Author Topic: The loss of quality in software.  (Read 2808 times)

hm_murdock

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The loss of quality in software.
« on: 28 December 2005, 02:16 »
There was a time that Stuffit was a well-respected and liked application for Mac. It was reliable, fast, and top quality.

Well, those days are LONG GONE. Now, Stuffit's makers are the same type of people that have the "BUY NOW BUY BUY BUY NOW" sites you find that hawk poorly-compiled clones of Spybot for $29.95 plus shipping for a downloadable installer that doesn't work.

Well, for some reason, I didn't install the version of Stuffit Expander that comes with OS X 10.4. I don't know why. Stupidity? Yeah, that sounds right. So, I go and download the "free" Stuffit Expander 10. Okay, it's actually free. Nothing hidden or any trials or crippleware or any of that. But... of course, you do have to give them an email address... not for confirmation, no, they pretty much say right out that you're gonna get spammed.

Downloaded, installed. No problems. Now today every time it starts, it quits unexpectedly.

That is a loss of quality in software and the people who make it.
Go the fuck ~

worker201

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Re: The loss of quality in software.
« Reply #1 on: 28 December 2005, 04:51 »
Hasn't bothered me much.  All my spam gets collected by Yahoo!'s spam filter, and Stuffit works just how I expected it to.  Using version 10.0.1.  Hasn't crashed in the 2 months I've had it.

piratePenguin

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Re: The loss of quality in software.
« Reply #2 on: 28 December 2005, 04:58 »
Would there not be more decent archive managers for Mac OS X? GNOME has File Roller, which looks like it'd do the job, but I've only used it about once.
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worker201

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Re: The loss of quality in software.
« Reply #3 on: 28 December 2005, 05:08 »
Actually, I've never used any automatic file compressors in Linux.  I mean, it takes a real dipshit to not know how to 'tar zxf' a file (or 'tar jxf').  I trust tar and g/bz2 zip, so I stick with them.  They do the work.  Same things can be done on a Mac.  It's just that Stuffit does all that stuff for you.

No offense to JJ, I mean, he knows his way around the Mac, but I have to assume that he is doing something wrong or nonstandard.  Stuffit has been/is a great program, and it has never failed me even once.

hm_murdock

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Re: The loss of quality in software.
« Reply #4 on: 28 December 2005, 05:55 »
Nope. I installed it and it sat there. I went into my old OS 9 Applications folder and ran Expander 6 and it's fine. I ran a disk verify, and there's no problems. I'll re-download Stuffit 10 later and see if that fixes the problem.

Like you said, Stuffit 10 works for you without error, just as, I'm sure it does for most folks. I have, however, heard of a number of quality issues with 10.
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WMD

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Re: The loss of quality in software.
« Reply #5 on: 28 December 2005, 08:15 »
Odd...I have 10.4, and the version that's there is 7.0.3.  I've never had anything go wrong...except that one time it refused to expand a RAR file.  (unrar for Linux did it.)
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hm_murdock

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Re: The loss of quality in software.
« Reply #6 on: 28 December 2005, 08:29 »
Aye. My thing is, I was stupid and didn't install it :D
Go the fuck ~

themacuser

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Re: The loss of quality in software.
« Reply #7 on: 31 December 2005, 13:29 »
Stuffup Expander seems to screw up all the time on my OS X machines. I hate it. Give me gzipped DMGs any day.
I'm often asked why I hate Microsoft - "What did they ever do to you?". Well, I'll tell you. They made dodgy programs and standards which have wasted hundreds of hours of my time involving lost work in crashes and stupidity.

cymon

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Re: The loss of quality in software.
« Reply #8 on: 31 December 2005, 20:25 »
I hate stuffit, I really just prefer Gzip, you don't have to register to use it.

Orethrius

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Re: The loss of quality in software.
« Reply #9 on: 31 December 2005, 21:30 »
7-Zip is free...

Proudly posted from a Gentoo Linux system.

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even if you're renting you've got more rights than if you're using windows.

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Siplus

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Re: The loss of quality in software.
« Reply #10 on: 1 January 2006, 01:19 »
I don't really like stuffit expander that much...

I'm very accustomed to File Roller in Linux and WinRaR in Windows. Stuffit yeilds little funcitonality. If open a zipped file using stuffit, it unzips it right on the spot, for example.

I like being able to preview what the zip contains, and determining where i wish it to be extracted

That being said, stuffit has never crashed on me. It never fails extracting a file.


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M51DPS

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Re: The loss of quality in software.
« Reply #11 on: 1 January 2006, 03:11 »
I remember using Stuffit for years on Classic, but these days I rarely really need it. Just about everything I download is encoded as a DMG (just open it in the Finder), zip (again, Finder in 10.3 and up can do it), or gzip/bzip (Terminal). I guess you could use Stuffit to open them, but what is the point?

cymon

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Re: The loss of quality in software.
« Reply #12 on: 1 January 2006, 04:34 »
The finder now has support for gzip, bzip, tar, and any combination of these. The only archive it doesn't expand is the .sit archives.

Also, Safari will auto-unarchive, as well as mount dmg's.

davidnix71

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Re: The loss of quality in software.
« Reply #13 on: 2 January 2006, 22:58 »
There is a hidden file expander called BOH or something like that, that appears occasionally when expanding a file Stuffit doesn't understand. 7-Zip is free and UnRarX, also free, comes in handy, too.

cymon

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Re: The loss of quality in software.
« Reply #14 on: 2 January 2006, 23:12 »
Yeah, but 7-zip doesn't work on the Macintosh.