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From: Patrick Elliott
Subject: Re: Installation into "My Documents": All Scenes Lost!
Date: 13 Sep 2009 17:36:56
Message: <4aad65f8$1@news.povray.org>
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Sven Littkowski wrote:
> Many other smart installations, or let's say, de-installations recognize
> easily that there are files in a folder which don't belong to the program
> itself (user-made files).
>
Yeah. Despite having diminished sympathy for actually making this
mistake (and not knowing it was one), I have to agree here. Most
uninstallers/installers will *only* effect the files that they original
placed. Other files, which might have been added later, are left alone.
A few, though very few, will tell there is something there, and ask if
you want to removed anyway. None of them do the smart thing, and offer
you a look at the files it can't recognize, so you can decide if you
want them a) left alone, or even b) moved. All in all, some of this
stuff would be semi-trivial, but the bone headed assumption of 99.9% of
all installers is, "This is a clean install, on a new machine, so I can
do any damn thing I please with it." At best *some* are smart enough to
leave things alone, in case you need to reinstall the application, to
fix something, but even that isn't always helpful, since, unless if
generates a backup of the original contents (which is places in its own
directory, instead of some place the average person could do something
with them), it may not "fix" the problem at all, if the problem is in a
file that it ignores intentionally, like settings files.
All in all, the compromises made on Windows, especially after Vista came
along, as a bloody mess, and most installers simply aren't smart enough
to tell when/if they are about to hose something important, or their
installation will, in the case of repair, actually fix anything.
But, in the end.. You messed up Sven, badly, and no one in the IT
industry would have a lot of sympathy for how. I make similar mistakes
out of laziness myself, and the fact that the backup system I do have is
an intentionally brain damaged one that came with my external, which
some times won't even complete, if it decides it doesn't like *one* file
some place. It also won't back up critical settings, or the like, or
documents it doesn't recognize. Replacing it though, would cost me money
and time, but if I lost everything, I would blame my own stupidity, not
POVRay's installer.
--
void main () {
if version = "Vista" {
call slow_by_half();
call DRM_everything();
}
call functional_code();
}
else
call crash_windows();
}
<A HREF='http://www.daz3d.com/index.php?refid=16130551'>Get 3D Models,
3D Content, and 3D Software at DAZ3D!</A>
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From: Sven Littkowski
Subject: Re: Installation into "My Documents": All Scenes Lost!
Date: 13 Sep 2009 20:03:43
Message: <4aad885f@news.povray.org>
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Hi,
well, that was one of the first things I was considering. Here in Jamaica
where i live (though I am a German) is no company offering such recovery
services, I would have to send the harddrive by mail to a location in the US
(they are the closest where you could find such companies) and hope the
harddrive will arrive (not a guarantee here in Jamaica).
But even so, such recovery services are immensily expensive. And meanwhile,
with all the file operations on that harddrive, their space must have been
overwritten many times.
Yes, of course it was my own fault to have my own ideas where I want to
store my files. But that all wouldn't have happened if POV-Ray's installer
wouldn't move around my own files. That is the cause for my fault, I would
think. And yes, I agree, the POV-Ray's installer needs to be smarter, as
mentioned in the previous postings of other newsgroup members. Remember,
what we do here is not to say "Your Fault", "My Fault", what we try to do
here is to give constructive suggestions to make things better and saver,
and more user-friendly.
"Christian Froeschlin" <chr### [at] chrfrde> wrote in message
news:4aad40f0$1@news.povray.org...
> You should be aware that they probably can still be brought back.
> If they are important enough to you, I'd recommend to stop using your
> hard disk immediately and bring in to a professional recovery service.
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From: Mike Raiford
Subject: Re: Installation into "My Documents": All Scenes Lost!
Date: 14 Sep 2009 13:17:59
Message: <4aae7ac7$1@news.povray.org>
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Thorsten Froehlich wrote:
> Tell Microsoft. It has been explained numerous times around here (and
> elsewhere) that Vista does not always provide access to the programs
> folder, so POV-Ray had to be changed to be compatible with Vista. You
> should ask yourself why you didn't provide POV-Ray's installer with the
> privileges to install in that very folder? - In fact your whole account
> of what happens make little sense in that regard.
Which reminds me, why doesn't POV-Ray's installer bring up the UAC
prompt when you tell it to install for all users?
--
~Mike
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From: Warp
Subject: Re: Installation into "My Documents": All Scenes Lost!
Date: 14 Sep 2009 14:08:44
Message: <4aae86ac@news.povray.org>
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Sven Littkowski <Sve### [at] jamaica-focuscom> wrote:
> Remember,
> what we do here is not to say "Your Fault", "My Fault", what we try to do
> here is to give constructive suggestions to make things better and saver,
> and more user-friendly.
You also have to understand that if you keep extremely important files
in your hard disk, some of them for so long that they are even from the
DOS days, and you don't understand the concept of backupping, you are
*asking* to lose those files one day or another.
The fact is: If you don't backup a file in your hard disk, you are
accepting that you will lose that file at any moment with no possibility
of recovering it. This is simply a fact of life and physics. Hardware will
break (it's not a question of "if", but "when"), accidents can happen,
buggy software can happen. *Anything* can happen which will destroy those
files. That's why backupping is so important if you really need to make sure
you don't lose some files.
And "backupping" does not mean copying a file to another place in the
same hard disk or even the same computer. It means copying (by whatever
means you want) to a completely separate media (such as a DVD-R or whatever)
and keeping it safe (so that if an accident happens, it will only affect
either the computer or the backup media, but unlikely both at the same time).
(And if the files are really important, you can't trust one single backup.
Like with the computer, storage media can degrade, break of suffer from
accidents, and sometimes this can happen without notice. This means that
if the hard disk gets damaged or otherwise the original files get lost so
that you would need to recover them from the backup media, it might have
happened that the backup media has broken as well. Again, this is simply a
fact of life and physics.)
--
- Warp
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From: Thorsten Froehlich
Subject: Re: Installation into "My Documents": All Scenes Lost!
Date: 14 Sep 2009 15:07:08
Message: <4aae945c$1@news.povray.org>
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Mike Raiford wrote:
> Which reminds me, why doesn't POV-Ray's installer bring up the UAC
> prompt when you tell it to install for all users?
Maybe the UAC prompt needs to be approved by a UAC prompt before it can be
shown ;-)
Thorsten
PS: I could guess this might have to do with signing the code, but really
with Windos, who knows :-(
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From: Christian Froeschlin
Subject: Re: Installation into "My Documents": All Scenes Lost!
Date: 14 Sep 2009 21:30:08
Message: <4aaeee20@news.povray.org>
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Mike Raiford wrote:
> Which reminds me, why doesn't POV-Ray's installer bring up the UAC
> prompt when you tell it to install for all users?
I don't think you can elevate the privileges of an application
that is already running. The installer could indeed have a manifest
to specify it needs administrator privileges - or have a recognized
name such as setup.exe or install.exe ;) - in which cases the UAC
would pop up on startup. Or, actually, this *could* be so if the
installer were an executable and not an MSI package, which is
itself rather strange for an end user application.
In any case, such a manifest would not allow the (rather unusual)
installation option of POV-Ray for "single user" w/o privileges.
It would probably be possible to split the installer into
two parts and extract and spawn the second part from the first
with request for privileges, but realistically ... not.
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From: Fredrik Eriksson
Subject: Re: Installation into "My Documents": All Scenes Lost!
Date: 15 Sep 2009 10:02:03
Message: <op.u0aw9oqn7bxctx@e6600>
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On Tue, 15 Sep 2009 03:34:39 +0200, Christian Froeschlin <chr### [at] chrfrde>
wrote:
> The installer could indeed have a manifest
> to specify it needs administrator privileges - or have a recognized
> name such as setup.exe or install.exe ;) - in which cases the UAC
> would pop up on startup. Or, actually, this *could* be so if the
> installer were an executable and not an MSI package, which is
> itself rather strange for an end user application.
MSI packages can also be marked for UAC.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163486.aspx#S6
--
FE
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From: Warp
Subject: Re: Installation into "My Documents": All Scenes Lost!
Date: 15 Sep 2009 16:17:39
Message: <4aaff663@news.povray.org>
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Thorsten Froehlich <tho### [at] trfde> wrote:
> I agree that the naming of that folder, rooted in the 8 character DOS length
> limit is not ideal any more. Probably it should be named "Samples Scenes" or
> "Example Scenes" or if it should be shorted just "Examples".
Would it be possible in Windows to make this directory read-only (and
make sure that if the user tries to render a scene from that directory,
the resulting image is written somewhere else)?
--
- Warp
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On Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:13:53 -0500, Mike Raiford <"m[raiford]!at"@gmail.com>
wrote:
>Which reminds me, why doesn't POV-Ray's installer bring up the UAC
>prompt when you tell it to install for all users?
For me it is because the only way that I can install Pov 3.7 is to switch UAC
off!
--
Regards
Stephen
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From: Sven Littkowski
Subject: Re: Installation into "My Documents": All Scenes Lost!
Date: 16 Sep 2009 06:58:23
Message: <4ab0c4cf$1@news.povray.org>
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Yes, I totally agree with you. I know a long time about the relative
shortlivingness of all storage media. DVDs and CDs don't last long, a few
years only. Also, with all the files I am working on, I would have to make
new partial backups EACH DAY! Uhh! :-)
Let's hope, the glorious POV-Ray team will make the installer smarter, at
least for all Windows versions and otherOSs which are not Windows Vista...
"Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote in message
news:4aae86ac@news.povray.org...
> Like with the computer, storage media can degrade, break of suffer from
> accidents, and sometimes this can happen without notice.
> - Warp
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