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This is going to take a while…

Expander box

2,023,406,814 hours! Wow! By my calculations, that's roughly 84,308,617 days, or 230,824 years, give or take a half-year or so. I hope the dual dual-core Intel-based Pro desktops are released soon; it seems I really need a faster Mac!

In all seriousness, this archive actually expanded relatively rapidly. However, I think the structure of the archive really messed up StuffIt's estimating abilities. The archive was a 220MB file containing Italian scenery files for the X-Plane flight sim. After expansion, it contains about 1,350 files, spread across 74 folders. While that doesn't seem overly excessive to me, apparently it's enough to greatly confuse StuffIt!

15 thoughts on “This is going to take a while…”

  1. Anytime you have a calculation that will take longer than a year or so to run, it's best to just wait, then buy a new computer to do it on. … Although in this case, I suppose it's good that you let it finish instead of rushing out to the store.

  2. Stuffit...stuffit.... stuffit..... didn't that used to be a file de-compressor, way back in the old days, before OS X?

    Honestly, Stuffit should be buried. Slow, unwieldy, in-accurate (as you discovered), and completely unnecessary these days.

    Especially true since Apple don't ship it with the OS anymore.

  3. I think you activated the Wife Convincer Module. This module activates automagically when the keyboard sensor senses that you really want a new Mac.

  4. #2: Yea, I completely forgot I even had StuffIt installed until I expanded this archive. I don't think I've downloaded a .sit file in a long time. Needless to say, I've now pointed .sit archives at BomArchiveHelper!

    #3: Ha! I like that one. Marian hasn't seen the screenshot yet; I'll show her this morning and explain that it must be time to upgrade...

    -rob.

  5. Funny, I had the exact same thing happen last week, and I took a screenshot of it too. The numbers are exactly the same: 2023406814. Maybe that's Stuffit's stock "hell, I don't know" number.

  6. Rob, unless you know some trick I don't know, pointing .sit (and .sitx) archives at BomArchiveHelper won't help. The last time I checked, the Stuffit file formats were closed and not supported by BAH. (in fact, I just tried again and when I tell BAH to handle .sit files it archives them rather than opening them...)

  7. Doh -- you're right, of course. I was thinking "zip," which is odd since I've never let StuffIt touch those. Ah well, the dangers of posting early in the morning :)

    -rob.

  8. There's a site which collects these kind of oddities at http://www.error10.net/. It makes amusing viewing, but was down when I tried it just now.

    (The XHTML example address tag just doesn't work in the Preview window)

  9. Stuffit also has that lovely little bug where expanding a file will sometimes result in what appears to be an empty folder in the finder. However after editing the folder's contents, all the other files 'magically' appear. And, of course, my favorite, try running Stuffit 10 when you have IPv6 off and it will crash immediately upon opening. Now, if only someone could explain to me what in the world the IPv6 settings have to do with expanding .sitx files... Not to mention that Mac users have to pay double that which Windows users pay ($79.99 vs $39.99).

    Needless to say, I agree with AdrianM and say that stuffit is completely useless and Mac users should follow the path that Apple has started on and just drop it.

  10. I've ordered a MacBook Pro. Interesting question, will I buy a universal binary of stuffit? I have stuffit 9 installed and I can't remember the last time I used it. Of course the fact that there is no universal binary of stuffit at the moment might make it easier to decide.

  11. They will probably just release some statement saying the cost of developing a universal binary is more, and so the price for a universal binary will be $159.99

  12. #11: I have downloaded the free Stuffit Expander on my intel iMac. It is PPC binary, but it works quite well.

    I'd rather not need another app, but from Mactopia to iconfactory, it seems a lot of places require Stuffit to decompress their files. (If there is another way to decompress .bin .hqx .sit and .sitx files, please let me know.) I don't know why the other stuff such as zip, gz etc. is not good enough for those websites...

  13. Running stuffit 10 with IPv6 was worse than just crashing stuffit... instead, stuffit would hang for a few minutes, and then finish what it was doing. Extremely annoying until automatic updates were disabled.

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