Odds and Ends: StuffIt Deluxe 7 RAR support; Norton Utilities Consistency; New Forum Sections

Stuffit Deluxe 7 RAR support Aladdin Systems provided the following statement to a user regarding support for expanding files using the RAR format:

"StuffIt 7.0 does not support the current RAR 3.x.x standard in use on versions of the Microsoft Windows OS and/or other OSes; StuffIt 7.0 only provides support for up to the discontinued RAR 2.5 standard. Aladdin Systems software developers do not have permission at this time to licence RAR 3.x.x from RAR creator Eugene Roshel for use in Aladdin Systems softwares, so the only current option is to try to reverse engineer the support. It is not known if and when this will be sucessful. At this time, archives using the current RAR 3.0.0 standard can not be expanded."

Euegene Roshel, the creator of the RAR format, replied:

"Portable Unrar 3.0 C source code is available in "RAR extras" part of www.rarlab.com since early beta versions of 3.0. It may be used free of charge in any applications, the only license limitation is that source must not be used to re-create RAR compression algorithm."

Norton Utilities Consistency Anthony Kassir received a disconcerting reply from Symantec's technical support department regarding the validity of disk errors reported by Norton Utilities:

"In general, if you run Disk Doctor on a boot volume and see an error, you will want to check it twice to confirm the consistency of the error. A background process accessing the drive may be triggering the error in Disk Doctor and as a result generating a false positive report. This can also happen on other non-boot volumes if there is an access attempt made there as well by an application. In general, it's best to shut down as many applications as possible to avoid this on a user's system when examining with Disk Doctor."

New Forum Sections We've implemented two new discussion areas in the MacFixIt forums:

• MacFixIt HomePage Feedback: Please use this area to provide feedback, suggestions and comments on MacFixIt.com's Late-Breakers home page. Unregistered forum users are welcome here, but please leave an email so we may contact you if needed.
• Tech Issues: discussion of platforms, interface, nanobits, and other bytes. All registered users welcome.