Linux' extensive filesystem support has more than once saved my bacon when it comes to file recovery. In the form of a LiveCD, that filesystem supports makes Linux a veritable WonderWidget. I once even mounted an Amiga partition and copied off the files for a friend once. I regularly use Linux tools to restore and recover NTFS filesystems. If nothing else this will eventually mean you could use Linux to rescue old HP-UX disks.
When a high energy lone particle collides with something, a veritable shower of particles is released which are then free to smash into other stuff. Also, cosmic rays can be waaaaaaaaay more powerful than anything we can make on earth. One of those slamming into our atmosphere or the Moon would have done something catastrophic already if it was going to.
The Democratic governor of Ohio recently championed a "Castle Defense" bill to put an end to hassling people who kill or injure intruders. They aren't all bad, you just have to see if the Democrat in question is an antigun nutter.
Cheap Taiwanese DVD players have already shown the way on this. Implement all mandated standards to get the license as a manufacturer but do a deliberately piss poor job of implementing the security bits. The manufacturer can then play stupid to the licensors while hacked firmwares are cranked out to pretty much make the boxes do what their owners want them too.
They touch your royalties with or without your consent and SOME people have values other than money not that it is established that SoundExchange is shenanigan free. An RIAA controlled organization is handed control of independent royalties by the government and it stinks. Grow a fucking clue asshole.
I Just Don't Buy That. When commercial entities enforce their licences everyone exclaims "That's business! Of course they have to protect their rights!" When a FOSS developer enforces his licenses then all the sudden "This will embroil FOSS in scary legal stuff and make it impractical to use!" or there's my favorite "FOSS developers aren't being team players when they enforce their licenses". What's good for the goose is good for the gander and the legal departments of these companies should know that. There is no "balance" here. Either you're in compliance with the license or you are not. If you aren't willing to comply then don't use the software simple.
Incidentally, users of proprietary software spend millions on internal "license compliance". Why is it that the comparitively simple terms of most FOSS licenses should be onerous?
Try reading up on the SoundExchange business. It means the MAFIAA can pull their crap even with independent artists who despise everything they stand for.
ok so your repackager can monitor an installer and turn it into an MSI, that is great for making your apps easier to deploy in a corp environment but I don't see how it helps with backup. If you have the original installer you can just back that up, the main reason someone would want to back up an application off thier computer is because they no longer have the installer.
If you had to click a bunch of dialogs, enter regkeys, or (horrors) activate it, then all the information that made that work can be done away with in a good precooked msi. If I wanted to quickly replicate a Windows environment then I don't want to click dialogs and run upty million updaters and fight activation servers. I'd want to blast things back in quickly. Of course, a really obnoxious activation setup may detect that it is a new load of Windows.....
The problem with trying to back up an application that is already installed is it can be near impossible to work out which of the files on your system may be used by the app. Maybe you can get that info from the uninstall data but my guess is that data does not dependably list everything the app needs (e.g. there are some updates to windows components that app installers are allowed to install but should never remove)
The answer here is to be in the habit of using install watch utilities to know those things.
The other option is to load up a clean machine with all the apps you like to use and image it. The combination of sysprep, mergeide.reg, DriverPacks, and nLite can be used to produce an image with a high probability of restoring onto all new equipment if need be. Then keep the contents of your Documents and Settings backed up separately along with any new installers you employed since the last image you mad.
BTW, even OS X has apps that don't install/uninstall cleanly by moving icons in and out of/Applications.
The closest to happiness I've seen is dumping the installed package list of Debian derivatives and keeping the installers for any out-of-repository itmes backed up. I can replicate a working environment onto a new Debian-type install in about an hour and most of that time is spent downloading packages.
I can see how such a definition may help if talking about say Alpha Centaurii. What we currently have is
Sun ---> rocky worlds ---> asteroid belt ---> gas giants ---> icy plutoids --(shading off into)-> Oort Cloud
So it then becomes interesting to see if that general pattern obtains elsewhere. "Plutoids" would be small round things bigger than comets that nonetheless don't clear their orbits. So what we have is a somewhat useful taxonomic term rather than a "consolation prize for Pluto". It could potentially be interesting. What if gas giants are never found beyond plutoids? There's all sorts of questions the term may be helpful in asking.
It drives me crazy that it is nearly impossible to back up applications under Windows.
You can but it takes a bit of work. AFAIK this method should work for most anything but YMMV.
Acquire the following two applications:
Advanced Installer: www.advancedinstaller.com
Unlocking all of Advanced Installer's functionality requires paying but for "Simple Packages" it is freeware. This may be worth doing as their "Repackager" is part of the pay-for functionality and with a bit of editing will do what you want in one fell swoop. Basically, Repackager runs app installers and watches regkeys created and files dropped on the filesystem. Once manually dropping regkeys that MS Installer creates itself for tracking purposes, this will create an.msi of most any installer you can run from an exe.
Total Uninstall 2.3.5: You'll have to dig a bit for this version. The latest version is shareware. The intended purpose of this app is doing a more complete job of uninstalling apps than Add/Remove programs does. You use it to execute exe and msi installers and like the Advanced Installer Repackager it will track all regkeys and files dropped. It most helpfully provides a list of these that you can use to create "simple packages" with AI. No, it doesn't export a list for the AI packager. You refer to the list while creating the package manually.
If you pay to use the Repackager then you can probably dispense with Total Uninstall and get this done a lot faster.
Of course, I welcome better applications and methods for doing this if anybody knows.
BTW diffPackageMaker is good for this on OS X too.
Tesla Motors is selling a somewhat exotic high-performance vehicle. It's electric but it isn't a hippiemobile golf cart. These things compete with Corvettes and Porsches not Priuses and are meant to be a rich man's toy.
He also ignored his lawyer's advice and insisted on a testifying at his trial. He made a REALLY bad impression doing it too. Since Hans had a fool for a client, I'm not inclined to use this as a data point for Geek Persecution.
Ultra long sentences serve 1,3, and 4 at the expense of 2. Furthermore, reform tends to get lip service at best in the US. We're generally a revenge minded lot Who Want Criminals Off The Street And Thinking Twice About Messing Up.
Someone inadavertently includes some GPL3'd code in said firmware.
Suppose you inadvertently include MS DLLs? If inadvertent code inclusion is going on then the dev house has bigger problems than the the terms of the GPLv3.
Now what?? are you therefore supposed to give away your microwave ovens? or only use them in the office? way to go out of business instantly!
The penalties and ways of mitigating those penalties are specified by copyright laws and associated caselaw. No judge is going to mandate that you give away the ovens. The author of the software might get an injunction against further sales of the ovens and the GPL3 is in no way special in that regard. If the code included belonged to MS, the same remedy would be available to them.
What would most likely actually happen is a settlement between the manufacturer and the GPL3 author. Again, the copyright law will determine the bounds but either disclosure of the firmware and/or a monetary payment will happen. Note well that copyright law does nothing to force that disclosure, it's simply that many GPL authors find that an acceptable way to settle a violation. Other authors may well just take the check and issue an alternative license.
If something worse happens then the violator is going out of his way to get slapped. Now the GPL can't actually force that firmware to be disclosed. After all, the in-house non-GPL portions belong to the dev house or manufacturer and are still protected by copyright law themselves. So again, the worst that can happen is determined by copyright law and that could be a permanent injunction against further sales of the oven in question and very large monetary penalties. But the oven maker would have to have had very bad legal advice for things to get that far.
Something I don't understand is why GPL (any version) authors are Teh Evil! when enforcing their licenses but when Adobe and MS do it then it is pure justice.
Because, its creater want the world to be solely OSS, he force it inches by inches.
You're assuming everyone who uses the GPL is a Stallmanite. It is a completely unwarranted assumption.
I've used the GPL for some little things I've done and I most certainly am NOT trying to force anything "inch by inch". The GPL does a pretty good job of turning "tit-for-tat" into a software licensing. It does not burn me if someone uses something else rather than my code. I don't have much regard for what Stallman calls Free. However I do find the GPL in its various forms to be "fair". Note the use of a lowercase "f". If I let you use something of mine under rather generous terms to make something then extend those terms to everyone else. Don't like it? Use something else; I won't cry about it. Incidentally, that is freedom as well (lowercase "f" again.....).
I can't help but notice some GPL critics are every bit as freaky as Stallman in their own way. People like Theo and Brett Glass seem to think there is only room for proprietary-locked-up-tighter-than-a-bugs-butt or BSD-MIT-free-for-all-and-nobody-else-gets-real-freedom-dammit!!
But even the GPLv3 "weird requirements" don't kick in unless you try to distribute outside the organization. I'm wondering if most company lawyers are actually that stupid. Course if the idiot who wrote this article is typical of the breed..........
The reason I feel that OS X is not ready for big environments is that it's inflexible. You can only hack around so many "features". For instance, we had a hack that's worked for 10.4 to bind to a Novell eDir server on campus without using Novell's schema changes for Mac support. We do not control the Novell servers. However, this appears to be broken in Leopard (10.5).
Leopard 10.5.2 had a lot of LDAP breakage that appears to be fixed in 10.5.3 which was released last week. The update took care of some problems I had using Leopard with our Linux LDAP servers. Still, I'm going to wait and be sure 10.5.4 doesn't turn around and break them again before we allow Leopard in more than token quantities here.
There is a disconnect between the way often raucous FOSS projects run themselves and most Asian cultures. I read of an Chinese embedded system manufacturer who didn't want to submit patches or participate on the LKML because of "flaming". Indeed they do flame there but Western geeks tends to be upfront if they think something sucks. Although Western cultures have a concept of "honor", they really don't have a concept of "face" which if far more encompassing. To have one's words and works torn apart as they are on large FOSS projects entails a loss of face. The Eastern way is generally to praise in public and criticize in private. This generally isn't too compatible with how things are done in mostly Western run FOSS projects.
The GNOME guys idea of user friendly is strip features and configurability rather than refining features, picking good defaults, and laying out dialogs for ease of use by normal users and having tastefully accessible extra options for the particular and demanding power user. And no guys, clicking around in gconf which may not even respect those customizations on the next login doesn't cut it.
Historically KDE has fallen down by making configurability difficult for casual users and a pain for power users but at least power users could eventually get things the way they want them. I read good things about how KDE4 is going with that but have yet to see it for myself as it was a mass of regressions from KDE 3.5 the last time I tried it. Once it acquires polish and forward ported features and apps from 3.5, I'll be switching too.
Why would anyone buy a sub-laptop for a mere hundred or two less than a full laptop?
I agree with you with UMPCs are going the wrong way being ever more featured and expensive. I want to see something like an EEE PC in a blister pack at Target for $150. We'll probably get there too but it will require a new manufacturer that has no "big laptop" lines to protect and isn't bound by any sort of agreement with MS that would require crippling such devices.
However there are reasons to want such devices even with the feeping creaturism and ever climbing price point. The size, weight, and ruggedness of these devices lend themselves to being used in a way that I wouldn't use a cheap "full laptop". They can be casually carried in one hand and you can get around quite rapidly with one. They'll survive drops and bangs that would kill their $100 more competition and better tolerate being frequently picked up and put down in funny places. They'll most definitely stand up to kid abuse better. If nothing else, these things are like ToughBooks on the cheap.
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Linux' extensive filesystem support has more than once saved my bacon when it comes to file recovery. In the form of a LiveCD, that filesystem supports makes Linux a veritable WonderWidget. I once even mounted an Amiga partition and copied off the files for a friend once. I regularly use Linux tools to restore and recover NTFS filesystems. If nothing else this will eventually mean you could use Linux to rescue old HP-UX disks.
When a high energy lone particle collides with something, a veritable shower of particles is released which are then free to smash into other stuff. Also, cosmic rays can be waaaaaaaaay more powerful than anything we can make on earth. One of those slamming into our atmosphere or the Moon would have done something catastrophic already if it was going to.
The Democratic governor of Ohio recently championed a "Castle Defense" bill to put an end to hassling people who kill or injure intruders. They aren't all bad, you just have to see if the Democrat in question is an antigun nutter.
Cheap Taiwanese DVD players have already shown the way on this. Implement all mandated standards to get the license as a manufacturer but do a deliberately piss poor job of implementing the security bits. The manufacturer can then play stupid to the licensors while hacked firmwares are cranked out to pretty much make the boxes do what their owners want them too.
They touch your royalties with or without your consent and SOME people have values other than money not that it is established that SoundExchange is shenanigan free. An RIAA controlled organization is handed control of independent royalties by the government and it stinks. Grow a fucking clue asshole.
I Just Don't Buy That. When commercial entities enforce their licences everyone exclaims "That's business! Of course they have to protect their rights!" When a FOSS developer enforces his licenses then all the sudden "This will embroil FOSS in scary legal stuff and make it impractical to use!" or there's my favorite "FOSS developers aren't being team players when they enforce their licenses". What's good for the goose is good for the gander and the legal departments of these companies should know that. There is no "balance" here. Either you're in compliance with the license or you are not. If you aren't willing to comply then don't use the software simple.
Incidentally, users of proprietary software spend millions on internal "license compliance". Why is it that the comparitively simple terms of most FOSS licenses should be onerous?
VirtualBox allows this.
Try reading up on the SoundExchange business. It means the MAFIAA can pull their crap even with independent artists who despise everything they stand for.
Educated? I'd say LARTed.
We shall smite them with the dreaded eldritch blade ClueBringer!
ok so your repackager can monitor an installer and turn it into an MSI, that is great for making your apps easier to deploy in a corp environment but I don't see how it helps with backup. If you have the original installer you can just back that up, the main reason someone would want to back up an application off thier computer is because they no longer have the installer.
/Applications.
If you had to click a bunch of dialogs, enter regkeys, or (horrors) activate it, then all the information that made that work can be done away with in a good precooked msi. If I wanted to quickly replicate a Windows environment then I don't want to click dialogs and run upty million updaters and fight activation servers. I'd want to blast things back in quickly. Of course, a really obnoxious activation setup may detect that it is a new load of Windows.....
The problem with trying to back up an application that is already installed is it can be near impossible to work out which of the files on your system may be used by the app. Maybe you can get that info from the uninstall data but my guess is that data does not dependably list everything the app needs (e.g. there are some updates to windows components that app installers are allowed to install but should never remove)
The answer here is to be in the habit of using install watch utilities to know those things.
The other option is to load up a clean machine with all the apps you like to use and image it. The combination of sysprep, mergeide.reg, DriverPacks, and nLite can be used to produce an image with a high probability of restoring onto all new equipment if need be. Then keep the contents of your Documents and Settings backed up separately along with any new installers you employed since the last image you mad.
BTW, even OS X has apps that don't install/uninstall cleanly by moving icons in and out of
The closest to happiness I've seen is dumping the installed package list of Debian derivatives and keeping the installers for any out-of-repository itmes backed up. I can replicate a working environment onto a new Debian-type install in about an hour and most of that time is spent downloading packages.
I can see how such a definition may help if talking about say Alpha Centaurii. What we currently have is
Sun ---> rocky worlds ---> asteroid belt ---> gas giants ---> icy plutoids --(shading off into)-> Oort Cloud
So it then becomes interesting to see if that general pattern obtains elsewhere. "Plutoids" would be small round things bigger than comets that nonetheless don't clear their orbits. So what we have is a somewhat useful taxonomic term rather than a "consolation prize for Pluto". It could potentially be interesting. What if gas giants are never found beyond plutoids? There's all sorts of questions the term may be helpful in asking.
It drives me crazy that it is nearly impossible to back up applications under Windows.
You can but it takes a bit of work. AFAIK this method should work for most anything but YMMV.
Acquire the following two applications:
Advanced Installer: www.advancedinstaller.com
Unlocking all of Advanced Installer's functionality requires paying but for "Simple Packages" it is freeware. This may be worth doing as their "Repackager" is part of the pay-for functionality and with a bit of editing will do what you want in one fell swoop. Basically, Repackager runs app installers and watches regkeys created and files dropped on the filesystem. Once manually dropping regkeys that MS Installer creates itself for tracking purposes, this will create an
Total Uninstall 2.3.5: You'll have to dig a bit for this version. The latest version is shareware. The intended purpose of this app is doing a more complete job of uninstalling apps than Add/Remove programs does. You use it to execute exe and msi installers and like the Advanced Installer Repackager it will track all regkeys and files dropped. It most helpfully provides a list of these that you can use to create "simple packages" with AI. No, it doesn't export a list for the AI packager. You refer to the list while creating the package manually.
If you pay to use the Repackager then you can probably dispense with Total Uninstall and get this done a lot faster.
Of course, I welcome better applications and methods for doing this if anybody knows.
BTW diffPackageMaker is good for this on OS X too.
Tesla Motors is selling a somewhat exotic high-performance vehicle. It's electric but it isn't a hippiemobile golf cart. These things compete with Corvettes and Porsches not Priuses and are meant to be a rich man's toy.
That's what I meant by Removal as in "removal from society".
He also ignored his lawyer's advice and insisted on a testifying at his trial. He made a REALLY bad impression doing it too. Since Hans had a fool for a client, I'm not inclined to use this as a data point for Geek Persecution.
Like they're going to allow the level of outside communication necessary to participate in an open source project much less run a corporation.....
I thought the point of prison was to punish and correct the guilty and get them back into working order.
That can be a point of prison but there are at least four not always compatible reasons from prison:
1. Deterrence.
2. Reformation.
3. Punishment.
4. Removal.
Ultra long sentences serve 1,3, and 4 at the expense of 2. Furthermore, reform tends to get lip service at best in the US. We're generally a revenge minded lot Who Want Criminals Off The Street And Thinking Twice About Messing Up.
I loved the scene where Lightman scrounged around for a poptop to use on the rotary dial payphone.
Someone inadavertently includes some GPL3'd code in said firmware.
Suppose you inadvertently include MS DLLs? If inadvertent code inclusion is going on then the dev house has bigger problems than the the terms of the GPLv3.
Now what?? are you therefore supposed to give away your microwave ovens? or only use them in the office? way to go out of business instantly!
The penalties and ways of mitigating those penalties are specified by copyright laws and associated caselaw. No judge is going to mandate that you give away the ovens. The author of the software might get an injunction against further sales of the ovens and the GPL3 is in no way special in that regard. If the code included belonged to MS, the same remedy would be available to them.
What would most likely actually happen is a settlement between the manufacturer and the GPL3 author. Again, the copyright law will determine the bounds but either disclosure of the firmware and/or a monetary payment will happen. Note well that copyright law does nothing to force that disclosure, it's simply that many GPL authors find that an acceptable way to settle a violation. Other authors may well just take the check and issue an alternative license.
If something worse happens then the violator is going out of his way to get slapped. Now the GPL can't actually force that firmware to be disclosed. After all, the in-house non-GPL portions belong to the dev house or manufacturer and are still protected by copyright law themselves. So again, the worst that can happen is determined by copyright law and that could be a permanent injunction against further sales of the oven in question and very large monetary penalties. But the oven maker would have to have had very bad legal advice for things to get that far.
Something I don't understand is why GPL (any version) authors are Teh Evil! when enforcing their licenses but when Adobe and MS do it then it is pure justice.
Because, its creater want the world to be solely OSS, he force it inches by inches.
You're assuming everyone who uses the GPL is a Stallmanite. It is a completely unwarranted assumption.
I've used the GPL for some little things I've done and I most certainly am NOT trying to force anything "inch by inch". The GPL does a pretty good job of turning "tit-for-tat" into a software licensing. It does not burn me if someone uses something else rather than my code. I don't have much regard for what Stallman calls Free. However I do find the GPL in its various forms to be "fair". Note the use of a lowercase "f". If I let you use something of mine under rather generous terms to make something then extend those terms to everyone else. Don't like it? Use something else; I won't cry about it. Incidentally, that is freedom as well (lowercase "f" again.....).
I can't help but notice some GPL critics are every bit as freaky as Stallman in their own way. People like Theo and Brett Glass seem to think there is only room for proprietary-locked-up-tighter-than-a-bugs-butt or BSD-MIT-free-for-all-and-nobody-else-gets-real-freedom-dammit!!
But even the GPLv3 "weird requirements" don't kick in unless you try to distribute outside the organization. I'm wondering if most company lawyers are actually that stupid. Course if the idiot who wrote this article is typical of the breed..........
The reason I feel that OS X is not ready for big environments is that it's inflexible. You can only hack around so many "features". For instance, we had a hack that's worked for 10.4 to bind to a Novell eDir server on campus without using Novell's schema changes for Mac support. We do not control the Novell servers. However, this appears to be broken in Leopard (10.5).
Leopard 10.5.2 had a lot of LDAP breakage that appears to be fixed in 10.5.3 which was released last week. The update took care of some problems I had using Leopard with our Linux LDAP servers. Still, I'm going to wait and be sure 10.5.4 doesn't turn around and break them again before we allow Leopard in more than token quantities here.
There is a disconnect between the way often raucous FOSS projects run themselves and most Asian cultures. I read of an Chinese embedded system manufacturer who didn't want to submit patches or participate on the LKML because of "flaming". Indeed they do flame there but Western geeks tends to be upfront if they think something sucks. Although Western cultures have a concept of "honor", they really don't have a concept of "face" which if far more encompassing. To have one's words and works torn apart as they are on large FOSS projects entails a loss of face. The Eastern way is generally to praise in public and criticize in private. This generally isn't too compatible with how things are done in mostly Western run FOSS projects.
The GNOME guys idea of user friendly is strip features and configurability rather than refining features, picking good defaults, and laying out dialogs for ease of use by normal users and having tastefully accessible extra options for the particular and demanding power user. And no guys, clicking around in gconf which may not even respect those customizations on the next login doesn't cut it.
Historically KDE has fallen down by making configurability difficult for casual users and a pain for power users but at least power users could eventually get things the way they want them. I read good things about how KDE4 is going with that but have yet to see it for myself as it was a mass of regressions from KDE 3.5 the last time I tried it. Once it acquires polish and forward ported features and apps from 3.5, I'll be switching too.
Why would anyone buy a sub-laptop for a mere hundred or two less than a full laptop?
I agree with you with UMPCs are going the wrong way being ever more featured and expensive. I want to see something like an EEE PC in a blister pack at Target for $150. We'll probably get there too but it will require a new manufacturer that has no "big laptop" lines to protect and isn't bound by any sort of agreement with MS that would require crippling such devices.
However there are reasons to want such devices even with the feeping creaturism and ever climbing price point. The size, weight, and ruggedness of these devices lend themselves to being used in a way that I wouldn't use a cheap "full laptop". They can be casually carried in one hand and you can get around quite rapidly with one. They'll survive drops and bangs that would kill their $100 more competition and better tolerate being frequently picked up and put down in funny places. They'll most definitely stand up to kid abuse better. If nothing else, these things are like ToughBooks on the cheap.