Wholly Mindless wrote:
Michael J. Mahon wrote:I just ask because it would be fun to invent three more formats before lunch today, since they are so important now that we have megabits per second of bandwidth and terabytes of storage. ;-) Seriously, I can understand it for lossy compression of specialized data types, like sound, pictures, etc., but have there really been any major breakthroughs in lossless compression of general binary data? Sorry for the rant, but this is like inventing new kinds of 115v plugs!Actually, bzip is pretty old and very compatible with all the unix derivatives. Not a brand new magical compression. Unusual in this case, but it's how I feel about shk archives when I don't have ciderpress installed.
Curious, if it existed back in the 1990s, then my old WinZip must be gagging on some field in the header not much used at the time... WRT ShrinkIt, it is ".zip for the Apple II"--there is no other significant archive format for the platform. (Anyone still remember BLU? ;-) I understand the need for platform-specific archivers/file systems, but proliferating archive formats is, in general, more of a problem than a solution. Intellectual property issues were an issue in the past, but I think that is mostly behind us. -michael NadaNet 3.1 for Apple II parallel computing! Home page: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/ "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused."