On Sun, 14 Jan 2001 09:36:51 +0200, Peter Popov wrote:
>On 13 Jan 2001 13:42:51 -0500, Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
>
>>  (Btw, bzip2 compresses better in almost every case and faster in
>>most cases than any of the other compression softwares; I wonder why
>>it isn't more popular in Windows systems...)

What kind of data are you compressing? bzip2 is usually slower than zip
at compressing and about the same speed at uncompressing.

>ZIP ruled the DOS world until ARJ came out. After that RAR and UC2
>offered better compression and AIN was basically a fast ARJ (with a bit
>lower compression). ZIP came back with the invasion of the Internet

Zip is well-documented, patent-free, and there is an implementation with
a very lenient licence. This is probably the reason why it is used for
compression in almost all internet protocols and file formats of the
last few years. The fact that many Web servers are Unix machines and zip
is available on these machines, while other formats often are not, may
also have had some influence.

>As of bzip2... well... bzip2 is best at text files (as is lha, I've
>never seen anything better that lha for compressing large volumes of
>ASCII) so that might have something to do with it. I am not sure if
>it needs a 32-it envoronment or large amounts of memory (like 1MB for
>a hash table / dictionary) but that would explain why it was mostly
>*x-only for a long time.

bzip2 doesn't even exist for "a long time", AFAIK. It is certainly
younger than Windows95, so a 32-bit environment should not have been a
problem in in the Windows world.

	hp


-- 
   _  | Peter J. Holzer    | All Linux applications run on Solaris,
|_|_) | Sysadmin WSR       | which is our implementation of Linux.
| |   | hjp### [at] wsracat      | 
__/   | http://www.hjp.at/ |	-- Scott McNealy, Dec. 2000

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