I know it's not answering the original question, which appears to be asking for a windows solution, but I've been pondering a backup script for a while. Something that will make a big tarball, split it into CD sized chunks (700Mb?) and write each chunk to a cd with cdrecord. It doesn't have to be an iso, any chunk of data which is a multiple of 2048 bytes can be burned to a CD. You can restore it by "dd if=/dev/scd0 of=chunk01 bs=2048" then the second cd with "dd if=/dev/scd0 of=chunk02 bs=2048" etc.. then cat chunk01 chunk02... chunknn > original.tarball.tgz and restore.
Okay, so details need to worked out, but this could be scripted, no?
Also, can a.tgz file be padded with zeros to a multiple of 2048 bytes without mucking them up?
I mean, do you really need a filesystem on the CD if it's just one tarball? I suppose if you want to retreive individual files you'd want a filesystem, but there are probably cases where it might not matter.
But I will say that my expectations for computer hardware at this point was pretty much exceeded. The fact that I now have about 10 times as much Ram as my first computers had harddrive space I am impressed.
10 times the RAM, but is it 10 times more responsive? I don't find oowriter on a 2Ghz P4 with 256Mb RAM loads any faster than WP5.1 on a 16Mhz 8088 with 640Kb of RAM.
Sure, oowriter does more than WP5.1 and is wysiwyg with a GUI yadayada, but workflow-wise it is functionally equivelent.
All the hardware speed gains have been mitigated by extra layers of crud - daemons, XFree86, KDE 3.1, CUPS etc. I guess most of this crud does useful stuff. X, KDE and CUPS are great, I wouldn't want to do without them. Multitasking, various daemons (we used to call them TSRs) all help to make things work better.
OK, I'm rambling here - my original point was that today's computers, from a purely subjective feel point of view, do not feel any faster/snappier/more responsive.
... first, take a lump of marble and a chisel - then chisel away anything that doesn't resemble an elephant.
How to make a poem - first, take a bunch of words, then chisel away any words that aren't poetry. This Darwin poem engine is like the lump of marble. It is the readers who chisel away non-poems who are the artists. Their chisels are the voting buttons with which they chisel away anything that does not resemble an elephant^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H poem.
Are you claiming that DNA itself didn't appear through evolution?
Yes. At least I'm seriously questioning whether it did.
This is oft debated and this post will probably re-ignite the old Evolutionist vs Creationist flamefest. Oh well. This is/.
DNA would appear to contain some kind of language describing genes and stuff. The physical medium, dioxyribonucleic acid (sp?) needs the language, but the language needs the physical medium.
Which came first?
It still puzzles me. I am not a biology expert.
Attributing it to intelligent design raises thornier issues though - such as who is the designer and who designed the designer.
Feel free to continue this thread in my journal to avoid a lengthy OT thread.
I have spoken to Parisians who were, to form, snobby about their language, and felt that I shouldn't learn Quebec french. They thought it sounded very antiquated, like language old farmers might use.
This reminds me of the difference between dutch and afrikaans. I speak dutch, but I struggle with afrikaans. afrikaans did in fact evolve from the dutch used by farmers. boer is the dutch word for farmer.
I think yuri's description didn't really blame Windows
That's right.
I would blame Mandrake.
Actually, I blame myself. I could have and should have checked out the XP drive layout before bulldozing carelessly through my partitions.
Thing is, when I switched the lappie on for the first time, XP wanted to run a First-Time wizard to introduce me to my new computer. The very first screen was a EULA and when I clicked "I disagree" (emphasis mine) it told me I had to agree on order to continue using XP. I had the choice of going back and clicking "I agree" or rebooting with the Mdk install CD which was sitting beside me.
I was so thrown by an EULA being sprung on me post-purchase that I was in a fsck-ya-then-stupid-windows mood. (Stupid EULA, not necessarily stupid OS).
Anyway, I think it's quite reasonable for Mdk to expect me to know my computer, although your idea of looking at the contents and displaying/mnt/win_os,/mnt/win_data1 is a good one, especially for non-geeks wanting to try Mdk.
I recently got an NEC Versa from my insurance company to replace a stolen laptop after we got burgled. It came with XP. I wanted to run Mdk 9.1 so I thought I'd go for a dual boot. In the process of installing Mdk I accidently nuked the wrong wrong windows partition (I nuked/mnt/win_d instead of/mnt/win_c because I thought d: would be the data partition and c: would be the boot/program partition - wrong! Later, I decided to burn/home to CDR and try re-installing as dual boot, but the NEC restore CD did not give me the option to give less space to XP with fdisk, so I let it run its course and restore to factory settings. Unfortunately it refused to boot so now I'm back to Mdk only.
The only thing I needed windows for was the Intel 537 modem chip. I d/l'ed a driver for 536 which I'm going to try though. At least I can plug the laptop into my desktop via cat 5 x-over cable and share the net that way. Mdk detected the lappie's eth0 without any problems.
When I switched to Linux, it was from OS/2 Warp. I also dual booted for quite a while before deleting the OS/2 partition. I should've kept the OS/2 boot manager though.
It wasn't until I finally upgraded from KDE 1.x to KDE 3.1 (a few months ago) that I finally stopped missing the Presentation Manager.
Solution: Linux will not enter the marketplace as a 'End User' OS, but rather as a server OS. Then, slowly, more and more people, lured bythe appeal of a free, non-MS OS, will start switching. SLowly, game makers will start making games for linux.
Server yes, but also firewall. More and more home users have cable or dsl connections, and many are looking at linux or *BSD as firewall options.
I work for a Telco/ISP/Cable TV provider in New Zealand. I'm noticing an increase in customers who say they intend to use linux as a firewall for their cable connection. The techs who install the cable modems officially only know how to configure windows, but are happy to tell the customers what the settings are so they can configure their own linux boxes. It's only a matter of time before linux set-up instructions are included in their manuals.
Also, more and more people are wanting to host their own web servers.
So I predict households with multiple PCs will soon have a linux box doing server/firewall stuff and a windows box for games.
Does SLIMP3 support ogg? I didn't see any mention of it at their website. I did see that it loads it's kernel from a server, and it's open source, so ogg support could be added but I don't know if any programmer has done so.
Now with religious discrimination, if you are a religious company, then having a muslim, or a hindu working in a baptist church would portray the same thing, and people will start to doubt you
Why? Sure, having a muslim or hindu preaching a sermon at a baptist church might be a little inappropriate, but why not have them working in the office? Or with one of the church's social work projects? I have absolutely no problem with employing a muslim, hindu or atheist as a budget advisor at a budgeting service run by a baptist church.
Someone said that 20 years is a long time in software, and not many technologies would still be in use by the time the patent expired. I said what about unix, and someone replied that unix is the exception. Now it looks like GIF is the other exception.
I'm assuming that the meeting in question was of IT professionals. In that case, chances are that among the 1/3 of hands raised, there were probably some pretty competent linux geeks among them. If it turns out that the meeting in question was not of IT professionals then I am pleasantly surprised - that a roomfull of non-techies has 1/3 linux usage at home.
Change doesn't have to be overnight. I woudl suggest to any organisation wanting to break free from the proprietary vendors' treadmills to make the switch in the following stages:
1) Office print servers/file servers, any other servers that can be a "drop-in" replacement. 2) Rewrite Intranet apps to remove active-X. 3) Open-Source office apps that run on windows - eg OpenOffice.org
1, 2 & 3 can be done simultaneously.
4) Replace IIS with Apache (when step 2 is complete) 5) When the applications are all-non proprietary, switch the OS.
eg Linux (with Evolution and exchange plug-in if necessary) 6) Get staff used to and happy with, say, kde or gnome. 7) Replace Exchange server with open source equivalent.
Step 7 presupposes that there are/is good shared calander type servers available. I honestly don't know.
Okay, the above is just a rough outline. A good IT steering committee could polish my road map a bit better.
The gap between 1, 2 & 3, and 4-7 could be 6, 12 or 18 months. My scheme leaves Exchange as the last change, but in some organisations it could be step 4 or 5.
It's basicly doable. Switch to non proprietary applications, and once you're comfortable with that, you can replace the underlying OS. Open Office is more or less the same on Windows and Linux, AFAIK.
Why does your comment remind me of a scene in Monty Python's Holy Grail where King Arthur chops of the arms and legs of his adversary, and the adversary just sits there uttering threats and calling King Arthur a coward.
Come on, you must have seen it.
Kinda like SCO really. "Come back here IBM! I'll head butt your kneecaps!"
Boy, this sort of behavior is rampant among companies small and large. I have known several small software companies whose sales divisions were always making promises that were not grounded in reality. Promised functionality that had simply been discussed, but was not actually in code at the time. I'd say to the sales managers, "what the hell are you doing?" to which they would reply, "making sales".
Not just software. Any company. The ever present tension between Marketing and Provisioning[1]
[1] Provisioning is the generic term I use for everyone else in the company (not Marketing) who provide the actual product and/or service.
tomhudson wrote: This is a legitimate use, just as hammers and shovels and pry bars also have legit uses.
Planesdragon replied: Not necessarily.
CSS is an encryption system, designed to ensure that DVDs are played only in players sold in the intended market.
Artificially segregating markets so you can charge more in some market segments (eg region encoding) is illegal in most jurisdictions AFAIK. (Hence regionless players are perfectly legal here in New Zealand)
Forcing a customer to buy one product in order to use another product (eg "Approved" DVD players) is also illegal in most jurisdictions AFAIK (Hence MS can't sue codeweavers)
Slashdot Mirror
I know it's not answering the original question, which appears to be asking for a windows solution, but I've been pondering a backup script for a while. ... chunknn > original.tarball.tgz
.tgz file be padded with zeros to a multiple of 2048 bytes without mucking them up?
Something that will make a big tarball, split it into CD sized chunks (700Mb?) and write each chunk to a cd with cdrecord.
It doesn't have to be an iso, any chunk of data which is a multiple of 2048 bytes can be burned to a CD.
You can restore it by "dd if=/dev/scd0 of=chunk01 bs=2048"
then the second cd with "dd if=/dev/scd0 of=chunk02 bs=2048" etc..
then cat chunk01 chunk02
and restore.
Okay, so details need to worked out, but this could be scripted, no?
Also, can a
I mean, do you really need a filesystem on the CD if it's just one tarball?
I suppose if you want to retreive individual files you'd want a filesystem, but there are probably cases where it might not matter.
Just a thought.
Yuri
Do you really want your windowing system to end up like Slashdot?
It already has. At least, the wiki has.
But I will say that my expectations for computer hardware at this point was pretty much exceeded. The fact that I now have about 10 times as much Ram as my first computers had harddrive space I am impressed.
10 times the RAM, but is it 10 times more responsive?
I don't find oowriter on a 2Ghz P4 with 256Mb RAM loads any faster than WP5.1 on a 16Mhz 8088 with 640Kb of RAM.
Sure, oowriter does more than WP5.1 and is wysiwyg with a GUI yadayada, but workflow-wise it is functionally equivelent.
All the hardware speed gains have been mitigated by extra layers of crud - daemons, XFree86, KDE 3.1, CUPS etc.
I guess most of this crud does useful stuff. X, KDE and CUPS are great, I wouldn't want to do without them.
Multitasking, various daemons (we used to call them TSRs) all help to make things work better.
OK, I'm rambling here - my original point was that today's computers, from a purely subjective feel point of view, do not feel any faster/snappier/more responsive.
Yuri
... first, take a lump of marble and a chisel - then chisel away anything that doesn't resemble an elephant.
How to make a poem - first, take a bunch of words, then chisel away any words that aren't poetry.
This Darwin poem engine is like the lump of marble. It is the readers who chisel away non-poems who are the artists. Their chisels are the voting buttons with which they chisel away anything that does not resemble an elephant^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H poem.
Yes. At least I'm seriously questioning whether it did. /.
This is oft debated and this post will probably re-ignite the old Evolutionist vs Creationist flamefest. Oh well. This is
DNA would appear to contain some kind of language describing genes and stuff. The physical medium, dioxyribonucleic acid (sp?) needs the language, but the language needs the physical medium. Which came first?
It still puzzles me. I am not a biology expert.
Attributing it to intelligent design raises thornier issues though - such as who is the designer and who designed the designer.
Feel free to continue this thread in my journal to avoid a lengthy OT thread.
This reminds me of the difference between dutch and afrikaans. I speak dutch, but I struggle with afrikaans. afrikaans did in fact evolve from the dutch used by farmers. boer is the dutch word for farmer.
Many distros (including the latest Mandrake) come with partition resizing software for ntfs, fat, and others
Well if I'd known that I would have had this (earlier post) problem.
Oh well. XP appears to be gone forever from my lappie. I'm over it (Mdk r0x0rz!).
That's right.
I would blame Mandrake.
Actually, I blame myself. I could have and should have checked out the XP drive layout before bulldozing carelessly through my partitions.
Thing is, when I switched the lappie on for the first time, XP wanted to run a First-Time wizard to introduce me to my new computer.
The very first screen was a EULA and when I clicked "I disagree" (emphasis mine) it told me I had to agree on order to continue using XP. I had the choice of going back and clicking "I agree" or rebooting with the Mdk install CD which was sitting beside me.
I was so thrown by an EULA being sprung on me post-purchase that I was in a fsck-ya-then-stupid-windows mood. (Stupid EULA, not necessarily stupid OS).
Anyway, I think it's quite reasonable for Mdk to expect me to know my computer, although your idea of looking at the contents and displaying
These Gauls are crazy
/me taps his head - *tap*tap*tap*
I recently got an NEC Versa from my insurance company to replace a stolen laptop after we got burgled. /mnt/win_d instead of /mnt/win_c because I thought d: would be the data partition and c: would be the boot/program partition - wrong! /home to CDR and try re-installing as dual boot, but the NEC restore CD did not give me the option to give less space to XP with fdisk, so I let it run its course and restore to factory settings. Unfortunately it refused to boot so now I'm back to Mdk only.
It came with XP. I wanted to run Mdk 9.1 so I thought I'd go for a dual boot.
In the process of installing Mdk I accidently nuked the wrong wrong windows partition (I nuked
Later, I decided to burn
The only thing I needed windows for was the Intel 537 modem chip. I d/l'ed a driver for 536 which I'm going to try though.
At least I can plug the laptop into my desktop via cat 5 x-over cable and share the net that way. Mdk detected the lappie's eth0 without any problems.
Let's not forget that they are defending your right to insult them....
WTF? Are the US military currently defending US soil or invading someone else's turf?
I'm glad I live so far from it all (not that my govt is much better).
When I switched to Linux, it was from OS/2 Warp. I also dual booted for quite a while before deleting the OS/2 partition. I should've kept the OS/2 boot manager though.
It wasn't until I finally upgraded from KDE 1.x to KDE 3.1 (a few months ago) that I finally stopped missing the Presentation Manager.
Solution:
Linux will not enter the marketplace as a 'End User' OS, but rather as a server OS. Then, slowly, more and more people, lured bythe appeal of a free, non-MS OS, will start switching. SLowly, game makers will start making games for linux.
Server yes, but also firewall. More and more home users have cable or dsl connections, and many are looking at linux or *BSD as firewall options.
I work for a Telco/ISP/Cable TV provider in New Zealand.
I'm noticing an increase in customers who say they intend to use linux as a firewall for their cable connection.
The techs who install the cable modems officially only know how to configure windows, but are happy to tell the customers what the settings are so they can configure their own linux boxes.
It's only a matter of time before linux set-up instructions are included in their manuals.
Also, more and more people are wanting to host their own web servers.
So I predict households with multiple PCs will soon have a linux box doing server/firewall stuff and a windows box for games.
Thanks - I found the FAQ about 2 minutes after posting to /.
Sounds like a good thing for me then. Most of my music is ogg (ripped from CDs my wife and I own thank you copyright nazis).
May need to upgrade from 500MHz K6-2 though.
Does SLIMP3 support ogg? I didn't see any mention of it at their website. I did see that it loads it's kernel from a server, and it's open source, so ogg support could be added but I don't know if any programmer has done so.
What about the DIY satisfaction. We're mostly geeks here, and love to do this kind of thing ourselves.
There's the learning aspect as well.
The rock and the hardplace. That's exactly where Bill is. Kinda feel sorrry for him.
I don't.
Now with religious discrimination, if you are a religious company, then having a muslim, or a hindu working in a baptist church would portray the same thing, and people will start to doubt you
Why? Sure, having a muslim or hindu preaching a sermon at a baptist church might be a little inappropriate, but why not have them working in the office? Or with one of the church's social work projects?
I have absolutely no problem with employing a muslim, hindu or atheist as a budget advisor at a budgeting service run by a baptist church.
... considering my comment from yesterday.
Someone said that 20 years is a long time in software, and not many technologies would still be in use by the time the patent expired.
I said what about unix, and someone replied that unix is the exception. Now it looks like GIF is the other exception.
20 years in the software industry is an eternity. The end of life on a piece of software will probably come many years before the patent ends.
*ahem* Unix is still around some 20+ years later.
Users != Expertise.
Disclaimer: Assumptions follow:
I'm assuming that the meeting in question was of IT professionals. In that case, chances are that among the 1/3 of hands raised, there were probably some pretty competent linux geeks among them.
If it turns out that the meeting in question was not of IT professionals then I am pleasantly surprised - that a roomfull of non-techies has 1/3 linux usage at home.
Yuri
Change doesn't have to be overnight.
I woudl suggest to any organisation wanting to break free from the proprietary vendors' treadmills to make the switch in the following stages:
1) Office print servers/file servers, any other servers that can be a "drop-in" replacement.
2) Rewrite Intranet apps to remove active-X.
3) Open-Source office apps that run on windows - eg OpenOffice.org
1, 2 & 3 can be done simultaneously.
4) Replace IIS with Apache (when step 2 is complete)
5) When the applications are all-non proprietary, switch the OS.
eg Linux (with Evolution and exchange plug-in if necessary)
6) Get staff used to and happy with, say, kde or gnome.
7) Replace Exchange server with open source equivalent.
Step 7 presupposes that there are/is good shared calander type servers available. I honestly don't know.
Okay, the above is just a rough outline. A good IT steering committee could polish my road map a bit better.
The gap between 1, 2 & 3, and 4-7 could be 6, 12 or 18 months.
My scheme leaves Exchange as the last change, but in some organisations it could be step 4 or 5.
It's basicly doable. Switch to non proprietary applications, and once you're comfortable with that, you can replace the underlying OS.
Open Office is more or less the same on Windows and Linux, AFAIK.
Yuri
Why does your comment remind me of a scene in Monty Python's Holy Grail where King Arthur chops of the arms and legs of his adversary, and the adversary just sits there uttering threats and calling King Arthur a coward.
Come on, you must have seen it.
Kinda like SCO really. "Come back here IBM! I'll head butt your kneecaps!"
Boy, this sort of behavior is rampant among companies small and large. I have known several small software companies whose sales divisions were always making promises that were not grounded in reality. Promised functionality that had simply been discussed, but was not actually in code at the time. I'd say to the sales managers, "what the hell are you doing?" to which they would reply, "making sales".
Not just software. Any company. The ever present tension between Marketing and Provisioning[1]
[1] Provisioning is the generic term I use for everyone else in the company (not Marketing) who provide the actual product and/or service.
This is a legitimate use, just as hammers and shovels and pry bars also have legit uses.
Planesdragon replied:
Not necessarily.
CSS is an encryption system, designed to ensure that DVDs are played only in players sold in the intended market.
Artificially segregating markets so you can charge more in some market segments (eg region encoding) is illegal in most jurisdictions AFAIK. (Hence regionless players are perfectly legal here in New Zealand)
Forcing a customer to buy one product in order to use another product (eg "Approved" DVD players) is also illegal in most jurisdictions AFAIK (Hence MS can't sue codeweavers)
IANAL, YMMV, yada yada