Slashdot Mirror
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."
Oh wait, you did.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Thr's a lt 2 b sd 4 dta cmprsn.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
My favorite window archiving tool: http://www.izarc.org/
I guess 7-zip is popular too. Regardless, Winzip is yesterday's news.
... is this really necessary for an archiver?
What about the annoying rar format? Hope it can de/compress that.
The ability to unzip large groups of ZIP files in one action would be a lovely addition!!! I just use winrar anyway as, although it can be alot more ugly, the methods it uses are much more elegant. My 2c...
Great, an AD pretending to be an article. Not only that, it's for a Windows product on a Linux-based website!
feh. stuff.
However, with broadband increasing in prevelance, and pendrives and CD writers becoming pretty much the norm now for home users (my parents, never the most technologically literate of users, have their own USB pendrives which they love), not to mention zip integration into just about every common OS now, is there still a place for WinZip? Even if people continue to download it, most people I know who've used it just bypass the nag screens without a second thought - how long can they survive?
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
What is this now, Pressreleasedot? I'm running WinZip 8.0 and will never upgrade it for the same reason I'll never upgrade from AIM 4.3, Acrobat 5, and Office 2000: the problem is solved and the old version does everything it should without any new useless cruft (why is Acrobat 7 ~25 megs to read PDF files? And why does it access the Internet at all?).
Did all the "old school" Slashdot editors leave or something? These new guys they have are pretty lame.
rooooar
tar + bzip2 + mkisofs + cdrecord.
.imp, it also handles zips fine] and doesn't require me to shell out money.
Wow... now I don't need "professional" tools.
Seriously, windows users come to expect nothing any more I guess. There are alternatives to "the 10th edition of twenty year old compression algorithms".
I'm sorry but honestly what the fuck is the real market for Winzip?
Even when I was a windows user I used Winimp as it is free, compresses better [when making
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Now that Microsoft has incorporated an unzip utilitiy in the OS, WinZip can't profit from people who just want to unzip files.
I have 7-zip...it handles almost all archives I come across quickly and well, and to boot it just works. Why the hell would I want to go back to WinZip, which from the sounds of it is even more bloated than it was before?
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
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.
<!-- DHTML / JavaScript menu, popup tooltip, Ajax scripts -->
Since most people just click past the nag screen this is the sensible thing to do: Give people the basics for free, and charge for the advanced features that really are corporate time-savers and hence worth paying for.
.: Max Romantschuk
Why does the Slashdot community, one of the largest Free / Open Source communities on the Net, care when a new proprietary version of some Windows-only software comes out? Find another place to post this nonsense.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
I wish archiver fanboys would stop using rar to compress movies... it's not like it saves a whole lot and it prevents replay of incomplete files.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
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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... it supports a new "deflate64" compression that is NOT supported by zlib. As a result, clamd chokes on some ZIP files and can't scan them.
/. readers.
This pain-in-the-@ss aspect of the new Winzip is the most likely thing to affect
I always thought winrar was superior to winzip. Can't really remember why though.
This has always been the case with software. Once a fairly mature release is in the market, with lots of useful features, they then need to make you think you need the latest features. Of course some marketing wonk writes lots of stuff that people ultimately read, and then they're convinced.
/. again?
I mean seriously, whenever I boot into Windows, Office '97 provides me with EVERY POSSIBLE word-processing feature I need.
MS has the advantage of making the OS too, so they can force you to upgrade either the OS or the application software at their whim.
Why is there an ad on
Ignore Alien Orders
Winzip seems to be ok untill Winrar came. Winrar is much smoother and less buggy and never had a problem with a compressed file, where as I needed to have "zip file repairing tool" with Winzip.
http://www.rarlabs.com/ - unzips a ZIP file in 2 clicks and handles about 10 other formats, and also has its own very good RAR format. Why bother paying for Winzip? I'm surprised people use it over winrar.
Nothing costs nothing
I stopped using easily corruptable zip files a long time ago, in favour of much more internet friendly rars.
Promote Charity on Myspace, Show Your Colours!
I thought winzip was always free... you just went to the website and downloaded the evaluation version while you were launching your favorite IRC application. By the time the download finished you had already found a free key generator in a l33t ju4r3z channel and had it cracked on the first use.
Scott
I just downloaded the 10.0 beta version. To test it, I unpacked the winzip 10 beta installer itself (wz100beta.exe). Inside the resulting folder, I found several exe files. There is one 725K file called GDS.exe, which appears to be the installer (or part of it) for Google Desktop Search. Two others named GTB9x.EXE and GTBXP.EXE seem to be the installers for Google Toolbar. Why on earth is Winzip bundling the installers for Google Desktop Search and Google Toolbar with Winzip?!! The readme and license agreement do not mention the word "Google" at all and neither does the winzip website as far as I can tell. I'm also betting that the GDS license agreement prohibits it from being redistributed in this fashion.
What on earth is going on here? Do you think they've just made a silly mistake or am I missing something really obvious?
...how many people actually pay for winzip?
...because it doesn't try to look/act like Windows Explorer. I liked the clean separation; archives should be used as archives, not as a stand-ing for compressed directories. You can't really run programs from within a zip file, not if they need to access any of the other files in there. Making archives act like folders seems like a good idea until you realize that there's a bunch of things that won't work unless they are integrated at the filesystem level.
Who needs WinZip.. Total Commander all the way :)
Proud owner of BOT2K3 [ bot2k3.net ]
Zip makes such large archives compared to rar, ace, and several other formats I'm not sure if it's even worth it anymore.
If they improved the algorithm in WinZip 10 maybe they can make it more competitive.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Very nice that they support bzip2 - it seems to be gaining some traction in the community now, so it should be handy.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
In WinZip's defense, it has long been a staple of the desktop world - yes, there are freeware and open source equivalents that do the same job and are freer, but WinZip has a few things going for it that those products don't:
It's easy to use: The free zip programs included in Windows, although they are easy enough for most users, just don't feel right - and you can't really expect grandma to use open source utilities or to find other Windows freeware zip progams, however easy you might find it personally.
People are familiar with it: It's been around for a long time and has become ubiquitous - from standard end-users to IT professionals, there are very few computer users who haven't had experience with WinZip and don't know how to use it.
It works well all of the time: People seem to have less difficulties with WinZip than with other archivers, and while this may just be due to familiarity or other reasons, the amount of people who recommend WinZip for everyday use is very telling.
They shouldn't have used a Slashdot article as an advertisement platform, that's true - after all, that's what ad space is for... but to bash the product itself is a bit much, in my opinion.
Liberal Ontarians and French Quebecers are draining Western Canada's wealth. Stop them now! Support Western separatism.
Ok, which one of you jackasses /.ed IZArc?!
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
They do. :)
http://www.winzip.com/prodpagecl.htm
Not open source but free as in beer with no nags or ads. Made in Italy and available in English and Italian and more. It handles more than 20 compression formats and offers four encryption algorithms.
ZipGenius
Insert witty sig here.
And since xp explorer does zip files, why are you even in business? And yes for the record I actually did buy one copy of winzip ages ago, but windows 95 was king back then...
Is slashdot being paid by the winzip authors to post this story ?
Yes.
how about posting a story about an opensource/free compression package ?????
Because no money changed hands.
At the top of my screen there's a bar with links to "freshmeat, sourceforge, thinkgeek,
Because money has changed hands. See how easy that was?
Does Malda and his crew care about that stuff anymore
More people visiting this site use Windows than Linux (I'm not one of them, but facts are facts). Any journalist/entertainer whose pitches fly counter to what the majority of his audience is interested in catching will fail. Linux adds to the slashdot "geek cachet" -- that's what's being marketed here, not genuine Linux news, for which there are hundreds of supeior sources.
or is this just a sleazy and easy money making operation for them ?
Sleazy? From a guy calling himself "Adult Film Producer?" Get a grip, chum. As for "easy," well, they've got to put up with idiots like you and me pissing in their pool 24/7. I doubt anyone could pay me enough to wade through the whining here on a daily basis. Hardly "easy."
there is a very good reason why this happens and it's not about compression at all. You should realise that the movies are already in a compressed format and so it *is* pointless to try and compress them further, the savings are minimal, what is not minimal however is the time spent redownloading a 700mb file because at some point in the download it got corrupted or perhaps was in the first place. Now with a system like bittorrent or edonkey it's possible to prevent corrupt files through hash checking etc, but one thing you need to be aware of is that your copy of Harry Potter doesn't usually start out on some bittorrent website, but on some 0-day FTP that only a few very priviledged people have access to. Now if that movie comes in 45 x 15mb files if one of these files happens to be corrupted in transfer, or was corrupt in the first place it's a simple process to download just that file again or for the person hosting it to fix it. However if i have just downloaded a 700mb file to find that it's corrupted I'll have to download said whole file again. This harkens back to the days in the 'scene' when releases were usually released onto newsgroups first, where you have no choice but to segment files.
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Like all other senses of importance it's only important if you make it so.
Seek alternatives [even in windows] and you'll find out that Winzip is about as important as the colour of the backside of the moon.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Come on, a new WinZIP release is newsworthy? This is just an ad for a silly product that adds a flood of bells and whistles to a set of processes that should be deadly simple.
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Funny thatm the guy above who said winrar is better is modded interesting, while the guy who says tar is better is modded a troll.
What are these mods smoking?
I'm sorry, but what is wrong with that sentence?
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I find it humorous that when Winzip hits 10.0 and starts offering free versions, /.ers start foaming at the mouth to say what a steaming heap of shit it is and OMG can you believe people BUY that when I love to use [other application] that has [other feature] and it's FREE? And then the obligatory, "slashdot sucks now, look at the ad they're running and calling it an article."
And just last week it was all lollipops and blowjobs for Opera when they turned 10 and released a free version.
If you actually run the installer you'd find that it asks you if you want to install it - probably a similar deal as Yahoo toolbar with flash player or whatever.
We've secretly replaced Slashdot with new Folgers Crystals - let's see if it notices.
I recently stopped using Acrobat Reader because it was so slow and bloated. I find FoxIt Reader a faster alternative.
Example: Local OS/TEMP on C: partition and Data partition on D: I select multiple directories on D: and tell it to create a new Archive on \\server\share\dir. Winzip will create the Zip on my C:TEMP first and then copy up the file.
Same goes for unzipping files too (more noticible on larger files). This serves no purpose and it just increases the time it takes to zip/unzip files.
Changing the TEMP everytime I want to zip unzip a file will help buts it not a solution.
The command line utilities work well, unzip/zip, unrar etc. But sometimes it's just nicer to run a gui. Especially for multi-selecting unrelated files to compress into one file.
Ever since Win XP added native ZIP support I figured : oh there's Microsoft added a new feature to the OS that kills the flagship product of a little guy. Of course, Internet Explorer (killing Netscape) is another obvious example. Why isn't this banned?
This new release includes "themes", which greatly de-uglifies it. Also, it reads/writes iso's, which is cool. I don't know if winzip does that or not. Winrar has a pretty powerful CLI too, which I use to back up certain directories on my Windows machine through a scheduled task. Winzip I believe has command-line options too.
Anyway, the new WinRAR is so nice I bought a copy.
Yes, bought, as in spent money! You can do that, you know.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
or perhaps you're just a clueless noob and dont understand why they're doing it.
I'm a clueless noob, it's true!
did you ever stop to think that if you were fxp'ing something from one dumpsite to another and one bit is corrupted the only way to fix that bit is to resend the entire file? now if that one bit is in a single 15mb rar you only need to resend the corrupt file
I think about stuff like this for a living, and if I were doing it I would use a better fucking protocol than resending megabytes of data because of, possibly, a couple of corrupted bytes. Perhaps the problem is that the twits who deal pirated movies like this are too clueless to write code.
playback of incomplete files? what the fuck is the point, just finish downloading it and then watch it
Did you ever stop to think that you might want to:
- check it's the right file,
- watch with some artifacts (if it's a TV show, who cares),
- deal with malicious seeds who let out 99% of the file and then disappear?
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Never was a fan of WinRAR, but UltimateZip is pretty nice.
It was me, I did it, I moved your cheese
p7zip
It has a simple gui interface and explorer integration. It supports many archive file formats including 7z, ZIP, CAB, RAR, ARJ, GZIP, BZIP2, Z, TAR, CPIO, RPM and DEB. There is also a UNIX commandline interface port available.
WinZip an important tool? You are making me laugh.
The only reason it is an important tool, is because it sounds like the official product for the zip format. The funny part, is that it is not. PkZip is. Thus WinZip is only installed when mandated by clueless CEOs, and when Windows could not handle zip files by itself.
Everyone else has either learned to get by (as Windows handles zip automatically), or they install WinRar or WinAce or 7-zip. All of those products seem to work better than Winzip, and handle more formats.
WinZip is dying. And I do not need netcraft to confirm it.
And if you want to blame the fact that this article is an ad on Linux zealotry, I should really smack you upside the head. This is news for nerds, and nerds are the last people who want to read about a *beta* version of an overcommercialized product. Maybe if this were a new WinRar, I might care. Yes I have a holier-than-thou attitude: I have transcended above using WinZip; you have not.
badness 10000
The most annoying thing about winzip is the apparent inability to create an archive starting with a directory! For instance, if I've got
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
I'm so glad I decided to support the software after probably close to 10 years of use by purchasing it a year or two ago. Now they make it free.
Mine did. What did you run? The google desktop installer that you got from messing with the binary, or the winzip installer itself?
We've secretly replaced Slashdot with new Folgers Crystals - let's see if it notices.
Makes sense, thanks for explaining to this clueless n00b!
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
FWIW, I don't use compression (WinRAR, or tar/gz) to save space, it's mostly for tidiness. Rather than have hundreds of files sitting in an archive directory, it's easier on the eyes to have say AUG2005.zip. Then, should the need really arise to get something, it's pretty easy to find.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
but Software patents aren't valid in the EU, and copyright law is in a different state.
It's likely that you'll see it in other (open) apps soon enough - they'll just be based in Europe instead of the U.S.
Or you could just, you know, use Filzip instead.
Filzip includes shell integration, handles just about every compression format (including .rar, .tar/.tar.gz, and .cab), and unlike WinZip, it
s 100% free as in beer. No fooling, no mucking around with a feature-deprived free version. Just grab it and go.
Read my blog.
I know that some days there isn't a lot going on and today is so obviously one of those. But come on. Why on earth did anyone think that a site squarely pointed at *nix would be interested in this?
This "story" is my vote for worst story ever.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Where's the Linux version?
;)
Join Tor today!
Caution, WinZip 10.0, when it is released, will not be a free upgrade. If you are a registered user of a previous version of WinZip and install WinZip 10.0, you will no longer be registered
Oh well, no more free upgrades. I guess they need more money.
I always liked the basic WinZip. It had all of the funtionality you needed. For some reason utilities lose there way as they add on more and more features. As long as there is a classic mode it will still be a great program. Yes this is an add, but WinZip is a classic PC program.
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
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.
-1, Wrong
The sentence is fine.
Why is anything anything?
I just downloaded the beta and it has 1. A nag screen, 2. An exit nag screen. I say stick with the ones that are actually free.
We're is a contraction of 'we are', and is perfectly correct. There's nothing worse than trying to be a grammar Nazi and getting it wrong :)
[url:http://www.rarlabs.com/]WinRAR[/url] supports more formats and has always been quite easy to use. The system context menu addin makes life simple. It does the task you ask and finishes. No opening up a window and clicking buttons. You click, 'Extract Here' and it extracts.
the bzip2 compression is also cursed...
That's bad.
But it comes with a free froghurt!
That's good!
I need to be able to read my email with WinZip. Someone brighter than I stated that "all applications grow until the point at which they can read email." This is when you know you've gone too far.
Don't get me wrong, added functionality is nice, but why not integrate with other apps? Like have a plugin that works with my Nero/EZCD/WhateverBurn so we can all focus on our own specialized tasks?
-- I have fans? Wow.
Can't you, you know, make a folder?
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.
DOS mode unzip doesn't work on NTFS systems. It recognizes 8 character files and extracts only 8 characters.
This is God awful for when I have 200 zip files in one directory and need to unpack them all in a single run (as in, "unzip *.zip") instead of having to open and unzip each one with WinZip.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Winzip
Winrar
Winace
Rar kicked ass
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAR Need i say more?
"I reject your reality, and substitute my own" - Adam Savage
http://www.filzip.com/
I've been using Filzip for a while and it takes care of all my archival needs.
Hmmm, Google CompreXX, or just try CompreXX.com :)
As you can see, I suck at marketing. Grumble grumble.
Winzip 10 is still unreliable since it still doesn't support Unicode filenames. Use WinRAR or 7-zip instead.
There's even a Windoze GUI (http://www.info-zip.org/WiZ.html) - if you really want one, though I didn't like it much when I last looked at it.
All it's lacked for ages now has been diskette spanning - though, as someone else points out elsewhere in this thread, in these days of USB flash drives and CDRWs there's much less need for that.
So Big Thanks, a Tip o' The Hat and a beverage of your choice to the Info-Zip folks.
I've had too many zip archives turn out corrupt over the years, not to mention they are large compared to other compressed formats. Hasn't everyone more or less stopped using zip anyway?
Have you tried 7-Zip?
Because it makes sense to make that point - If they've got a new proprietary implementation (which is what it sounds like) then chances are that they'll try to file for a patent for it in the near future - assuming they haven't done so already.
Although copyright is the problem that the great-grand-parent was pointing out, It's not likely to be the only problem that other developers would face trying to implement a compatible algorithm. Something to bear in mind, no?
http://www.stuffit.com/win/index.html
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Every single specialized program turns into yet another bloated, all-singing, all-dancing swiss army knife.
We're Unix people, right? Familiar with small tools that do their job right and work well together? I need only one GUI swiss army knife, and it is Konqueror.
7-Zip supported deflate64 months ago, and it's open source.
Umm, untill even they started the annoying nag screen. 7-zip all the way..
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
A new version of WinZip merits a story on /.? What the hell is going on over there?
or you could try seven-zip which is decidedly NOT shareware. Not to mention it supports more than RAR.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Grumble, grumble. And I evidently suck at doing the reading and googling after a long week with 14 hour work-days. Now mod my post into oblivion!
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
While zlib doesn't support deflate64, such support is already available in info-zip unzip. If clamd were to use unzip instead this particular problem would not be an issue.
BI don't know about you but I usually create or open an archive with a tar command, I'm not sure I've ever called gzip or bzip2 directly.
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
I'm sorry but I switched to PowerArchiver many moons ago. It has served me well and is more compatible with compressed archives that I create on my UNIX machines and Mac.
"...the soul of this machine has improved..." Douglas A. Maske
I mean, when you can suck 100mb off the internet in a few minutes, do we need an archiving utility?
I actually get annoyed when large files are broken into smaller zip or rar files for distribution over the web. Sure there are still many people that use dialup networking that need access to the same files (patches and such), but providers should really offer 1 large file for broadband and then lots of small files for dialup, or opt to use a download manager that can pause or restart downloads.
Also, except for text and Windows bitmaps, what really CAN be zipped these days? Most web/photo image formats are pretty much compressed as are various video and music formats. I don't know how many times I download a zip or rar archive and find out the overall compression rate on the archive is less than 5%. What am I saving by having it zipped, 100kb? The kind of large files that people are downloading and distributing are alreay very dense in their native format, zipping them offer little improvement in reducing file size.
About the ONLY reason for zip like archive utilties these days is for encryption, packaging files in protected archives for secure delivery. WinZip has been beefing up their encryption support, but I think they need to really change focus and become an encryption archiver rather then a compression archiver. Compression can always be an option, but shouldn't be the focal point of the utility. Encryption should become WinZip's priority and focus if they wish to continue developing a winning product for the future.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
PKZip anyone? You don't need anything else! Chris
"You can drive out Nature with a pitchfork, but It always comes roaring back again." - Tom Waits
If you suck, why are you grumbling? Hire someone who's better or learn to do a better job yourself.
Read through the thread and look at all the great commentary on and links to alternative archiving programs. Many of them are gratis, and a few are even F/OSS.
Whatever the original intent of the post, the discussion has created in this thread a useful resource for fans of non-commercial software. That can't be all bad, can it?
I think local computer stores were making a small fortune with the amount of floppy disks being bought.
<HUMOR>
You bought floppy disks? AOL sent me all the floppies that I ever needed!
</HUMOR>
Seriously, though, I bought high-quality floppies when data integrity was important.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
I don't need a GUI tool that can handle 48 different formats... I can use just select correct program for the job in the command line. For .zip use unzip, for .rar use unrar, then there's untar, and unace. I;ve set some Bash aliases so I don't need extra handles on the command, and can extract tar balls in one.
WinRAR supports more than RAR also?
:)
RAR, ZIP, CAB, ARJ, LZH, ACE, 7-Zip, TAR, GZip, UUE, BZ2, JAR, ISO, Z.
7-zip may support more - I honestly don't know, as WinRAR fits all my needs perfectly - and I'm not trying to say 7-zip is a bad choice (again, I wouldn't know). But, for your information, WinRAR does much more than just RAR.
You may suck at marketing...but you make a damn good program. I bought it, and will not use anything else for compression work.
Requiem
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
IMHO Winzip peaked at around version 5 when they finally introduced long filename support. Everything after that was more of the same, nothing really new. Sure, this "archiving faster" crap sound cool but is it really faster? And do the customer really wanna fork over cash for a 3% (or whatever) increase in zipping?
Also, I'm rather tired of using fifty billion archivers and have therefore switched to PowerArchiver which does a good job at most every format.
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
Thanks! Help spread the word :)
I see no mention of command line support which is great for scripting. Winzip8/9 and winrar both offer command line options for compression/decompression (winzip via a downloadable extension). izarc looks full featured, but I see no mention of command line support, so IMHO, it's just free.
If someone who uses it knows that it does support a CLI than please reply and I'll give it a shot.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
But that's gzip or bzip2 that do the compression.
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
Why would I want to install WinZip?
Windows has supported Zip files since Windows ME.
Heck, it opens them up like regular folders and lets you view/open items inside as well as cut/copy/paste to and from them.
I'm surprised that Winzip hasn't gone after Microsoft for anti-trust issues.
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
There are plenty of better alternatives that have been around for *years*.
This might have mattered back in the early 1990s, back when pkzip was DOS only.
WinRAR isn't free
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.
A very very few people have caught up with the times, and just split AVIs, or even post the entire huge file, and you download everything you can get, put it together, and download pars to fill in the cracks. It works fine.
Clients are even including par2 support themselves, where they automatically download the smaller par2 (The empty one) and see how many blocks they need, and download that many, and magically repair the file before you knew anything was wrong.
I've heard a lot of excuses for this 'raring avis' and not one of them holds up anymore. Stop compressing the damn files.
And, yes, there are people with old crappy clients out there that won't download fiules where parts are missing. This is a) idiotic, and b) not important, as everyone has switched over to using yEnc, and thus old clients don't work at all!
So, basically, the 'small files work best on Usenet' is dead.
And small files have never worked better on FTP, because FTP has always had something called 'resume'.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Now we wait for the crack....
Is it just me or are the winzip cracks one of the most downloaded pieces of software on the internet? They may as well just add a winzip page to altavista....
PS I am in no way promoting piracy here. Piracy is bad, very bad. Downloading too much will make you go blind!
The file name is a byte array right?
So why can't we just stuff UTF-8 into it?
One of the major points of UTF-8 is that it doesn't cause too much grief even if the thing on the other end doesn't understand it.
We would just need to use the relevant unicode-filename APIs in the Zip manipulator software and interconvert that with UTF-8 for the Zip file. Maybe have a command-line flag to have the filenames interpretable as ISO-8859-1, but have UTF-8 as the default.
Of course it already does this in unix because filenames are just a byte array there already. But it might be nice to be able to interpret the names as UTF-8 to be able to get listing columns to line up etc.
Would need to be implemented in Info-Zip first, and then waved around on a big flag in front of the other Zip software authors.
I briefly tried 7-zip 4.23 and ditched it. 3 observations:
1. Right click noise
7-zip adds these items to the right click menu for any file type:
Extract files...
Extract Here
Test archive
Add to archive...
I can understand the last one. Every zip utility has this, and it is nice to have.
But the three first? Why would I want to "Test archive" when right clicking on a shortcut to Mozilla Firefox? Does 7-zip think that my shortcut might be a compressed archive in disguise?
If so, why stop here? Why not have my MP3 player present at least one option in the right click menu for any file type? And (all) my movie player(s) too? And my word processor - after all, that Firefox shortcut could be a Word or OOo document in disguise. And if the right click menu grows too large, I can always buy a screen with better resolution.
I was not even asked if I wanted those extra items in the right click menu.
THIS IS NOT WHAT THE RIGHT CLICK MENU IS FOR. Right click options for compressed files should only be visible when right clicking on compressed files. That is why the menu is also called a CONTEXT menu.
2. All files in an archive are shown organized in folders.
This may be ok. Winzip's behaviour of showing all files in a long list is sometimes more confusing, sometimes less. It is a question of taste.
But when files are shown in folders, I would prefer a left pane with a folder tree and a right pane with contents of selected folders. Most compression utilities do this, but I could not find an option in 7-zip. I could find a 2-pane view, but it was more like Norton/Midnight Commander with 2 independent panes.
Again this is a question of taste.
3. Uninstaller want to reboot computer.
WHAT? Reboot necessary for this? For God's sake - it is a simple compression utility. How much damage did the installation do to my system since a reboot is necessary to revert to my old setup?
It was not even because of those annoying right click items. They disappeared prior to rebooting.
I never used WinZIP. RAR is my choice since 1996. Flirted with ACE for a few mounths in 1997, but I went back to RAR and used it ever since. Who in God's green Earth would want to use ZIP?
I don't believe I said anything anywhere to contradict that point? I was talking about what decompression algorithms it supports. GGP already stated it was shareware. I really don't see why it had to be restated, but alright.
Just so everyone else knows, in case they haven't read it yet:
WinRAR is not free.
Now they're really aware.
I can now give a normal tar-bz2-tarball to a Windows-user and they'll be able to open it!
Just use 7zip. http://www.7-zip.org/ Or if you're inclined to spend a little bit of money, get WinRar.
...because I can't find anywhere on WinZip's site that tells me it is. In fact, it says they'll give you a "free" registration code to try out the beta, but it will no longer work for the final release. It also says they are the same download but that functionality will be determined by either a Standard or Professional registration code.
So as far as I can tell, all they're probably planning to do for this is make you pay more if you want the Professional version.
R.Mo
If you have alzip. It can read rar, zip, ace, bz2, gz, tar, cab, lzh, pak, etc. It has a great checksum (even if it's a large file), it's fast and simple. 7zip is great too, but I had problems when I extract files that are larger than 3GB.
Alzip is free for home users and their other programs such as FTP client are great too.
Next time onwards, please stick to the right memes in the right websties. ;-)
More than mere navel gazing.
Sorry to crash the party but... due to the fact that there are many *FREE* utilities, and ONE commercial utility (worldly famous), what made you think you could actually make money with yours?
:(
It's not the first time something like this happens, anyway... sorry
Not always. FreeBSD 5.x and higher have bsdtar installed as "tar", which uses libarchive. It does all the compression in-process without using any external programs.
The reason I haven't upgraded - I'd have to find the more recent serials.
Parent may be rude, but it's Insightful, not Offtopic.
I am perfectly happy for 99% of my zipping requirements using the zip utility built into WinXP.
Here's hoping that they include a feature to do "disk spanning" on one volume where the max file size has been reached. I've got 500GB of storage in FAT32 form, limiting file sizes to 4GB - too small for zipping up backups of file systems (notebooks); when it hits a file size limit, WinZip should check for available space and (optionally) create sequentially-numbered subsequent .zip files.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Why?
There are fifty million free archive programs out there that do just as much and more - and have for years.
I've NEVER used Winzip. I used to use a version of PowerArchiver. Currently I use ZipGenius.
I've never understood the need for fifty million features in archive programs either. I zip a bunch of files, I unzip 'em. Occasionally I try to repair a damaged one - which never works.
And do we really need any NEW archive formats that save 7% more space - with 200GB hard drives going for $100?
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
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.
This signature was left intentionally blank.
"allows scheduled archiving instructions to be set"
I wrote a program to do just this, since WinZip didn't have it and others cost lots of money or sucked. Finally, I can use tried and true software for auto-archiving... Wonder how flexible their implementation is though?...
--I smoked my sig.
When I used Windows XP "Compression Wizard" for the last time, I was trying to unzip a 500K archive from a Windows network volume in the same office. It went sluggish with very slow progress for minutes and used network like crazy. Dropped that, installed 7-zip, it completed the work in a few seconds.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
99% of the time I want to:
[x] click on a zip file and see the zip files content
[ ] in a file/folder way rather then a flat directory list
[x] press a button to extract
[ ] have this button be obvious and not hidden between other options
[x] pick or create a target folder
[ ] then with one simple button I would like to close winzip and have it drop me in the folder I just unzipped my files to!
Is this really all that hard?
My weapon of choice is power archiver. It supports just about everything I would ever come across, for both compressing and uncompressing
[sig]www.masterslate.org[/sig]
Yes, but I've found that, even in that case, renaming "tar" to "zip" gives zip a comparable compression ratio, and even nearly identical files.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
From my experience, WinRAR (when producing .rar files, of course) provides the best compression-to-compression-and-extracting-time ratio. 7z files, when smaller than .rar files, do not show any significant advantages, while taking a considerably longer time to compress and decompress. Bz2 really excells at raw uncompressed data (like pure text, .bmp and .wav files), but operates quite slowly and tends to give less satisfactory results if the data already has some kind of compression on its own. Zip (and gzip) are quite fast, but don't compress as much as the former methods.
In the end, as much as I like open-source, I still use .rar for most of my archives. But 7zip is my favorite self-extracting generator.
its free. never been nagware. and it just plain works.
I meant winrar instead of the rar format, i knew it supported many formats.
the formats my version of 7z supports are:
001
7z
arj
bz2
cab
cpio
deb
gz
rar
rpm
tar
z
zip
which are mostly formats more common then the ones winrar supports
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
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.
3.243F6A8885A308D313
I'm tired of the editors acting like assholes. I'm so fucking out of here.
The thing is that the sites they are FXPing between are fast enough that it's not worth comming up with a more complicated system. It takes just a few seconds to send a 15mb file.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
Resume doesn't work for corrupted files. The idea is to to be able to replace the corrupted part quickly. Thats not the main reason though. The main reason for splitting the files is that multiple people FXP files to an site from different sources at the same time (called a race), and this is only possible when it the release is split up.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
I paid for Winzip too. Just before version 8.
Since then, I've paid a lot of upgrade fees to other companies, but not to WinZip.
I think the last money I spent with them was very well spent and I'll consider that when choosing whether or not to pay them again. I'm likely to.
But if they want me to pay again a year later, they can kiss my shiny metal...
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I can't see anywhere that it says this will be free?
In fact, the only "free" on the page is in this sentence:
"Caution, WinZip 10.0 is not a free upgrade."
Have I missed something burried in one of the links? I looked and I see nothing that says it'll be free.
Yeah, the last time I used winzip was the last time I opened a zip file on an old beastly computational device...
Too used to windows default 'Compressed Folders', and when needing the smallest of files - WinRAR. Sometimes you just need it to fit on that 1.44!
"Caution, WinZip 10.0 is not a free upgrade. If you are a registered user of a previous version of WinZip and install WinZip 10.0, you will no longer be registered."
http://www.winzip.com/whatsnew100b.htm
if they had a 'free upgrade' policy at the time youpurchased/register then in all liklyhood a court would make them stick to that agreement.
Fortunatly, I use 7zip.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
in response to a post about your failure to include a link to your own product, you respond by telling the person to google for it.
;P
uhm, why not include a working link in your response? this is the 'intarweb' after all...
btw, you are correct; you do suck at marketing
sum.zero
Yeah, but 7-zip is open source.
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
So how does this compare to WinACE? I know everyone has their favorite (TAR, RAR, PAR, GWAR) but, who really has the best compression with usability?
Actually, the price depends on who unzips.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
But it's about the slowest zipper you can find.
7 zip
Winzip on Slashdot? Bwaahahahahahaah! Read most of the replies and coulnd't agree more.. How did this pass the moderation? -SERIOUSLY- There's so many good projects out there, let alone other more decent commercial software like the german winace and winrar, (and they both have a linux client!) I prefer winrar myself, or linuxrar ;)
tar -cjpSf foo.tar.bz2 foo/
Uncompressing is also a single step:
tar -xjpf foo.tar.bz2
If users can't open it, give them the software. I know WinRAR handles these, not sure what else, but it's nothing too onerous.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
i think it's free as in, the standard version no longer will nag you for registration, while the pro version will still require a registration. that's what i gathered, at least.
Do you just make up statements like that?
.zip files? If so then I can see your problem, however I don't do that, so it's not really an issue. As for PDF vulnerabilities, the odds that I might execute a malicious PDF are far smaller than the odds that I'll be aggravated by Acrobat 7's spyware-laden bloat. There's just no reason to require a net connection and a 25 meg program to read a 1 meg PDF. I open maybe 10 PDFs a year, and most of them are from "reputable" sources. If I have to choose between choosing who to trust, and offloading that choice to Adobe, the choice is clear.
http://secunia.com/product/566/
I see nothing in there about "going to a website causes virus infection." Do you set your browser up to automatically download and execute
In short, as I said in my original post, the new "features" of the newer versions don't outweigh their annoyances. If they are more prone to exploits then I'll just be that much more careful.
rooooar