The day YouTube stops me from watching videos with an ad blocker on is the day I start ripping every single godsdamned video I wanna watch on youtube with yt-dlp and watching them the mother-fuck-offline lol.
this is actually a good idea for preservation efforts. leaving such a huge library of videos that has been around since the modern internets founding with no backups feels dangerous because it is at the mercy of a for profit company which at any time can choose to just nuke their archives.
see what is currently happening with reddit many users are overwriting their comments which (good fuck reddit fir trying to make money from user provided free content then going around and charging the people that maintain the platform) but its also sad to see because now this huge repository of solutions or anecdotes of real issues that affect or have effected people will soon be gone.
!datahoarder and other similar communities might be of interest, they do archiving projects like this.
I saw a complete archive of everything posted to Reddit on one of the datahoarder communities as well, it'll have copies of all those deleted and overwritten comments tucked away in there for future recovery.
Today, Microsoft says that Midnight Blizzard is using secrets found in the stolen data to gain access to some of the company's systems and source code repositories in recent weeks.
Ah how I wish someone would delete the IRS’ records and backups 🥰
But on a relevant note, that is major! Hitting Russia in the wallet is going to hurt. The morale among the civilian population can get worse under this too.
I’m actually wondering how many Russian billionaires are celebrating today that the tax department has lost the records of all the tax bills they haven’t paid.
I bet a ton are. And probably not for current years but past years of making mistakes, whether on purpose or not are likely now gone and they effectively have a clean record.
But I wonder if they had anyone making payments. How are they going to know their balance? This is assuming their tax structure is similar to what the US has.
It could benefit a lot of people from all classes. But could also create a lot of havoc when the government demands to be paid and the people don’t agree with the numbers being demanded.
Optimistically, whatever tax is not getting paid, it converts to money not being spent to continue the war. Realistically I would expect the government to cut every other expense but the war, so this is not going to influence the war short-term :(
The thread starter is probably right about civilians’ morale, cause they are going to be sucked dry of any money even faster with this kind of fuck-up from government
BitTorrent works in chunks basically, or can download it nonlinearly. Downloading from a site in a basic way gets the file from start to finish, the download manager can let you stop it and pick up where you left off, as long as the server you’re getting the file from is configured to allow it.
Back in the day when most stuff was on FTP and HTTP and your connection was crap and could drop at any time, you’d use a download manager to smooth things along. It could resume downloads when connection dropped, it could keep a download going for days on end and resume as needed, and it could abusing the bandwitdh limitations of the source site by using multiple parallel connections that pulled on different file chunks. In some ways it was very similar to how we use BT today.
It was also useful to keep a history of stuff you’d downloaded in case you needed it again, manage the associated files etc.
and it could abusing the bandwitdh limitations of the source site by using multiple parallel connections that pulled on different file chunks
Also for files which had multiple different mirror sites you could download chunks from multiple mirrors concurrently which would allow you to max out your bandwidth even if individual mirrors were limiting download speeds.
Back in the 2000s, browsers were really bad at downloading big things over slow connections since they couldn’t resume, a brief disconnect could destroy hours of progress. But I don’t think you need this anymore.
This is very upsetting to me–more as a point of principle than in fact–but I appreciate that it doesn’t bother younger generations at all. I just had a small argument with my 11 year old about how not-a-big-deal-who-cares this is, and it basically ended with us agreeing to disagree since it’ll be his problem and his kids’ problem.
And the problem is normalizing the notion that an OS doesn’t need to include a non-subscription word processor. The entire point of this move is to shift the OS Overton Window in favor of consumers accepting and expecting that features like word processors, spreadsheets, etc., should be installed separately and paid for on a subscription basis despite previous iterations of the same software being feature complete on install and purchased at a set, non-recurring fee.
WordPad hasn’t been anybody’s first choice for a word processor in years, but it was included with Windows and did the bare minimum for unsophisticated users. Now we’re entering an era in which those users will as a matter of course buy off-the-shelf computers that come pre-installed without WordPad, but rather with a trial of Office Fuck-You-Pay-Me Edition. Those users may well discover that after their first six months with their new computer (that has made Microsoft more money selling their data than they paid for it), they suddenly get a pop-up informing them that their trial is up and MS wants $99.99 to release the documents they’re holding hostage.
It’s a step backwards for consumers in general, so even for the sophisticated of us who are least likely to be personally affected by this change, there’s definitely cause for alarm.
Google Docs is free and has basically become the standard word processor for the “unsophisticated users” you’re worried about. It essentially comes with your OS because you only need a browser to use it.
it still has strings attached, its not truly “free”. heck, google won’t let it be word pad had no ties to Microsoft once it was given to you. everything else but LibreOffice and some others still have its creator’s ties.
Making things in Google Docs is fine, but last I checked Google Docs just sucked at opening anything that wasn’t already a GDoc. LibreOffice Writer sometimes has formatting errors opening Word Docs, but it does a miles better job than Google Docs.
Also, I hate how normalized everything using the cloud (aka “Someone Else’s Hard Drive”) for no reason is.
Well to be fair to Google (urgh, that hurt to write) that’s by design, and LO doing so well at it is due to investing a lot of engineering time on it. Basically MS released an open standard for office documents, but refuses to use this open standard themselves, and instead keeps using an ever evolving “transitional” version of their standard that isn’t made public.
The cost of the full Mac apps and OS is in the cost of the hardware. At least it’s one upfront cost. Surely the way windows is going can’t be popular or sustainable.
piracy theme intensifies
Office is one of the easiest things to pirate. It 1. is very popular 2. has an official mass-activation way that can be easily exploited. I suspect we may have a spy in there
Or, y'know, just use LibreOffice with the tabs setting and contextual groups if you can afford experimental features
or if you still hate the UI just use WPS instead, who cares that it's awful and from China you don't have to pay
Also, why would you even get Word or PowerPoint on macOS?? Excel I understand but these two??
Let me clarify what I meant. I am saying that we pay for the OS which includes applications on both Mac and Windows. Only Mac gives us a free suite of office applications.
I’d like to normalize the notion that an OS shouldn’t include any application software except for a browser you can use to install other things. Let people pick what they want to use and install it themselves.
I think a file manager, text editor and command prompt are pretty essential too. And when you’ve added those, where exactly is the limit where it becomes “application software”?
Better yet, the OS should just include a desktop environment with simple utilities and a package manager to install the applications you want. It will make users less likely to run into malware while searching for the programs in the web
I was talking more in the lines of taking away most of the windows bloat. If someone wants to install their own desktop environment they will most likely go down the linux path.
We’re talking about Windows here, where the desktop environment is too thoroughly intertwined with the rest of the OS to ever remove it. The kind of terminal emulator environment that Linux boots into doesn’t even exist in versions of Windows that have been sold after the early 2000s.
I think it’s worth separating the two related but distinct concepts of what is a part of the operating system itself (for example, the actual file manager) and what is pre-installed or bundled with the operating system (games like Minesweeper).
I agree with you that a rich text editor definitely shouldn’t be part of the OS. But should it be a bundled part that ships with the desktop environment, the way Windows/MacOS/Android/iOS/ChromeOS all come with photo library software, basic image editors, media players, browser, email client, etc.? These applications aren’t strictly necessary to use or maintain the system itself, so maybe they shouldn’t have some kind of privileged use of the OS’s functionality, but there’s no harm in bundling in the installation defaults.
I don’t think a rich text editor is an important enough function to necessarily be preinstalled with the OS, but I can see an argument, at least. There’s a reason why Windows shipped with one since the beginning, and why MacOS and KDE and Gnome each have a default that very few people actually use regularly.
Wasn’t there an anti trust or monopoly suite against Microsoft for bundled IE back in the day? Funny how times change, though I agree it’s not easy to get a preferred browser without one. Mean it never was overly simple but they were on so many CDs mailed out back then. Think it has to do with some IE and Windows integration too so not just cause they bundled it.
The problem with IE4 is that it was designed in such a way that it was deeply integrated into the operating system, such that it could not be uninstalled.
It's completely reasonable now to ship an operating system without a browser, as long as there's some kind of "app store" or "package manager" through which a user can install whatever browser they want (provided it's available through said store, of course).
Tbh I use Notepad way more than anything for note making.
If it needs to be formatted, OneNote is free to use and can be saved in any cloud (if there is a shortcut like OneDrive or Dropbox in the Windows explorer)
If it needs to be free and not very sophisticated, I’d look around for a markdown based editor.
If all of that fails, I will use Word.
Never used Wordpad in 15 years (of 24 years of existence) except while trying to open word but Windows suggesting Wordpad first.
i use wordpad a lot for viewing docs (loads faster, uncluttered ui). occasionally writing them... and more than once instead of notepad for a text file (on a system without a notepad alternative available) because i needed more features.
i have a few clients that use wordpad as their 'word processor', lack of spelling check be damned.
microsoft must have run out of excuses for specifically not including one in it, seeing how recent windows has spell check baked-in to the os itself. so instead of losing a few dozen sales of office home and student or 365 by making wordpad just a little bit better for those who use it, they're gonna be the assholes and take it out completely and push everyone to the damn cloud app or a 365 sub. fk 'em.
It has it’s uses. Not for me but some are definitely need it. Problem is, how much effort is it to keep it around vs how much is it used realistically.
Best way forward would be to replace it with a completely different app like Word online but as an actual app lile Word Lite or something like that.
Likely scenario, honestly. I really don’t worry about it, though. Not to brag, but it doesn’t bother me. Understand, there is a solution. X marks the spot.
(Yeah, I know, that’s kind of stupid. But it seemed funny in my head.)
I used it for my damn resume because I didn’t have word, didn’t need office. I also liked it because when friends asked me to review a document I could open word documents with it, I would do that sometimes even when I had office because WordPad opened faster and I didn’t need perfect formatting.
I think it is safe to say that your 11 year old is factually wrong lol. But it is okay that they don’t understand how bad this is because the concept of how multiple businesses have switched to subscription based models even in places we wouldn’t expect, like a monthly subscription allowing already installed hardware in your car to actually function, cause it’s just 11 year Olds don’t have a great concept of bills and money at that level yet. I say wait for their first complaint of it as an adult and then put on your carefully choreographed and practiced “I told you so” dance
Okay kidding aside I think it is absolutely wonderful this is something you didn’t just have a conversation with your young kid about but that you had to agree to disagree, you sound like a fantastic parent who actually fosters a relationship with their kid. And probably only rarely says I told you so.
I disagree. I don’t think a rich text editor should be part of the OS as it’s not there to operate the computer. An OS should be the tools to run applications and manage your computer. There are a bunch of apps which are so small that it makes sense to include them - like a calculator and text editor, but everything else should be optional.
There should be an OS out there for you which doesn’t come with a rich text editor. [If there is ever a time to mention GNU+Linux in a MS thread then now is that time.] For most people however, not including it is a needless barrier to entry.
I get where you're coming from but I think you're overstating the impact in this day and age. If this had been 1995 it'd be a big deal. Now it's rediculously easy to install any alternative you like for free.
Libre Office is an entire free fully features office suite.
I'm less bothered about removing WordPad than I am about Microsoft advertising and pre-installing it's products in Windows - they force Edge on people, they push OneDrive and preinstall a preview of Office. That's the real problem - not losing WordPad.
At one point Anti-Trust / Anti-monopoly regulators globally punished Microsoft for pushing Internet Explorer to consumers and for a long time in Europe had to offer a choice of Browsers to download on new Windows installs. Now it's allowed to get away with abusing it's dominant position to force it's products on consumers.
A web browser is not a word processor no matter how much they tart it up. If the thing isn’t saving a file to my local drive that is in a common format It’s not worth putting your effort into.
So many kids are going to grow up not having the concept where data lives and what the failure modes are.
Does liber office make .docx files and export to pdf?
It does. It’s fine as a replacement for Word, but no one has an answer for Excel. LibreOffice Calc is fine for a basic spreadsheet, but Excel is in a completely different universe than Calc with anything beyond that.
To be fair though, Excel is in a completely different universe than literally any other competing product.
Sheets is capable enough for the average person but a business is always going to want to use Excel because it’s the industry standard.
I can’t remember the last time I actually needed a spreadsheet for anything other than looking at a bunch of tabular data, but I’m a programmer so I’m not the standard spreadsheet user.
JSON files that get committed to a git repo, obviously. They’re in a private repository in GitHub so that takes care of security and resiliency, two birds with one stone.
Nothing compares to excel. There are spreadsheets, and there is excel. The world runs on excel, and for a damn good reason. Also, excel runs the world, literally.
They don’t. Libre Office is maintained by a non-profit called The Document Foundation. They’re funded entirely by donations. I think they make enough to have some full time employees.
A lot of open source software is created by individuals or non-profits. The Mozilla foundation makes Firefox, for instance. They make money through donations and also Google pays them a ton of money to be the default search engine.
There are for profit companies that make or contribute to open source software. Such as Red Hat. They tend to make money by selling support for the software.
Because libre office is not compatible with many others. You can open it sure but there’s no guarantee that opening .doc or .docx will have broken formatting. Not good for those in the academia or workplace where formatting are strictly enforce.
Absolute bullshit. Microsoft moved to the Open Office document standard after they were forced to and Libre is renown for its ability to open Microsoft’s documents without issue. I have opened countless personally.
Do yourself a favour and get off the junk office suite that hasn’t received a functional update in the last 10 years that wasn’t to improve its rent charging capacity.
This is very upsetting to me–more as a point of principle than in fact–but I appreciate that it doesn’t bother younger generations at all.
I am in a support group with over 100 senior citizens in it. Getting a file with a *.rtf extension used to be a thing, but it hasn’t been a thing in years. I do get *.doc and *.docx files so they’re probably getting lured into Office like you said even before Wordpad is removed.
It’s too bad Linux isn’t more normalized. For those very simple users (and for the more sophisticated) Linux is probably much better than Windows at this point.
No ads, free software, updates can be very simple and stable, less security issues.
Fundamentally there's no need for the user/account that saves the backup somewhere to be able to read let alone change/delete it.
So ideally you have "write-only" credentials that can only append/add new files.
How exactly that is implemented depends on the tech. S3 and S3 compatible systems can often be configured that data straight up can't be deleted from a bucket at all.
I don’t know if it is the „correct“ way but I do it the other way around. I have a server and a backup server. Server user can‘t even see backup server but packs a backup, backup server pulls the data with read only access, main server deletes backup, done.
For an organisation hosting as many companies data as this one I'd expect automated tape at a minimum. Of course, if the attacker had the time to start messing with the tape that's lost as well but it's unlikely.
It depends what’s the pricing. For example ovh didn’t keep any extra backup when their datacenter took fire. But if a customer paid for backup, it was kept off-site and was recovered
It might be even pretending to be a big hosting company when they’re actually renting a dozen deds from a big player, much cheaper than maintaining a data center with 99.999% uptime
I never understood the appeal of paid programs. 7-Zip works equally well and is free and open source software. It integrates much nicer into File Explorer as well.
I agree that 7zip is great (albeit based in Russia, so not something I’m sure I want to support at the moment), but consider for a moment that winrar licencing is primarily aimed at businesses (which is why they don’t bother locking personal users out after the trial ends), and for that money you get a certain guarantee of functionality and stability over a long period of time.
There’s absolutely no guarantees that 7zip will continue to be developed, or that it will retain it’s current features and functionality - the developer can turn it into a Minesweeper clone if they feel like it, and there’s nothing a business can do but keep using an outdated and thus potentially dangerous version that will eventually become unusable.
You also get a certain level of customer service and corporate communication between the purchasing company and the production company to help resolve issues, which may not exist at all with the alternative.
It’s also not always wise to have your business rely heavily on a tool that only sees development through volunteer work by a limited number of disparate people that may come and go, and while I don’t know how large the volunteer base is that works on 7zip (it could be just the one guy, it could be a hundred people), to a company it’ll never feel as reliable an option as relying on a tool that sees development and maintenance through a paid, full time staff at an established legal entity company with an established reputation.
And speaking for a moment to that established company bit, consider that winrar’s company is based in Berlin, within the European Union and under it’s rules and laws, which is a far better proposition from a company’s standpoint than having to legally deal with an individual guy inside the Russian Federation, especially one that hasn’t actually sold your business a product at all.
Anyway, just a few potential thoughts for why tools that do the same job might be preferred by a business, sorry it got a bit long 😅
No, it isn’t! Especially if you want to edit files inside a .zip, which that tool doesn’t seem capable to do it, nor creatingmultiple individual files… Also, if you just want to browse a package to see what it’s inside, the GUI does a piss poor job showing you the files/folders.
… You can’t edit files inside a zip file. The program’s just hiding that it’s decompressing and decompressing the whole thing every time you change something.
Zip files are usually just another wrapper around DEFLATE, and compressing each block requires knowledge of the previous block’s compression (Part of LZ77). It’s a streaming format, not a sparse format.
If you edit a text file, it actually just creates a new file because inserting text in the middle means all of the text after changes position. I’d still call that editing an existing file rather than creating a new file based on the previous one plus some edits. The second description might be more technically accurate but it’s just unnecessary technical details because it’s effectively the first description.
Even going back to the original use of edit, editors would mark up books or articles and then a new copy would need to be created with those edits. I’m having trouble thinking of any cases where edit truly means “change something in place without making a new copy of it with the changes included”. I guess small edits with pencil or whiteout can sometimes work.
Your choices are basically “rewrite the entire file” or “leave the original file in place, do an append and try and hide the old file.”
Editing old data in most streaming file formats with inline metadata is basically impossible because they compact the data as much as possible and internally refer to offsets.
Appending is trivial, editing is very hard if not downright impossible.
7zip is FOSS, GPL license. Even if the author stops others can step in. Even if nobody does and it stops being actively developed you’ll still be able to extract your archives for the foreseeable future. You can still unpack ARC files from the 80s.
No, the fact that businesses pay for it for something of that guarantee despite there being free peer-alternatives means that it is a better guarantee.
When you see businesses electing to pay for something despite free alternatives, there is likely a reason (or a number of them). I've seen free tools go from active maintaining to completely dead in a single update due to the work needed to get it back up and operating with new environment-side changes.
Just because someone was born in Russia does not make them a specific type of person. Nobody chooses where or when they are born. 7-Zip has been for ages, and if something were to happen to it then im sure one of the dozen of forks around will take the role as the “main one”. However you are right, companies desire something predictable, stable. Which is why some companies like SUSE, Red Hat, etc. Manage to sell FOSS. in fact i believe some of these distros include p7zip, and they freeze it to a specific version, security updates and bug fixes are backported.
I like WinRAR for its built-in parity functionality. You can achieve similar results with 7-Zip using PAR2, but having it built right into WinRAR with two options (add a recovery record to each archive, or create separate recovery archives (basically what PAR2 does)) is so much more convenient.
WinRAR is like what…? 30-35 bucks? That’s per user, unlimited machines, lifetime license. More than fair I’d say.
WinRar decompresses directly to destination. All other I have tried does it to like c:/tmp (can probably change that though) then copy it over, which is impractical or even impossible with really large files.
You sure about that? I’ve decompressed huge files, some time ago, using a 3.5” HDD and if it were like that, it would take much longer than needed because of that overlay you talk about.
I didn’t downvoted your post, I just made a genuine question, since I’ve never noticed that. I’m just sceptic on what you mentioned. Whenever I have some free time, I’ll try to do a deep test on that one!
Edit: No need to do a test, since I never use drag n drop (like mentioned on another comment), my test would always show the same outcome as WinRAR.
Why does drag-and-drop archive extraction from 7-Zip to Explorer use temp files?
7-Zip doesn’t know folder path of drop target. Only Windows Explorer knows exact drop target. And Windows Explorer needs files (drag >source) as decompressed files on disk. So 7-Zip extracts files from archive to temp folder and then 7-Zip notifies Windows Explorer about >paths of these temp files. Then Windows Explorer copies these files to drop target folder.
To avoid temp file usage, you can use Extract command of 7-Zip or drag-and-drop from 7-Zip to 7-Zip.
The notification to enable enhanced safe browsing even shows up when you’re accessing Gmail on Firefox. It doesn’t even make any damn sense, this feature only works on Chrome. And of course they’ll never add a “don’t show again” option. Think I might just set Gmail to forward to my Proton account from now on.
Edit: found an article on how to forward to ProtonMail in case anyone else wants to know how. Seems very easy to do.
Mark my words, this is going to become more common. When corporations become as large as nation-states they will begin to act like nation-states.
Oh, you got malware from our ads? Well if we could implement our Web Integrity API we could easily verify, and track any ads and prevent this. It’s all about security and think of how much better your security would be if we could prevent this!
When corporations become as large as nation-states
They may not be in terms of people, but many sure as hell are already bigger in terms of money than a LOT of countries. Not to mention how Microsoft alone is the “glue” holding together a fuckload of different govt’s computer systems.
When corporations become as large as nation-states they will begin to act like nation-states.
This is why all the infighting between “government is bad” libertarians and “corporations are bad” socialists is missing the point. In reality, it’s simply very large organizations of any type that are bad.
I’m nostalgic for the day when Google was the good company. A few years before “alphabet” you could see the change coming and since “alphabet” they are worse every year.
In the future your browser will be able to remotely attest that you have no viable security solution to block the infection and no working backups as a condition for being served these malicious ads, increasing the ad value since they can now be more precisely targeted
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