Rufus Manual Pdf

[Adam Makin]

Theengagement of philosophers with manual work went beyond simply talking about it, with many thinkers throughout history having worked at manual jobs. Socrates himself was apprenticed to a stonemason and sculptor. Baruch Spinoza, the Dutch Jewish philosopher of the Enlightenment, turned down many offers of prestigious teaching positions and chose to make his living as a lens grinder. In the 20th century, the French philosopher, mystic and political activist Simone Weil worked as a labourer in two factories for a year so she could better connect with the working classes and support them in their fight for improved working conditions and more rights. Even if there were no links between these philosophers, their intellectual work and their positions as manual workers, the fact that they had manual jobs at all, in some cases where they could have chosen to leave them, shows that they did not see these jobs as incompatible with philosophy. It certainly demonstrates that they did not consider such work beneath them, nor that they recognised the gap between both types of work that some of us see today. But if their jobs did not directly impact their ideas, how can the gulf be bridged at all?

The answer to this lies in skills, more specifically, the skills that a modern-day student gains from studying philosophy. Contrary to popular belief, philosophy does indeed teach useful skills for the job market. Skills such as critical thinking, logical reasoning, problem solving, as well as skills in argumentation, communication and research, among others, are all acquired by philosophy students. These skills are applicable to a wide variety of occupations, including skilled manual work. The nature of the work involved in trades such as electrical engineering, plumbing, carpentry and more, all of which require years of specialised training both physical and intellectual, would be greatly benefitted by such skills, for example. An advantage of philosophical skills over others is that, while the methods, materials and techniques in other professions change with the advancement of time and technology, the skills taught by philosophy remain the same throughout, and are thus able to be used indefinitely. Therefore, bridging the gulf between manual and intellectual work requires the application of philosophical skills to manual work (and vice versa), which in itself shows that the gulf is not as wide as first assumed.

It seems that more philosophers, some of whom work manual jobs themselves, have been catching on to this idea in the past couple of decades. Robert R Sherman, who worked as a carpenter before becoming a professor of philosophy at the University of Florida, argues that carpentry is as much intellectual as it is physical work. Meanwhile, Carl Mitcham, professor emeritus of humanities at the Colorado School of Mines, writes that philosophy is important to engineers, and that both professions need to take notice of each other. Similarly, Rosemary Barnes, a researcher at the University of New South Wales, says that studying both engineering and philosophy made her a better engineer. Finally, the philosopher, electrician and mechanic Matthew B Crawford in his book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (2009) makes a philosophical case for the enduring need for hands-on, skilled trades, and challenges the idea of a separation between mental and manual. There are surely many more ways by which philosophy and skilled manual occupations can be brought together and, as time goes on, these are bound to become more noticeable. Philosophy of engineering is already a sub-discipline of philosophy; how long before a philosophy of carpentry or a philosophy of electrical work is developed?

I'm an unaffiliated Software Developer who is also a Free Software enthusiast and a contributor to various Open Source projects.

Akeo is the name of my company, but it's really just a one-man operation that I conduct in my spare time, so please don't expect it to have the same level of resources as Microsoft, Google, or Apple when it comes to development and support...

Oh, and incidentally, Akeo is the name of a small lough that's only visible from the top of Muckish, but you don't really care about that, do you?...

Mostly because I found that I really can't stand proprietary software and grew tired of seeing everybody use the trusted, yet old and limited HPUSBFW formatting utility. Reverse Engineering that tool to create a Free Software clone seemed like an interesting challenge, so I just went for it. For additional background info, see here.

Besides, with the code being Free Software (which is a very deliberate choice as Rufus would not be as good as it is if it was closed source, due to its ability to leverage the great work of others!), anybody could recompile and distribute the same version free of charge.

Of course, with all this being said, remember that Rufus is 100% Open Source. So if you really want a feature, you can try to find a sympathetic programmer (or even better, develop your own programming skills) to modify the code and then submit a patch for review.

If you're downloading Linux binaries, you might be used to trying to validate your download by comparing its SHA-256 with the version published by the developer, to ensure that your download has not been corrupted or tampered with. So you might be looking towards doing the same for Rufus.

However, you should be aware that, because Rufus is digitally signed with a Windows Authenticode digital signature, this manual step is entirely superfluous because, one of the rare advantages of Windows compared to Linux is that it has a well established system for validating digitally signed executables every time you are launching them.

This means that, whenever you launch Rufus, Windows automatically computes its SHA-256 and as part of the digital signature validation process, verifies that this SHA-256 matches with the one from the application that the original developer signed.

As it is of course possible for somebody else to create a non-official version of Rufus and sign it themselves under a different publisher name (but of course, the nice thing about digital signatures is that if they do that in order to create a malicious version of Rufus, the person behind it can easily be tracked, and their signature revoked to immediately prevent users from launching their malicious version).

Now, if you still think you would really like to validate the SHA-256 of the executable yourself, know that, since all of the binaries we publish are built from the automated (and public) GitHub Actions system, rather than on our own development machine, you can still do that, as we do produce the SHA-256 as part of the build process. You will however need to strip the digital signature first (and possibly zero-out the PE Checksum) before computing the SHA-256 on your end for comparison, as explained on our Security page (which I strongly invite you to read if you are worried about validating that an application is not malicious before running it).

First of all, I think I need to define what portability is, because a lot of people (including Wikipedia) use a wrong definition, and completely miss the point of what a portable application is really about.

A portable application is an application that (usually) doesn't require installation and that gives you the ability to carry and preserve your settings when moving from one computer to the next.

Thus, if you are expecting that portability implies anything about NOT writing into the registry or user directories on Windows you are very mistaken. Most of the time, being portable means that the application will write its settings to a text file (such as a .ini file on Windows) that you can carry around with the software, as you move from one computer to another, instead of the registry, and this may be the reason why many people confuse "portable" with "not writing to the registry, ever" on Windows, but there really is no promise being made from a bona fide portable application that it will leave the registry untouched.

And so, with this having been clarified, I can explain that the regular version of Rufus already qualifies as a portable application because, if you happen to have a rufus.ini in the same directory as your Rufus executable (even if it's an empty file), then Rufus will read and write its settings, such as the language you want to run the application into, or the other options that get preserved between sessions, into that file, and should you copy both your rufus.ini and the Rufus executable to another computer, you will see that your settings have been preserved from the previous computer, hence "portable". And at this stage, I also have to stress out that, even when Rufus runs in portable mode, your registry will be modified, since this is NOT what portability is about.

Then, why provide a portable version at all, you say? Well, this brings us to the ONLY difference the "portable" version of Rufus has with the "regular" one, which is that the "portable" version will create a rufus.ini by default (so that you don't have to do it yourself, if you want to use Rufus in portable mode), whereas the regular version doesn't. That's really all there is to it!

This is also the reason why when Rufus downloads an update, it always picks the "regular" version, even if the version you were running was the "portable" one, as you would already have a rufus.ini, therefore, the new "regular" version that is downloaded will continue to run in portable mode.

Now, if you're still confused about what the above means, then you should probably just use the standard version of Rufus. Portability is really ONLY for people who need to work with an application on multiple computers, and want to have their settings preserved as they do so. If that doesn't apply to you, then you should download the regular version.

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