19 May
2005
19 May
'05
12:41 p.m.
On Thu, 2005-05-19 at 12:50 -0500, Jim Leonard wrote:
That's why I find format discussions so
frustrating. If I write an
article discussing some programming topic, and I do it in a straight
text editor and save as an ASCII text file on a floppy disk, and
then compress that file using RAR (which adds error-correcting code
to the archive) and distribute it online, what is "the original"?
Is it the RAR archive... or the extracted text file... or the
information itself contained in the file?
it's whatever the furthest-back thing in the process that lets you
recreate any later stages is, I suppose. So in your example, the ASCII
text file is the original; anyone could make a RAR file of that at a
later date should they so want to.
cheers
Jules