And WinRar came from USSR…
Try WinUHA, it’s a great free option! (sometimes better than WinRAR!)
Noah: Are you serious? Don’t use WinRAR simply because it’s not free? Because you can’t add your own features? I’m sure there’s a Bileblog article written specifically about you somewhere.
If the makers of WinRAR ever decide to abandon the project, we’ll be stuck with the last released version. Hopefully by then it will be able to re-pack RAR files. I’m sure it’ll be a popular feature.
Your committment to support independent software developers is praiseworthy.
I completely agree, and bought my WinRAR license some months ago as well (best tool I ever used… 7zip is not only slower, but has also - IMHO - an ugly interface).
First better JPEG, now better ZIP compression. I think it must be time for Jeff to get a bigger disk or faster internet connection or something!? 
Storage space is nearly free at this point. No, correction, since Gmail, it is free!
Bandwidth is still far from free
I’d have to agree Noah Slater, it’s a proprietary and closed format. 7-Zip is your friend.
Jeff - I’ve only recently started following your blog, and I’m very impressed. I’m a developer with an interest in data analysis, and I appreciate very much you sharing your excel file. I love seeing what other people do with their data, and as I was reading your article I was preparing to ask you for a copy of the xls. Seeing it available at the end was a great pleasure - thanks so much for realizing that there are others who may want to tinker with the data themselves - not necessarily to refute your claims, but just to get our hands dirty ourselves.
Keep up the great work!
Even if some tool had 10x the performance of 7-Zip, i will continue to use 7-Zip. I don’t want my data locked in a proprietary format.
For what it’s worth: same archive tarred and gzipped - 72K. Tarred and bzip2-compressed: 54K. Open formats, libraries available for just about any system, free tools abound, and can be opened and read by WinRAR among many, many others.
I’ll point out that a lot of times, the material being compressed might vary your choice in compression algorithm. For instance, tar-bz2 of the csharp snippets seems to still do a bit better than 7zip:
53K ms-csharp-snippets.tbz
59K ms-csharp-snippets.7z
But as the linked survey shows, bzip does less well on other material.
I’m also a big fan of 7-zip which supports quite a few compression formats and it’s own 7z format is fantastic. That and the fact that it’s open source…well, the price is right. And in this case, you get way more than you pay for.
$ tar cjf csharp.tar.bz2 ms-csharp-files/
$ ls -l csharp.tar.bz2
-rw-r–r-- 1 user user 54786 2007-02-23 09:17 csharp.tar.bz2
That is all.
Eam, yes I am entirely serious. Insult me all you like, but I’m not the only one who thinks like this.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=free+software+movement
Why bother praising WinRAR for it’s excellent compression when the algorithm is not freely available? Keeping such advances from the rest of society does not benefit anyone and should be called out as such, not praised.
“Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results.” - R. Stallman
I personally like Power Archiver (http://www.powerarchiver.com/) it has integrated shell support as well as complete built-in support for 7-ZIP, ZIP, CAB, LHA (LZH), TAR, TAR.GZ, TAR.BZ2, BH, RAR, ARJ, ARC, ACE, ZOO, GZ, and BZIP2 file formats. (http://www.powerarchiver.com/features/list.php). Another feature I love about it is that it can unpack ISO CD-Images. I mostly use the 7-ZIP compressions because it seems to pack my files tighter than ZIP, RAR, or GZIP. Try it out you will not be disappointed. I haven’t and I have used it for 4 years now.
Lck - “7zip is not only slower, but has also - IMHO - an ugly interface.”
I agree! I only use it because I use PortableApps on my thumbdrive and it seems to work great for lugging around all of my school-related code snippets and such. Being a novice coder, my code seems to bloat more than anything else. I really like 7Zip, but don’t care much for its interface.
Interesting post. I remember back in the day doing lots of comparisons between different formats… .zip, .arj, .lzh, etc (remember those?)
These days I use on Windows systems I use 7-Zip, and on *nix I just use GNU Tar/GZip
- Corey
Another feature I love about it is that it can unpack ISO CD-Images.
Note that the Winrar client is perfecly able to unpack ISO images, as well as 7z archives for that matter.
When talking about compression it’s not necessarily the best compression the thing that matters the most. It’s also about availability, licensing, and such.
This issue is rather similar to the one that you discussed on video quality before (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000755.html)
Comments from people like Noah Slater (who is, no doubt, a very nice person, no harm intended) help convince me more and more than this Open Source cult is nothing more than creeping Socialism.
That can’t be good for anybody.
Sorry, Noah. Can’t go there.