in a CMD window? Is there a way to elevate 'edit'? Do you have to elevate 'CMD' first?
Speaking of/etc/hosts, I'm always happy to plug the best thing in the world. They've got info for every version of Windows out there--locations, how to edit, etc. Duh, there's my answer--looks like you need to elevate CMD.
Shrinky dinks? Paper clips? Gimme a break. I can duplicate a Medeco key blank with a piece of brass stock and a dremel tool
You know how some posts are really funny when you read them out loud (or imagine them) in Comic Book Guy's voice? Read (or imagine) this one in Grandpa Simpson's voice.
Sometimes I want paper bags and sometimes I want plastic. Usually I bring my own bags. So, do I get three cards? What if all I bought was a gallon of milk or a 2-liter soda* and I'm happy to carry it to my car completely bagless? Do I need a fourth card for that?
Furthermore, the "Paper or plastic?" routine is the SHORTEST segment of the entire process, PLUS the well-trained cashier usually asks as she's** scanning the first item and the bagger hears the answer before the first item arrives in his hand. So really, it adds ZERO time and nearly NO effort to the transaction.
Dear IBM: THIS IS NOT PROGRESS! This is quite possibly the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. If you want to make my life better, create a card that indicates my preference to have the soup cans placed UNDER the bread in the bag. (Am I the only Slashdotter who has started arranging things on the belt in the order they should be bagged?)
* God bless the metric-phobic US of A.
** not being sexist here, most of the cashiers at my local store are indeed female
IKEA stores in the US also charge for bags. You use a big yellow one to shop with but if you want to bag your purchases to go home you buy a blue one that you can reuse later.
Even if a canvas bag "falls apart" in six months (doubtful--I started using the ones that Publix and Target supply about six months ago and they look fine) it's still better than regular disposable bags--just do the math. Say you use a canvas bag instead of a plastic bag (and the canvas ones easily hold 2-3x as much as the flimsy plastic ones) for a weekly trip to the store. 6 months x 4 weeks = 24 bags. If one canvas bag holds as much as two plastic bags and you use it for a year you're now at 100 bags saved. So get some stylish bags, or take care of yours, or clean them every so often.
No one's saying you've got to strut around town with them, just use them to go from the store to the car and then into your house. (Unless you live within walking distance from the store. If that's the case, spring for some real bags.)
I agree that the little plastic bags make handy trash bags for wastebaskets at home and I'm not saying you have to quit using them altogether. As with everything else, there is a "happy medium" in there somewhere.
...although paper is a nice idea and all, it is basically useless for that or any other bag purpose, because it's not waterproof.
Like everything else in life, it depends on what you need. Inside my house, waterproofness isn't an issue. Paper bags can hold much more weight than plastic bags, and if you put a lot of loose stuff into a paper bag--clothes, christmas lights, whatever--the paper bag gives it some shape and they can even be stacked, unlike plastic bags which are like stacking dead jellyfish. A doubled paper bag is almost like a cardboard box but they stack very small when not is use.
Thanks. Glad I could help. That's why we all come to slashdot--for the occasional spike in the S:N ratio.:-) Reply here if you've got any other questions. I've got many years of experience stringing together surprisingly useful things from sub-optimal components.
> OK, I keep hearing "use rsync" or other software. What > about those of us who use shared web hosting, and > don't get a unix shell, but only a control panel?
As long as you've got scriptability on the client, you should be able to cobble something together. Like, in OS X, you can mount an FTP volume in the finder (Go -> Connect to Server -> ftp://name:password@ftp.example.com) and then just
(Interestingly, it shows up as user@ftp.example.com in the Finder but the user name isn't shown in/Volumes/.)
AFAIK, pretty much any modern OS (even Windows since 98, AFAIK) can mount FTP servers as volumes. OS X mounts them as R/O, which I always thought was lame, but that's another rant.
> Or who have a shell, but uncaring or incompetent > admins who won't or can't install rsync?
If you've got shell (ssh) access, you can use rsync. (Not over telnet, natch. If that's all you've got, look at the workaround above.) Rsync works over ssh with nothing more than
For the original poster, who was complaining about downloading many gigs over a slow link, just rsync over and over until its done--if it drops a connection, the next attempt will start at the last good file.
And if you've got a control panel, look for a button labeled 'backup'! My host uses CPanel and there's a magic button.
Final option: how did the data get onto the www server in the first place? Isn't there already a "backup" on your local machine in the form of the original copies of all the files you've uploaded? If you haven't been backing up in the first place, well, yeah, making up for that might be a little painful. (Note: if your site hosts lots of user-uploaded content, ignore any perceived snarkiness.:-) )
But the important thing to know is, EVERYONE knows that drinking too much alcohol is bad, but most people would be VERY surprised to learn that too much water can be lethal. From the Wikipedia page:
On January 12, 2007, Jennifer Strange, a 28-year-old woman and a mother of 3, from Rancho Cordova, California, was found dead in her home by her mother hours after trying to win one of Nintendo's Wii game consoles in KDND 107.9 "The End" radio station's "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" contest, which involved drinking large quantities of water without urinating.
On October 12, 2002, 3-year-old Rosita Gonzalez died of water intoxication when her babysitter Nancy Gayoso punished her by forcing her to drink three quarts (2.8 liters) of water in a four-hour period.
In a much-publicized case of fraternity hazing, four members of the Chi Tau (formerly Delta Sigma Phi) House at California State University, Chico pleaded guilty to forcing 21-year-old student Matthew Carrington to drink excessive amounts of water while performing calisthenics in a frigid basement as part of initiation rites on February 2, 2005. He collapsed and died of heart failure due to water intoxication.
The first one was also covered on Slashdot. In one of the cases (I forget which; I think the first but can't search right now) someone called the contest organizers and/or the police to warn them but they thought the caller was joking.
If ever there was an article that deserved to be tagged 'duh,' this is it. And even so, it even managed to skip over two key points--even if you could perfectly restore a system and not lose a byte of data, unexpectedly cold-rebooting a server 1) is downtime and 2) restoring is a pain in the ass. Sometimes less painful, sometimes more painful, but a pain nonetheless. UPSs are very cheap insurance.
At first glance it's hard for me to see where Drizzle would fit where SQLite doesn't.
MySQL may not be everyone's cup of tea and it does have some "gotchas" but it does at least have SOME "real" database features that SQLite doesn't. From their FAQ: Q: SQLite lets me insert a string into a database column of type integer! A: This is a feature, not a bug. SQLite does not enforce data type constraints. Any data can be inserted into any column. You can put arbitrary length strings into integer columns, floating point numbers in boolean columns, or dates in character columns.
Besides, not everyone needs everything. As you said, "One man's 'superfluous' is another man's key feature." So if they're key features for you, don't use it. There are scores of lowest-common-denominator web apps out there that don't need any of these features. I always use the analogy of a pickup truck and a tractor-trailer--yes, a real rig can do an order of magnitude more than a pickup can, but a pickup is still suitable for thousands of common tasks.
Not everyone needs "real" database features. It's a continuum and you pick the software from the list that fits your needs. Text files work for some things, SQLite works for others, then MySQL, Postgres, MS-SQL, Oracle, etc. The best tool for the job is often the one that does what you need and that you know how to use. I don't NEED to use some comp-sci-grad-approved enterprise-ready database for a damn phonelist. Using a "real" database does not instantly make me a "real" programmer and my choice of DB does not make my work "legit" or not.
Yes, it works fine after a crash. I've grown accustomed to having Saft save me when Safari craps out for years now; glad Apple finally implemented this. And yes, it would be REALLY great if they'd advertise it a bit! (I just found out about it a month or two ago.) BTW, works with Safari 3/OS X 10.4.11 as well.
If you already have it working, you should be able to quit, upgrade (say, from 10.5.3 to 10.5.4) and then launch and all should be good.
Also be aware that it won't work with some pages--if you had to submit a form to get to a page, or if it relies heavily on JavaScript/AJAX, if you're logged into your bank, etc. But it works 99% of the time.
And if you're using PithHelmet to block ads, I suggest learning about/etc/hosts It's a different kind of adblocking approach; one advantage is it works at the system level and blocks ads in ALL browsers.
And yes, I'm also waiting for them to copy Firefox's "Reopen recently closed tabs" feature.:-) But the history menu is usually good enough, especially since the menu itself is all-inclusive. No, I haven't played with FF's AwesomeBar yet.
It's the browser as much as the connection. I have an original (EDGE) iPhone and a co-worker just got a BB which also runs on (AT&T) EDGE. For fun I put them next to each other and tried to open Slashdot on each. The iPhone took a bit, as you've doubtless seen--20, 30 seconds or so. The BB's screen went dark several times while I was waiting for it to load and I finally cancelled it after a couple minutes. Looking at a few other pages was literally a step or two above using lynx over ssh. THe iPhone, as you've seen, looks just like a desktop browser, just shrunken. WORLDS of difference.
It is so painfully slow it makes dial-up, which I haven't done in over a decade, look good.
Well, of course, it's not ideal, and I'd rather not ONLY use it, but it's certainly workable in certain situations. You've already said it's just usable enough to use in a few situations; it's only going to get better.
BTW, it's the web's fault as much as anything else. Slashdot loaded faster on my P75 in 1998 with "auto load images" turned off over a 28.8 connection than it does today on my dual-G5 on a T1 at work. I'm waiting for someone to make (and Apple to allow) a webkit-based browser for iPhone that ignores CSS and JavaScript. (And accepts an ad-blocking/etc/hosts file.)
It searches for MP3s, transcodes them to WMA format, wraps them in an ASF container, and adds links to further copies of the malware, all without modifying the.MP3 extension. [emphasis mine]
So if this is correct, I figure one of two things is happening: 1) It renames the file blah.mp3.asf, but if you have extensions hidden, it will hide the 'asf' and show the 'mp3' or 2) it is an asf named blah.mp3 but when WMP opens the file, WMP says "Who cares what it's named, I can see that this is an ASF so I will go ahead and play it."
I agree this is too little information, so I will take advantage of the vagueness to walk a decade down memory lane.:-)
Back in 1998 when I was first getting into Linux and other OSs--back when we thought OSs besides Windows had a chance because Windows was so crappy and all these others were so great--there were a couple experiments that were fun.
BeOS, as others have already mentioned, booted very quickly. I remember seeing it advertised at around 20 seconds after POST; on my 300 MHz AMD K6-2 it took about 30. On any newer system with a halfway decent disk you'd see boot times in the teens or less. One of the open-source BeOS clones might be worth looking at.
Around that same time, QNX released a free demo that fit onto a floppy--one with (limited) NIC support and the other for computers with modems. Full TCP/IP stack, browser, shipped with a browser-based ring-stacking game (Towers of Hanoi) written in JavaScript. You can probably find copies of the image online. Ah, here we go, fifth match. I don't remember what floppy boot times were like but if you install it onto a CF card or something I bet it'd be great. (Can't get it to run in VirtualBox at the moment.)
A bit later I bought a 1 GHz PIII HP Pavillion. After I replaced the 60 GB WD HDD with a 13 GB unit (big drives are for servers; clients get small drives) and replaced the trialware-laden WinME with Win98 boot times dropped from 35 seconds to 25. That's gotta be 6, 7 years ago by now... how old is your box?
Not known for boot times but speaking of relatively fullfeatured alternative OSs, ReactOS might be worth looking into.
Oh yeah, and way back in the late 1980s, my parents bought an AT or XT clone which booted from power off to a C: prompt in seven seconds. Great for running WordPerfect 5.1 and Banner Blue Movie Guide.
Linux is pretty good at not getting owned so it's a bit of a non-issue at the moment, but I dare say it's only a matter of time before someone starts targeting them as well.
100% true. OTOH, I've been hearing that for ten years now. As a practical matter, I'll continue to use various non-Windows OSs without worrying about vulnerabilities day-in, day-out. It's the difference between living in a decent neighborhood where you lock your door each night, versus living in Cracktown and sleeping with one eye open and a handgun under your pillow.
Slashdot Mirror
Just curious, how would Vista respond if you say
in a CMD window? Is there a way to elevate 'edit'? Do you have to elevate 'CMD' first?
Speaking of /etc/hosts, I'm always happy to plug the best thing in the world. They've got info for every version of Windows out there--locations, how to edit, etc. Duh, there's my answer--looks like you need to elevate CMD.
Remember when ALL laptops pretty much STARTED at ~$3k?
Shrinky dinks? Paper clips? Gimme a break. I can duplicate a Medeco key blank with a piece of brass stock and a dremel tool
You know how some posts are really funny when you read them out loud (or imagine them) in Comic Book Guy's voice? Read (or imagine) this one in Grandpa Simpson's voice.
it should be s1wn3d!
Sometimes I want paper bags and sometimes I want plastic. Usually I bring my own bags. So, do I get three cards? What if all I bought was a gallon of milk or a 2-liter soda* and I'm happy to carry it to my car completely bagless? Do I need a fourth card for that?
Furthermore, the "Paper or plastic?" routine is the SHORTEST segment of the entire process, PLUS the well-trained cashier usually asks as she's** scanning the first item and the bagger hears the answer before the first item arrives in his hand. So really, it adds ZERO time and nearly NO effort to the transaction.
Dear IBM: THIS IS NOT PROGRESS! This is quite possibly the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. If you want to make my life better, create a card that indicates my preference to have the soup cans placed UNDER the bread in the bag. (Am I the only Slashdotter who has started arranging things on the belt in the order they should be bagged?)
* God bless the metric-phobic US of A.
** not being sexist here, most of the cashiers at my local store are indeed female
IKEA stores in the US also charge for bags. You use a big yellow one to shop with but if you want to bag your purchases to go home you buy a blue one that you can reuse later.
Great idea, except for the fact that many cards serve as both.
As much as I hate Wal-Mart, I have to say that they have been using biodegradable bags for a very long time... Biodegradable shopping bags, please!
Doesn't matter--things don't biodegrade in a landfiill!
Even if a canvas bag "falls apart" in six months (doubtful--I started using the ones that Publix and Target supply about six months ago and they look fine) it's still better than regular disposable bags--just do the math. Say you use a canvas bag instead of a plastic bag (and the canvas ones easily hold 2-3x as much as the flimsy plastic ones) for a weekly trip to the store. 6 months x 4 weeks = 24 bags. If one canvas bag holds as much as two plastic bags and you use it for a year you're now at 100 bags saved. So get some stylish bags, or take care of yours, or clean them every so often.
No one's saying you've got to strut around town with them, just use them to go from the store to the car and then into your house. (Unless you live within walking distance from the store. If that's the case, spring for some real bags.)
I agree that the little plastic bags make handy trash bags for wastebaskets at home and I'm not saying you have to quit using them altogether. As with everything else, there is a "happy medium" in there somewhere.
...although paper is a nice idea and all, it is basically useless for that or any other bag purpose, because it's not waterproof.
Like everything else in life, it depends on what you need. Inside my house, waterproofness isn't an issue. Paper bags can hold much more weight than plastic bags, and if you put a lot of loose stuff into a paper bag--clothes, christmas lights, whatever--the paper bag gives it some shape and they can even be stacked, unlike plastic bags which are like stacking dead jellyfish. A doubled paper bag is almost like a cardboard box but they stack very small when not is use.
Correction: Firefox WAS called Firebird, then changed after the database collision was noticed. And this was AFTER changing the name from Phoenix because of the BIOS manufacturer. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#History and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#Release_history
Thanks. Glad I could help. That's why we all come to slashdot--for the occasional spike in the S:N ratio. :-) Reply here if you've got any other questions. I've got many years of experience stringing together surprisingly useful things from sub-optimal components.
> OK, I keep hearing "use rsync" or other software. What
> about those of us who use shared web hosting, and
> don't get a unix shell, but only a control panel?
As long as you've got scriptability on the client, you should be able to cobble something together. Like, in OS X, you can mount an FTP volume in the finder (Go -> Connect to Server -> ftp ://name:password@ftp.example.com) and then just
(Interestingly, it shows up as user@ftp.example.com in the Finder but the user name isn't shown in /Volumes/.)
AFAIK, pretty much any modern OS (even Windows since 98, AFAIK) can mount FTP servers as volumes. OS X mounts them as R/O, which I always thought was lame, but that's another rant.
> Or who have a shell, but uncaring or incompetent
> admins who won't or can't install rsync?
If you've got shell (ssh) access, you can use rsync. (Not over telnet, natch. If that's all you've got, look at the workaround above.) Rsync works over ssh with nothing more than
Use SSH keys to make life perfect.
Or, google for 'site mirroring tool'. Many have an option to only download newly-changed files.
To get your databases, make a page like
and download that every so often.
For the original poster, who was complaining about downloading many gigs over a slow link, just rsync over and over until its done--if it drops a connection, the next attempt will start at the last good file.
And if you've got a control panel, look for a button labeled 'backup'! My host uses CPanel and there's a magic button.
Final option: how did the data get onto the www server in the first place? Isn't there already a "backup" on your local machine in the form of the original copies of all the files you've uploaded? If you haven't been backing up in the first place, well, yeah, making up for that might be a little painful. (Note: if your site hosts lots of user-uploaded content, ignore any perceived snarkiness. :-) )
Can we have that in English please? Possibly with a diagram?
But the important thing to know is, EVERYONE knows that drinking too much alcohol is bad, but most people would be VERY surprised to learn that too much water can be lethal. From the Wikipedia page:
The first one was also covered on Slashdot. In one of the cases (I forget which; I think the first but can't search right now) someone called the contest organizers and/or the police to warn them but they thought the caller was joking.
To help answer your question, check out this early demo version of web-based Windows here.
If ever there was an article that deserved to be tagged 'duh,' this is it. And even so, it even managed to skip over two key points--even if you could perfectly restore a system and not lose a byte of data, unexpectedly cold-rebooting a server 1) is downtime and 2) restoring is a pain in the ass. Sometimes less painful, sometimes more painful, but a pain nonetheless. UPSs are very cheap insurance.
At first glance it's hard for me to see where Drizzle would fit where SQLite doesn't.
MySQL may not be everyone's cup of tea and it does have some "gotchas" but it does at least have SOME "real" database features that SQLite doesn't. From their FAQ:
Q: SQLite lets me insert a string into a database column of type integer!
A: This is a feature, not a bug. SQLite does not enforce data type constraints. Any data can be inserted into any column. You can put arbitrary length strings into integer columns, floating point numbers in boolean columns, or dates in character columns.
Besides, not everyone needs everything. As you said, "One man's 'superfluous' is another man's key feature." So if they're key features for you, don't use it. There are scores of lowest-common-denominator web apps out there that don't need any of these features. I always use the analogy of a pickup truck and a tractor-trailer--yes, a real rig can do an order of magnitude more than a pickup can, but a pickup is still suitable for thousands of common tasks.
Not everyone needs "real" database features. It's a continuum and you pick the software from the list that fits your needs. Text files work for some things, SQLite works for others, then MySQL, Postgres, MS-SQL, Oracle, etc. The best tool for the job is often the one that does what you need and that you know how to use. I don't NEED to use some comp-sci-grad-approved enterprise-ready database for a damn phonelist. Using a "real" database does not instantly make me a "real" programmer and my choice of DB does not make my work "legit" or not.
Yes, it works fine after a crash. I've grown accustomed to having Saft save me when Safari craps out for years now; glad Apple finally implemented this. And yes, it would be REALLY great if they'd advertise it a bit! (I just found out about it a month or two ago.) BTW, works with Safari 3/OS X 10.4.11 as well.
If you already have it working, you should be able to quit, upgrade (say, from 10.5.3 to 10.5.4) and then launch and all should be good.
Also be aware that it won't work with some pages--if you had to submit a form to get to a page, or if it relies heavily on JavaScript/AJAX, if you're logged into your bank, etc. But it works 99% of the time.
And if you're using PithHelmet to block ads, I suggest learning about /etc/hosts It's a different kind of adblocking approach; one advantage is it works at the system level and blocks ads in ALL browsers.
And yes, I'm also waiting for them to copy Firefox's "Reopen recently closed tabs" feature. :-) But the history menu is usually good enough, especially since the menu itself is all-inclusive. No, I haven't played with FF's AwesomeBar yet.
It's the browser as much as the connection. I have an original (EDGE) iPhone and a co-worker just got a BB which also runs on (AT&T) EDGE. For fun I put them next to each other and tried to open Slashdot on each. The iPhone took a bit, as you've doubtless seen--20, 30 seconds or so. The BB's screen went dark several times while I was waiting for it to load and I finally cancelled it after a couple minutes. Looking at a few other pages was literally a step or two above using lynx over ssh. THe iPhone, as you've seen, looks just like a desktop browser, just shrunken. WORLDS of difference.
It is so painfully slow it makes dial-up, which I haven't done in over a decade, look good.
Well, of course, it's not ideal, and I'd rather not ONLY use it, but it's certainly workable in certain situations. You've already said it's just usable enough to use in a few situations; it's only going to get better.
BTW, it's the web's fault as much as anything else. Slashdot loaded faster on my P75 in 1998 with "auto load images" turned off over a 28.8 connection than it does today on my dual-G5 on a T1 at work. I'm waiting for someone to make (and Apple to allow) a webkit-based browser for iPhone that ignores CSS and JavaScript. (And accepts an ad-blocking /etc/hosts file.)
It's an exceptionally stupid situation where anybody in the world can download the SDK, but nobody can talk about it...
The first rule of the SDK is... you don't talk about the SDK!
(And yes, I totally agree it's retarded... just couldn't resist the opportunity for a Fight Club reference.)
It searches for MP3s, transcodes them to WMA format, wraps them in an ASF container, and adds links to further copies of the malware, all without modifying the .MP3 extension. [emphasis mine]
So if this is correct, I figure one of two things is happening:
1) It renames the file blah.mp3.asf, but if you have extensions hidden, it will hide the 'asf' and show the 'mp3'
or
2) it is an asf named blah.mp3 but when WMP opens the file, WMP says "Who cares what it's named, I can see that this is an ASF so I will go ahead and play it."
Anyone know which it is?
I agree this is too little information, so I will take advantage of the vagueness to walk a decade down memory lane. :-)
Back in 1998 when I was first getting into Linux and other OSs--back when we thought OSs besides Windows had a chance because Windows was so crappy and all these others were so great--there were a couple experiments that were fun.
2008 will be the year of OS X on the desktop! :-)
Must be hell. Does he have a brother named Bobby Tables?
Did they at least buy you a shirt?
Linux is pretty good at not getting owned so it's a bit of a non-issue at the moment, but I dare say it's only a matter of time before someone starts targeting them as well.
100% true. OTOH, I've been hearing that for ten years now. As a practical matter, I'll continue to use various non-Windows OSs without worrying about vulnerabilities day-in, day-out. It's the difference between living in a decent neighborhood where you lock your door each night, versus living in Cracktown and sleeping with one eye open and a handgun under your pillow.