Re: Just for fun...

On 3/30/07, Trans <transfire@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Yet, this is practical only in the short-run, and because too many
people follow this kind of tenant, the long-run never gets here. In
other words, by not collectively working together to adopt better
technologies we are ultimately being less practical.


Like I said, not ideal. And I have nothing against going forward, and
would applaud any *open standard* (free to implement by anyone)
becoming widespread across all platforms.

Meanwhile, however, compression becomes steadily less and less of any
real value for the average desktop user, for almost any scenario -
today, archiving is mainly done to group files, and any compression is
mostly a nice side effect. A certain group of people who believe in
doing things as efficiently and correct as possible (they call us
nerds ;-)) will not agree, but it's true nonetheless and easy to
observe in almost any computer user - it's when a directory, or even
more than 2-3 files is to be mailed that the archivers are used,
almost never because of size issues. Talking general computer use
here.

Of course, if I release some code only meant to be used on Linux, I
usually tar.gz or .bz2 it, and Mac users probably still sit things in
general?

The point is, by defaulting to zip, you may hold back the revolution a
bit, but it also ensures that your mom, your boss, your customers, and
just about everyone except Perrin ;-) can open it. This is convenient
and pragmatic, but it's also important: there's a lot of busy people
out there who will not even bother to reply wit a complaint if they
can't open the files directly, they will just junk the message and
move on. A *lot* of people out the aren't interested in installing
anything, no matter how good it is. A lot of these people may pay your
salary or sponsor your next project.

I have about 40 students I work with, computer literate and in the
ages 18-30, and I am writing this because this has shown to be a real
problem, before I got them all to only send stuff in formats as
standard as possible - this includes not sending MS files unless
requested. Students have, in a very real sense, lost internship
opportunities, and maybe even job offers (who knows?) because of this,
and it has only a long time after shown that it was only because it
was a RAR archive or funnily, an Open Document, or something like
that.

Some will say it's a matter of education, to which I wish you the best
of luck. It hasn't worked so far, because most people are not
interested. However, I sincerely support any movements to getting say
7zip built in in the next Windows service pack... that's what it is
gonna take at this moment.

-- Kristoffer



--
Kristoffer Lundén
✉ kristoffer.lunden@xxxxxxxxx
✉ kristoffer.lunden@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.gamemaker.nu/
☎ 0704 48 98 77

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Help me understand self vs current object
    ... This does involve a Rails/ActiveRecord object, but that shouldn't matter ... I'm archiving an object when it gets deleted, so I'm chaining methods in ... The very moment you placed "is_deleted = true" in that code you told Ruby to allocate a local variable which is called "is_deleted" and whose value is "true". ...
    (comp.lang.ruby)
  • Help me understand self vs current object
    ... This does involve a Rails/ActiveRecord object, but that shouldn't matter ... I'm archiving an object when it gets deleted, ... def as_delete ...
    (comp.lang.ruby)
  • Re: Archiving
    ... folders and to assign a matter number somehow to email in the database. ... Susan Conkey [MVP] ... they receive mail they assign a category which is actually the clients ... They would like an archiving system that would retain that matter ...
    (microsoft.public.exchange.admin)
  • Re: Archiving
    ... how do they assign it the matter number? ... Susan Conkey [MVP] ... they receive mail they assign a category which is actually the clients ... They would like an archiving system that would retain that matter ...
    (microsoft.public.exchange.admin)
  • Re: Archiving
    ... Susan Conkey [MVP] ... folders and to assign a matter number somehow to email in the database. ... that should be retained by any archiving product... ... they receive mail they assign a category which is actually the clients ...
    (microsoft.public.exchange.admin)