Re: The Saltine's Disks Archived at Mac GUI Vault

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

D Finnigan wrote:
> Steven Hirsch wrote:
>
> > On 02/28/2011 06:23 PM, Michael J. Mahon wrote:
> >
> > > WinZip certainly doesn't like it--"Error reading header after processing
> > > 0 entries."
> >
> > Hmm.  Fine on Linux with tar -xjvf ...
>
>
> Steve Nickolas sent me mail yesterday stating the same thing. It looks like
> the problem was a too-old version of WinZip that didn't understand the bzip2
> compression algorithm.

So, what is the benefit of bzip2 relative to the ten other compression
formats?

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!

-michael

NadaNet 3.1 for Apple II parallel computing!
Home page:  http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/

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