On Oct 28, 2:06pm in "Re: Re: Bob's amazing hard-drive plans...", you warbled:
] > LHARC could be used to do that much simpler and in less space and in one ] > process! ] ] I don't know what LHARC is. Why is there such a large variety of file ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ] formats around (lbr, arc/ark, lha, hqx, zip, zoo, lzh, several forms ] of lzw, tar, ...)? It seems that every time someone wants to archive ] something they invent a new format for it instead of using one of the ] commonly available ones. Anyway, the compression rate of ".tar.gz" is ] hard to beat, so if you want to make everyone use lharc you'd better be ] sure of what you are doing... Ok... first off, lharc is basically the old version of lha, which also incorporates lzh files. The main reason most people invent a new compression utility is because they want to use a specific type of data compression. There's no point in using the Lempel-Ziv compression technique to compress .gif files, for example, you might end up with something bigger than what you started with... if you use .jpg compression, however, you'll get massive reduction in size. lha can be better even than gzip -9 in some cases. It all depends on what you want to compress, and how you want to be able to retrieve it. gzip is clumsy simply _because_ for an archive you have to use tar/shar. lha takes that necessity away. ] A remote user logged in to a Sam? Get real! *grin* but surely the network??? ] You can't make a useable Unix process hierarchy on a Sam. It hasn't got ] basic memory allocation facilities. Actually, technically it does... the HEAP space, for example ?:) What you mean is, there's no way of _enforcing_ it allocations. ] Sorry, but if I want a useable Unix system I'll buy a 486 or a 68040... If _I_ want a useable unix system I'll buy a risc-pc and port Linux. I guess I'm strange that way, but I a) can't stand the '86 range, and b) like the 8-channel sampled sound and the fact that most RISC-OS apps run in about 2Meg Ram and can run (walk!) off a 1.4M floppy. It's soooo cool. Unfortunately, I can't afford the 1800 quid it takes for a decent system. Shame that... :) Geoff (:
