atheistgod1999 wrote:.zip files. It seems like every download is that nowadays.
What's up with them? It's been like that for nearly 30 years. Anything that doesn't just open up in a browser [so, video, PDFs, audio files, etc] is zipped to pack files together and make 'em small.
on a vaguely related note, if there's one format that bothers the shit out of me, it's .sit, at least when they don't actually have Mac-specific files inside
unless you can find an old-ass version of Stuffit for Windows or install a copy of Mac OS in Sheepshaver or whatever [or use a real Mac], you can't open the file
Mac programs at least have a valid reason to be in .sit files -- the entirety of them is stored in the resource fork, if you stored the file in most other formats like a zip or whatever, since those formats are non resource-fork aware, you end up with a 0-byte file packed, since there's no data portion.
With shit like .mov files that have no need to be in a .sit [and fuck, they're probably already compressed, usually cinepak or road pizza encoding], my blood gets a boiling. I know why it was done [namely, it preserves creator/type codes, which are impossible to change without resedit or some not installed by default utility, and I already had my rant on that], but it's still fundamentally retarded.
also, there's nothing quite as stupid as a download for Stuffit Expander stored as a .sit instead of say, .hqx [which your browser might be able to decode/you could at least open it with something other than Stuffit], leading to the chicken-and-egg problem
oh, and Disk Copy .smi images are the worst, especially since the System 7 Tuneup is stored on one [which is most useful on System 7.0, since it fixes the "disappearing files" bug] -- and you need System 7.1 to run the self mounting image, why not just have it just be a self-extractor that doesn't have any dependencies on installing a pseudo-disk driver into memory that requires System 7.1 or more, fuck