[mdlug] Archive formats (was "Linux Format" March issue available for download)

[Aaron Kulkis]

Jeff Hanson wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 7:43 PM, Aaron Kulkis <akulkis00 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> As I recall, RAR has the advantage of being easily divided
>> into smaller files
>>
>> .rar => .rar00, .rar01, .rar02...
> 
> Can be done with most current archive formats including zip.
> 
>> without the Unix command "split", which, for some strange reason,
>> has STILL not been discovered and migrated by the Windows world.
>> (nor it's complement, "cat" which can be used to re-concatenate
>> file chunks back into the original file)
> 
> There's a bunch of third-party ones but nothing that's standard with the OS.
> 
>> RAR was extremely important when system memory sizes started
>> climbing, but the largest removable media was still the old
>> 3.5" floppy.
> 
> In the warez scene, file splitting is still used with online storage
> accounts that have maximum file size limits.  It also used to be a way
> to reduce reattempt costs if corruption occurred during transfer,
> sometimes supplemented with Parchive:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive
> 
> Not as much an issue with a more stable Internet and protocols that
> correct on the fly like BitTorrent.

TCP connections are M-error-detecting/N-error-correcting
up to N and M bits per packet, where N and M are two
integer which I don't know off hand.  Both are greater
than 1, and M is approximately 2N (either 2N+1, or 2N-1,
I forget, because it's been a 21 years since I took
EE362, Discrete and Continuous Mathematics)