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Vista's Limited Symlinks
An anonymous reader writes, "Symlinks haven't really been added to Windows Vista. It seems that the calls to the Windows Vista symlink API only occur during the creation of such files or when accessing them from Windows Explorer. What this means is, you can't access symlinks from another OS. To be fair, you probably didn't expect to be able to dual-boot into XP and suddenly have access to the symlinks you created on the Vista partition earlier that day. But then again, you probably expected to be able to access these symlinks through a network share/UNC path or as files on a webserver. But you can't." From the article: "Clearly, Vista's symlink API isn't complete — hopefully this is something that can be patched via a hotfix and that we don't have to wait for Fiji to get something as simple as UNC support built in."
"Those who do not understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." -Henry Spencer
... that /. can find about Vista then Microsoft have won.
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
There are plenty of other OS's they could base thier OS off, maybe even VMS.
Unix is far from perfect, I want choice but when Linux fanboys here choice they think it must be a choice which distribution you use, because Linux is the only choice.
Back to the line about VMS, because NT was built by a bunch of ex-DEC guys, the NT Kernel isn't that bad.
I mean, they could always port GNU userland over to the NT kernel, but dont MS already do that (or something similar) in their UNIX resource thing, which you can download.
There are two types of people in the world: 1) those that can extrapolate from incomplete data.
Is it possible to run all of Windows on EXT3?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Compare Mac OS X. It has two different kinds of symlinks. It has the traditional, pure-quill, UNIX symlinks which work exactly as UNIX users expect.
It also has Mac OS "aliases," introduced IIRC in System 7, which most Mac devotees think are superior to UNIX symlinks.
Now, before I get too far into praising "aliases," let me acknowledge that the presence of both mechanisms in Mac OS X is a big, hairy, ugly, mess, and one of innumerable places where the Mac world currently suffers from having anywhere up to half a dozen or so APIs for the same basic functionality. Mac OS X now resembles, well, my house, with fifteen-year-old half-abandoned dusty possessions still lurking in the attic. Not that Windows is any better, of course.
But I digress. You may like Mac OS aliases or you may dislike them, but you can see they they are a complete, well-thought-out, finished, working mechanism that it is at least possible to admire as something more than a half-baked knockoff of symlinks.
I happen to like them, a lot, because they just work. You don't need to do anything special at a programming level to dereference them, and it doesn't matter what programming language you're using or whether you're accessing them across the network, or whatever. However you do it, when you open the alias, you open the file it points to. And they are not fragile: you can move them or rename them or whatever and they still point to the right place. (The tough part is not dereferencing them... and Apple's deliberate failure to document or provide an API for creating them programmatically).
What I find hard to forgive Microsoft is that when Microsoft implements their knockoff of a well-known OS feature, it is rare that they come up with anything fresh and original. So many of their derivatives seem to be hasty knockoffs implemented by people who didn't "get" the original. And they put these half-baked implementations into shipping products, making it very difficult for Microsoft ever to finish them or fix them.
You can see this in a dozen places, like the Windows NT command language, which is a half-baked extension of the miserable quarter-baked DOS command language. Jeez, guys, you had DCL and the various UNIX shells as models, couldn't you do better than that?
And five years later, there tends to be conflicting documentation: the documentation written when badly-designed feature X was introduced, telling all good little Microsoft developers that they simply must, must, must use feature X in everything, and the documentation written a few years later warning everyone against the bad practice of using crufty old deprecated feature X...
I just wish I could shake Microsoft by the scruff of the neck and say, "Listen, if you can't improve it, then at least make a faithful copy of it."
Don't just pee in it to give it that personal flavor.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Is OS X like the dozens of other *nix systems? Well, "Yes" and "No". It has all the core features but has enough of its own. It combines the stability, networking and security of Unix + the Apple GUI. Last time I checked, it is doing pretty well even among the other dozen or so "similar" operating systems. The point was that Microsoft could have been the Microsoft (support lots of software and hardware) and the Apple (have a stable, no-nonsense core operating system) -- it could have had the best of both worlds, in my hypothetical parallel universe.
At the risk of being modded a troll, I will say this... With the frequency at which many Windows installations need to be hard rebooted, is an XFS driver for windows a good idea? I have personally found that XFS does not handle a push of a reset button well, in my case having overwritten every open file with 0's.
I swear we should be allowed to give mod points to sigs... "-1, Offtopic"
Most of the nice features of NT died either because they came with a performance penalty (e.g. user-mode display drivers), or because they didn't integrate nicely with win16, and later win32 (e.g. multiple API subsystems). It still keeps some nice features; the NT kernel was designed on the assumption that system calls should be pre-emptible, all objects have an associated ACL, but modern NT-based systems bury the kernel under so much crap that it's not worth the effort.
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