We received this email today...
Quote:
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tHE SITE APPEARS GREAT, BUT ISSUE IS THAT EVERYTHING IS ZIPPED. EVEN THE DOWNLOAD TO DECOMPRESS THE RAR FILES IS ZIPPED. WINZIP IS NOT FREE. I DON'T WANT TO PAY $30 FOR DOWNLOAD WINZIP FOR A PROGRAM I DON'T EVEN KNOW WORKS. ARE YOU TRYING TO PROMOTE ZIP FOR SOME REASON?
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... and this thread is the perfect place to discuss it.
Before I begin: It seems your caps lock key is stuck. That's a common problem with those lousy "free" keyboards that come with computers. If you need need a new one, I highly suggest the Micro Innovations multimedia keyboard, available at both Amazon.com and local/online Microcenter stores. (Tip: Pull the "cover" off. It's not required, if you don't like it. I did that.) Another option is the "HP Classic" keyboards currently sold at Walmart.
Anyway, back to the email...
Everything is zipped because it has to be "archived" in some way, as described earlier in this thread. You cannot safely attach executable files and unknown MIME types to web servers and databases. (Well, you technically
can, but it's really stupid to do so, from a security stance.)
Zip is not a commercial format -- it's very much open source (or rather,
public domain as per the PKWare founder, who invented pkzip), and "WinZip" does not own it. WinZip is simply one available program that can create or "unzip" zip files -- as well as several other archive formats. Note that WinZip runs in eternal nag mode, even though it's not "free", so you can still use it without buying it. The same applies to WinRAR. Both WinZip and WinRAR works quite well -- especially WinRAR.
If you want fully open-source archive utilities, look no further than 7-zip:
http://www.7-zip.org
In addition to the "official" Windows CLI and GUI binaries, versions for Mac OS X and Linux distributions have been created by third parties.
jZip is yet another option:
http://www.jzip.com
Note that many more files on this site (most, maybe?) are archived as RAR files, because those tend to be more robust both in compression and reliability. So no, we're definitely not endorsing Zip format in any way. If anything, we'd be endorsing WinRAR and the RAR format. The aforementioned 7zip and jzip can also "unrar" RAR files.
And welcome to the site.
