These little things...

[Shawn McMahon]

On Mon, Apr 10, 2006 at 10:27:43AM +0200, Alan McKinnon said:
> >
> > The thing about RAR is, it can compress some things that ZIP can't.
> 
> That's a new one to me. Care to elaborate?

DivX-encoded TV programs.  I have no statistics.

> Is that Fidonews as in Fidonet? AFAIK the whole problem with ARC was 
> patent issues from SEA, so Phil Katz developed ZIP and made the 
> format public domain, effectively obsoleting ARC in one fell swoop

Fidonet mandated ARC early, and last I heard had never changed this.

It was a trademark dispute, not patent, and SEA owned ARC; they were
suing Katz over PkARC.  ZIP has effectively obsoleted ARC, but Fidonet
has a history of being slow to change.  Current standards still mandate
that the default assumption is that any node supports mail packets
compressed with ARC.  There is a "MN" flag for nodes that don't
support any compression.

In 1995 a flag was proposed "NOZIP" to indicate nodes don't support ZIP
compression; it has yet to be adopted as a standard.  It's estimated
that "most" nodes do support ZIP, but there's no standard way to
differentiate.

I caution again that my information may be out of date; I haven't been a
part of Fight-o-net for a very long time.  I just did a search on a
recent nodelist; there isn't a single person using the proposed NOZIP
flag, but there are many using MN.


-- 
   Shawn McMahon    | Ubuntu: an ancient African word meaning "I am sick
   EIV Consulting   | of compiling Gentoo".
 http://www.eiv.com |                       - Jeff Waugh (paraphrased)
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