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[Titan]

mmm... the number of ppl with dail-up is "unfortunally" decreasing fast, so it's becomming more and more of a minority.. and therefor compability is more the issue here.. seriously!

EDIT: btw, i once downloaded 2 full CD's (1400 MB) over my 33.6 dail-up modem... so trust me.. i know how long it CAN take..
Used dailup myself for 10 yrs.

I also use dial-up, but as this is TDSL (like ADSL) it's really fast.

[mika]

Originally posted by Titan@Sep 16 2004, 04:45 PM
mmm... the number of ppl with dail-up is "unfortunally" decreasing fast, so it's becomming more and more of a minority.. and therefor compability is more the issue here.. seriously!

Not if you look at bandwidth internationally. For example, here in South Africa (Which is quite a huge place with loads of people - I say this because most people believe SA is a big desert with lions roaming the deserted streets ) we only have one Telecoms company who's main product is ISDN (64K). They do have ADSL but then cap the bandwidth at 3GB which means that it is not download friendly. I also know for a fact that there are plenty of contries where bandwidth is not as easily/cheaply accessable.

Another point is that just because some people have the extra bandwidth, does not mean they should just "waste" it waiting for a bigger download, when they could be dowloading something else.

About the zip standard: The basic fact is that some things become standards because more people use them, not because they are superior. But that does not mean that standards do not/should not change. BUT, things will only change when people actually start initiating the change, and not waiting for someone else to do it.

Well, if I would upload a game in .rar instead, it wouldn't bring much yet...

[Titan]

Look... is MS had integrated zip AND rar into the system, i'd be happy to turn everything into rar's... but they didn't.. and most homeusers have Win XP...
As so, they don't need any standalone-program to utalize the files, and it's made more easy to use...

Kosta.. i think you'd better come give your oppinion on this and why you chose zip as standard.

[Kosta]

Well, as you said, a "standard" solution does not have to be better than an alternate one, but it is a standard after all. And it is very doubtful that people will switch to RAR now because RAR exists since the time I had my first 386. Why zip gained the popularity it did, I don't know, I just know it did. By using zip I wish to avoid sending tens of emails daily telling people how to extract the files they download. If it was a wma vs. mp3 situation, I would switch to wma as it is smaller, has better quality and is supported by default under windows...

[Titan]

Once heard a good comment about "standards"..

A new format that is NOT standard, doesn't need to be just as good, or even twice as good... it has to be ten times as good to atract attention.

[mika]

Hey I agree, but you guys are just assuming that most people have WinXP. If you look at most weblogging reports, most people are still using Windows 98. This did not come with compressed folders (winxp version of zip files).

Still I think RAR didn't get accepted because of other reasons. Linux/Unix for one. I don't think there is a RAR reader/writer for that and when the internet was young, most servers ran on unix. And pkzip was very popular in it's day even before the internet while RAR only started getting popular around the time the internet became commercial. Another aspect is the fact that anyone can make a zip/unzip compressor/decompressor because the zip compression is well know and open-source while I don't think RAR is.

[Ioncannon]

how about we use.... .ARJ YEA! l

Well, ARJ is really not good enough for that. It has no graphical interface like WinRar has, it's compression is not as good as WinRar's and it's not opened automatically with Windows XP as a directory like the ZIP-format.
Does it have any advantages, on other hand, that could make that good again?