These little things...

[Alan McKinnon]

On Monday 10 April 2006 23:15, Shawn McMahon wrote:
> 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.

Interesting, I didn't know that

> > 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.

Ah yes, it comes back to me now. Last time I used Fido was 1993, 
memory fades with time

> 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 I caution again that my information may be out of date; I haven't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.

-- 
If only you and dead people understand hex, 
how many people understand hex?

Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five