On Thursday 2 December 1999 Leif Gregory wrote: > I agree with you Claudius about people preferring (although naively) > ZIP over RAR. It's the same point I've made about people preferring > Outlook or OE over TB. They want what they know, not what is the best. Well, I have a couple of problems with RAR which aren't related to this. The most minor one is that I don't particularly like WinRAR's UI. It just looks a little clunky, and it gets the file icons all wrong. More importantly, I have free implementations of zip, tar/gzip, bzip, lzh, arj and a few more on my machine. RAR is not free. Not only that but it attempts to impose overly restrictive license terms. If I do not accept the license terms I must delete WinRAR itself (reasonable), and *also* all RAR files I have - not reasonable - the data is *mine* dammit and Eugene Roshal has no right at all to tell me what to do with it. Not that I have any hesitation in extracting data from RAR files and recompressing under tar/bzip until such time as I find a free RAR implementation. In effect, people distributing software in RAR format are attempting to force me to buy a seperate piece of software that I neither want, nor will use apart from to extract that one piece of software. Like I said, there are widely available free ZIP implementations around, and only slightly less widely available free tar/gzip implementations and I don't believe the slight increase in compression ratio (which I haven't verified) is worth the loss of freedom. John -- you gave me something that i could touch in a world where i'd had too much something i could feel with my broken hands full of lost ideals but soon i'm returning to you my friend and we'll go where the rivers end in the silver sea and i'll carry you if you carry me -- -------------------------------------------------------------- View the TBBETA archive at http://tbbeta.thebat.dutaint.com To send a message to the list moderation team double-click HERE: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To Unsubscribe from TBBETA, double-click HERE: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------
