[tex-live] Re: [tug-board] Any news of DVDs ?

[Reinhard Kotucha]

>>>>> "Peter" == Peter Flynn <peter at silmaril.ie> writes:

  > Me included. I don't have anything personal against bzip2 except
  > that it's unheard-of, unusual, and non-standard. Granted, it's on
  > my FC4 machines, but TeX CD/DVD images are the only things that I
  > ever use it for, so I have to RTFM every year to remember what to
  > type. Goddess help the poor individual user.

Why do people only regard things Microsoft provides as a standard?

bzip2 is a standard for many years now.  It´s a pity that (some)
Windows users are not aware of it.

  > explain to technically-sophisticated people that using bzip2 does
  > *not* make others go "oooh, that's clever/sensible", it makes them
  > go "goddammit why can't they follow standard practice". We have
  > enough problems as it is, explaining to newcomers why LaTeX isn't
  > like Word, and adding a non-standard compression method just
  > accentuates the problem.

As I said before, bzip2 ***is*** a standard.  

  > Bzip2 *does* compress better, but 30Mb out of 600Mb is 5%, which
  > is IMHE *much* less than the increasingly common degradation in
  > download speed encountered by the average broadband user on a
  > contentious connection -- in other words your domestic connection
  > is more likely to be a cause of slowdown than is a 5% difference
  > in file size. Users on corporate and campus networks have
  > bandwidth coming out of their ears, so it's irrelevant; and users
  > on dialup aren't going to download DVD images.

Maybe bandwidth comes out of your ears, but this is certainly not the
case for most people, especially in developing countries.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-4592165
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Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO.
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