The lowest storage tiers may not be expensive, but the middle ones are, and the power that drives them has bigger costs too. Why do you think that web developers push so much crap JavaScript onto your machine? Becuase using 95% of your CPU costs them nothing, and if it saves them 5% overhead on their end, that is one less server in a rack, one less rack used in row. It literally takes less time to decompress the block you just got than to read and wait for the next block.ĥ: so as a container format, you can compress whatever you want, however you want, and even include the tools to extract whatever that is, and in most cases end up using significantly less space than you started.Ħ: All the little things add up to big things at scale. Systems are starting to compress data at rest in RAM now, because fast cpu efficient compression is so cheap now with a modern CPU it is often faster to compress/decompress data in the memory tier than to pull from a deeper storage tier. Since most people experienced PAR on Usenet or a similar service where the idea was to maximize the recoverability individual files withing a larger archive that had been split up, it made less sense to compress or encrypt the parts of a file, and video files were already compressed due to the video codecsĤ: It is just as relevant as ever to compress data in flight, even down to the hardware layer. For convenience zip compression support was added on many platforms.ģ: PAR is awesome tech and some clever math, but is also an over the top add on. Here are some of my other thoughts.ġ: It is still intrinsically part of the Unix ecosystem, invisible to most on a day to day basis as the operating system quietly manages packages and libraries in the background.Ģ: RAR isn't a compression format and it was chained with zip, bzip, or another compression tool for decades. RAR is a container format (much like the media container formats for video/audio), so it's not really apples to apples to compare it to bzip. RAR and WinZip are dead, and even 7z.exe is only on my computer as a command-line version to plug into Peazip (I think). Because I want one tool that handles compressed files, and only one. I used IZArc for years until it went ad-ware, and I'm now on Peazip. and used RAR rather than ZIP (before 7z existed) to get a few more bytes on the disk. Far beyond the old releases where people would down-sample in-game FMV just to try to shrink it into a sensible number of RAR files, etc. To be honest, compression is far less an issue now than it ever was. Data storage corruption is far less of an issue than it ever was now.ħz has better compressions, but nothing that ZIP couldn't add with a "ZIP v4" or whatever we're up to now (PK/WinZIP extended ZIP with AES encryption, etc. ![]() ![]() RAR should have been dead since the days of the floppy, though, it's only used as some kind of "hacker" cachet label, to show you were around in the heyday of "Software Name (cracked).r57" and hoping and praying you could get the complete set off Usenet before it disappeared.Įven PAR (which is designed to have a configurable amount of redundancy to avoid data corruption) is pretty niche and obsolete nowadays. ZIP could do it (hell, I even know the PKZIP command-line syntax even today), but RAR allowed you to add some more "integrity" to the files so they were more likely to survive corruption. ![]() RAR was best for integrity and spanning disks across large sets.
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