Slashback: Zip, Language, Opportunism 321
Funny name, well-executed idea. YourMother writes "After almost 4 days of being offline, the social network Orkut is back online. The Orkut development team has been working nonstop since bringing it down on Sunday afternoon and quite a few new security features have been implemented to protect users information. Within the first 48 hours it was up, it gained almost 100,000 users, growing many times faster than other social networks like Friendster or Tribe. Did Google hit the social network bulls-eye?"
glinden points to a story with some more information about those security holes. "From the article, 'Sources close to Google suggest widespread XSS (cross-site scripting) hacks forced the closure of the service. It isn't clear how much personal data or communication was disclosed.'"
Playmate. Playmate, playmate playmate. An anonymous reader writes "A week after an appeals court ruling revived a Playboy Enterprises Inc. trademark infringement lawsuit against Netscape Communications Inc., the companies have reached a settlement in the case (See a ZDNet report) The terms of the settlement have not been disclosed. This puts an end to a closely watched case in the search engine advertising field. Several other lawsuits over misuse of trademarks in search engine ads are still in place. Google e.g. is embroiled in a lawsuit with Luis Vuitton regarding keyword-based ads in France and asked for a California court's ruling to back its trademark policy for AdWords after facing the threat of a lawsuit from American Blind & Wallpaper Factory Inc."
You have to admire such brave nomenclature. Michiel Frackers writes "Thanks for the link to my site, I got 3 gigabyte of traffic in a few hours! If I would have known, I would have written something in English. I have added an update about the Strangeberry product and its relation to Tivo at the URL you linked to.
I also included a link to my private blog (as www.frackers.com is more about my work in media & technology). Hopefully this clarifies some things for your readers, I did not intend to make this some kind of quest or game at all: it's just that I promised Arthur and his colleagues not to disclose what they are exactly doing, as you will understand."
And Anonymous joe writes with this link to an intriguing bit of Strangeberry speculation at the Register.
Nokia to port Python to Mobiles, not Perl An anonymous reader writes "Nokia was mistaken. In fact, El Reg reports that Python, not Perl, is the preferred language for scripting on its smartphone platforms. The availability of a Python implementation for mobile phones is part of a broader plan, including a JVM-based BASIC interpreter."
However, the Register article linked says that Perl is being considered, it's just that Python is being looked at as the primary language.
I wouldn't trust their pearls, either. Blade Leader writes "OCZ has issued a recall of OCZ Ultra 2 thermal paste after the Overclockers.com article on their lack of silver content. They blame the lack on their supplier, and claim they will be pursuing legal action."
A piece of history (or at least a piece of somethin' ...) Artemis writes "Searching along E-Bay and MikeRoweSoft.com I noticed that Mike Rowe has decided to sell the Microsoft Cease-and-Desist Letters and WIPO book he received on E-Bay. He is selling the WIPO book with the 25-page letter received from Microsoft's lawyers on January 14/2004.This inch-thick book contains copies of web pages, registrations, trade marks, other WIPO cases, emails between me and Microsoft's lawyers and much more. There are 27 annexes filled with information. This package also comes with the 25-page complaint transmittal coversheet that was sent with the inch-thick book."
What's wrong with gunzip, tar? whitefox writes "CNet News is reporting that PKWare & WinZip have settled their differences and will maintain Zip file compatibility for the foreseeable future with each supporting the other's security extensions. In addition, PKWare will include its SecureZip in the code it licenses to other software makers. This is good news in deed for users and developers alike!"
Orkut (Score:3, Interesting)
No-one I know has joined yet and I've not heard much on the net so are there really any members or is it just another conspiracy theory - ie you think it's good therefore you want to join?!?
Re:Orkut (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Orkut (Score:5, Funny)
No, I have real friends.
Re:Orkut (Score:5, Funny)
-
The text of my Orkut invite (Score:5, Interesting)
And, to get philosophical -- is it really possible to meet people online? Can you really have "met" somebody ... whom you've never met before???! I just don't get the point of these "friend networks," at all.
Re:The text of my Orkut invite (Score:2)
I'll PayPal You $1 If You Invite Me... (Score:5, Funny)
It will make my Friday. I'd buy that for a dollar!
Re:The text of my Orkut invite (Score:2)
Nope.
What does it get me?
Precious little, in truth.
Since it's Google, I guess we're all assuming it won't land us on anybody's spam lists,
Speak for yourself, pal, whilst I go about my usual business of assuming the worst, spam being so far down on my list of Bad Things, that I can hardly see it. The Government must surely be licking its chops in anticipation of getting its hands on some of this stuff one fine day when it decides it really needs it. Neither shall we discount the inevitable eventual screw ups that allow this data to be hacked, stolen, or just blundered away on the hard drives of machines that got scrapped.
but how can we be sure?
We can't.
Is there any way to back our information out of the system if we decide it's all a pointless waste of time
Nope.
(or worse -- a scam)?
Or worse, something worse. Much much worse.
Re:The text of my Orkut invite (Score:2)
Short answer: yes.
Longer answer: I've never really formed a "friendship" with someone online except in the context of games. First it was when I used to hang out on the Zone (now the MSN Gaming Zone... I was young, and didn't know Microsoft was evil) and I became friends with someone my age and gender in Finland. We finally met up in Denmark when I was on that side of the world, and had a great time hanging out together. She's come to visit a couple times (including for my wedding) though I have yet to go visit her. But I felt like we "knew" each other to a certain extent before we met up, and we did share a hotel room and stuff.
Since then, I've met lots of folks in MMOGs, and there were three of those at my wedding too
I just don't get the point of these "friend networks," at all.
I didn't either. A friend invited me to Friendster because he was feeling inadequate having so few contacts. But then poking around, the "interests" link found me a random person who was also interested in transportation. On impulse I sent him a message, and we wrote back and forth a few times. I now have a broader idea of who out there is interested in transit, the sorts of things they do, and a semi-useful contact in Boston if I'm ever looking for interface designers who understand transit (and hey, given that I'm going into transportation planning, it could definitely happen).
It's a bit less anonymous than randomly searching the web, because you know someone who knows someone who knows them. It seems to work nicely.
Re:The text of my Orkut invite (Score:2)
Re:Orkut (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Orkut (Score:2)
Re:Orkut (Score:2, Funny)
What's the point? (Score:2)
Re:Orkut (Score:3, Interesting)
Looking over his shoulder, I noticed that many people on the service seem to be in their 30s. That seems older than the normal "let's meet on the Internet" crowd, or am I mistaken?
Re:Orkut (Score:3)
i'll invite whomever wants in (Score:2, Informative)
Re: Orkut (Score:2)
Well Slashdot has certainly been giving it coverage. Are you sure the conspiracy you are talking about isn't betwix the editors here and Orkut? Or is all the attention just over the Google connection? Hmmm. A plot is surely afoot!
==============
Re:Orkut (Score:2)
No Stranegberry content in Anonymous Joe's link (Score:3, Informative)
What about infozip? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What about infozip? (Score:3, Interesting)
De-facto standards and proprietary standards get started becuase no one has an alternative. If an open standard is created, I'm sure users and the market will prefer that one.
The best time to make such an open standard is before any proprietary one has a chance to get a strong foot hold.
Re:What about infozip? (Score:5, Informative)
WinZip's AES encryption is documented here [winzip.com]. PKWare's format is apparently proprietary.
So who seeds Orkut (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be interesting to see what the demographic of the initial seed population was - and to see whether that influenced the community over time... As any fule know, the initial conditions can have a profound impact on any time-dependent phenomena
Simon
Re:So who seeds Orkut (Score:2)
Re:So who seeds Orkut (Score:2)
But hey, I could be wrong. That's where my money is, though. Anyway, somebody invite me. I want to share my bad ass music interests and engage in enlightened conversations with.. uh.. internet people. *smacks irc* DOWN BOY!
Re:So who seeds Orkut (Score:2)
Re:So who seeds Orkut (Score:2)
I mean, if Google is netting millions in their shiney new method, kudos. The FOAF-factor going on here is interesting, but I'm guessing this is going to be a wash-out into simple oblivion any day now, because FOAFs are interesting "Oh, you know monkeyspanker as well!?" but it doesn't carry that far.
If people are open to meeting online, then personals, chat, IRC, blogs, BBS's, Listservs, meetups, clans, MMPORGs, user groups, and the myriads of marketing based events (conventions, openings, book signings, political events) are already a enough? NO! We must also jump into this! well, there's plenty of chatheads to partition into little camps, so away it goes...
Holy cow, so now can I connect my Friendster people to my Orkut people? OH no! Bleed over! Suddenly, we've mapped a lot of spurious relationships. A buddy told me to sign into Friendster, so I did. I wrote a pithy opinion and never went back. At a certain point, it's akin to organizing your photos over and over.
Re:So who seeds Orkut (Score:2)
That's the only thing I've actually done with Friendster. Oh, one person found me from high school with it, but I didn't particularly want to be found by them. lol.
Re:So who seeds Orkut (Score:5, Interesting)
I was once solicited, directly from the salesfloor of my then employer ( my customer was a sales manager who I impressed), to work in sales for a major international insurance agency.
Upon the formal application I was turned down for employment (thank God).
Why? Because I'm not a joiner. I didn't belong to fraternity, Elks Lodge, Country Club, The Rotary, what have you.
Thus I didn't have, in their eyes, a ready pool of people the "invite' to purchase insurance. My abilites and professionalism as a salesman were completely irellevant to them.
Does that shed any light on your curiosity?
KFG
Re:So who seeds Orkut (Score:3, Insightful)
The major problem with hiring people is that it is typically a long term investment with a good deal of commitment on the part of the employer. For obvious reasons, there is an extreme benefit in determining the qualifications of a candidate before hiring. Despite all best efforts in interviews and resumes, it really isn't possible to gauge a candidate very accurately except to weed out the most incompetent. Even if someone isn't up to par, they can fake it in an interview long enough to look better than another candidate that just can't deliver a good sales pitch at interview time. Social networking provides the applicant credibility, and provides the employer better accountability ('Jim recommended him, so Jim has ultimate responsibility').
Of course, further benefits include lower startup time for a new employee and, over time, increased morale and teamwork, the foundation of which was already partially built off of company time before even the first day. Someone coming into work with a few familiar faces will tend to hit the ground running better, being less timid about getting starting advice and knowing a comfortable person to ask about things as they start running. Even without asking questions, the closer contact allows the existing employ to detect problems long before they would have been seen with a stranger.
So yes, to those without the networks, it is really unfair, and it is unfair when you build a really nice social network only to have it shattered by a site shutdown (both have been my situation), but it does increase candidate review reliability overall and increase net productivity.
All that said, I think this should go out the window in the sales/marketing world. The best evaluation is the pitch they throw for themselves in a short term. If a guy can sell you on taking him for a job over other candidates, I can't imagine a better qualification for that line of work...
Re:So who seeds Orkut (Score:2)
Want an invite? Email me at dojothemouse@mac.com
Re:Orkut has no focus (Score:2)
Re:Orkut has no focus (Score:3, Funny)
Oh, you're not fooling us, Mr. Ashcroft!
dojothemouse@mac.com
And neither are you, Michael Eisner!!
Am I the only one... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:3, Interesting)
Snorks, not Smurfs. (Score:2)
Is a "copy" the same as a "duplicate original"? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Is a "copy" the same as a "duplicate original"? (Score:2)
Re:Is a "copy" the same as a "duplicate original"? (Score:2, Insightful)
If the bidding doubles a couple times, he'll be making more than the $10,000 he wanted in the first place. Hmm, maybe in 30 years, he'll buy them?
think of it this way (Score:2)
High ebay bid (Score:2, Informative)
Business plan (Score:2)
2) Get sent a cease-and-desist letter.
3) Sell it on E-bay.
4) PROFIT!
thoughts (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you ever tried to extract a single file from a gzip'ed tar archive? It's not possible without unpacking everything and throwing away the bits that you don't want.
Nokia to port Python to Mobiles, not Perl
Yay! This makes *much* more sense. Python rocks and is perfectly suited for portable devices on small devices, hence the successful PalmOS port.
Orkut - Funny name, well-executed idea.
Urm.. it's been a very badly executed idea if they've had to shut it down already because of hacking. Then there are the disgruntled reports from users that think it's completely pointless. It's only popular because Google is - they could have sneezed and everybody would have noticed.
Re:thoughts (Score:2)
Why exactly is python "perfectly suited" for portable devices? I recently stopped running gDesklets on my desktop because the python interpreter consumed somewhere between 22-26MB of ram and a constant 15% of CPU cycles just for the one app... Granted the CPU number is a bit misleading b/c it's a pII 400, but you aren't going to get a whole lot more horsepower than that on a portable device.
So long story short, if thats typical of python apps I'd say they're terribly suited for small devices.
Re:thoughts (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:thoughts (Score:2)
Extracting from .tar.gz (Score:2)
What's wrong with:
to extract a file, or
if you want to view it?
it is much slower (Score:2, Interesting)
Theoretically, with the right vfs interface, you could mount a
The main thing
Basically, the trade-off is size (tar.gz/bz2) vs. flexibility/speed (zip).
Re:thoughts (Score:2, Informative)
that does unpack everything only to throw away all but the file you wanted, though. try unpacking only the middle-most file in the kernel source tarball, see how long it takes.
of course, zip has to put up with (very marginally) worse compression because each file is compressed individually to solve this problem. also, tarballs can be treated as streams since all the metadata is interleaved in with the files - a zip has all the directory data in dedicated portions of the file, which means you might have to seek backwards in certain situations. that, of course, is not always possible in some of the situations where a tarball will still work for ya.
Re:thoughts (Score:5, Informative)
that does unpack everything only to throw away all but the file you wanted,
Well, actually it only unpacks the stuff that comes before the file in the archive. If the file in question is near the top, most of the archive is not unpacked.
Re:thoughts (Score:3, Informative)
tar made the assumption that it was sending/receiving it's data from a sequential access device, not a random access one. This assumption heavily influenced the file format. So even on a random access device, it still has to slog through the preceeding data to get what it wants. But it has some nice advantages for data recovery. If you lose half the tape, you can still get the files back on the part you have. It doesn't matter if you only have the first half, the last half, or the middle half. As long as the complete file exist on a piece of tape you have, you can get that file back.
Because of this, tar won't even exit early if you only want one file and it's at the beginning of the archive.
Watch:
crlewis@localhost % time tar tvf test1.tar
-rw-r--r-- clewis/users 439 2004-01-13 13:41:20 win2000Serv.cfg.bz2
-rw-r--r-- clewis/users 14735 2004-01-13 13:41:20 win2000Serv.log.bz2
-rw-r--r-- clewis/users 1006 2004-01-13 13:41:20 win2000Serv.nvram.bz2
-rw-r--r-- clewis/users 342346881 2004-01-13 14:09:11 win2000Serv.vmdk.bz2
0.080u 2.280s 0:13.95 16.9% 0+0k 0+0io 191pf+0w
crlewis@localhost % time tar tvf test2.tar
-rw-r--r-- clewis/users 342346881 2004-01-13 14:09:11 win2000Serv.vmdk.bz2
-rw-r--r-- clewis/users 439 2004-01-13 13:41:20 win2000Serv.cfg.bz2
-rw-r--r-- clewis/users 14735 2004-01-13 13:41:20 win2000Serv.log.bz2
-rw-r--r-- clewis/users 1006 2004-01-13 13:41:20 win2000Serv.nvram.bz2
0.170u 2.070s 0:13.59 16.4% 0+0k 0+0io 191pf+0w
clewis@localhost % time tar xvf test1.tar win2000Serv.cfg.bz2
win2000Serv.cfg.bz2
0.170u 1.940s 0:14.54 14.5% 0+0k 0+0io 250pf+0w
clewis@localhost % time tar xvf test2.tar win2000Serv.cfg.bz2
win2000Serv.cfg.bz2
0.160u 1.970s 0:12.31 17.3% 0+0k 0+0io 250pf+0w
It takes just as long to extract a single file from the beginning or end of the archive, and they both take the same amount of time as processing the whole archive. Now, extracting the whole archive is much slower, because that big file takes a lot of bidirectional Disk I/O, but it's the same time whether it's at the begin or the end.
Now watch this, we'll "Lose" the first 15KBytes, and everything after 30KBytes.
clewis@localhost % dd if=./test1.tar bs=1k skip=15 of=test1.1.tar
clewis@localhost % ls -la test1.1.tar
-rw-r--r-- 1 clewis users 15360 Jan 29 17:53 test1.1.tar
clewis@localhost % time tar tvf
tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Skipping to next header
-rw-r--r-- clewis/users 1006 2004-01-13 13:41:20 win2000Serv.nvram.bz2
-rw-r--r-- clewis/users 342346881 2004-01-13 14:09:11 win2000Serv.vmdk.bz2
tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
0.010u 0.000s 0:00.03 33.3% 0+0k 0+0io 195pf+0w
I still got back the data that existed in the part that was saved. win2000Serv.vmdk.bz2 is corrupt, but win2000Serv.nvram.bz2 is fine.
Re:thoughts (Score:2, Informative)
Did Google hit the social network bulls-eye? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Did Google hit the social network bulls-eye? (Score:2)
Re:Did Google hit the social network bulls-eye? (Score:3, Funny)
Bytecode my interpreter! (Score:3, Funny)
I need to go write a JVM in BASIC now (if it hasn't been done already) so that when I have kids, they can see what games under 6000fps look like.
Damn that silver... or lack of it (Score:2, Insightful)
Stupid Guy Asks... (Score:2)
What is XSS (Cross-Site Scripting), and what about it can be used to compromise site security?
Schwab
Re:Stupid Guy Asks... (Score:3, Insightful)
Cross-site scripting is when you create a form on your web page which targets a page on another site. An example of cross-site scripting used appropriately is when you insert a Google search box on your page. The search form sends the query to Google, not your site, so it's cross-site.
The problem comes when people create deceptive forms that get the user to do bad things, or create forms that blatently allow the user to do something they shouldn't.
Someone can easily post links and more information and make some karma off of this post...
Re:Stupid Guy Asks... (Score:3, Informative)
What is Cross Site Scripting" [cgisecurity.com]
Google and cross-site scripting (Score:4, Interesting)
As amazing as it sounds, Google don't really pay that much attention to web technologies. They may have some pretty impressive clustering, database and analysis technologies, but the way they apply web technologies such as HTML and HTTP is lacking.
For a start-off, their website isn't even valid HTML. If they moved some of the presentation details to CSS, they could lop a massive chunk of bandwidth off their bill and take some of the load off their servers and speed up access to their site. I don't know what they are paying at the moment, but it's bound to be significant.
Their spidering technologies only half implement HTTP. For instance, they ignore the content-type header, favouring the file extension instead. The only other software that I have heard of being that broken in terms of HTTP is Internet Explorer.
Their ranking algorithms pay a little attention to the HTML structure (e.g. they rank keywords in <h1> elements highly), but then they comlpetely ignore other significant markup, or screw it up, like definition lists.
So they didn't understand the rules for escaping special characters in HTML. It doesn't come as a surprise, cross-site scripting attacks bite many people who haven't paid attention to the HTML specifications.
It's a shame, because so many people bend over backwards to get ranked highly in Google, that if Google actually tried to use HTML and HTTP properly, it would cause loads of people to write higher-quality HTML overnight.
Re:Google and cross-site scripting (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, have you actually _looked_ at the returned HTML from a Google search? It does use CSS within the returned page (see the style section), and it's very compact CSS and HTML.
The rest of their site has some "potential inefficiences" that could be corrected, but keep in mind that probably more than 99% of Google's traffic is search traffic. Amdahl's law - optimize the part that slows you down the most, not the little corner cases. Google's search results pages are very efficient.
Oh, and re the orkut thread, it was seeded with Orkut's friends and coworkers at Google, pretty much. The social network is pretty obvious in the way it grows out from there - stanford, google, bay area, computer science, geek schools, other schools, general population.
Re:Google and cross-site scripting (Score:3, Insightful)
Wake me up when the girls arrive.
-- YLFIRe:Google and cross-site scripting (Score:2)
Second, have you actually _looked_ at the returned HTML from a Google search? It does use CSS within the returned page (see the style section), and it's very compact CSS and HTML.
There are a few oddities in there, though - a lot of <span class=f><font size=-1>blah</font></span> type stuff, where they could have just put the font size into the CSS styling of the span class. My verdict: good, but could do better.
Re:Google and cross-site scripting (Score:3, Insightful)
they ignore the content-type header, favouring the file extension instead.
Now, wait a minute. Do they actually IGNORE the header, or do they merely have it take less precedence than the extension? Those aren't the same thing. (In other words, in cases where the file extension isn't helpful, do they drop back to the content-type?) If so, that's not google's fault. They're tring to archive the web as it is actually used in practice, by people who are on average, ignorant of the standards. There are a lot of files out there where the content-type is going to be some generic term that only tells you, "yup, it's a binary file alright", or worse, are actually downright wrong. Given that these mistakes are everywhere out there, it might be that google decided they would get a more accurate database if they let the file extensions take precedent, as wrong as that may be from a conceptual standpoint (and very unfair, too - if my file ends in
But anyway, the choice to let extension take precedence might be their only option. If most of the internet sites out there are doing it the wrong way, google has to aquiese and go along with that in order to have a more accurate database.
Strange irony (Score:4, Interesting)
Netflix, DRM, and Paranoia (Score:4, Insightful)
As the Register article suggests, preventing piracy with DRM would be one of the concerns if Netflix were to launch an online video-on-demand service. But let's think about this for a minute. People can already rent the physical DVDs and rip them to a digital format. Is making the files available for direct download any more dangerous?
In fact, it's less dangerous, if anything. If you rip a generic DVD and share it on Kazaa, etc., it's completely untraceable back to you -- anyone could have ripped that DVD. However, an online video-on-demand service could embed some sort of unique watermark in the file to identify the customer, so that they could be held responsible for any illegal copying (as with the recent Oscar screener fiasco).
In their fear of online piracy, the MPAA/RIAA/etc. have forgotten that
Cheers,
IT
A Fair Deal... (Score:5, Funny)
Think about it - can you afford not to invite the Fnkmaster into your Orkut family? I didn't think so... don't be afraid... push that invite button...
So much for the exclusivity of Orkut... (Score:4, Interesting)
E-Bay [ebay.com] and can be had quite inexpensively, it would appear.
A Simple Plan (Score:2, Funny)
2. Sell cease and desist on Ebay
3. ???
4. Profit!
I haven't seen one dev comment on zip yet (Score:2)
Anyways..
alt.binaries.sounds.karaoke..
SYSNOPSIS
I've been getting into karaoke on the PC for the last year or so. I'm going to explain it for the benifit of the folks that don't know what im talking about.
Karaoke has a special format called CDG. It's some weird kind of subcode in the audio data that can be read by compatible CD drives. The CDG data is used to display the lyrics on screen, sort of like a 320x240 BMP slide show, but with 64 pallete cyclable colors.
They subcoded it so you could put a CD in a normal player and still get sound (without the lyrics/pictures)
Well fast forward to 10 years past CDG creation. Some clever people figured out how to not just rip the audio data, but the CDG data as well. In order to play MP3+G karaoke you need 2 things, a
Unfortunatly the CDG files are very large. Mostly it's just redundant data, so zipping it results in very nice compression. To make it easier on your fat table, you put the
So basically, there's all these karaoke zip files being created with 2 or 3 different versions of zip, all incompatible with one another.
I wrote a crappy, lame, yes lame, really fucking lame VB bastardization for unzipping these files to a temp directory, and cue'ing the
Until I run into those zip compatibilty errors. My winamp ends up with "Pkzip 2.1 file, PKzip 2.0 support only" showing up in it's playlist instead of the karaoke song I was hoping for.
Anyways, I just wanted to make a on topic post, and the only thing I can say about it other than explaining my situation is to say "THIS IS ANNOYING AS HELL!" Why can't the 2 zip giants get along?
Re:Selling legal documents? (Score:3, Informative)
-Kilka
two copies (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Slow week then. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Slow week then. (Score:2)
Re:Zip is old school (Score:2)
Solid vs. segmented archives (Score:5, Informative)
The .tar.gz and .tar.bz2 formats are "solid" archives: they enchain the files into a single archive, the .tar file, and then compress that as a whole. This allows them to achieve better compression because they can compress redundancies between files as well as within them. Zip, OTOH, is what I call a "segmented" archive: the files are individually compressed and the compressed images are enchained.
Solid archives can be smaller than segmented, but are more difficult to manipulate after the fact:
- To extract a single file from a solid archive, you have to read everything in the archive, at least up to the file you're extracting. A zip file has a directory at the end that quickly locates the desired file.
- To add, delete, or replace files in a preexisting archive, you have to decompress the whole thing, manipulate the files, and then compress the whole thing again. It can be done, but it's slow and can take up lots of disk space. Zip can do these things directly, leaving unaffected files unchanged.
- Finally, solid archives are more fragile than segmented ones. If a solid archive is damaged, everything from the point of the damage onward is lost. With zip, however, only the files at the damaged portion are lost, and subsequent files are still recoverable.
IIRC RAR can generate either a solid or a segmented archive.Zip, furthermore, has a feature that can preserve arbitrary file metadata such as NTFS file permissions. Tar, OTOH, is meant for Unix, and can only preserve metadata relating to Unix.
There's no technical reason that you couldn't create a .zip.gz or .zip.bz2 file, getting a solid archive that preserves all the metadata, but alas, you'd probably confuse most people doing that :-(
Re:Zip is old school (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Zip is old school (Score:3, Interesting)
I imagine that someone still has a working version of it, although I've long since convered everything to ZIP for doing archives. (Might switch to BZip2, might not...)
Frankly, the "secure archive" in PkZip/WinZip is usless to me because I'd rather use an open-source tool like GPG to encrypt.
Re:Zip is old school (Score:2)
Here's a quick dir *.exe on E:\compression
[snip: 26 decompression programs]
You're my hero!
Even back in the slow-downloading BBS days, you were ready to uncompress any porno that came your way!
Forget Al Gore! It's visionaries like you who created teh IntarWeb!
Re:Zip is old school (Score:3, Funny)
Argh, ACE was the worst! Simply because there was no need for it. RAR already existed to distribute multipart binaries (i.e. warez). But for a while it was the case that any warez you would download would consist of ZIP files inside RAR files inside ACE files. WTF?
These days I prefer Apple's DMG.
Re:Zip is old school (Score:2, Informative)
There was, however, the ZIP support that was added to XP, but that support seemed (at least to me) limited.
Re:Zip is old school (Score:2)
LK
Re:Zip is old school (Score:2)
For what it's worth, this will kill that "feature" in XP.
1. Select Run from the Start menu and enter
regsvr32
2. Click OK.
3. Restart the computer.
To un-kill XP's zip support:
1. Select Run from the Start menu and enter
regsvr32 %windir%\system32\zipfldr.dll
2. Click OK.
3. Restart the computer.
This originated with someone named "Larry" and forwarded to me, I don't know who "Larry" is.
Re:Zip is old school (Score:2)
PowerDesk can do exactly what you want: zip files (to arbitrary recursion depths) are treated as directories with drag and drag and so forth implemented as unseen temporary files.
If I recall correctly, however, it does have some of the performance problems you mention.
Still, it works pretty well, but I no longer use it because it looks ugly and I find PowerDesk's splash screen too annoying.
Re:Zip is old school (Score:2)
Re:Zip (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Zip (Score:3, Informative)
I'll second this. Since I started using it, 7z has become my archival tool of choice. Even for creating plain old
And, 7z exists as open source! Can't go wrong with that (unless you work for SCO).
One complaint, though, its GUI really sucks (or at least the last time I reinstalled it did, I haven't checked for a new one in a while). They need to make it behave more like the standard Windows Explorer view (not that I think the world of Windows Explorer, but on a 'doze system, for the most part you can count on "things having to do with files" behaving like it, by default)... Just the standard drag-n-drop behavior would make it 10x easier. But, I use it mostly from the command line anyway (Try doing that with WinZip), so the GUI doesn't bother me all that much.
Re:Zip (Score:4, Informative)
by going to http://www.winzip.com/wzcline.htm you can add command line support to WINZip.
Not trying to to be a jerk, just wanting to inform people who need to use it (Corporate policies... ewww)
Re:Zip (Score:2)
Not at all! Thank you for that link.
Although I personally have switched to 7z for almost everything, having more tools available for scripting never hurts. And as you mention, in case of a corporate policy restricting people to WZ, those command-line tools may seem like a blessing (I know I would have loved them at my previous job).
Re:Zip (Score:3, Interesting)
Apparently it works through wine, but nobody's thought enough of the format to actually port it, despite the windows code being open.
Re:When last I checked... (Score:2)
Both fair points, although for a lossy transmission medium, you can use PAR entirely separate from RAR. They do integrate well, but actually don't need to go together. You can PAR a set of ZIPs or 7Zs just as well as a set of RARs.
Re:Zip (Score:2)
I'll check out your link though, because I do need extra features occasionally. Thanks
Re:Zip (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, take your computer, unplug it, place it back into the box it was delivered in, and ship it back to the factory.
Re:Hum... (Score:2, Informative)
Slashback is a general summary of the last few days/weeks top stories that have a followup. Kinda like the update tag on FARK.com, but compressed into one stories heading.
Re:Hum... (Score:4, Funny)
"Slashback tonight brings you updates and corrections from recent and ongoing stories..."
That's all it is.
Re:Invitation (Score:2)
Ooo me too?
-Tim
Re:$10,000+ for the cease and desist!?! (Score:2)
I'm not sure what will become worthless first...the WIPO book or SCO stock but either way this just has to be the biggest waste of money I've ever seen!
I guess YANAL then. Bloodsuckers are the kind that has disposable income and interest in that sort of stuff.
Or well funded pranksters...It'd be kind of fun to send that to your domain-owing friend and watch him freak : )
Re:Friendster fights back (Score:2)
I had a completely legit profile (my only one!), with 19 friends (all real people!), and a completed profile.
After two months of using it, one day I log in, and its gone. My profile still exists, but only the most basic information. All 19 friends were gone, all my profile information, all my personal messages, EVERYTHING - gone.
So I emailed for support, and a form letter response indicated that "It wasnt a virus, nor could Friendster" infect my computer. WTH?
I replied to it, but never heard back.
Two months later, several friends report no problems with it, but my account has yet to be restored. It's very odd. I even wrote to feedback, but no response yet.
Not a great way to build 'trust' on a social network.