101–110 of 110 posts
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Rar is still common to this day for the same reason since the beginning: The scene standardized around rar in the 90s (after arj). https://scenerules.org/
That's mostly because it allows files to be split up in parts, and as such making incremental transfers easier in case a connection is lost, right?
These tools got famous in the scene before Internet was widespread.
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> And Western European too. Just ask about Italy, Spain, France in the 90's... And Sweden and... I'm starting to think this was worldwide, or at least "anywhere-outside-the-US". Many memories of me and friends hanging out on DC++, using cracked applications wherever we could, and most people around me did the same too.
> And Sweden Did you guys have dedicated open-air markets selling CDs with "software collections", "Windows essentials", "The best of Adobe" for $2 ... ? I remember visiting one in Moscow and it was wild . Every piece of software, including like Oracle and SAP ... lol. All for peanuts.
During the 8 bit days all tapes were clearly copied, many of them even had B&W copies of the instructions, clearly cutted out with scissors.
However this is all gone, after our involvement into EU all these kind of stuff started to be cracked down.
It is still around if you look for it, e.g. cracked game consoles and cable TV boxes, but it will be clearly taken care of if found by authorities.
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A few things. People care because RAR is ancient, and there are a lot of RAR-archives in the wild. And also WinRAR has resisted enshittification - it's a very well made piece of software that has had a mostly stable UI. It works, and works well, so why change? About lzma, I believe zst beats it on every metric. I resisted it for a while, because it's tainted by Facebook, but I can't argue with the results.
> About lzma, I believe zst beats it on every metric Performance, yes. But not compression. lzma compresses much smaller than zstd.
There was a particularly good benchmark comparison of the two which put them on a Pareto front of speed vs size from different levels over each on some different sources but I can't find that. ZSTD was ahead most of the time.
(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.
7z has recently started supporting zstd compression, so you can compress much faster (though not as much).
WinRAR is one of the tools what I'm missing a lot since I've moved to MacOS. The other one is Total Commander...
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7z has recently started supporting zstd compression, so you can compress much faster (though not as much).
Which version added the ZSTD compression? I think decompression was 24.01