Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2008 October 13

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October 13

Is Windows 7 being released so soon because of the criticisms about Windows Vista?

I actually didn't realize that a successor to Vista was being released so soon. ScienceApe (talk) 00:07, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

No. You can make that claim if you like, but you'll have no evidence to back it any more than you can claim that Windows 7 will be released soon because Tony Gonzalez is looking for a quick trade. There is no cause and effect there. -- kainaw™ 01:55, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Last I checked, he was asking, not making that claim. 98.221.85.188 (talk) 01:31, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

The first, second and eighth times I checked, he wasn't accusing ScienceApe of making the claim... only granting him the leverage to make it, if he should so wish. However on the Seventh viewing I saw nothing but blasphemy, and images of Ninjas lauging at the sight of the Wolfpocalypse. Raise arms, don't let the super wolf get us all. - Jimmi Hugh (talk) 01:40, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Why would he want to make that claim? I don't understand that logic. Oh, and please re-review the rules, and act civil on the reference desk. 98.221.85.188 (talk) 13:44, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Ugh... If I wasn't civil with my identical style of response... then you definetly weren't being civil. Especially as I added surreal and friendly humour so you could cop out of responding and not feel like you were being attacked for posting unnecesary messages in an attempt to have ago at Kainaw. So, I was being Civil, you on the other hand are being somewhat rude and childish. As for making the claim... If he wasn't considering, reviewing or analyzing the possiblity and/or action of making such a claim then he wouldn't have posted the question, so on some level there is achance he might want to, or at least feel he could come to make or not make that claim. Kainaws response was Valid, complete and his claim note was entirely on point. You on the other hand are just a twat... now that's not civil :). - Jimmi Hugh (talk) 16:42, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

I think something about my sig tells anon users "Read the preceding statement with as much ill intent as possible." I'm not really certain why, but I'd like to know. -- kainaw™ 01:56, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Don't be rude, and act civil on the reference desk. 98.221.85.188 (talk) 13:44, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Can you point to anything remotely uncivil in my response? I did not respond, "You are an idiot for making that claim." I responded, "You can make that claim." The first response, which you appear to be reading, is uncivil. The second response, which appears to be escaping your reading, is an allowance, permission, and acceptance of the questioner's view. Misreading responses and arguing that others are uncivil is, by nature, a very uncivil act. Perhaps you want to open another RFC on me and try to coerce others into joining in. -- kainaw™ 16:50, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Isn't it supposed to be 2010? That's like... 4 years. Windows 95-98 was 3, 98-2000 was 2. that to XP was also around 2. How is 4 years "soon" in this context? Even if it comes out this year its still the same gap XP was to 2000 and Windows 7 will be what XP is to 2000 (ie a small update with a few extra features)Gunrun (talk) 07:58, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Erm... we *are* in 2008 here. 2008 to 2010 is 2 years, which is about average, according to your figures. Or did you mean since Vista's overall release, which the person above doesn't seem to be referring to? --Alinnisawest,^{Dalek Empress} (extermination requests here) 18:03, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

I was meaning to imply that the gap between releases isn't small at all. Just the gap between XP and Vista was so big. Gunrun (talk) 10:23, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Vista came out in late 2006, Windows 7 could arrive in Q3 of 2009. So it's going to be closer to 3 years. That is fewer compared to the gap between XP to Vista, which was 5 years. I think the interval between Vista and 7 seems so short (at least to me as well) because there probably won't be as many changes in computing from late 2006–2009 as there were from 2001–late 2006. Louis Waweru  Talk  18:20, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Microsoft has frequently said that Windows 7 would ship around 3 years after the availability of Vista. Vista was released twice: October 2006 for businesses, and January 2007 for consumers. Therefore, a release anywhere from late 2009 to early 2010 is possible. There are rumors of a June 2009 release date, which would allow Microsoft to get Win7 on many back-to-school computers. Any feelings that Win7 is being released very quickly is only because of the long time between XP and Vista. Most likely future releases of Windows will be released around 3 year after the previous version. -- Imperator3733 (talk) 18:38, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

• New versions of Mac OS X are released every couple of years, too. (Updates are stopped shortly thereafter.) Linux is the worst, though. Ubuntu, for example, has a new release every six months. There's a "long-term support" release that lasts three years. The bottom line is that us Windows users have been spoiled.--Account created to post on Reference Desk (talk) 02:10, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Hm, an interesting perspective; most people I know tend to think the opposite: Windows users have been badly served by the lack of incremental improvements between Windows XP and Vista, leading to a drawn-out death for one, and a steep learning curve for the other.

MacOS X was able to add major new features and core improvements as soon as they were ready, while everything in Windows had to wait for Vista. And as for Ubuntu, one of its key advantages is precisely that it is does keep track of improvements in the software world.

The length of time offered for support is another issue, admittedly, but one form of support is to offer a smooth and cost-effective upgrade to an improved OS, rather than trying to patch all the holes in an ageing version. - IMSoP (talk) 16:59, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

What file types benefit most from defragmentation?

Although we have several articles on fragmentation and defragmentation, I don't see my issue addressed. Discussion follows based on 8.3 naming conventions, but answers should easily generalize (shouldn't they?)

• Initially, I thought compacting .exe (and .dll) files would have the most benefit, but now I'm fairly sure that defragging such files only helps once, at program launch.
• There wouldn't seem to be much benefit to compacting document files (.doc, .xls, etc), as they do a WriteToTemp-Delete-Rename sequence whenever they're resaved.
• Savefiles and the like from games wouldn't seem to offer much benefit, as they're really only written once and read a small number of times. I suppose each game designer decides whether to write to a new file or rewrite-in-place.
• Two of my email systems manage their own databases themselves, periodically compacting folders, so there's probably not much to be gained there?

So, although I dutifully cleanup and defrag once every two or three months, I'm hard pressed to know where I would most see a difference for my efforts. Experts? --DaHorsesMouth (talk) 01:45, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Well, what you are saying is that every operation gets faster - but none individually matters to you. But each one DOES make your machine run faster - programs start up only a little bit faster, they read their initial data only a little bit faster, they write results only a little bit faster...but every disk-related operation is faster - so there is a net win.

• You are right that once the program is loaded, it doesn't read the .exe file again - but lots of programs are starting and stopping in response to who-knows-what going on in the background. Your browser is loading plugins and helpers as you work, for example. DLL's may be loaded, unloaded and reloaded during the operation of some kinds of program.
• Documents and images will indeed tend to defrag themselves 'automatically' as they are written out - but lots of documents are read over and over without ever being re-written. Also, if your disk is horribly fragmented, the system may have to move the disk heads a long way to get to a sufficiently large contiguous free area to write new files out to - which slows things down.
• Game 'savefiles' are typically small - so yeah - not much benefit here. But the massive level files get a huge win from being contiguous...especially if the game 'streams' from disk continually as you move through the virtual world.
• Email systems aren't "defragging" (in the usual sense of the word) when they "compact" a mail archive. They are de-fragmenting within the blocks occupied by the file - but the file itself might still be scattered all over the drive if it's badly fragmented. Even the act of compacting will go a lot slower if the mail file is fragmented badly.
• In general, having gaps scattered all over your file system means that disk heads have to move further on the average...so EVERYTHING goes slower when the drive is fragmented...even operations like using swap-space that use contiguous blocks will run more slowly if the heads start off further away (on average) than they would with a defragged drive.

I don't think there is any one specific place where you'll see a speedup - but every operation gets a small benefit from having a nicely defragged drive, so there is a net win.

As a Linux user, I look in puzzled amazement that Windows STILL needs to have it's drive manually defragged after half a dozen major OS revisions. Linux systems NEVER needed to be defragged.

SteveBaker (talk) 03:13, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

I don't know about never... every time you save something on your hard drive, it will put it in the first available block of adequate size (according to my understanding). So over time, as you delete files, there come to be gaps. Defragging may not be necessary (as it's not necessary with Windows) but it will stillincrease system performance on badly fragged drives, especially on slower HDD's. Heck, even my iPod could use some defragging from time to time. DaRkAgE7_[Talk] 04:35, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Note that if you have Steam installed on your computer, it will be difficult to defrag it (although you can easily defragment Steam games by right-clicking on the game, going to "Properties", clicking on the "Local Files" tab, and clicking the "Defrag cache files" button). -Jéské ^{(v^_^v Kacheek!)} 18:54, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Windows systems don't need to be defragged either. People just think they do, for some reason unknown to me. You can certainly get major performance benefits (on any OS) by reducing the number of head seek operations, but the kind of defragmentation that typical defragmenters do doesn't work very well to reduce head seek operations. By making each individual file contiguous, you're optimizing for the case of files being read from beginning to end in a certain order. This doesn't help at all for small files unless by an amazing coincidence some program reads a bunch of them in that semi-arbitrary order. It would help a lot for large files if they were commonly read from beginning to end, but that's actually rather rare; large files tend to consist of smaller parts which are read and written somewhat at random. Audio and video files are often read sequentially, but the bottleneck there is the presentation to the user, not the disk reads. If fragments of a large file are scattered all over the disk, moving them together might have some benefit since seek time does depend on the physical separation of the cylinders.

Executables are not read from beginning to end at program startup. On all major operating systems, they are demand paged. If the executable uses dynamic libraries (DLLs) then the typical startup sequence will involve reading a few pages from the executable, a few pages from a DLL, etc., so defragmenting each file individually is not going to help that much. Windows XP/2003/Vista record which pages are loaded the first time an application starts and preload those pages the next time, so you might see a bigger improvement in startup time on those OSes if you defragment. XP and later also record which files are used during boot and application startup and move them all together to a contiguous region of the disk (when the system is idle). If you use a third-party defragmenter that undoes that ordering you might actually hurt performance. -- BenRG (talk) 19:18, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Qwerty vs Dvorak: why no scientific evaluation?

I taught myself to touch type when I was about 16, and on a portable manual typewriter. It was about the handiest thing I have ever done, because I have always done my own typing, and average about 60 wpm on a computer keyboard. I have often wondered why the outmoded QWERTY is STILL standard, even when everything else about typing has changed so much.

I read many years ago that Dvorak minimised the distance the fingers had to travel by putting the most used keys on the home row, as well as on the keys used by the strongest fingers. Figures I read earlier were that Dvorak cut finger distance travel by about 30% over Qwerty which means you could either type a lot faster, or type at the normal speed but go easier on your fingers, with less chance of Repetitive Strain Injury.

I find it astonishing to read—here and elsewhere—that tests on the merits of the two systems “are inconclusive”. We are talking about entirely measurable quantifiable operations here, which can be researched for next to nothing in monetary outlay, by just about anyone. What, we have a Large Hadron Collider looking at the early universe, but tests on keyboard layout efficiency “are inconclusive’? Bollocks!

My idea would be that someone could write a simple program that begins by randomly allocating a virtual keyboard position to every letter and adds up the distance that has to be covered by moving from one letter to the next in a piece of input text. So the program would generate a particular keyboard layout, and the operator would then input a sizeable piece of text, say about 100 pages, and the program would measure how far fingers resting on home keys would have to travel to type the entire piece of text. If the program also included an average finger movement speed, it could also tell you long a competent typist would take to type that text.

The first thing you would measure would be the performance of Qwerty and Dvorak and the other candidate arrangements. At least such a system would give you measurements on the notional efficiency and speed of one system over another which had scientific and mathematical credibility.

By getting the program to test ALL the possible keyboard layouts, we could well come up with one which is better than any of the other candidates, and would be notionally the most efficient layout of all. Of course, there are other criteria to be considered apart from pure finger movement distance. The stronger fingers should have more work to do than the weaker ones, the work should be roughly equal for both hands, and awkward movements when fingers have to move down a row should be minimised, speed and dexterity measures would have to be adjusted for the different fingers, digraphs should not be adjacent and so on. But the initial program could be rejigged to give weight to all these other variables. Why has nothing like this been done? A program like that could be written by any amateur coder.

Of course the usual anal retentive will now post in and tell me that “this is not the place to canvass new ideas, no matter how brilliant”, so I am going to post this on the Wikipedia Computer Research Desk. As well as here. Myles325a (talk) 02:31, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Short answer: Because it's not "evaluation" that we need.

The problem is that we know that Dvorak (and other) 'new' keyboard layouts are faster...we don't need experiments to tell us that. The problem is that people won't switch - even though we know that we're using an inefficient layout and we know that better layouts are out there. If you made Dvorak keyboards and sold them for $10 each at "Best Buy" - you'd hardly sell a single one. So doing further research doesn't really get us anywhere...what's the point in knowing (even in mind-numbing detail) that QWERTY/AZERTY is a pile of crap if nobody will switch as a result of that knowledge?

Worse still - we're inadvertently training an entire generation into thinking that using a twelve-key telephone number pad is the best way to enter text!! (My grumbling tendonitis twitches in sympathy when I even consider that prospect!) So far from adopting better designs, we're actually heading backwards at amazing speed. I guarantee that by the time present-generation teenagers reach 40 to 50 years old - they're going to have terrible repetitive strain problems due to appalling user interface designs on cell phones. The replacement of the PDA by the up-market cellphone means that our brief foray into handwriting recognition has fallen by the wayside.

FWIW - there is an even better way than Dvorak. We should really toss out the gigantic, bloaded 101 key keyboard altogether and switch to using chording keyboards. In those setups, you mostly don't move your fingers at all - you type by entering 'chords' (like on a music keyboard) with the gentlest of fingertip pressure only.

• You don't move your fingers - so RSI issues disappear.
• You only need one hand to type - the other is free to write with a pencil or turn pages in a book or whatever.
• The "keyboard" is small enough that you could mount it onto a mouse - and move the entire keyboard around instead of having to move your hand off of the keyboard and onto the mouse a bazillion times a day.
• You need almost no desk space for the device. You can sit it comfortably in your lap if you want.
• You could easily adapt the design to work in the confines of a cellphone format.
• With fewer keys - it's cheaper than a 101 key contraption.
• It's SO different from QWERTY that it's actually easier to learn than Dvorak because there is no temptation to slip back into your old ways.

I have a hand-held wordprocessor called "The Microwriter" that dates back to the early 1980's - it has just six 'keys' (there are two 'thumb' keys - one acts as a kind of 'shift' key) and with about a day's practice, you can use it as well as your QWERTY keyboard - and most users get proficient enough to take realtime dictation on the things. (The photo of the Microwriter in the article is actually my machine). It's horrifying that this vastly more efficient technology is not standard - but getting all of the two billion keyboard users around the world to switch is impossible - and doing a 'gradual' change over would be utterly disasterous.

Just about the only problem with chording pads is that you need separate left- and right-handed versions. However, I'm left handed and I learned (by necessity) to chord with my right hand - and the ability to use a pencil in my left hand and do all of my keyboarding with my right is an enormous win. Sadly, the drivers for the Microwriter to allow it to drive a regular PC have long ago ceased to be supported...so I'm back with QWERTY.

But sadly, despite all of the huge gains to be had...it really doesn't matter how amazing the alternatives are - we're effectively stuck with QWERTY into the indefinite future.

SteveBaker (talk) 03:43, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

When I imagine using a chording keyboard, my hands ache at the thought of constantly holding them in one position and moving my fingers in unaccustomed combinations. I wonder how many people stick to it as a fraction of those who try it. —Tamfang (talk) 03:33, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

I got tendinitis in my right index finger from mousing. My index finger didn't move at all relative to the button, it just clicked. That was the repetitive strain that caused the injury. I've never tried a chord keyboard (I've known about them for years), but like Tamfang I feel pain at the mere thought of it—especially the idea of putting it on a mouse. It's also hard for me to believe that chord keyboards improve typing speed, since you have to release each chord before pressing the next, and I can press sequences of keys with different fingers faster than I can repeatedly press the same key.

As for Dvorak, I've never known what to think. Simple-minded metrics like distance between keypresses are useless because human physiology is complicated. The way to get useful data on this question is for some corporation that employs a lot of typists to convert a fraction of them to Dvorak and look at the effect on typing speed (which can be monitored with software) and RSI-related complaints. I'm surprised that this seems to happen so infrequently. Hasn't it ever been a management fad?

Claude Shannon estimated the entropy of written English at about 1–1.5 bits per character, so with a really efficient layout it should be possible to type around 3–5 letters per keystroke on a 32-key keyboard, or per chord on a 5-key chord keyboard. It'd be a bear to learn, though. -- BenRG (talk) 10:15, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Just a thought, regarding your suggested program... perhaps you could add a feature to give more weight to common usage? For example, the word "the" is very common, so since this word is very common, perhaps the letters contained in these common words would be on the home row and towards the middle more?

Seriously though, I don't think it would make any difference in the long run, because naturally almost every keyboard on the planet is of the qwerty variety and it will be impossible to change... like America's continual clinging to the imperial system? (On an interesting side note I remember reading that the qwerty keyboard was originally set up in a way so that it would be more difficult to type on... since typing too quickly on a typewriter will jam the lever thingys...) DaRkAgE7_[Talk] 04:44, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

For most uses it doesn't make much difference. It's the human being trying to think best what to say that's the bottleneck. It's like the Heisenberg principle Time x Nonsense >= some constant. Is it a good idea to cut down time when so many people already dash off things they regret? Dmcq (talk) 05:35, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

In fact a far better way of selling things like chording pads than saying they save time would be if they could give extra convenience or a saving in space for portables or as SteveBaker says because it gives a free hand. For instance having one hand chording and the other drawing with a stylus could be very productive. BTW I change sense to nonsense in my little formula above - shows that even a QWERTY keyboard doesn't slow me down enough. Dmcq (talk) 10:18, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

I think this is very similar to x86. Just about everyone (who can understand computer hardware) will agree that x86 is a terrible design, but it is used throughout the world, people understand how it works, and there is a lot of software that runs on it. There have been many alternatives to x86, but they have all lost because x86 is so widespread and is so cheap. For the same reason, no alternative keyboard layout will replace QWERTY because everyone knows QWERTY. The benefits of switching simply do not outweigh the cost and difficulty of doing so. -- Imperator3733 (talk) 18:55, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

The niche might grow in the future, though (with the advent of touch screen which makes a new keyboard layout purely to the software designers. Kushal (talk) 02:23, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

there is pretty much no doubt that dvorak is faster. in the caveman days, when computers didn't have screens and were called typewriters, the winners of the typing speed competitions always used dvorak keyboarded typewriters, (which had to be specially built, obviously)

and regarding the chorded alphabet: if you put a microswitch under each finger, that's eight bits, and you can teach yourself to type in ASCII. very handy if you're trying to type while riding a bike or some such.

and re the bad effect of mousing on your index finger: yes indeed. screwed my right hand up good. i've switched over to old IBM keyboards with the trackpoint gadget that sticks up in between the g and h and b keys, but they're getting scarce. at least a few notebooks have them now, though.Gzuckier (talk) 16:41, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

This past week I've been reading up on alternative keyboard designs, and found someone who claims 80wpm on a keyboard that he designed himself, with 18 keys. QMK and ZMK (I don't know how they are related) are keyboard firmware systems that allow, among other features, "layers" of encodings; this chap evidently puts the 14 or so most frequent letters on the top layer, and shifts to get the others. That's a sort of chording, I suppose. —Tamfang (talk) 04:20, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

Free web hosting request

Can anybody with room to spare on their website/web server give me something to play around with? I want (need) at least a few hundred megabytes of space, some bandwidth, local .htaccess control, Ruby on Rails, PHP (safe mode off by default), and MySQL. All the free webhosts that have the above features that I've seen (believe it or not) have really crappy signup systems. I might use the site as a pilot for a project or simply as a sandbox for educational purposes. --hello, i'm a member | talk to me! 05:33, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Would... nearly free do you? I use this host called NearlyFreeSpeech.net which seems to have everything you offer (except the php safe mode off by default thing but I'm sure this is changable) and they're pennys to set up and use especially if your site is low bandwidth. Gunrun (talk) 07:43, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

If you want a totally free and full-service sandbox, just run it off your localhost? You can always migrate to a full server if you want later. Much easier than trying to finagle free hosting. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 14:18, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, setting up a webserver on your local host would not be to hard at all.

XAMPP. x42bn6 Talk Mess 23:26, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

I already have a localhost server...I just want some basic hosting. --hello, i'm a member | talk to me! 23:57, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Is there a place to request features for Windows?

I have thought of a dozen or so features I think should be added to Windows 7. For one, I'd like MS to give us back the old defragmenter. I don't know why they castrated it in Vista. Is there a place where I can request stuff like that?--Account created to post on Reference Desk (talk) 18:24, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Microsoft Connect is the place. I don't think they castrated the defragmenter, I think the idea was that people shouldn't have to worry about things like this. But if you want to see what's going on try using it with the command prompt defrag/?. Louis Waweru  Talk  18:35, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

The defragmenter in Vista runs in the background, which makes sure that everyone is defragging. With the old defragmenter, people who don't know much about computers most likely wouldn't know to defrag. -- Imperator3733 (talk) 18:43, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the link. I've used the command-line version, but it doesn't give the graph. I understand the graph doesn't mean much, but it lets me see the progress and how much time is left. Maybe they should add an "Advanced" button to see the old screen? I've always liked Windows for the feedback it gives users. It seemed like, as Waweru said, MS was making a half-hearted attempt to hide things from us like they were Apple. At the same time, they added things like Windows Defender and the Compatibility Assistant that pop up extra messages. They need a clearer mission, it seems.--Account created to post on Reference Desk (talk) 18:47, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Not having used Vista, I'm not sure if the following is entirely correct, but the defrag tool in Windows 2000, 2003 and XP was a cut down version of Diskeeper. As this was proprietary software used under licence, I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft finally created their own bespoke defrag software for Vista. A lot of people use a full version of Diskkeeper instead. Nanonic (talk) 22:30, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

The bundled defrag tool was never very good. There are much better defragmenters for Windows 2000/XP/Vista, like the free open-source JkDefrag. Better yet, don't bother defragmenting at all. It's mostly a rain dance. -- BenRG (talk) 23:36, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

There are many better defrag tools than Diskeeper. There are also other reasons to avoid the software. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 02:45, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Good Proxy?

I'm looking for a good proxy to hide my IP address- this means no pop-ups. I've tried a few, but they all have pop-ups and massive, annoying ads, so I figured I'd ask my knowledgeable fellow Wikipedians. Any help? A plus would be if it showed me as in Canada. --Alinnisawest,^{Dalek Empress} (extermination requests here) 19:28, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

tor? --98.217.8.46 (talk) 19:48, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Anything I don't have to download? --Alinnisawest,^{Dalek Empress} (extermination requests here) 19:53, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Hide My Ass! I tried the first one it gave me, worked well from Japan to NY. Forgot to undo the settings and Wikipedia showed me a screen I'd never seen before about being behind a proxy (hahah). Here's the idea in Firefox. So, you'd want to chose one located in Canada. Louis Waweru  Talk  20:23, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

If you have the knowledge and a second computer you can always set up your own proxy, if your goal was to simply avoid getting pop ups. —Preceding unsigned comment added by E smith2000 (talk • contribs) 22:34, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Who are you trying to hide your IP address from, and for what reason? I'm not saying you shouldn't, but it makes a difference as far as choosing proxies goes. -- BenRG (talk) 23:39, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Bit of a long story, but essentially, I'm a spambaiter on occasion. I've used other proxies, but the pop-ups get REALLY annoying when you're actually trying to do something other than get on Youtube while you're at work. Just a bit of a precaution so it looks like my emails are coming from somewhere else other than Michigan, USA (particularly when I'm claiming they're coming from Toronto, Ontario). --Alinnisawest,^{Dalek Empress} (extermination requests here) 02:18, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

The good ones aren't free. The free ones are either slow or covered in ads. You can find many pay-services out there that charge per KB of bandwidth. The low-end options are relativity cheep and should be good'nuff for spambaiting. ---J.S (T/C/WRE) 02:52, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Make Live USB image with Mondo Rescue

Resolved

I am trying to make an image/clone of a Live USB I have with Mondo Rescue, but it never works, it always end up backing up my PC, even if I choose /media/USB as my root directoy (in mondo rescue)... Does anyone knows if this is suppose to let me create images of USB flash drives (a Live USB in particular)? or it is just to backup my runnnig system? I am going crazy with this... SF007 (talk) 22:50, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

dd (Unix) works for volumes under 2GiB. --antilived^{T | C | G} 03:40, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Partimage. --wj32 ^t/c 06:52, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

dd (Unix) is not an option (only does raw copies, not to mention it is a command line program), and partimage does not backup the MBR properly due to a bug in the software... I tried many programs, none of them worked like I wanted... SF007 (talk) 12:26, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

I think what I am trying to do is not possible... (backup a Live USB + bootloader in it and restore to another Flash drive of different size). R-Drive Image and Acronis True Image almost made it... Thanks anyway. SF007 (talk) 16:43, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

I thought raw copy is EXACTLY what you need, for you need MBR, bootloader, and the content itself. I have done dd transfers between different sized hard drives and they end up exactly the same (as long as the backup drive is bigger than the original), and then you can resize the partition with gparted if needed. And what's wrong with a command line programme? --antilived^{T | C | G} 04:16, 17 October 2008 (UTC)