WinRAR has a lot of great features as an archiver and compressor. It can create parity archives, and has a lot of other great features if you look at the manual
Granted it doesn’t have compression advantage over 7z, but those flags and features look great when I want to create archives, generally better and more convenient than anything else I look at, but I usually end up going with plain old zip files since various utilities can scan and search through them, etc., a network effect win for the zip format. But it also underscores that the best compression ratio doesn’t count for that much for me and some other people
Well said. The ability to embed a recovery record for really important stuff and the command line support is enough for me to keep using Winrar forever.
They've always used copying as one of their signature moves, see zune vs ipod, win3/95 vs mac, early Internet explorer based on spyglass/NCSA mosaic, Novell eDirectory vs ActiveDirectory, C# vs Java, F# vs Ocaml, and many more I would have to think hard about and take a long time to remember.
They tend to enter late with a me-too product, whether they copy, acquire, or embrace-extend-extinguish, but copying does play as large a role as any of their strategies, none of which generally involve actual innovation and often lean heavily on illegal, underhanded, or unethical business tactics.
Please try using F# or C# for once and you'll see how incorrect this statement is. Both had huge amounts of novel work that influenced the whole industry.
It's useful. It's not science. Those two statements don't have any contradiction. "Pseudo-science" sounds like a dismissal without further evaluation beyond "is it science?" In practice, it's more useful than the scientific big 5 model of personality.
How is it more useful than the Big 5? I find the Big 5 to have far more explanatory power. Openness to Experience especially is an under-discussed factor in human relationships.
The fact that the MBTI frantically added a fifth type for neuroticism is all the evidence you that at best it's playing catch up real personality science. The MBTI is all about profiting off of a human desire for belonging, which is why all the examples that the major sites give for each type are historical heroes (are you more of an Abraham Lincoln or Joan of Arc). Neuroticism is a harder sell, but guess what? Thinking of myself as a sensitive/neurotic person has been extremely enlightening, more than all the MBTI results in the world.
I'm preaching to the choir, but I get fired up about this stuff.
The early death of smokers tends to save a long, expensive period of end-of-life care. I believe smoking deaths reduce health care costs, ironically enough.
That study is almost 30 year old, has there been more current research? I also wonder if externalities like trauma on friends/family are factored in, I could imagine there are some transitive effects?
That sounds like sour grapes from a CEO that only and very simply got out-played at a CEO's main job of overall strategy. Even every employee working 80 hours a week still couldn't paper over complete CEO strategic failure. He's seriously going to plead that Google didn't have the man hours or resources to win with their PhD head-count and bankroll? Ridiculous.
"It is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or a fourth power into two fourth powers, or in general, any power higher than the second, into two like powers. I have discovered a marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain" - Pierre De Fermat
That's too reductionist to be an useful model. Humans are extremely complex systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system . You're describing them more like a complicated system.
Granted it doesn’t have compression advantage over 7z, but those flags and features look great when I want to create archives, generally better and more convenient than anything else I look at, but I usually end up going with plain old zip files since various utilities can scan and search through them, etc., a network effect win for the zip format. But it also underscores that the best compression ratio doesn’t count for that much for me and some other people