Re: Warp

["John H. Kim" <jokim@mit.edu>]

In message Thu, 01 Dec 1994 21:15:41 +0100,
  robr@iaehv.nl (Rob Ruggenberg)  writes:

> A reaction about (a) disk space:
> Warp was somewhat of a disappointment for me as my Thinkpad has only a 170
> Mb hd, which I had doublespaced into 240 Mb. On that drive I had about 80
> Mb free - rather comfortable.
....
> So now I have Warp and about 50 MB free space left.
> I feel disappointed because I still miss that 100 Mb software that I had
> to dump.....
> In some newsgroups I was told that in January there will be a Stacker 4
> especially for OS2. I'll wait for that.

I highly recommend you check out Zipstream on ftp-os2.cdrom.com as the file
/pub/os2/32bit/diskutil/zs102b.zip.

It's operating premise is more secure than Stacker's - each file is
compressed and saved separately, meaning a bad sector can only take one
file, not your entire file system.

The compression is better - it comes within 1% of the latest version of
PKZip by my tests (Stacker will compress better if you've got thousands of
files < 512bytes and you're using FAT instead of HPFS)

It's faster - it's threaded so all compression takes place in the
background.  No more waiting for your command prompt to reappear while the
compression software does its job.

It's cheaper - it's shareware at about $45US.

It supports HPFS, it's here now.  The only minus I can think of is that
there's no DOS equivalent so any compressed files are accessible only from
OS/2.  Also, it seems to slow down if you have lots of files in one
directory (I don't think it's much more than Stacker, but it's been so long
since I used Stacker that I can't tell).

Can you tell I like it?  :-)

> In the mean time I keep thinking: why did not IMB include a
> diskcompression programm with Warp?

1) They're unable to comprehend customers' desires,
2) They wanted to encourange other companies to write such file systems -
   OS/2 is designed to handle multiple file systems, you just programmers
   to write an appropriate IFS (installable file system).

You can pick the conjunction: 'and' or 'or'

Make sure you backup regularly when using any sort of compression program.
 _____________________________________________________________________
|\_____________________________________________________________________\
| |                                                                     |
| | John H. Kim    "None of what you are seeing is actually happening." |
| | jokim@mit.edu                                                       |
| | jokim@uni.uiuc.edu   - disclaimer for TV movie 'Without Warning'    |
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