what Windows XP does for ZIP files, except for all archive types (that plug-ins support) and all Windows platforms. Give WinZip another 8 years and they'll figure that one out.
CompreXX right now natively compresses ZIP, RAR, ACE, SIT, 7ZIP (7ZIP has the best compression), and 28 total archive formats. It extracts 48. Of course, because I do not have a multimillion dollar marketing budget, there is nothing I can do to get the word out about it.
And reading about WinZip's revolutionary "new" features, especially on Slashdot, is really depressing.
"RAR itself is fine. It spliting up RAR archives into multiple files that annoy me.
And then there is the different extentions:
rar, r##, part##.rar etc.."
-1 Troll
Zip is also capable of splitting it's archive, why don't you complain about that too?
Anyway, people split RARs for good reason. It's so that if during a massive download you have a small bit that doesn't stand up to CRC, all you need to do is redownload the segment that went bad instead of maybe 4.7gb all over again.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
Winzip 10 is still unreliable since it still doesn't support Unicode filenames. Use WinRAR or 7-zip instead.
7-Zip supported deflate64 months ago, and it's open source.
I have in a pretty similar situation, I was compressing 1.4gb of various binary data in the hope of getting it onto a cdr. Zip and gzip I didn't even bother with (no, ok, I did try them, they sucked, about 1.2gb). 7-zip and ace were better but pretty bad, about 8-900mb each. Arj got it down to about 706mb, just too much without overburning. Rar blew them all away, compressed it down to just over 550mb. Took two hours to do though.
I am trolling
I believe RAR does what they call "solid archiving," which means that a single compression dictionary is created for the entire archive.
.tar.gz does.) For the first ZIP, specify "no compression" (sometimes called "archive only") for the degree of compression desired. No compression dictionary will be created. Then ZIP that uncompressed ZIP file, using maximum compression this time. Since you're compressing just one file, only a single compression dictionary will be created. Especially for files that have a lot of similarity to each other (like human-language text or computer-language text), there's a big savings in using a single dictionary.
.tar.gz.). ZIP managed ~17MB, double-ZIP managed ~12MB - slightly smaller than the .tar.gz distro, in fact.
ZIP doesn't do that; each file in a ZIP archive is compressed individually, with a separate compression dictionary. That hurts the compression ratio for ZIP archives that contain many files, particularly many small files, particularly many similar small files, like source code, for example. But it does mean that archive operations (like extracting or updating individual files or and adding files to or removing files from an archive) are fast and simple.
It's possible, in some cases, to dramatically increase the compression ratio ZIP achieves by ZIPing twice, emulating the "solid archive" method. (This is also what using
I tried this with some source code archives and reduced ZIPs from (IIRC) ~150KB to ~90KB. Not really a worthwhile absolute savings, these days, but a huge improvement, percentage-wise. I also tried this with the Windows distribution of Emacs (which is distributed as
Doing this is a little clumsy, but it can offer a much-improved compression ratio in a format that virtually every Windows user already has access to.
You should give 7-zip's own file format set on "Ultra" for the compression ratio, by far the best in the industry.
Regards,
Steve
I've been trying out Tugzip. Free, no nag screens, supports almost any format including rar, pretty nice.
I was conned by an old man in a cloak. It turns out those *were* the droids I was looking for.
There's a little known tool in the Microsoft Download Center that lets you mount an ISO as a virtual CDROM. You can get it here:
b d84-7841-4978-96f5-bd58df02efa2/winxpvirtualcdcont rolpanel_21.exe
http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/b/6/7b6a
Another one of the reasons people switched away from Altavista/Lycos/etc to Google was because Google's service was actually superior.
Unfortunately today, Digg falls far short of this. The dupes are far worse than at Slashdot. Way worse. The amount of non-tech, non-news, and general crap is usually a lot greater than the amount of releveant tech news. A lot greater. We may complain about Slashdot, but at Digg the problems are worse. And to say that they don't have any ad submissions hit front page is laughable (this, for example, is currently front paged and it's no different from this post except the software). Of course, even if there were a complete lack of ads, it would be far overshadowed when you have a story like Bill Gates's House on Google Maps. And, of course, the comments there are hardly worthwhile.
So, sure, Digg is a nice little curiosity. But as a Slashdot replacement it fails in far short. Complain about Slashdot all you want, but the reality is that it is not as bad as we say, and it's nowhere near as bad as Digg.
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
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.
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You do not need to use wine, there is also a native linux port for 7zip.
Open Source Alternatives
I haven't tried the method that you suggest, but 7zip, using zip compression can routinely create archives smaller than winzip by using the paramater pass=4 and the archives are compatable with any program that will open zips. I'm not sure if this would beat your method, but since it is one step rather than two it is worth trying.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
My weapon of choice is power archiver. It supports just about everything I would ever come across, for both compressing and uncompressing
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You should've given PAQ a try too. From what I understand PAQ compression uses adaptive switching between multiple compression algorithms on the fly based on which produces the best result for a current block. Be warned that it is pretty slow and memory intensive.
Another one to try is UCL . This is a compression engine behind UPX, executable file compressor. It has a remarkable property of having super-fast decompression.
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