im a member on another mac related forum and everytime i see toast images posted inside of a .sit stuffit file
i literally cringe...
does anyone hear understand my reasoning for doing so?
am i the only one in the world that thinks this is entirely illogical + redundant???
for my sanities sake, can i hear from any other intelligent human beings, what do u think of this strategy ?
ive tried to explain that this is not neccessary, that a toastfile is already a binary format, immune to the
resource fork woes of old,
what argument can i bring to the table to prove to these people that this is not something that u should do?
again and again?
toast files are already semi-compressed binary format are they not?? placing a toast image inside of a stuffit file..
what are your thoughts??? would u do this? would u laugh at someone who did this ? what do u think?
my view is that this is an approach coming from an uneducated perspective of being afraid of file corruption..
and its a bad old habit that the mac community used to have.. putting everything (and i mena EVERYTHING) inside of stuffit files
rather then using macbinary encoding.. (encode to .bin)
Hardly a "bad old habit." It used to be a necessity for transferring files in non-Mac environments (ie - online). Stuffit files were often encoded to .bin or .hqx formats to preserve the data fork. Stuffit .sit files themselves had to be encoded since they too contained a data fork. Stuffit was the first go-to since it was usual to be uploading an archive of files rather than a single file like an ISO. Also, files were often .sit compressed before they were split into smaller segments, then encoded, back on dial-up when it wasn't practical to download a single large file.
.toast files can be converted with usual success to .bin or .iso, so no compression in its default format.
I see no harm in adding compression for a smaller download and file integrity check. Not so important nowadays as it was pre-OS X, but unless you're converting a vast number of files it seems like too trivial an issue to be concerned about.
.sit files were the norm yes i realize this.. but u dont need compression in this day of rapid fire bandwidth
u can download a cd uncompressed ijnjust a few moments
but to uncompress the same 650mb on a powerpc cpu takes like up to 20-30min dependin on the compression settings... and that compression saves literally no space..
especially since the guy makin the .toast.sits has a 1.6ghz+ overclocked mdd and what if im uncompressing on a g3 b&w??
major headache for no reason... no bandwidth saved... just taking ages to decompress... the sit file is not neccessary to preserve a data fork on a .toast file its already binary
the same way a .dmg file is binary and doesnt need to be encapsulated
downloading uncompressed 650mb files, still isn't fast for everyone... but you want to know the real problem? UPLOAD. Most people have terrible upload speeds, and don't want to sit around forever waiting for a file to upload that someone's just going to complain about how they uploaded it anyway.
$.02