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My mother forced me to buy winrar when I was ~10. They saw the licence popup every time I would open minecraft.jar to install a mod.
They are big anti-piracy supporters and so they thought I pirated winrar.
Well.... So for my punishment for "pirating" winrar, they made me buy it with my birthday money...
I moved to 7zip
Then linux.
Now I'm happy.8 -
this.title = "gg Microsoft"
this.metadata = {
rant: true,
long: true,
super_long: true,
has_summary: true
}
// Also:
let microsoft = "dead" // please?
tl;dr: Windows' MAX_PATH is the devil, and it basically does not allow you to copy files with paths that exceed this length. No matter what. Even with official fixes and workarounds.
Long story:
So, I haven't had actual gainful employ in quite awhile. I've been earning just enough to get behind on bills and go without all but basic groceries. Because of this, our electronics have been ... in need of upgrading for quite awhile. In particular, we've needed new drives. (We've been down a server for two years now because its drive died!)
Anyway, I originally bought my external drive just for backup, but due to the above, I eventually began using it for everyday things. including Steam. over USB. Terrible, right? So, I decided to mount it as an internal drive to lower the read/write times. Finding SATA cables was difficult, the motherboard's SATA plugs are in a terrible spot, and my tiny case (and 2yo) made everything soo much worse. It was a miserable experience, but I finally got it installed.
However! It turns out the Seagate external drives use some custom drive header, or custom driver to access the drive, so Windows couldn't read the bare drive. ffs. So, I took it out again (joy) and put it back in the enclosure, and began copying the files off.
The drive I'm copying it to is smaller, so I enabled compression to allow storing a bit more of the data, and excluded a couple of directories so I could copy those elsewhere. I (barely) managed to fit everything with some pretty tight shuffling.
but. that external drive is connected via USB, remember? and for some reason, even over USB3, I was only getting ~20mb/s transfer rate, so the process took 20some hours! In the interim, I worked on some projects, watched netflix, etc., then locked my computer, and went to bed. (I also made sure to turn my monitors and keyboard light off so it wouldn't be enticing to my 2yo.) Cue dramatic music ~
Come morning, I go to check on the progress... and find that the computer is off! What the hell! I turn it on and check the logs... and found that it lost power around 9:16am. aslkjdfhaslkjashdasfjhasd. My 2yo had apparently been playing with the power strip and its enticing glowing red on/off switch. So. It didn't finish copying.
aslkjdfhaslkjashdasfjhasd x2
Anyway, finding the missing files was easy, but what about any that didn't finish? Filesizes don't match, so writing a script to check doesn't work. and using a visual utility like windirstat won't work either because of the excluded folders. Friggin' hell.
Also -- and rather the point of this rant:
It turns out that some of the files (70 in total, as I eventually found out) have paths exceeding Windows' MAX_PATH length (260 chars). So I couldn't copy those.
After some research, I learned that there's a Microsoft hotfix that patches this specific issue! for my specific version! woo! It's like. totally perfect. So, I installed that, restarted as per its wishes... tried again (via both drag and `copy`)... and Lo! It did not work.
After installing the hotfix. to fix this specific issue. on my specific os. the issue remained. gg Microsoft?
Further research.
I then learned (well, learned more about) the unicode path prefix `\\?\`, which bypasses Windows kernel's path parsing, and passes the path directly to ntfslib, thereby indirectly allowing ~32k path lengths. I tried this with the native `copy` command; no luck. I tried this with `robocopy` and cygwin's `cp`; they likewise failed. I tried it with cygwin's `rsync`, but it sees `\\?\` as denoting a remote path, and therefore fails.
However, `dir \\?\C:\` works just fine?
So, apparently, Microsoft's own workaround for long pathnames doesn't work with its own utilities. unless the paths are shorter than MAX_PATH? gg Microsoft.
At this point, I was sorely tempted to write my own copy utility that calls the internal Windows APIs that support unicode paths. but as I lack a C compiler, and haven't coded in C in like 15 years, I figured I'd try a few last desperate ideas first.
For the hell of it, I tried making an archive of the offending files with winRAR. Unsurprisingly, it failed to access the files.
... and for completeness's sake -- mostly to say I tried it -- I did the same with 7zip. I took one of the offending files and made a 7z archive of it in the destination folder -- and, much to my surprise, it worked perfectly! I could even extract the file! Hell, I could even work with paths >340 characters!
So... I'm going through all of the 70 missing files and copying them. with 7zip. because it's the only bloody thing that works. ffs
Third-party utilities work better than Microsoft's official fixes. gg.
...
On a related note, I totally feel like that person from http://xkcd.com/763 right now ;;21 -
I don't get why people are still using WinRAR. I discovered 7-zip years ago and while it's very minimalistic, open source and ad-free (also without any annoying "buy me now" shit), there has never been an archive I couldn't open using it.10
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Trying to compress 1Tb of data,
Will take 40 hours... I expected worse. Good boy Winrar, I will buy you this year promise..8 -
Our friendship should be perennial, should be perpetual and as eternal as that of a #WinRAR's 40 days trial license.
#Geeky #FriendshipGoals
3 -
Einstein once said: "There are only 2 infinite things, the universe and the 40-day trial of WINRAR and I am not sure about the first one"
8 -
Lately, I see a lot of rants/comments/jokes about WinRAR and its eternal trial (algorithm, is that you?). Here's a nice video explaining why WinRAR chose it as its business model and how it works: https://youtu.be/fTgZRVVr3_Y
Spoiler alert: WinRAR is brilliant.
But use 7-zip or be a command line ninja.
6 -
i'm sorry but i am just FORCED to share the recent dialogue with my friend.
he bought a winrar license and got a 4digit customer number
4 -
For some reason, I started using Office 365 30 day trial a month ago, obviously, and yesterday, a month passed, but the product registered automatically and says it is a product officially signed with a product key.
Thanks Microsoft!
I <3 you!
(don't report this to nsa)3 -
Few days ago a PPC campaign manager complained to me that the banners she got from her client were in an "unusual file format". Asked me to check it out because she couldn't open the file and she really needed the banners.
I kid you not, it had a .rar extension...
She, at the age of 30, had no idea what WinRar was...4 -
With new terms of service docker desktop is becoming winrar - everyone use it but nobody pays for it
2 -
You know, one thing that really puzzels me is that people are willing to use WinRar despite there being plenty of better alternatives (*cough*7-Zip*cough*) that doesn't slap an activation notice in your face every fucking time.4
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I know it just keeps honest people honest, but if you were going to create a license file for a product; how would you go about it?1
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I have 1.2gb of files, they are textures (client side for my gameserver players). By using winrar I managed to archive it to 550MB. Do you guys know more efficient way of shrinking large sizes of files?12
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If you were buy winrar license, please tell me who you are?
Kinda curious if there is anyone in this universe that buy it 😂8 -
A question guys, I'm looking for a DB client. We are using SQL Management Server Studio, but its way way overkill for a frontend guy like me.
Min Requirements:
- Needs to be simple
- Must support MSSQL
- Plugin support and/or dark mode
- Free and/or not too buggy evaluation (like Sublime or Winrar)
- GUI should be reasonably modern
- Should also be native. Our database is a denormalized mess.6 -
Think about how much time you spent in your live by just clicking away the Winrar license popup. Was it worth it?
2
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