Very Computer

by **Mark Gresbac** » Fri, 10 Feb 1995 07:40:47

PKWARE, Inc. is looking for Beta testers of the PKWARE Data
Compression Library (R) for UNIX.

Versions are currently in Beta Test for Novell, SCO, and SUN based
systems. Other platforms are under development.

If you are interested in Beta testing the PKWARE Data Compression
Library that allows you to incorporate data compression directly
into your sofware, log in to the PKWARE BBS. Use the following
account:

login: Beta Tester
password: quality

This will allow you to download the Beta Tester application form.
Follow the instructions in the form and return it to PKWARE for
evaluation. We will contact you if we approve your application.

The PKWARE Data Compression Library is a flexible utility that will
compress ASCII and Binary data by as much as 90%!!!

Mark Gresbach
PKWARE Inc.
9025 N Deerwood Drive
Brown Deer, WI 53223

TEL: (414) 354-8699
FAX: (414) 354-8559
BBS: (414) 354-8670

by **Paul Smi** » Wed, 15 Feb 1995 22:22:34

: >The PKWARE Data Compression Library is a flexible utility that will
: >compress ASCII and Binary data by as much as 90%!!!

: So will gzip!!!!

If you need pkunzip/pkzip DOS compatibility; unzip-5.12.tar.Z by S. Smith
unzip's on unix better then pkunzip, unzip works great.

...

by **Harrison Pic** » Thu, 16 Feb 1995 18:18:00

>>PKWARE, Inc. is looking for Beta testers of the PKWARE Data
[snip]>

>search and eval process. PKWARE offers object form only for a decent price
>and will control what platforms it goes to and when/what gets fixed/enhanced.

>When asked about source avail., it was quoted in the several thousand range.

Doesn't sound like it would cover the cost of creating the source by
yourself, so maybe it would be a good buy. One of the (obvious)
reasons for selling source a high price is that it is what it cost
you, and you may see you code in a new competitor's product right
after you sell it.

[snip]

Quote:
>Anyway I would just be very wary of obtaining a crucial component of my
>software product with limited, expensive availability when there is a great
>alternative.

PK has put lots of product out at a modest price (or decent price as
you say above), and provided a lot of service to the PC industry. If
your argument is that they should also give away the source, that seems
self-serving. Most people won't need to source; and PK can keep
making a living "messing" with computerss as long as what others
might learn from their source isn't used against them.

You don't need to run PK down, most of us will just pay the decent price
for PKWare and be glad to leave the source alone. And all of us, even
you, use binaries every day that we don't have the source for, and don't
want it, either. Unless you have lots of time, you can't re-invent every
wheel.

>BTW, I have NO affiliation with greenleaf besides being a totally satisfied,
>slightly overenthusiastic user of their product...

>J. Kell Canty, Distributed System Architects.

>"Sometimes I'm the windshield, sometimes I'm the bug..."

And I have no connection to PK except having used their products for
many years, obtained as shareware, their trusting me to pay if I found
a use for it. It's a better deal than MS will offer you, when they
wipe out the rest of the industry.

Harrison

--

Harrison Picot II + Cogito, ergo UnixWare
2407 Raymond Place *
Haymarket, Va 22069 +
USA 703.754.8891 *

by **Brian Hi** » Fri, 17 Feb 1995 02:36:36

I think J. Kell Canty's point was that by using the PKWARE product you can
only compile your programs on the platforms supported by PKWARE (unless
you fork out the $$ for the code). If I'm selling a program and I am unable
to get it running on a customers machine because PKWARE hasn't ported to
that platform it becomes quite worthless, doesn't it?

by **Craig Dewi** » Mon, 20 Feb 1995 01:20:49

Quote:>>The PKWARE Data Compression Library is a flexible utility that will
>>compress ASCII and Binary data by as much as 90%!!!
>So will gzip!!!!

And we all know the great advantage of gzip over anything else - it's
*FREE* !!!! So why would anyone bother with any other compression
utility, especially one that costs money.

Regards,

Craig.
--

Support *independent* media <--> Support your local community radio station
Swimming in the MUSIQUARIUM of life <--> Monday 2 - 4pm, 2SER FM (107.3 MHz).
Always striving for a secure long-term future in an insecure short-term world

by **Tom La** » Tue, 21 Feb 1995 23:53:37

>> : Not to mention that GNU zip has become the de-facto standard for UNIX
>> : compression...
>> Except that many many of us need to preserve datafile level
>> compatibility with DOS/Windows... and thus the .zip world.
> Sorry. Gzip is also available for DOS. So, why keep up this needless
> argument?

Even more to the point, there's info-zip. You want pkzip compatibility,
you got it. (And without that brain-dead not-"-d"-default...)

Quote:> Note followups, please...

Blithely ignored, since the folks in comp.compression already know this
perfectly well --- I assume it is the folks in comp.unix.* who are
carrying on this argument.

regards, tom lane

by **Tim Hin** » Wed, 22 Feb 1995 03:14:54

Is it possible to set up the boot to have it give you a selection as to
which partition you want to boot up in? In my case DOS 6.0 or Unixware 2.0.

I recently tried to install Solaris 2.4 with problems, but it gave you the
option as to which partition you wanted the machine to boot up in.

I found this to be a nive feature. I don't want to have to use fdisk
to change my active partition each time I want to boot up in the other
operating system. I'd rather have a choice at startup time.

Hardware configuration:
Pentium 90mhz
Conner IDE 850MB HD
Adaptec 1522A SCSI HBA
Plextor 4Plex SCSI-2 CD-ROM
Seagate 1GB SCSI-2 HD

Conner IDE 850MB HD
- two partitions: 1) DOS 6.0 and 2) Unixware (active)

Seageate 1GB HD
- two partitions: 1) DOS 6.0 and 2) Unixware (active)

Tim Hines
University of Missouri-Kansas City
Computer Science and Telecommunications Program

by **Willard F. Daws** » Tue, 21 Feb 1995 14:21:37

>: >>>The PKWARE Data Compression Library is a flexible utility that will
>: >>>compress ASCII and Binary data by as much as 90%!!!
>: >>So will gzip!!!!
>: >And we all know the great advantage of gzip over anything else - it's
>: >*FREE* !!!! So why would anyone bother with any other compression
>: >utility, especially one that costs money.
>: Not to mention that GNU zip has become the de-facto standard for UNIX
>: compression...
>Except that many many of us need to preserve datafile level
>compatibility with DOS/Windows... and thus the .zip world.

Sorry. Gzip is also available for DOS. So, why keep up this needless
argument?

Note followups, please...

by **Ade Bark** » Tue, 21 Feb 1995 12:42:31

: >>>The PKWARE Data Compression Library is a flexible utility that will
: >>>compress ASCII and Binary data by as much as 90%!!!
: >>So will gzip!!!!
: >And we all know the great advantage of gzip over anything else - it's
: >*FREE* !!!! So why would anyone bother with any other compression
: >utility, especially one that costs money.

: Not to mention that GNU zip has become the de-facto standard for UNIX
: compression...

Except that many many of us need to preserve datafile level
compatibility with DOS/Windows... and thus the .zip world.

-Ade Barkah
--
Head of Development
Renaissance Knowledge Systems
Englewood, Colorado

by **Vernon Schryv** » Tue, 21 Feb 1995 14:17:06

>>>>The PKWARE Data Compression Library is a flexible utility that will
>>>>compress ASCII and Binary data by as much as 90%!!!
>>>So will gzip!!!!
>>And we all know the great advantage of gzip over anything else - it's
>>*FREE* !!!! So why would anyone bother with any other compression
>>utility, especially one that costs money.

>Not to mention that GNU zip has become the de-facto standard for UNIX
>compression...

That last sentence is not true. While the AT&T/USL/Novell `pack` is
clearly a distant third in the UNIX world, gzip is dominent only in some
spheres, notably the 80*86 universe, while `compress` still holds sway
elsewhere, including (as I recall) SVR4 as shipped by USL. For all I
know, the total number of 80*6 UNIX machines with NetBSD/FreeBSD/BSDI/Linux
is large enough to dominate, but the majority of the dollars is clearly
in the `compress` world, among the top 5 or 6 UNIX computer vendors.
In other words, if you measure the market by seats, that last sentence
above might or might not be true, but if you measure by dollars, it is
false.

The trouble with gzip is very much like the trouble with `compress`, a
license. Compress has the LZW patent, but gzip has the copyleft.
Depending on where you sit, one or the other is easier to deal with.
Yes, many amatuers and some others think the copyleft is no problem in
the commercial world. They are simply wrong and unaware of all of the
facts of other lives, but that old argument is not worth rehashing,
since it always beomes one of "I know the constraints you suffer; no
you don't until you've waked in my shoes; yes I do; no you don't"
ad naseum.

Please note again that Unisys recently explicitly claimed that LZW
decompression not just compression is covered by the Welch patent and
requires a license (after all, that's much of the GIF viewer hooha),
which makes the code in gzip that decompresses LZW a problem (contrary
to the Free Software Foundation's lawyers' claims), except that Unisys
explicitly said that LZW can be used freely and for free in freeware.

That last means that the only real advantage of gzip is that it generally
compresses more densely.

by **Neil Corle** » Wed, 22 Feb 1995 02:33:47

There is a PKWARE v2 compatible ZIP package for unix. Try ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/zip.
The zip and unzip are separate. It also ships with slackware linux. It has un(pk)zipped everything
I have thrown at it so far.

Who needs DOS? :-)

Neil

by **Mike Batchel** » Wed, 22 Feb 1995 23:12:21

>>>>The PKWARE Data Compression Library is a flexible utility that will
>>>>compress ASCII and Binary data by as much as 90%!!!
>>>So will gzip!!!!
>>And we all know the great advantage of gzip over anything else - it's
>>*FREE* !!!! So why would anyone bother with any other compression
>>utility, especially one that costs money.
>Not to mention that GNU zip has become the de-facto standard for UNIX
>compression...

How much is the royalty one pays to the FSF for using GPL'ed code in a
commercial product, compared to what PKWare wants for their stuff?
--

"Supporting Windows is like buying a puppy. The dog only cost $100, but
we spent another $500 cleaning the carpet."
- Marc Dodge, "Reality Check", _Open Computing_, December 1994

by **Mike Batchel** » Wed, 22 Feb 1995 23:16:39

>+---------------
>| Any serious sysadmin will compile gzip on its UNIX platform...
>+------------->8
>...assuming that the preferred trade-off is time for space. I use compress
>still for the 100MB+ data files we have to work with, because gzip just plain
>takes too long. (I once left it running overnight and it was still chewing
>the next morning. compress took 2 1/2 hours for the same file.)
>compress is not yet obsolete. If there is a faster package than gzip which
>avoids that d*mned patent, though, I'm all ears.

Try gzip -1. It seems to be to be about as fast as compress, and slightly
better compression. Depends on the data, of course.

--

"Supporting Windows is like buying a puppy. The dog only cost $100, but
we spent another $500 cleaning the carpet."
- Marc Dodge, "Reality Check", _Open Computing_, December 1994

Very Computer

PKWARE, Inc. looking for UNIX Beta Testers

PKWARE, Inc. looking for UNIX Beta Testers

PKWARE, Inc. looking for UNIX Beta Testers

PKWARE, Inc. looking for UNIX Beta Testers

PKWARE, Inc. looking for UNIX Beta Testers

PKWARE, Inc. looking for UNIX Beta Testers

PKWARE, Inc. looking for UNIX Beta Testers

PKWARE, Inc. looking for UNIX Beta Testers

PKWARE, Inc. looking for UNIX Beta Testers

PKWARE, Inc. looking for UNIX Beta Testers

PKWARE, Inc. looking for UNIX Beta Testers

PKWARE, Inc. looking for UNIX Beta Testers

PKWARE, Inc. looking for UNIX Beta Testers

PKWARE, Inc. looking for UNIX Beta Testers