[flagged]
Well enough according to their recent financial disclosures.
The WinRAR approach
11–20 of 110 posts
Re: The WinRAR approach
#12It is not about goodwill; it is more about making laypersons familiar with the software so that corporate licenses can be sold. This has been a very much established BM for sharewares.
Re: The WinRAR approach
#13(I know this article isn't actually about rar, but...) It's surprising that anyone still cares about the rar file format. lzma, as used in .7z, has superior compression, and neither are particularly fast so it's not about performance. 7-Zip is BSD licensed and has a native Windows UI.
"Best" doesn't always win. We'd be sporting PalmOS if that were the case.
Re: The WinRAR approach
#14LGR covered this extensively
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7W6hv4kcvg
Re: The WinRAR approach
#15> If you're familiar with WinRAR, the Windows file compression tool, you'll know where this is going. WinRAR became infamous for offering a "30-day trial" that never actually expired.
I remember Paint Shop Pro being even more famous for this. I certainly got to day five hundred and something of the 30 day trial. I seem to remember an interview with the creator where he was grateful even to users that didn't pay because they helped sort knowledge of it. Sadly, I think later versions made it a harder limit.
Re: The WinRAR approach
#16(I know this article isn't actually about rar, but...) It's surprising that anyone still cares about the rar file format. lzma, as used in .7z, has superior compression, and neither are particularly fast so it's not about performance. 7-Zip is BSD licensed and has a native Windows UI.
The difference in compression isn't that big. Just ran a test on some random 1GB plain-text file I had lying around. Both on the highest compression level at a dictionary size that uses about 5.5GB of RAM to compress (since that's what 128MB dictionary size uses in 7zip, the Winrar equivalent are 916MB, more than what's useful for this file). The result was 7zip compressing the file down to 225MB in 9 minutes and WinRAR compressing it to 239MB in 2 minutes. That's a 6% difference, at a considerable speed cost.
Not a scientific benchmark, but I think it underlines general point. If I want the best results I use a .tar.xz at insane compression levels, or more commonly a .tar.zstd if I want good decompression speed. The usecase for 7zip and WinRar is convenience, ease of use and windows-native file handling instead of the unix-focused .tar format. WinRar wins out on all three of those.
7zip's gui is a worse clone of WinRar's, archive creation has a fraction of the features, windows-specific file handling is an afterthought at best (winrar has handling for the archive flag, alternate data streams, file security, hard links, etc). And most important of all rar is built as an archive format. You get built-in recovery records, and hashes are stored as blake2 hashes instead of the frankly insufficient crc32 hashes 7zip uses.
I'd give 7zip points if it had a better (== more familiar) CLI, but they made the bizarre decision to copy winrar's cli too and make even worse documentation for it. The only things it has going for it are a linux UI and the open-source license
Re: The WinRAR approach
#17My company doesn't even pay for WinRAR. Their approach is pretty awful, haha.
If you use it or have it installed after 30 days without a buying, your company has violated the terms of the license.
Re: The WinRAR approach
#18(I know this article isn't actually about rar, but...) It's surprising that anyone still cares about the rar file format. lzma, as used in .7z, has superior compression, and neither are particularly fast so it's not about performance. 7-Zip is BSD licensed and has a native Windows UI.
"Best" doesn't always win. We'd be sporting PalmOS if that were the case.
Im just now writing a MOBI parser, which are just Palm Database Format files effectively, and if that is any indication, I’m fairly sure PalmOS is very far from the best option available.
Re: The WinRAR approach
#19Protip: there are some kickass WinRAR themes out there.
Re: The WinRAR approach
#20(I know this article isn't actually about rar, but...) It's surprising that anyone still cares about the rar file format. lzma, as used in .7z, has superior compression, and neither are particularly fast so it's not about performance. 7-Zip is BSD licensed and has a native Windows UI.
WinRAR has a lot of great features as an archiver and compressor. It can create parity archives, and has a lot of other great features if you look at the manual Granted it doesn’t have compression advantage over 7z, but those flags and features look great when I want to create archives, generally better and more convenient than anything else I look at, but I usually end up going with plain old zip files since various…
Well said. The ability to embed a recovery record for really important stuff and the command line support is enough for me to keep using Winrar forever.