🚀 go-pugleaf

Rich Siegel (siegel@world.std.com) wrote:
: In article <1993Jan1.020105.9470@stortek.com> pg@sanitas.stortek.com (Paul Gilmartin) writes:
:
: >Curse Aladdin for planned obsolescence; a powerful argument for staying
: >with Compact Pro.
: 
: How do you figure this? By definition, if there are architectural changes
: in a file format, an older version can't open files created by a newer
: version of the program, or if it can, it can't take advantage of the 
: functionality offered by the newer version's format.

For certain adaptive compression schemes, such as Lempel-Ziv-Welch,
much efficiency can be gained by cleverer heuristics within the
compression algorithm without invalidating the existing file format
architecture.
: 
: This isn't 'planned obsolescence', this is progress.
: 
: It's not a 'powerful argument for staying with Compact Pro', because
: Compact Pro is subject to the same limitations.

The latest Compact Pro, for example, slightly improved the compression
and nearly doubled speed (both within a few percent of StuffIt Lite,
with the difference admittedly in favor of StuffIt), and the files
can still be extracted by the original Compactor.
: 
: There's no reason to 'curse Aladdin', since, after all, they provide a
: free expander for their current file format, as they always have. In 
: fact, it's a pretty good reason to use the Aladdin format, since they
: haven't forgotten to support the users of the shareware StuffIt products.
: Whether this is smart PR or common sense is moot - the fact is that
: StuffIt Expander can unstuff any StuffIt file format back to the 
: original.

Granted, but sometimes I want to compress files, also.  The key I got
when I registered Compactor unlocks the latest distributed Compact Pro.
StuffIt, on the other hand, keeps asking me for money.

And, unfortunately, there's a synergistic obsolescence:  Compact Pro
takes 96K of disk space and 504K suggested application memory.
When I registered StuffIt 1.5.1 Aladdin sent me StuffIt Classic.  I
installed it.  File after file after filter.  I just didn't have
room for it on my SE with 20M internal -- it became shelfware.

As I see it, Compact Pro is cheaper, smaller, and simpler than StuffIt.
I could live happily without StuffIt, and would if I had the choice.
A few percent in performance isn't worth the money and disk space.
But, yes, I am grateful for the free StuffIt Expander.

YMMV
gil