Estimated Transfer Time Is No More In Windows 8

MrSeb writes "Ahh, the Windows Explorer progress dialog. For years it has been struggling to figure out how to calculate how long our copy and delete operations would take, sliding the progress bar back and forth in a seemingly random, haphazard way, the laws of time all but ceasing to exist — five seconds remaining one moment and 13 minutes the next. That's (almost) all going to change, with the arrival of a greatly improved file management experience in Windows 8. Copy, move, delete, rename, and conflict resolution are all being overhauled and it's about time!"

Comments

Obligatory XKCD

[supersloshy]

You all knew it was coming ;)

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[ajo_arctus]

Of course! I came straight to the comments to post the exact same thing. It is my favourite xkcd, I think :)

FWIW, I'll believe that Microsoft have actually changed something for the better once it's shipping and it is proven that they actually did it. Too often they've been quick to talk and slow to deliver.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate you so much.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[hcs_$reboot]

I wonder...
- was Microsoft really not able to fix that (probably) easy bug?
- or did they think it's not important enough?

There was another (less) famous bug: notepad not able to deal with word-wrap correctly - not sure if they fixed this one in Vista+ (that was happening in the latest XPs).

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

Being an experienced PC user, I was shocked that I had been infected with a computer virus. This wasn't just any virus, however. It held my computer hostage and wouldn't go away unless I paid the creators $80!

I don't think you meant to do this, but you just described the product you were advertising.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

It's so obligatory that the Windows 8 blog itself beat you to the punch: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/08/23/improving-our-file-management-basics-copy-move-rename-and-delete.aspx (search for "funny jokes")

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Sez Zero]

You all knew it was coming ;)

XKCD612 was actually referenced in TFA. So, yes, I knew it was coming.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[idontgno]

This is Slashdot. Why would TFA have given anyone any idea about anything? That would have required reading it, and that never happens. Ever.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

MyCleanPC trashed my Windows install and broke my PC. Definitely not recommended.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[AvitarX]

It's a little unfair to criticize them strongly, I think the Vista conflict resolution was the best out there when it was released.

And times haven't been terrible since XP.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Moryath]

Not only that, it kicked my dog and stole my grandmother's false teeth!

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[pak9rabid]

I'm going with B.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[dingen]

Ah great! I like funny jokes a lot better than unfunny ones. Well done, blog administrator for including my favorite type of joke!

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[GameboyRMH]

It turned me into a newt!

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[GameboyRMH]

Yeah Microsoft can't fix a feature that works fine in most other OSes so they remove it entirely. Great work guys. Great work.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Stormthirst]

I suspect that Notepad not being able to wrap properly is the least of their worries

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

error 404 not found.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[m.ducharme]

A newt?

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

That sucks, it gave me a blowjob then made me a sandwich. It must have learned a thing or two from your grandmother while it was stealing her false teeth.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder...

- was Microsoft really not able to fix that (probably) easy bug?

- or did they think it's not important enough?

There was another (less) famous bug: notepad not able to deal with word-wrap correctly - not sure if they fixed this one in Vista+ (that was happening in the latest XPs).

So how do you calculate how long it will take to copy files? On the same device? Between physical devices? Between different interfaces (SATA -> USB)? Across a network? What if the system is thrashing and busy? What if there's network traffic? What if a cluster of bad sectors is discovered and it's trying to relocate them on the fly? Is it verifying the copy? Are all selected files from the same location? Are there links? Sparse files? Will the server have to bring a tape unit online? Copying on different partition formats? What about alternate data streams? Will a virus scanner inspect them? ACLs between different domains?

With so many conditions and edge cases and minutia, simply projecting estimates from sampled speed data seems like a pretty good compromise if you want an estimate of the time. Problem is, people don't understand it's an estimate. An exact prediction of the future would be nice, but I don't want to sit for 50% of the total copy time while the computer does the maths required to make that perfect deterministic calculation ala Star Trek.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely linux has no problem estimating time per unit to perform such file operations, right? Since it's just an easy bug to fix?

Do you think they should walk the directory structure at the beginning of the file move, check the file sizes, add them all up, benchmark the transfer speed (which will vary depending on position of the data on the disk), and then start moving the files? Or should they just move the fucking files? Do you think this would work well in large file trees with thousands of directories with thousands of subdirectories and even more thousands of files?

Hmm.. Based off the comments I see here, this is obviously not an issue in linux. So please, master kernel hackers, how should Microsoft fix the progress bars?

The progress bars in Windows are not fucking magic. Please show me a progress bar that is magic, as I have some applications I could use it in! They just move as much as the program has them move. You still have to come up with a way to calculate the time it will take. Hopefully, by now, you can realize this is a non-trivial problem. Thanks.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[supersloshy]

^ This. I saw this article and, before I even thought about it, I shared the comic. I only checked TFA afterwards and realized I was beaten to the punch.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[supersloshy]

Yeah, Windows has gotten better. I just like the comic because it used to be so true though. I use GNOME all the time as my preferred OS, and Windows 7/Vista have been pretty tolerable as a gaming OS for me thus far.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[GameboyRMH]

...I got better...

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[piripiri]

I'll take both.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Shompol]

.... and that's when I installed Linux and never looked back.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[tunapez]

I wonder... - was Microsoft really not able to fix that (probably) easy bug? - or did they think it's not important enough?

Yes.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[hedwards]

The problem with it was that there wasn't any sort of bounds placed on the estimates. They also didn't take into account that type of transfer IIRC, if you're copying to a network share the estimates would be calculated the same way as if it was disk to disk or on the same disk.

Ultimately it's not that simple to solve in any reasonable way. At least not without knowing more about the transfer than the file size and the current and past transfer rates. And it would regularly be thrown way off if it needed user interaction during the process.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[bmxeroh]

OH NO! My gigabits are slowing down too, and I'm definitely underclocking! Maybe I should go beat my dog? Save me MyCleanPC! Please clean up my gigabits and get my computer overclocking again...

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course. We just weren't sure if it would be the first post or the 39823rd.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Hadlock]

Probably not very important. When file transfer is all but completely broken even in Win 7 (try moving a 3gb file across the network, then try moving a second, third, fourth file 30 seconds after the first has started some time) and bogs to shit, imagine the sales rep pointing to file transfer time in Windows Server and saying "wow look at this! if you upgrade to server your concurrent file transfer time will improve by 6000%! Look at the infrastructure savings you'll save by not having to upgrade your network!" etc etc.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[JVolkman]

Why couldn't they start moving the files and calculate the total size in parallel? By the time they calculated the total size, they'd already have a speed benchmark.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Sarten-X]

So how do you calculate how long it will take to copy files?

Off the top of my head:

Maintain a table of expected speeds for each storage device on the filesystem. Record how long it takes to read the filesystem information. When a device is mounted, if it's reasonable for the device type, seek to the middle and end, measuring speeds there, too. Get approximate curves for the read and write speeds across locations, and use those for future estimates. For future read and write operations, take note of where they are and how fast they go, and adjust the curves accordingly.

When an operation starts, look at the curves for input and output for the respective devices. Find the expected speed for the target location. Whichever speed is lower should be used for the estimate.

With so many conditions and edge cases and minutia, simply projecting estimates from sampled speed data seems like a pretty good compromise if you want an estimate of the time.

Edge cases are edge cases, and shouldn't be causing incorrect estimates most of the time. Estimating based on the first few seconds of an operation makes sense if that's all the information you have, but a modern operating system should be able to know so much more than that now. It should be able to know the effects of virus scanners and verification. It should know how fast a device has performed in the past.

Problem is, people don't understand it's an estimate.

Saying that your transfer will take somewhere between 5 minutes and 9 hours is not an estimate. It's a mockery. What I want to know is whether I should get a cup of coffee, watch some TV, or read a novel. What I'm told is that my OS has no idea what it's working with.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

a feature that works fine in most other OSes

lol

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[saleenS281]

That sounds like the storage you're pushing to is broken. I routinely upload and download to/from my NAS device (opensolaris zfs box) from win7 and max out a gigE link.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[TheInternetGuy]

Actually it sounds like he is on a half duplex network, and getting collisions with his own return traffic.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[LynnwoodRooster]

Now you know why you should always weigh your software against a duck...

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[QuickBible]

It seems like some brilliant person could discern the fractal pattern of file copying and estimate the time more accurately than the current method. Copying files is basically a self repeating pattern. Move 1 bit to 1 bit, Move 1 byte to 1 byte, move 1 word to 1 word, etc.. No matter what resolution you examine the problem from you are at once dealing with the same pattern and thus it is in the realm of fractal geometry.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Joce640k]

That would have required reading it, and that never happens. Ever.

Trying to get first post is WAY more important than reading the article.

Slashdot needs a new moderation option "first post whore" which sends posts to the very bottom if it reaches 5.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Forty Two Tenfold]

That's A+B = sour grapes.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Meski]

I would have been happy with % progress and an hourglass. That gives me enough info to decide by the rate the percentage is changing that i should:
1 - wait
or
2 - get a coffee
or
3 - cancel, as something's gone wrong

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[netsharc]

It feels to me like the Windows Team worked on fixing the whole thing because of the xkcd joke...

So, xkcd is determining which way an OS goes... bravo everyone!

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[alexandre_ganso]

It is actually simpler than that. Just take more spaced samples - so you let the interference noise build up - overestimate and try not to be precise to the second except when it is really close to the end (say, when it thinks its less than 25 seconds).

It is all about perception and estimation. When the OS tells me "oh, this will take around five minutes", I forget it there and go do something else. I don't care if the file actually took 3 and a half minutes AT ALL.

Instead of this, MS created that monster worth of being part of some slackware install process or some crazy kde plugin.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[neokushan]

Maintain a table of expected speeds for each storage device on the filesystem.

A table of "expected" speeds for each storage device? For one, the word "expected" leads to all sorts of problems. What's the "expected" speed of a hard drive? What about a badly fragmented Hard drive? What about a Hard Drive that's also being accessed by some other, unpredictable task?
And what about a USB drive? How fast do you expect that to go? If you've ever used a couple of USB drives from different manufacturers, you'll know the difference between one and another is night and day. Is Microsoft supposed to keep a database of every sing USB device ever made, just to get an estimate that's slightly more accurate? How about devices that didn't quite exist when the OS was launched? And what about when you throw in things like the Chipset used on the machine, which can also have a drastic effect on speeds, as well as things like drivers? Who's going to maintain this table, who's going to keep it up to date, where should it be stored, how big do you think it would be? You're talking about gigabytes of data, the only way to realistically do it is to stream it from the internet. Nevermind that's another operation to perform, but for a lot of copy jobs, it'd probably take too long.

f it's reasonable for the device type, seek to the middle and end

And what if it's not reasonable? And how will you know in advance where the files are actually going to be stored? If it's a mechanical drive, you might end up with files all over the place, or you might get lucky and have them sequentially written. The point is, you just won't know until it's too late.

There are many, many ways to estimate something as "simple" as a copy operation, but due to the sheer number of variables there isn't a simple, sure-fire way to always be accurate. The best you can do is be somewhat accurate most of the time.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[neokushan]

The argument for that could be that while you're busy calculating the file sizes, you're starving the copy operation of bandwidth. Especially when you're using a Mechanical HDD, whereby two joint operations will more than half the overall speed as the mechanical side of things can't actually perform 2 things at once, meaning everything has to take turns.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[neokushan]

I would just like to say that not enough programs use decimal percentages these days. Going from 1% to 2% over the course of a few minutes makes it hard to estimate yourself without really paying attention to it, whereas going from 1.50% to 1.53% in a second or two gives me an instant glance as to the speed (And in my feeble brain, makes it feel like it's going faster).

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[AvitarX]

I use kde, and really like how both gnome and kde handle the transfer status as an out of the way notification (windows 7 does too, sort of).

I'm not sure about the conflict resolution in either, but vista and 7 it is great. It copies everything it can, throws up an error on conflict, but keeps going, the only files held up are the actual conflicted ones.

Windows 7 has a pretty decent windowmanager/taskbar too.

Last big copy I did on OS X it scanned all files and checked for conflict before starting, I don't like this, and believe that's what gnome does too.

For a large batch of small files from a network it can take a very long time, even when going into an empty folder.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[AvitarX]

So are the parts of windows 7 and vista being discussed (and at least some of them can be swapped out)

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[WuphonsReach]

Is Microsoft supposed to keep a database of every sing USB device ever made, just to get an estimate that's slightly more accurate?

No, but you should keep track of every physical device that gets hooked up to the system and track the best transfer rates (files per second and bytes per second). Which would allow you to make better initial estimates. Or track the last 10 biggest (# of files or # of bytes) transfers and average the results. Both of which are very simple algorithms.

If the best files/sec number says 2 hours and the best bytes/sec number says 1 hour, then initially saying that the transfer will take 90 minutes is not that bad of a guess.

Mostly, tracking history is about improving the initial guess. Once you're 30-50% through the transfer, you should have enough history about the current process and you can start doing weighted estimates based on the last 10 seconds, the last 30 seconds, and the last 120 seconds.

If you don't have history for a device, then you don't give an initial estimate until you are 30-60 seconds into the transfer.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[WuphonsReach]

I get a solid 50-55 MB/s transferring files to/from a Samba file share in Win7 64bit.

And the bottleneck there is the hard drive on the server (which is maxed out at 100% utilization).

Naturally, unless I have multiple spindles in a RAID-10 array, I'm not going to try pushing 2 large transfers at once to that set of disks.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[neokushan]

I believe these days Windows doesn't give you that initial estimate anyway.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Sarten-X]

Expected speeds, as explained through the entire remainder of my post, are based on actual historical performance on the machine. A brand-new device never seen before has no expectation, until the first read - which conveniently happens while mounting the filesystem. By the time the OS is ready for any user-facing operations, it's already read several blocks of data at minimum. That's enough of a history for a basic estimate, recognizing that it's going to be inaccurate for a while.

"Reasonable for the device type" means a quick I/O test should be run on hard disks and optical disks, and anything else where seeking actually makes sense. Flash memory devices, for example, should only be tested for read speed, since excessive writes would reduce the lifespan of the device. Network mounts naturally don't have a "beginning" or "end", so the OS shouldn't try to estimate speeds on that. Likewise, wasting time to test a tape's speed would be ridiculous. I don't think it's excessive for an OS to know about every type of storage device, and whether it's sane to seek on it.

As for knowing in advance where the files are stored, that's part of the filesystem driver. Given that Windows only supports a small handful of filesystems, it'd be a small matter for the API to require planning as the first step in writing a file. When a program asks for an estimate of operations, it should be able to say what those operations are. The OS could go ahead and do the filesystem work of planning where the files will be transferred to and from (conveniently predicting "disk full" errors ahead of time, rather than 2 hours into the process), and from that determine the speed for each operation. Once the planning is complete, the actual copying could commence.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[pnewhook]

How many years did it take them to fix the math bugs in the calculator app in Windows 3.1? Just because it is a simple problem doesn't mean they know how to fix it.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Meski]

You only need to do that if the rate of change is small enough that the decimals aren't flickering like hundreths of seconds. I was thinking of a bar showing progress with the percent number embedded in it.

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[neokushan]

Well most UI's only update every second or so anyway. If the transfer was going particularly quickly, all you'd see is (for example) 5.32% -> 10.41%. Even if the UI does update quickly, it's not much of an issue in the same way that clocks that show ms don't detract from being able to tell the time.

It's a minor thing, just something that I appreciate when working with slow transfers.

How about replacing an open file?

[h4rr4r]

How about replacing an open file?
That is one thing every windows user would benefit from.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[ge7]

You can replace/overwrite it. Only time you cannot do that is if the software developer has made his program to specifically lock that file, and usually there's a good reason for that.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[Desler]

How about replacing an open file?

How about what? You've always been able to replace open files as long as their is no write lock on the file. In fact I just did so with a half dozen files. Apparently I have a magic version of Windows. Oh wait, I don't. And the behavior is no different than any other OS that will not allow you to replace a file that has a write lock on it.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[_0xd0ad]

Even if there is a "good" reason to prevent me from replacing/overwriting a file, there's still no "good" reason to prevent me from moving/renaming it.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[h4rr4r]

Then so sad that damn near every program uses them I guess. Too bad windows lacks lsof, is there a decent replacement for that?

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[Desler]

There's never a good reason for that,

Because you say so? There are plenty of good reasons that a piece of software would want a write lock on a file so that someone else can't replace the file. Synchronization is a prime example. Secondly, exactly what does this have to do with Windows when the same behavior exists on virtually every other OS.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[ge7]

So then it's a badly designed program. You can't really blame Microsoft for that. Locking the file keeps it from beginning destroyed by two or more concurrent writing operations and signals to the other program that it should wait while the operation is finished. Linux also has lock switch for files - do you also blame Linux distros for that, or do you blame the badly designed programs?

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlocker works quite well, although IIRC the installer may appear to contain some adware/malware. The product itself seems to be solid.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[0123456]

Because you say so? There are plenty of good reasons that a piece of software would want a write lock on a file so that someone else can't replace the file.

There are plenty of retarded reasons but I can't think of any good ones; if it's something like a database, then you should only be allowing one process to access it, not allowing multiple programs to randomly write stuff in there.

All I've ever seen file locking achieve is annoying users and fscking up the system when it fails so you have to reboot to clear the stuck locks.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[Desler]

Then so sad that damn near every program uses them I guess.

Why would it be sad? Do you care nothing about consistency of your data or do you never deal with synchronization? Since plenty of apps for Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, etc also have the exact same behavior I'm still failing to see why this is lumped in as some sort of Windows issue. It's trivially easy to write a C program to do this on any OS. Just open a file with exclusive write access and you won't be able to overwrite the file unless your OS is buggy or stupidly written.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[Desler]

There are plenty of retarded reasons but I can't think of any good ones

And that means something why? Because you're the sole arbiter of what is good and what is not? Oh wait, your opinion means jack and shit.

All I've ever seen file locking achieve is annoying users and fscking up the system when it fails so you have to reboot to clear the stuck locks.

You do realize that any time you open a file for writing you are almost always given an exclusive write lock on it, correct? Behavior that pretty much all OSes have had for 30+ years?

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[stewbacca]

How about being able to move or rename an open file while we are at it. These three shortcomings, the fact Windows wouldn't tell you there wasn't enough disk space until it was 30 minutes into the transfer, and the issue in this story are the reason I'm a Mac user.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[Desler]

And exactly which OS(es) allows you to rename or move files that have write exclusive locks on them? Because, from what I can see this has, again, nothing to do with Windows.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[stewbacca]

This behavior doesn't exist on OS X, nor did it in Mac OS (as far back as I can remember).

As a user, your logic makes no sense to me. There are plenty of good reasons (behind the scenes technical reasons?) why the OS should make it harder for me to accomplish work?

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[Desler]

Really? It's a short coming of Windows yet I created a txt file, opened it in Notepad and Notepad++ and I was able to both rename and move it. I guess I once again have a magical version of Windows.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[Desler]

So to test, I was able to do this in Windows. Created a txt file, opened it twice, once in Notepad another time in Notepad++, was able to rename it and move it. So what's your issue?

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[spazdor]

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653

Process Explorer can list file handles.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[h4rr4r]

Not with a proper text editor.
Never seen the .filename.swp that vim uses?

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[Desler]

This behavior doesn't exist on OS X, nor did it in Mac OS (as far back as I can remember).

Really? Because I wrote a trivial C program and ran it on OS X where I opened a file with an exclusive write lock and the file couldn't be replaced.

As a user, your logic makes no sense to me. There are plenty of good reasons (behind the scenes technical reasons?) why the OS should make it harder for me to accomplish work?

Why does it not make sense? Do you as a user not want consistent data? Do you never work in an environment where files are shared and you don't want others overwriting your changes? These are not uncommon situations in the least bit. And yet, to handle all these you *gasp* have to put exclusive write locks on files. Apps for both OS X and Linux do this as well. This has absolutely NOTHING to do with anything that Windows does.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[Desler]

But...but...it has to be a Windows problem despite the fact that what they complain about can also happen in Linux and Unix and Mac OS X. Hell even the complaints about not being able to rename or move open files in Windows is wrong. These people basically have no clue what they are talking about.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[0123456]

And that means something why? Because you're the sole arbiter of what is good and what is not? Oh wait, your opinion means jack and shit.

So, give us a good reason why a program should be locking a file so no other program can access it. And by good reason, it has to be something that isn't better solved by having one process arbitrating access to that file (e.g. dumb database vs some kind of SQL server).

You do realize that any time you open a file for writing you are almost always given an exclusive write lock on it, correct? Behavior that pretty much all OSes have had for 30+ years?

No wonder you think file locking is a good thing if you know so little about how file accesses work. I don't remember even Windows being that retarded, and the numerous Unix variants certainly weren't.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[h4rr4r]

Because it means you are closing apps to replace files. A silly thing to do. I can rm rm, lets see windows do that.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[h4rr4r]

Thank you.
Does this have a CLI?
I would hate to have to watch filenames blink in and out of the list in a gui.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[0123456]

Linux also has lock switch for files - do you also blame Linux distros for that, or do you blame the badly designed programs?

The difference is that almost every Windows program locks files even though there's no reason to do so, whereas almost no Unix programs lock files because there's no reason to do so. If you have two programs writing to the same file simultaneously, you're probably doing something wrong.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[_0xd0ad]

You didn't test anything, because Notepad doesn't lock files when it opens them. Try renaming/moving a file while it's still being downloaded, or a movie while it's being played.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[_0xd0ad]

I never said it was exclusive to Windows.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[Anonymous Coward]

Like the way I can't rename a PDF file if it is open in Adobe Reader? Or rename an MS Word file? Yet if I attempt the same thing in OS X or Linux it's just fine to rename them while the file is open and the program just picks up the changed name?

It's not Microsoft's fault, but due to developers who write software differently for Windows? Yet somehow developers can manage to do it for other platforms. I guess Windows isn't an important enough market for software developers to do it right, or they think that users would never have a reason to rename a file while it is open, if working in Windows.

No, I think most people realize some types of basic file operations in Windows are pretty limited compared to other operating systems/file systems, and it isn't the developer's fault.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[spazdor]

Start a Terminal window.
Type in:

$ cat > ~/SomeTextFile.txt

then type a few lines of junk into the terminal afterwards. leave the Terminal window open.

Now go into your home directory and open the file you've created in your favourite text editor. Try making some changes to the file and then saving it.

Didn't work, did it? See, OSX has always had write locking semantics, and earlier MacOSes did too. What was actually going on, is you were just using apps which were sanely designed, which means they only open the file for reading and writing during 'Open' and 'Save' operations, and the rest of the time they leave the file untouched.

When you think you "have a file open", that's not really the case. You opened the file in order to copy it into RAM, and then closed it again once its contents were displayed in your application window. All subsequent changes to the document onscreen are being made to the document in RAM, not on the filesystem, up until you click "save" and commit it back to the filesystem.

Just like in Windows. And *nix. And OS/2. This is pretty much the standard behaviour of every multitasking operating system ever made.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[cfalcon]

Yes, because he says so.

Whose goddamned machine is it exactly?

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[afidel]

Process Explorer allows you to search by resource and close an open handle forcibly. Won't work against a system process but should work for anything else.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[ge7]

Exactly this. Imagine if Windows allowed overwriting files like that. Especially when programs are explicitly requesting write lock on the file. So many people would be complaining about important documents that got destroyed and crashing applications.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[slater.jay]

Speaking as someone who uses Linux every day, I must ask: why in the world do you consider that a *good* thing to be able to do?

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[spazdor]

If I've got a log file which is opened by one program in Append mode, and I rename/move it, what should happen? Should the program keep appending logs to the file in its new name/location until it closes and reopens the file, or should it start a new file with the original's name/path? Choose carefully - either answer will create unpredictable or incorrect behaviour in some programs depending on the details of the file and how it's being used.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[amorsen]

Linux has only rudimentary mandatory lock support. Approximately no one uses it, and you need to add a mount option to the file system to enable it.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[_0xd0ad]

Slight correction, it doesn't even leave the file open. It just opens it, reads the contents, and then closes it. Of course you can rename/move the file. But drop a 1/2 GB file into Notepad and then try renaming it while Notepad is still trying to read it. You can't.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[stewbacca]

Do you never work in an environment where files are shared and you don't want others overwriting your changes? These are not uncommon situations in the least bit. And yet, to handle all these you *gasp* have to put exclusive write locks on files. Apps for both OS X and Linux do this as well.

The difference being, with OS X, I never have to worry about the consistency of my data and it works like humans work, not people who dabble in 1s and 0s. Whatever tech goes on in the background that allows me to move, replace, rename, overwrite an open document is what I like about OS X. I don't care what tech goes on to maintain "the consistency of my data". When I have a document open, then realize I want to move it somewhere else, rename it, or replace it, I want it to do that. I don't want to have to install a stupid unlocker program like I do on Windows. I don't want to have to quit what I'm doing, shut everything down, just to do a simple task like renaming a file.

In OS X, when a document is over a network, the write lock is present, but not when the document is on the local account. Files on my local account on my local machine don't have sharing or versioning issues, because I'm the only user that will be touching them, so I don't care to be bothered with unnecessary lock files. Windows sucks in this regard...period.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[Desler]

Try renaming/moving a file while it's still being downloaded, or a movie while it's being played.

Okay, I tried it both on Windows and Ubuntu. Behavior was the exact same. It couldn't be moved or renamed since Firefox hold a lock on the file. So, once again. Why is this Windows fault?

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[darkgrayknight]

the lock on the file only exists while it is being read into RAM.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[stewbacca]

That's a nice technical answer and all, but here's the reality of what the user experiences:

Scenario 1: Rename an open File

Windows: open MS Word, create a doc, save it as my page.doc. Then, with that file still open, because like 99% of all users, you are working with a document so therefore it is open, go to the desktop and rename the file. It tells you the document is in use and cannot be renamed.

Mac: do all that same stuff, except when you get to the "rename" part, it renames the file. The open copy in Word updates the file name.

Scenario 2: Move an open File

Windows: Open MS Word, create a doc, save it as my_page.doc. Continue working on the doc then get a email from your boss telling you to stick the doc in a different directory. You go to the file in Windows and cut and paste it to the new location, only to be greeted by the message that the file is in use and cannot be moved. Go back to Word, choose "save as" and save the document to a new place, then go to the old place and delete the dupe.

Mac: Go to the finder and move the open Word doc wherever you want. All the relative file paths are updated. OR, use "save as" in Word and deal with duplicate copies (but then again Lion introduces an entirely new versioning system, and there is no longer "save as", but that's another conversation)

So lock file, no lock file, whatever. You cannot debate that OS X handles open files differently (more elegantly) than Windows. I've never had to install an "unlocker" app in OS X.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[91degrees]

Those programs don't keep the file open.

What the application does, from a coder's point of view, is open a file, reads a file into a buffer, and closes a file. It then displays the buffer. The file is no longer open.

A lot of applications will open the file, read it and keep it open. Sometimes they do this for a perfectly valid reason bit a lot of the time it's just bad programming.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[Barefoot Monkey]

And exactly which OS(es) allows you to rename or move files that have write exclusive locks on them? Because, from what I can see this has, again, nothing to do with Windows.

BSD, Linux and MacOS allow you to do that, and even delete or overwrite the file while it's still locked without causing problems. Moving, deleting or renaming a file affects only a hardlink to the file and not the file itself; and overwriting a file is actually just deleting a hardlink and writing to a completely new file.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[h4rr4r]

When the problem is Word, I think we can blame them.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[Toonol]

I use a little utility called 'unlocker'. Whenever an operation is performed on an open file, it lets you force it through. I use it to copy music/videos out of my firefox cache. At least with flash, they're locked while playing, and deleted when done.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[MikeyC01]

Windows 7 (and I believe Vista too) won't let you move/copy to a destination if the destination doesn't have enough space at the time the copy starts

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[h4rr4r]

For a great many reasons the biggest one being that I could replace rm while using rm. Which means I don't need to reboot to do that.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[stonedcat]

Some people like to have complete access to their filesystem and not be hindered by their OS babysitting them or worse replacing the missing file later without their authorization. On atleast two occasions I've had to overwrite cp and mv to fix an issue with compiling. Had I been dealing with a microsoft OS I would have needed to jump through a ton of hoops to do something similar if not boot to entirely different OS and do it from there.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[nmb3000]

Process Explorer allows you to search by resource and close an open handle forcibly. Won't work against a system process but should work for anything else.

Forcibly closing file handles behind a program's back is almost always a really bad idea. The program holding the handle has no reason to expect that the handle has been closed and will continue to use it. Sometimes this just results in an invalid handle error, but if the handle has been re-issued it might mean that program A unintentionally closes (or writes to!) program B's handle (since the internal handle identifiers are re-used by the kernel).

I'm pretty sure Raymond Chen (of the OldNewThing blog) wrote about this, but I can't find the article now.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[Desler]

Windows sucks in this regard...period.

No, actually it has nothing to do with Windows at all. The part you glossed over points out that I wrote a simple trivial program in C that opened a file and put a lock on it. It was not over a network or anything else, yet it was unable to be renamed, moved or replaced. There are plenty of other OS X and Linux apps that I have used that have exactly the same behavior with files they are working on. Basically this has jack and shit to do with Windows despite what you and h4rr4r will continue to claim.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[_0xd0ad]

It's not Windows' fault; it's equally stupid on all OSes.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[Desler]

Huh? I ran the exact same program in Ubuntu and the same behavior happened. The file I opened was not able to be renamed, replaced or moved until I unlocked it. What the hell are you talking about?

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[piripiri]

It depends if you use the inode or the path to locate the file. Both are totally justifiable, and won't create unpredictable or incorrect behavior under a descent operating system.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[icebraining]

I don't know what bullshit is Ubuntu or Gnome doing, but I can move and delete temporary download files in my Debian box. Have you used 'rm' or the graphical file manager?

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[piripiri]

Because of course it's better when you can't.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[icebraining]

Moved or renamed, it's the same file. I don't see what's the problem.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[stewbacca]

You are simply being disingenuous. I suppose you can submit an anecdote of your custom written app that violates the default file management settings of the OS as proof that OS X handles open files just like Windows. Better proof would be for you to use any app on a Mac, open a file then rename/move/replace it in the Finder. You simply won't be bothered with lock files or dialogs like you will in Windows every time.

I swear, every time a legitimate complaint about Windows file management comes up, some slashdotter will blast this forum with the technical reasons why users are stupid and shouldn't be trusted to do anything the way they want to, instead of just accepting that Microsoft has spent 20 years cutting corners, instead of making the system work well. I'm still waiting to hear a good argument of why Windows defaults to this behavior instead of just saying, "yeah, that kinda sucks...we should have fixed that in XP service pack 1."

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[_0xd0ad]

The OS should seamlessly allow it to continue appending logs to the file in its new name/location, and let the program decide whether to create a fresh file if it detects that the file it had open has been moved/renamed.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[high]

Kind of! Process Explorer is a SysInternals program. SysInternals is a bunch of power user programs for Windows. While Process Explorer is GUI only you can instead use the command line alternative Handle.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896655

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[Coren22]

Except as another poster stated, Word for Mac doesn't do it. Therefore it was a specific choice of the programmer(s) of the Word for Windows, but not of the programmer(s) of Word for Mac. Both programs are by Microsoft.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[amorsen]

I don't believe you. See Mandatory File Locking For The Linux Operating System. Even with that, all you have to do is clear the gid bit to kill the "mandatory" lock, and the so-called locks are subject to race conditions.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[riscthis]

I don't want to have to install a stupid unlocker program like I do on Windows.

Using such a program has a very good chance of causing random file corruption:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.04.windowsconfidential.aspx

"Forcing a handle closed is equivalent to reaching into a program and freeing some memory. The program thinks the handle (or memory) is still valid and will continue to use it. But since the handle is really free, it will be reused for something else."

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[Renegrade]

Your program isn't reflecting the reality of the situation.

Under Windows, merely opening a file for writing always locks it exclusively, unless you use one of the funky shared-write modes.

CreateFile("winblows.txt",GENERIC_WRITE,blah,blah,blah,blah,blah); -- winblows.dat has an exclusive lock on it. You cannot manipulate or delete it until that handle is released.

Under Unix variants, if you simply open a file in write mode, you can still manipulate and delete it. That's why Debian can do updates of running services whereas even the mighty windows 7 (er sorry, windows NT 6.1?) requires a reboot every month to patch in those updates.

The downside of the Unix method is that if you delete a file that's open for writing from another process, the space won't be released until that other process closes the file (or is terminated, which also closes the file). This, however, lets you use the files in a /tmp fashion without having to actually place them in /tmp, with a faster release to boot.

I'm not familiar with OSX ; I would have assumed it's the same as Linux/*BSD/etc, but some of the other posts and tests submitted suggest otherwise.

Debian 5.0:

rene@tessa:~/test$ cat > ABCD
^Z
[1]+ Stopped cat > ABCD
rene@tessa:~/test$ lsof | grep ABCD
cat 3263 rene 1w REG 3,1 0 429757 /home/rene/test/ABCD
rene@tessa:~/test$ mv ABCD EFGH
rene@tessa:~/test$ ls
EFGH
rene@tessa:~/test$ fg
cat > ABCD
abcd's contents
rene@tessa:~/test$ ls
EFGH
rene@tessa:~/test$ cat EFGH
abcd's contents

Writing into a file simultaneously from multiple handles is possible but not advised.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[stewbacca]

Exactly my point, and exactly why my argument that OS X handles open files more elegantly than Windows is correct.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh, process explorer. It was my savior back in the NetBackup 5.x days when MSCS cluster backups would fail and leave gigantic .vsp files laying around, locked and not easily deleted. You know, the ones that showed as 0 bytes in explorer but were actually many gigs. I don't miss doing backups. Especially backups for win servers that were hosting multi Terabyte shares. Stupid poorly designed fileservers, NetApp yay.

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH33732

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[shutdown -p now]

The OS itself permits this. The problem is that setting the correct sharing flags when opening a file is a chore that many developers don't do. This is exacerbated by the fact that Win32 CreateFile() function requires the caller to specify what he wants to permit others to do, not what he wants to prohibit them to do (dwShareMode parameter and FILE_SHARE_* constants). If you're being a good citizen, you should pass FILE_SHARE_READ | FILE_SHARE_WRITE | FILE_SHARE_DELETE, but it's just so damn simple to pass 0 there - which has the effect of an exclusive file lock - that many do just that. Also, many higher-level frameworks wrapping CreateFile pass zero by default.

In contrast, on Unix, the default is no locking, and you need to explicitly call fcntl(), which most programs don't do. This may mean that some Unix programs are not correctly locking files when they should (and would e.g. crash or misbehave if the file is modified while they're working on it), but in practice it's rare to hit it, while incorrect overboard locking is much more likely to result in user annoyance. In that sense, POSIX API encourages developers to do the thing that is most often right and less annoying to the user.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[GooberToo]

Those mandatory locks are not POSIX. Thus number of cases where they actually add value are small. Traditionally, Linux advocates POSIX interfaces and defacto standards. In this vein, for the vast majority of use cases, alternative co-operative locking is by far preferred and as an advantage, you entirely avoid the cluster fuck that is file locking under Windows.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just out of curiosity, what happens when you tell OSX "Move this 200 MB photoshop file while I'm in the process of saving it?"

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of which I hate it when Windows automatically installs a driver I am trying to downgrade after I disable it. I had to reformat and reinstall the OS because of a bug in the graphics card driver. UGH

It is the same thing with the OS thinking oh, poor user let me just reinstall that buggy driver for you and make sure it is up to date with the bad driver.

I just installed a service pack so I wasn't willing to simply risk a restore with both a driver and service pack. How do stupid people do this?

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[makomk]

There's also an interesting quirk on Linux and probably many other Unix-like systems where if any program has a deleted file open for reading, you can't remount the filesystem as read-only and therefore can't shut the system down cleanly. Only really affects people writing init systems because everything else gets killed during the shutdown process though.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[Anonymous Coward]

Quit holding hands and playing with the little girl linux and move up to a real man's linux.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[metrix007]

File locking is well understood and OS agnostic. It's only the Windows haters who try to misrepresent it as a flaw in Windows.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[BillX]

In after the millions of nerdrage arguments about the finer points of file locking semantics that will inevitably follow (and have), I have an even more modest wish. Forget operating on the locked files for now: when I try to copy/move/delete a directory of 10,000 files, of which 3 are locked, will this new Windows file manager go ahead and copy/move/delete the other 9,997 instead of freezing for half a minute and then bombing out of the process on the first failure?

(As much *fun* as it is to clean out the Windows temp directory via manual binary search to find the actually deletable ones...)

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[drsmithy]

For a great many reasons the biggest one being that I could replace rm while using rm.

Can you expand on the technique you might use to replace rm with rm ?

Which means I don't need to reboot to do that.

You don't need to reboot to replace open files in Windows, either, you just need to close whatever it is that has them open.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[drsmithy]

Some people like to have complete access to their filesystem and not be hindered by their OS babysitting them [...]

I see. Do you feel equally "hindered" by memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking ?

[...] or worse replacing the missing file later without their authorization.

No file is going to get replaced without your authorisation.

On atleast two occasions I've had to overwrite cp and mv to fix an issue with compiling. Had I been dealing with a microsoft OS I would have needed to jump through a ton of hoops to do something similar if not boot to entirely different OS and do it from there.

Indeed. Such crazy "hoops" as creating a second copy of the cp or mv executables and using those to overwrite the originals. Mind-bending stuff.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[petman]

There was actually a very good reason for that. In the old days, applications didn't have access to a lot of memory, so certain apps couldn't load the whole file into memory and had to view/edit it on-the-fly. Of course, nowadays, this is no longer an issue, but I guess some developers just got stuck with the old paradigm.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you a fucking retard or something?
Your last two posts = 80% bullshit...

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[petman]

Repeat Scenario 1, but this time with MS Wordpad instead of MS Word. You'll find no trouble renaming the file while it's still "open". As some posters have pointed out, Windows is not the issue, it's applications like MS Word.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[Meski]

kill the handle. The app will hate you for it, but it will let you overwrite.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[goarilla]

with process explorer you can lookup file handles

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[David Chappell]

And exactly which OS(es) allows you to rename or move files that have write exclusive locks on them? Because, from what I can see this has, again, nothing to do with Windows.

Windows does have some unusual limitations which make it difficult to replace programs and DLLs if they are running or loaded. On Linux, MacOS X, most Unixes one can simply delete the program or DLL and create a new one with the same name. Processes which loaded it before you replaced it keep their connection to the old file. When the last such process terminates, the disk spaces used by the file is freed.

In contrast, Windows does not allow one to delete an open file (whether it is locked or not). This makes upgrading applications and OS components much more complicated. It is necessary to close all running instances of the program or DLL to be upgraded. In the case of system processes or important DLL files, this may not be possible. It may be that the best one can do is store the new files elsewhere and create a script which will copy them into place during the next reboot (when almost all programs and services are stopped).

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[David Chappell]

For a great many reasons the biggest one being that I could replace rm while using rm.

Can you expand on the technique you might use to replace rm with rm ?

rm is a poor example since it seldom runs for more than a few seconds. Firefox is a better example. On Linux one can generally use Firefox while a batch of upgrades is being installed even if Firefox is one of the things being upgraded. (I say generally because occasionaly there will be a slight incompatibiity between the new and old Firefox which does not clear up until one restarts Firefox.)

Which means I don't need to reboot to do that.

You don't need to reboot to replace open files in Windows, either, you just need to close whatever it is that has them open.

In many cases the only practical way to close them is to reboot.

Re:How about replacing an open file?

[drsmithy]

rm is a poor example since it seldom runs for more than a few seconds. Firefox is a better example. On Linux one can generally use Firefox while a batch of upgrades is being installed even if Firefox is one of the things being upgraded. (I say generally because occasionaly there will be a slight incompatibiity between the new and old Firefox which does not clear up until one restarts Firefox.)

Of course, you need to restart Firefox to take advantage of any updates, which puts you in exactly the same situation.

In many cases the only practical way to close them is to reboot.

And in Linux you would need to restart pretty much everything, which is essentially the same as rebooting.

I will also make my standard point that if a server reboot - scheduled or otherwise - impacts the SLA of any service, your architecture is broken.

It will be...

[kiehlster]

1302481501461469 minutes until this feature is completed.

Re:It will be...

[stms]

No it will be about 10 seconds.

Re:It will be...

[antdude]

4815162342 :P

Will the file copy/move crash....

[GuyFawkes]

... when it hits a locked / corrupted / moved file, as every version of windows has since year dot??/

That alone would be a vast improvement and make all the file sync tools surplus...

Re:Will the file copy/move crash....

[nstlgc]

Didn't they fix that in Vista? Last time I can remember having a similar problem was in XP...

Re:Will the file copy/move crash....

[SJHillman]

You can copy files in Vista? I've never had the system stable long enough to try that.

Re:Will the file copy/move crash....

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean when you're copying a bunch of pictures off of a customers computer for you to look at while you're "repairing" it and one of the pictures is in a bad sector and as a result Windows tells you theres an error and simply quits the transfer?

Happened to me many times before, and if Windows 8 has it where it can "skip" the corrupted file and move on to the next one, then that's awesome....

Re:Will the file copy/move crash....

[0123456]

You can copy files in Vista? I've never had the system stable long enough to try that.

You can, but it takes so long that no-one has ever managed to copy a complete file.

Re:Will the file copy/move crash....

[broggyr]

Chuck Norris copied a file in Vista. Once.

Re:Will the file copy/move crash....

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, this is one of those things that make me think, "in the 11 years since Windows 2000, why hasn't Microsoft improved this?" It'd be great if copy processes didn't die when an error occurs. It'd be great if there were something like a queue, so you could see which file copies have failed, and have the option to resume/retry. It'd be great if, when it gives you the option to replace an existing file in the new location, one of the options were to check the checksums to see if they're the same file.

All this stuff would take a little work to make it simple and palatable to everyday users (maybe just hiding these options by default), but I wish Microsoft would focus on these kinds of improvements rather than making fancier window animations. Follow around some users and sysadmins for a year and catalog all of their annoyances, and then fix them.

Re:Will the file copy/move crash....

[Zorpheus]

This is the reason why I still don't use the explorer in windows, but a replacement. Try to copy/delete/move several files, if one of them is locked it will cancel the whole process.

Re:Will the file copy/move crash....

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I do it all the time. Maybe you're just an idiot.

Re:Will the file copy/move crash....

[jnpcl]

I had to deal with this quite often when I worked in the Photo Lab at the local retail store.

XCOPY /C is your friend.

Re:Will the file copy/move crash....

[Anonymous Coward]

No clue, but it doesn't crash in 7. It pops up a dialogue asking what you'd like to do.

Re:Will the file copy/move crash....

[goarilla]

I prefer robocopy heck even xxcopy over xcopy anytime.

Re:Will the file copy/move crash....

[Anonymous Coward]

Anytime, eh?

How about when it's a locked-down workstation and you can't install new software?

Re:Will the file copy/move crash....

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a robocopy ..eh.. copy right there in the system32.

So..

[cyberchondriac]

It'll be replaced by a dialog box saying, "It's done when it's done"?

Re:So..

[Anonymous Coward]

And that took a fairly long amount of time. What does that say about the devs...

Re:So..

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the time estimate is not gone. Check the screenshots with the TFA: http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/windows-8-copy-speeds.jpg. I clearly see time estimates there. They are just relegated to the advanced view and not in the default view.

Re:So..

[synapse7]

I could see this would be viable over GB lan, but what about over wireless or FTP/VPN over a slow internet connection.

Re:So..

[Anonymous Coward]

It'll be replaced by a dialog box saying, "It's done when it's done"?

The Arabic version will say Inshallah.

Teracopy

[mehrotra.akash]

Perhaps they should just buy teracopy

Re:Teracopy

[Anonymous Coward]

Came here to say this. +1

Re:Teracopy

[devlynh]

Who says they didn't?

Re:Teracopy

[daern]

Perhaps they should just buy teracopy

Try Altap Salamander too - www.altap.cz. Cracking software, especially if you prefer to press keys rather than click buttons :-)

Re:Teracopy

[kermidge]

Bingo. I've used it for years. Free, fast, and when used with unlocker, you can move most anything.

That said, best file utility for my needs was from Codehead Technologies for the Atari ST.

Re:Teracopy

[DJRikki]

Or not since Teracopy is actually incapable of copying terabytes of data - Im an unlucky paying customer

Re:Teracopy

[Anonymous Coward]

I used that for the first time yesterday and it crashed ... I'll take unknown completion over crashing.

Re:Teracopy

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps they should just buy teracopy

Please, yes please!
Now there is a copy program worth using EVERY day. With ACCURATE estimates, no matter if the copy is on local disk or halfway around the world.

Re:Teracopy

[mehrotra.akash]

oh.. never knew that

Maximum I had ever done was moving about 700GB between 4 drives on ( 3 USB, 1 internal)
The queuing and skipping of uncopyable files let me go and have dinner while it was going on

Re:Teracopy

[mehrotra.akash]

Teracopy crashing is better than explorer crashing while copying your files

Also, when moving since it does the deletes only after ALL the files are copied successfully, in case of a crash, just delete the destination and redo the operation.. you dont end up with half the files in source and half in destination

Re:Teracopy

[Anonymous Coward]

No, maybe they should copy the feature set and create their own interface. Every tool that they buy dies. 'Loosing' processExplorer was bad enough.

Re:Teracopy

[atamido]

I've been thinking about becoming a paying customer, so I'm interested in this. Is it an issue with the number of files, the total size of all files, or the size of the largest file? And do you know what the limit is?

So Futuristic

[droidsURlooking4]

Finally catching up to ftp and kermit

Terrible summary & headline

[Godai]

First, I've never seen the progress bar in a Windows file transfer progress bar slide 'back and forth in a seemingly random, haphazard way'. I've seen progress bars that do that, and but I've never seen a Windows file transfer dialog do that. The estimation can jump around like crazy at times, but the progress bar was always fine (since, I assume, it's simply based on # of files completed). Maybe Windows 98 did that? I don't remember it doing that, but its been a while. Certain XP, Vista & Windows 7 don't.

Second, if you RTFA the estimated transfer time is currently still there; its just downplayed.

Re:Terrible summary & headline

[godrik]

"Second, if you RTFA the estimated transfer time is currently still there; its just downplayed."

You read RTFA? Hand over you slashdot reader card!

Re:Terrible summary & headline

[The MAZZTer]

The problem is that the progress dialog pre-Vista does not know how many files there are as it starts, so the progress bar may go quickly for a bit then slowly for another bit as it encounters folders with few small files and folders with many large files, respectively.

Re:Terrible summary & headline

[Anonymous Coward]

Consider yourself lucky. I've seen it go from 30 seconds, to 15 minutes, back to 30 seconds again, and then to some other seemingly-random and thoroughly unhelpful estimate in between, especially with network file copies on a busy network, but it also happens between local drives sometimes depending on what the machine is doing. It's whacked. Granted it's not a simple problem when other tasks may be interfering, but it's still really, really awful.

But worse than the crazy estimated file transfer time is the unnecessary file locking in order to keep legacy programs from breaking. Oh look, I can't rename that file in Explorer until I close the file in Word (repeat for any other program and file). Seems reasonable ... until you realize that every other decent OS and filesystem in the last decade hasn't had that limitation. Not Linux, not OS X, not UNIX systems going back decades. Hell, I can't even rename a PDF file that I happen to simultaneously have open in Adobe Reader, and it's read-only!

Re:Terrible summary & headline

[hcs_$reboot]

You read RTFA?

You read RRTFA?
Error Stack Overf%$3z/.$%#@

Re:Terrible summary & headline

[0123456]

The bigger problem is that the first thing the GUI does when you want to copy the files is to go and see how many files there are and how large they are so it can estimate the amount of time it's going to take, and by the time it's done that it could just have copied the damn files in the first place unless they're enormous.

Re:Terrible summary & headline

[greed]

If the count isn't known, it shouldn't use a progress bar. What's the Windows version of the "barber pole" unknown-limits-but-not-crashed progress indicator?

Re:Terrible summary & headline

[0123456]

Oh look, I can't rename that file in Explorer until I close the file in Word (repeat for any other program and file).

My favorite was the way that I couldn't delete a file in Explorer because Explorer was trying to generate a thumbnail for the file. And usually that would cause some thread in Explorer to vanish up its own backside so the file remained locked until I killed Explorer or rebooted.

Ah, I so miss the excitement of running Windows and never knowing what is going to spectacularly fail next.

Re:Terrible summary & headline

[Godai]

I know there is one, I just can't remember what it looks like. I have a vague sense that its a solid green bar (lighter in colour) with something bouncing back & forth, but I might be mixing it up with something else. I know it has one though, I've definitely seen it.

And what's 0123456 was talking about is that I believe when its a large number of files it gives you the 'indeterminate' progress bar while it has some status like 'Calculating files to copy' or 'Preparing to copy'. But there are times when it does that for like two minutes (or worse), and then completes almost instantly. So it literally took longer to calculate how long it would take than to do it. That's fairly rare, but it does happen. It used to happen a lot more often with Vista with the 'Long Goodbye' bug (moving to the recycle bin) but that was eventually fixed. That didn't eliminate the problem, but it did reduce its occurrence quite a bit I believe.

Re:Terrible summary & headline

[Godai]

I know the time estimation is loopy, I've seen that plenty of times. I meant that the actually progress bar doesn't jump around. The summary suggests it does, but I've never seen that.

Re:Terrible summary & headline

[QuantumPion]

It doesn't slide back and forth. What it does is jump from 0% to 99.9% complete in the first millisecond of copying, and then take 10 minutes to finish the last 0.1%.

Re:Terrible summary & headline

[Anonymous Coward]

Honey, you need a bigger stack.

That's what she said!

Re:Terrible summary & headline

[avxo]

Oh look, I can't rename that file in Explorer until I close the file in Word (repeat for any other program and file). [...] Hell, I can't even rename a PDF file that I happen to simultaneously have open in Adobe Reader, and it's read-only!

Don't blame Windows for that. Blame the programmers who coded the app in which you opened the file. Because they are the ones who called CreateFile to open the file, and set the share mode to either 0 (which means that nobody else can open the file) or to FILE_SHARE_READ (which means others can only open the file to read its contents). If they had set the share mode to FILE_SHARE_DELETE in one API, you could delete and rename the file to your heart's content!

But I guess it's just easier to just blame Microsoft.

Re:Terrible summary & headline

[Anonymous Coward]

The Windows equivalent of the "barber pole" is a progress bar with a wildly jumping estimate of time to completion. I'm shocked you have to ask.

Re:Terrible summary & headline

[Anonymous Coward]

It is...(wait for it) The Progress Bar! It has a mode of operation that does exactly as you describe. In C# it has a style called Marquee that does exactly this. I'm not certain if there is an equivalent style in the Win32 api, but I'd assume it is possible there as well.

Re:Terrible summary & headline

[Godai]

Well, sometimes, but fair enough :) I'm not trying to debate that its estimate can be badly wrong -- anyone who uses it for enough time will see that -- I'm just taking issue with the summary's suggestion that it actually moves back & forth. I've seen progress bars that do that -- even some Microsoft products' progress bars -- and its bloody irritating. But if you're going to slag something, slag it accurately.

Also, its worth noting that for all its derision, Mac OSX gets its estimation just as wrong. The article does mention that accurately guessing time to completion is incredibly complex for a file transfer. Its one of those things that works very well 98% of the time, but for that 2% where it doesn't, it's so spectacularly wrong that you can't help but remember it. At any rate, downplaying the estimation is probably a good thing. Sometimes its better not to offer information if it can -- even if its only rarely -- be incredibly wrong.

Re:Terrible summary & headline

[Anonymous Coward]

He's complaining about Word, which was programmed by Microsoft. The same problem occurs with Powerpoint, Excel and Visio.

Re:Terrible summary & headline

[vlueboy]

I just can't remember what it looks like. I have a vague sense that its a solid green bar (lighter in colour) with something bouncing back & forth, but I might be mixing it up with something else.

You're right. A search on "windows barber pole" led me to the "Marquee" control in Windows forms at MSDN. It looks like blank progress bar where a 20-40% width marker made up of tiny green progress bars slide back and forth like a train. Think about the red scanner sensor effect in front of Kitt, the AI car in Knight Rider. I first saw it used in Netscape 6 for Windows, IIRC.

Re:Terrible summary & headline

[phoenix_rizzen]

File copy progress bars haven't "bounced around", but installation progress bars certainly do. :) Especially for Microsoft products.

Re:Terrible summary & headline

[_0xd0ad]

Especially Microsoft? The worst offender is Adobe Reader. It's ridiculous.

At least apps like 7-Zip/WinRAR give you two progress bars: one for the current operation, one for the overall progress.

Re:Terrible summary & headline

[EvanED]

Eh, only sort of. Everything that explorer needs to read in order to get the estimated time it will need to read when it copies -- and then when it goes to copy, it's already in the OS's buffer cache, so it's just moving the work around.

The exception to this is if the copy blows your buffer cache and flushes the otherwise-preloaded MFT portions. And in that case, the copy is going to take forever anyway, so taking 2*forever isn't a huge deal.

Personally, if someone writes a 'cp' or 'mv' on Linux that will do the same and then give me a progress indicator, I'll switch to it immediately. (Anyone know of one? I've put some time into it, but the closest I've seen is one that just gives you a progress bar for single large files.) IMO the only time that the initial gathering phase takes an appreciable amount of time is when you are going to really want the progress bar anyway.

TLDR: You say "bigger problem", I say "wonderful feature".

Re:Terrible summary & headline

[Coren22]

But not the equivalent programs for Mac which are also made by Microsoft.

Re:Terrible summary & headline

[Anonymous Coward]

If the count isn't known, it shouldn't use a progress bar. What's the Windows version of the "barber pole" unknown-limits-but-not-crashed progress indicator?

Usually a non-responsive or possibly black screen but with the mousepointer still moving, sometimes.

Re:Terrible summary & headline

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see how you repeat things when you're over 2000 years old, you bastard!

I hope I don't have to explain the joke..

Re:Terrible summary & headline

[syockit]

You should've left out the last line, at least someone else could profit from getting modded "Funny" using it if you happened to have maxed out your score.

Re:Terrible summary & headline

[avxo]

I specifically quoted OPs statement about Explorer, a core Windows component, and Adobe, a popular, non-Microsoft program, and was responding to that. I don't know if various Office programs exhibit this behavior, but if they do, the people at Microsoft responsible should be blamed. But not the people at some unrelated division.

The point was that this isn't something inherent to the design of Windows. It was something that was caused by the choice of flags used by the programmers when calling the Windows API. With that said, there's a legitimate issue in renaming under Windows, caused by the operating system itself, but it doesn't involve files; it involves directories: you cannot rename a directory if a file inside that directory is open.

And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

* Drive letters - WTF???

* \ instead of the standard / - leave it to Microsoft when faced with picking a sane choice and and a mind boggling idiotic one...

* Can't boot to a standard desktop from any Windows OS media

* No application bundles

* The Registry - LOL. Why lose just the settings for a single application when you can lose everything! Thanks Microsoft!

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[Radres]

What about not having cancelling a print job take forever and a day?

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, let's use a character everyone uses and might want to use in a file name as our path delimiter. And the alternative (backslash)? Let's use that to escape spaces and shit! YEAH UNIX RULES. Not.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

You can change mount points, but it's like a hidden feature. You can reference paths with / too if you know how also. The rest is about making money. The registry is designed to thwart piracy more than anything else.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[djdanlib]

Oh, kids these days just don't troll like they used to. How about we get some facts in here, instead?

There is no standard directory separator:

/ is UNIX and derivative OSes since the beginning of subdirectories
: was the separator on MacOS from the 1980s until MacOS/X
\ is DOS and Windows, from the 1980s
VMS was this massive mess: http://www.itec.suny.edu/scsys/vms/ovmsdoc073/V73/6489/6489pro_010.html
(Were there others?)

Also, if you lose your Registry... wow. Never seen that happen in 16 years of working in IT. I think the last time I heard of that was when someone's hard drive started going bad, and they were running Windows 95, and had never backed up anything in their lives. Why wouldn't anyone back up their hard drive regularly, anyway? Some people must like the pain of reinstalling everything and starting from scratch... Mac / UN*X users are not exempt from this requirement either.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

NT4.0 allowed double drive letters (AA...ZZ:). Why was that feature removed ?

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

Not hard to lose the current user profile though if Windows chokes during logoff or shutdown. While you don't completely lose the registry, you are pretty much fucked.

(Had it happen to me this year - was a royal PITA.)

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

* The Registry - LOL. Why lose just the settings for a single application when you can lose everything! Thanks Microsoft!

Gnome is doing the same thing. See gconf-editor.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[MurukeshM]

You mean help piracy. The number of cracks that attack registry keys... 123,785,496.. no wait, 2.3568, no 1,555,524,285,233,131,651.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[vlm]

Some people must like the pain of reinstalling everything and starting from scratch... Mac / UN*X users are not exempt from this requirement either.

Sure we are exempt. Set up the new box in DNS and DHCP server. 10 minutes to install a generic Debian base system using the default images, off a PXE boot. "apt-get install puppet" on the new machine. Configure puppet on the host to describe what the new machine should have:

node 'somethingnew' inherits basenode {
    include webserver
}

or whatever. /etc/init.d/puppet restart on the new host. Stand the heck back, "tail -f /var/log/syslog" if you really want. All done, magically. Did that a couple times last weekend.

If you are not autosigning puppet certs, you get to run "puppetca --sign somethingnew.domain" on the main host before the final step.

I've been supporting Debian on the desktop at home and work since 1997. Thats just how linux desktop support guys roll...

Why the heck should I bother with a backup copy of /bin/ls when Debian has like 500 world wide mirrors of it for me?

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

Takes me forever on Kubuntu 11.04.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[h4rr4r]

and it is just as brain dead.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[UnknownSoldier]

> There is no standard directory separator:
    "The great thing about standards, is that there are so many to pick from."
        -- Unknown
Yeah, because everybody was too fucking lazy to see what everyone else was doing, so everyone invented their own way.

> \ is DOS and Windows, from the 1980s
True, but DOS got the brain-dead drive letters and 8.3 filenames from that idiot CP/M inventor Gary Kildall. My Apple ][ had 30 character filenames (spaces were allowed.) MSDOS has set the world of computing back by 20 years.

> (Were there others?)
Yes, Apple ProDOS, October 1983, had 15 character filenames, and used the forward slash.

For once, Wikipedia isn't crap ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems#Limits

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[mrnobo1024]

* Drive letters - WTF???

* \ instead of the standard / - leave it to Microsoft when faced with picking a sane choice and and a mind boggling idiotic one...

Why are mount points better than drive letters, and why is / better than \? Unix's own particular way of naming files is far from universal.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[the linux geek]

The / directory separator isn't inherently "standard." It's standard among many Unix-family systems, which - surprise, surprise - are not the only operating systems in the world.

Stratus VOS uses >, as a Multics-family system.
Bull GCOS 8 uses \
HP NonStop uses .
VMS uses .
Mac OS used :

As far as the registry, and how Windows is the only OS horrible enough to use one, look up AIX and ODM sometime.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[0123456]

Also, if you lose your Registry... wow. Never seen that happen in 16 years of working in IT. I think the last time I heard of that was when someone's hard drive started going bad, and they were running Windows 95, and had never backed up anything in their lives.

Happened to me one day in the 90s, I think it was NT3.5? From what I remember I booted up the machine, it said 'Oh crap I deleted the registry. Sucks to be you' and that machine was dead until we reinstalled.

But a bad block in the middle of the registry is a far more likely occurence; that seems to screw it up real bad too.

Some people must like the pain of reinstalling everything and starting from scratch... Mac / UN*X users are not exempt from this requirement either.

I back up the configuration files from my Linux machines into an SVN repository so I can trivially rebuild them (and I have rebuilt them; when I put an SSD in my netbook installing Linux and just copying over the updated config files was faster than trying to copy over the old OS install). That's typically about two dozen small text files rather than some enormous binary blob that contains all kinds of information that can't be restored onto a new system. Nor did I have to reinstall every program because it kept all its configuration information in said enormous binary blob'o'crap.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[UnknownSoldier]

* Can I rename a file so it starts with a period or space?

Oh that's right -- Explorer is brain dead.

Good to see Microsoft is leading innovation! /sarcasm

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[ThisIsSaei]

There are quirks to all systems that are not necessarily 'garbage.' The \ vs / argument is just that. Yes, the jargon is non-standard. It's not objectively better or worse, and you dislike it - one assumes - only because you're not used to it.

One could point to annoying *nix quirks and make the same arguments. For example, mounting external USB drives as executable and the inherent headaches that come from that. I don't blame *nix for that because it's a meta-flaw in the executable bit architecture and the variance in External USB drives.

If the same argument can be made against all operating systems, it's more PEBKAC than anything else. Point-in-case: GNOME and the Unity Menu.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[UnknownSoldier]

> and why is / better than \?

/ is easier to read
/ is closer to the pinky, in a standard location
/ doesn't interfere with C's escape char '\'
"C:\\this\\requires\\double\\backslashes\\sucks"

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[ThisIsSaei]

The same issue persists for settings in any OS during a crash. Had a *buntu box do it to me yesterday.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[91degrees]

\ instead of the standard / - leave it to Microsoft when faced with picking a sane choice and and a mind boggling idiotic one...

You have a bunch of commands that use / as the symbol indicating a flag. You want to add directories to your file system. Are you going to change all the commands and thus make any scripts no longer work, use the / for both a directory separator and a flag, thus giving ambiguous commands or use a different separator?

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[BasilBrush]

VMS was this massive mess

Whilst you rightly point out that there is no standard filepath system for Windows to differ from, it's a shame you fall into the same trap of criticising another OS for no better reason than you are unfamiliar with it.

Also, if you lose your Registry... wow. Never seen that happen in 16 years of working in IT.

It's not so much a matter of losing it. It's the fact that it gets filled up with obsolete crap over time. Which was always the primary reason Windows slowed down over time and eventually needed reinstalling. The registry is one of the worst software design blunders of all time.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

It used to happen all the timw with Windows 98. Around that time that OS was popular they started putting more memory in the hard drive caches. This, combined with Windows 98's over-zealous desire to shut down super fast, meant the power was going off to the HD before it had finished dumping the data in its cache to disk. Often times it was the file the registry resides in that was still open when the power was cut off. The practical implication of this was people would shut down their machine, go to boot it up again, and find that Windows was irreparbly borked.

This really isn't a rebuttal to your post, rather I think it helps explain some of the hostility towards the registry.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[armanox]

The UNIX way came first genius. It was DOS that got it backwards.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[UnknownSoldier]

> You have a bunch of commands that use / as the symbol indicating a flag. You want to add directories to your file system. Are you going to change all the commands and thus make any scripts no longer work, use the / for both a directory separator and a flag, thus giving ambiguous commands or use a different separator?

Why does config.sys have the SWITCHAR= command then??

DOS 2+ - SWITCHAR - SET SWITCH CHARACTER
AX = 3701h
DL = new switch character

Return:
AL = status 00h successful FFh unsupported subfunction

Notes: Documented in some OEM versions of some releases of DOS; DOS 2.x had a SWITCHAR=c setting in CONFIG.SYS. Supported by OS/2 compatibility box and Novell DOS 7. Ignored by MS-DOS 5+ and DR DOS 3.41-6.0; DR DOS 6.0 and Novell DOS 7 leave AX unchanged

http://www.ctyme.com/intr/rb-2753.htm

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[djdanlib]

That sounds like what I remember, although it only happened a scarce few times that I was aware of. Those memories are rather dusty!

I never liked the Registry. I wish it had been done differently. Bill Gates even disliked it, see? http://gizmodo.com/5019516/classic-clips-bill-gates-chews-out-microsoft-over-xp

The mess of INI files from pre-Windows-95 needed to be fixed. UNIX people have it good with the somewhat disciplined usage of /etc by most programs' authors. Windows coders didn't have that same discipline. Just about every program had at least one INI file, and most installers even added things to WIN.INI and sometimes SYSTEM.INI via various hand-rolled code and wouldn't you know it, things broke all the time, and the shareware authors were quite prolific. You'd sit down to fix someone's slow computer, and they would have hundreds of them and their WIN.INI would be totally bloated and ridiculous. Microsoft fixed the INI situation, but the fix was pretty bad too. Somehow people seem to think I'm defending its honor or something like that.

What I'm saying is: People, back up your systems so you can restore them if something gets borked. The Registry doesn't corrupt or delete itself (since Windows XP anyway, thanks for the correction) so if it's corrupt or missing, you undoubtedly have other massive failures happening and will need your backup anyway.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[djdanlib]

Whilst you rightly point out that there is no standard filepath system for Windows to differ from, it's a shame you fall into the same trap of criticising another OS for no better reason than you are unfamiliar with it.

You are correct, I allowed my opinion to get into a post that was supposed to be facts. I did have to use VMS for a few years, but I never liked the design.

It's not so much a matter of losing it. It's the fact that it gets filled up with obsolete crap over time. Which was always the primary reason Windows slowed down over time and eventually needed reinstalling. The registry is one of the worst software design blunders of all time.

I completely agree that it got filled up with crap and that it was a terrible design. I'm not sure I agree that it was the primary reason Windows needed reinstalling - I think a lot of that had to do with users littering their computers with whatever flavor of the week virus-laden shareware they acquired, file system corruption from people shutting down using their chassis' power switches, and terrible swap/registry/file system fragmentation problems. Sometimes it was faster to reformat and reinstall than to fix all of the above. Users always filled up their hard drives to the point where you couldn't defrag anyway if you wanted to.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[djdanlib]

That's an excellent tip. I'd mod it up, if I wasn't the parent poster.

Perhaps I should have been clearer. UN*X / Linux users still need to back up SOME things, just not normally the entire drive. Although, I've occasionally wished I'd backed up my entire drive back in my masochistic Gentoo-stage-1 days when I had approximately 1 day of useful computing time per week...

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[LO0G]

Actually the \ character was chosen because the "/" character was used in DOS 1.0 for command line switches. And / was used in DOS 1.0 for command line switches because that's what they used in the DEC operating systems (VMS, DECSystem 10, DECSystem 20) from the 1970s. Remember that DOS 1.0 didn't support directories (all files were located at the root of the drive). They added directory support in DOS 2.0. Once / was used as a command line switch delimiter, it couldn't be used as a path separator, so they chose \ instead.

If you're going to blame the "/" character on anyone, it's not MSFT, it's DEC.

Oh and here's a little known fact: DOS (and Windows) allows the user to use either \ or / as a path separator.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[Nethead]

Close slashdot and go refactor something.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

You have a bunch of commands that use / as the symbol indicating a flag. You want to add directories to your file system.

Patching over one mistake with another one doesn't fix the original mistake. It makes two mistakes.

Worse, it makes a dependency chain of mistakes, which is a really bad mistake in and of itself.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[canajin56]

You can create a file that starts with a period, you can put periods all over the place. But no, you can't start with a leading space through Explorer's rename function (but you can through most programs that can save files, or rename them using the CLI) and you also can't insert wildcards, double quotes or slashes of either leaning, even through the CLI. So, there's that. But on the other hand, I've never wanted to create a file named " ../?/*.txt" so the issue has never really come up.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[EvanED]

I'd have modded you up except I'd rather nitpick. :-)

Oh and here's a little known fact: DOS (and Windows) allows the user to use either \ or / as a path separator.

This is true... sort of. The problem is it's not completely consistent from a UI perspective, even among MS stuff. Lots of CMD's builtin commands won't work with / separators, and it won't tab complete through them. ('dir foo/bar' gives 'paramater format not connect'.)

The standard file dialogs also don't work properly if you give them a path with /s, nor do they offer completions.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[shutdown -p now]

SWITCHAR was an attempt by Microsoft developers to sneak in "/" as the directory separator over the heads of IBM. It was removed from MS-DOS 3.x onward.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[lgw]

Either way it's stupid. My file names should be able to have yyyy/mm/dd in them. It's stupid legacy baggage from the bad old days.

NB: NTFS allows anything except null in a file name, it's the layers above that reject slashes and so on. The '\' as file separater thing isn't part of NTFS really, it's the OS playing "let's be compatible with the DOS shell from the 80s" - even less excusable IMO.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[blahplusplus]

"* Drive letters - WTF???"

So what? What is so wrong with drive letters?

"* \ instead of the standard / - leave it to Microsoft when faced with picking a sane choice and and a mind boggling idiotic one..."

Blame nerds for having no business savvy to make THEIR FAVORITE OS the defacto standard not others who saw the business opportunity the nerds didn't.

"* Can't boot to a standard desktop from any Windows OS media"

Yes you can Norton Ghost does this, it is possible you just haven't looked into how to do it.

"* No application bundles"

What?? Most people buy their PC's from PC vendors and most vendors include pre-installed apps anyway, why would this matter at all?

"* The Registry - LOL. Why lose just the settings for a single application when you can lose everything! Thanks Microsoft!"
The registry has problems no doubt about it but all the settings for many things are in one place. Would you rather have 100's of seperate config files?

All of your complaints are questionable to say the least, and lets not forget linux's damn near lack of usability by normal human beings for so long. Nerds often forget that they have no sense to of designing things for OTHER PEOPLE to use.

This is why people like steve jobs are rich and why many nerds never made it in business.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[lgw]

They're both stupid. I want to be able to put dates in my filename.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[MightyYar]

or use a different separator?

Seems like a time to make OLD2NEW.COM, where you run the old scripts/commands through it and it poops out the new version.

Seems cleaner.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[drinkypoo]

YYYYMM[dd[hh[mm]]]-filename.extension

sensibly includes dates and properly sorts on all operating systems which can support filenames that long

HTH, HAND

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[shutdown -p now]

* \ instead of the standard / - leave it to Microsoft when faced with picking a sane choice and and a mind boggling idiotic one...

Microsoft developers originally wanted to use "/". However, IBM has already reserved "/" as a start-of-switch character in their utilities for MS-DOS 1.0 (where there were no directories) - and this is because it was already used for this purpose in CP/M. IBM insisted that this was kept supported into DOS 2.0. And you can't reasonably support it with /-separated paths, because the old semantics required "foo /bar/baz" to be parsed as "foo /bar /baz" by the shell, and "/bar" and "/baz" treated as switches. For a while you could work around this by setting SWITCHAR in config.sys, but this was eventually dropped. Here is the full story.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[lgw]

Very geeky. Very work-around. Not the same as just putting a damn date naturally in a damn filename, the way any non-geek would naively want to. A "path separation character" is an invention of a command line shell anyhow, why should the OS even know such a thing exists?

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[Renegrade]

AmigaDOS (released mid 1985) uses 30-character names, including spaces etc, for drive names, volume names (the disk inserted in the drive, even hard drives had this, came in handy in the zip disk era), directory names and filenames. forward slash (/) for the separator, full-colon (:) for the root of the drive in question, and a null string for the current working directory ("").

Commodore 15xx series disk drives for the C64/128 (released at various times, starting in 1982) had 15 character filenames but no subdirectories. Volume names existed but I don't think they did anything. The actual C64/128 etc machines didn't really have a filesystem, the drive had almost as much processing capability of any of those 8-bit machines (6502 CPU and upwards of 8k of memory for some models) and handled all the 'filesystem' details.

MS-DOS really did take us way back. To be fair to CP/M, though, it was more of a 70s OS anyways and should have been laid to rest long before IBM went shopping around to strangle, er, monopolize, er, leverage another new computing industry.

To give an idea of what this has done to the industry, this is how I mount my 'projects' share from various machines:
Linux/BSDs: /net/proj/
AmigaOS 3.x: projects: (with an alias of 'proj:')
Windows/DOS: P:\
Commodore 128(keyboard style model): I don't have a smb or nfs driver for it. Or a network card. I could get the latter, and *possibly* the former if I cared though.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[dissy]

I've never wanted to create a file named " ../?/*.txt" so the issue has never really come up.

Nice file name! I'll have to store that one in my ... directory so I can easily find it again.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[Kalriath]

* Drive letters - WTF???

Mount points are just fucking indecipherable to regular users. "/dev/sda1" lolwut?

* \ instead of the standard / - leave it to Microsoft when faced with picking a sane choice and and a mind boggling idiotic one...

Oh, you mean Digital Research, who wrote DOS. Microsoft didn't.

* Can't boot to a standard desktop from any Windows OS media

A feature no-one cares about. Joy.

* No application bundles

Here you show your true colours, Mac fanboy. Since OS X is the only OS that has this concept. And app bundles are just folders anyway. /Applications/Safari.app is no different than C:\Program Files\Safari except one of the two OSes hides the implementation from the user. I don't like my computer hiding things from me, mmkay.

* The Registry - LOL. Why lose just the settings for a single application when you can lose everything! Thanks Microsoft!

Despite how you *nix fanboys rant on about it, I have never, in my entire life, encountered a corrupt registry. It's almost like you overstate the prevalence of this issue to make Windows look bad!

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[DMUTPeregrine]

I have. They tend to go corrupt because the disk is failing though, so it's almost never not a windows specific error. /etc getting trashed is effectively the *nix equivalent.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[Shinobi]

Here in Sweden, we actually use the ISO standard to date things, other than in some very informal things.

The last contract I signed, for example, I put down the date 2011-06-13, as did the person who hired me.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you want to start a file with a period, that's dumb. I don't care that .htaccess does it, it's still stupid.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[drsmithy]

Sure we are exempt. Set up the new box in DNS and DHCP server. 10 minutes to install a generic Debian base system using the default images, off a PXE boot. "apt-get install puppet" on the new machine. Configure puppet on the host to describe what the new machine should have:

Ie: just like Windows machines and properly configured Group Policies, SCCM, etc.

It's funny you bring up centralised configuration management when the tools available for it in the Unix world are - while potentially very comprehensive - horrendously awful to use.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[brantondaveperson]

HFS+ is like this too - any characters are admissible. Except that the Finder will allow you to manipulate them & of course you can do so with the command line too. In windows I've had files before that I've been unable to delete in Explorer OR the command line due to them having an illegal filename.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[smallfries]

And app bundles are just folders anyway. /Applications/Safari.app is no different than C:\Program Files\Safari except one of the two OSes hides the implementation from the user. I don't like my computer hiding things from me, mmkay.

Nope. They are self-contained applications within a folder - not just a folder. If I install /Applications/Safari.app then I know that everything to do with that application is in that folder, not scattered across lib folders elsewhere on the disk. So uninstallation is just trashing a folder, moving the app to another machine is a simple copy and keeping separate versions of something is trivial. It's the unix philosophy of exposing semantics through the file-system, it's just a shame that none of the linux distros have tried it. Although sadly OSX still needs a full-blown package manager with all of its warts and issues to handle installation of non-OSX software.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[m50d]

Yes you can Norton Ghost does this, it is possible you just haven't looked into how to do it.

Norton Ghost isn't windows OS media.

What?? Most people buy their PC's from PC vendors and most vendors include pre-installed apps anyway, why would this matter at all?

What matters is that there's no reliable way to uninstall something on windows. When you run uninstall you just have to hope the original programmer wrote it right; sometimes they forget, or in the case of e.g. game copy protection, deliberately don't bother removing something. With drivers it's pretty much impossible, even if they've broken your system. That's why windows users end up reinstalling every six months.

The registry has problems no doubt about it but all the settings for many things are in one place. Would you rather have 100's of seperate config files?

The smart way to do this is what KDE does: all your settings are in individual, human-editable config files. There's a registry-like database for performance, but this is just a cache, and if it ever gets corrupted you simply regenerate it from the config files.

Arguing over directory separators or line endings is stupid, but windows' lack of package management is real and bothers me when I'm using it.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you explain why several hundred million users would want to do that? Oh.. you cant? Well, they don't give a fuck about your stupid "ideas" then. If you want a nerd OS that nobody uses, try Linux.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[timbo234]

/dev/sda1 is not a mount point. A mount point is something like /media/BACKUPHD, which is what my backup USB drive shows up as when I plug it into my Linux computer, or /media/VIDEOHD which is what the USB drive with my movies and TV shows on it appears as. This system does make a lot more sense and is much more intuitive to a user than random alphabetical drive letters.

It may not be the most important issue in the usability world but it is something where the Unix world is ahead of Windows.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[slim]

Mount point:
  - in UNIX: /usr
  - in Windows: C:
  - although you can mount volumes at arbitrary mount points in Windows too if you want to: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc938934.aspx

Block device identifier:
  - in UNIX: /dev/sda1
  - in Windows: er, can't find an example right now. I have seen it on boot logs when booting's broken.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[Gr8Apes]

> and why is / better than \?

/ doesn't interfere with C's escape char '\'

I'd say that the fact that / doesn't interfere with MSDOS's own '\' escape character would be enough reason to have NOT chosen it as the path separator.

I personally didn't care about the standard location for / being close to the pinky, but more about the non-standard '\' location on various keyboards, even MS branded ones IIRC.

Then there is the fact that Bill chose \ over any of the already existing systems out there. Although I used VMS for years, I didn't remember it's odd directory structure, thanks for bringing that back to the fore...

Lastly, why MS couldn't have allowed either / or \ (OS/2 did) and start the conversion to sanity with / being the default with NT. There have been lots of complaints about the backslash over the years, since it is the classic escape character in most systems across the board.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[Gr8Apes]

* Drive letters - WTF???

Why are mount points better than drive letters, and why is / better than \? Unix's own particular way of naming files is far from universal.

Because drive letters are limited to 26, and mount points are unlimited. Mount points can also be fixed per device, while drive letters get reused, leading to no end of fascinating issues when two only slightly different directories structures get switched during a power cycle (think snapshots).

So yes, drive letters are moronic.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[Gr8Apes]

How would you like them shown? (Note that the spaces could be spaces, periods, dashes, or pretty much any character not banned by the system) MMM+ is the month name, abbreviated to the length shown, MM would be numeric as noted previously and does sort naturally.

YYYY MMM dd .... (sorts by year and month, months not naturally sorted)
MMM dd [YYYY].... (sorts by month and day only, months not naturally sorted)
dd MM YYYY.... (sorts by day, month, year)

I personally prefer the YYYY-MM-dd method, since it means that things are naturally sorted, easy to read, and does not require any special escaping.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[mikechant]

So what? What is so wrong with drive letters?

Simple example: I have a partition where I keep all my music files.
Typical modern Linux: Create partition (or format entire drive) with label=music
Partition automounts as /media/music (always)
(or *if* I want to I can make it appear as /music or whatever)

Windows: Partition appears as (e.g) F: drive , G: drive H: drive, whatever depending on what else you have connected. May subsequently wander between drive letters.

Even MS knows that drive letters suck; that's why they've been deprecated in recent versions (i.e. they still exist but you're discouraged from using them; in Vista and W7 they can be hidden and your C: and D: drives for example may appear just as 'system' and 'data').

Also, certainly in Windows XP, drive letters don't even work properly - eg you can get 'collisions' between network drive mappings and usb sticks making the network drive inaccessable - I've experienced this personally (as have many others).

I could go on...

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[goarilla]

Yeah but it's modular it could just be your browser or mail client instead of your entire graphical environment,
bear in mind in windows every session is a graphical session which is not the case in *NIX in general.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[blueg3]

Actually, : is still the directory separator on Mac OS X. The BSD APIs silently interchange : and / so that / is the directory separator through the BSD APIs. (The : character is the only character not allowed in HFS+ filenames, although nulls will cause lots of problems, even if you use the fake UTF-16 representation of null that Apple uses.)

You can see this for yourself if you make a file or directory with / in it in the Finder and then ls it from the Terminal (or vice versa).

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

So write them YYYY.MM.DD, the way God intended. (And don't you dare use - as a date separator.)

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[goarilla]

To be fair you can restrict a drive letter to a specific device.
And mounted drives can be used in windows as well it's even a known work-around for the 26 drive limitation http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307889/en-us.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[goarilla]

- in Windows: er, can't find an example right now. I have seen it on boot logs when booting's broken.

\Device\Harddisk0\D

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

path is a hierarchical marker which would be important to you in your not-geek, non command line shell, world too right?

anyway. linux has fewer restrictions on filename and filepath characters than does DOS so a little test:

1. copy date from calendar applet (gnome 2)
2. terminal here on desktop
3. vi "".txt
4. insert, type T E S T, escape, :wq
5. ls -alt |head

displays .txt

Success.

and with the file explorer Nautilus I'm also able to create the same file.

---

[tester@MVX6 Desktop]$ vi "Thursday, August 25 2011".txt
[tester@MVX6 Desktop]$ ls -alt |head
total 12K
drwxr-xr-x 2 tester tester 4.0K Aug 25 10:24 .
drwx------ 26 tester tester 4.0K Aug 25 10:24 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 tester tester 6 Aug 25 10:24 Thursday, August 25 2011.txt
[tester@MVX6 Desktop]$
[tester@MVX6 Desktop]$ date
Thu Aug 25 10:25:07 CDT 2011
[tester@MVX6 Desktop]$
[tester@MVX6 Desktop]$ vi "Thu Aug 25 10:25:07 CDT 2011".txt
[tester@MVX6 Desktop]$
[tester@MVX6 Desktop]$ ls -alt |head
total 16K
drwxr-xr-x 2 tester tester 4.0K Aug 25 10:25 .
drwx------ 26 tester tester 4.0K Aug 25 10:25 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 tester tester 6 Aug 25 10:25 Thu Aug 25 10:25:07 CDT 2011.txt
-rw-rw-r-- 1 tester tester 6 Aug 25 10:24 Thursday, August 25 2011.txt
---

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[ThisIsSaei]

It was actually all the the Unity Menu's settings; so it wasn't a client issue, but some crap work that Canonical did. Obviously non-GUI system won't have GUI errors, but that's not saying anything - is it?

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[UnknownSoldier]

> I personally didn't care about the standard location for / being close to the pinky, but more about the non-standard '\' location on various keyboards, even MS branded ones IIRC.

Yes, exactly, this is why I mentioned the standard location of the / in the first place. Because most people would be able to understand that I meant "Conversely, the \ is in a non-standard location." ;-)

Although it looks like the location of \ is slowly choosing the defacto location of being above Enter/Return.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[lgw]

I'm actually OK with limits like that in the shell - after all, someone can always write a better shell (I wrote my own explorer once for Windows - need to find that again because I hate the Win7 one). But limits in the OS (that dont come from the FS) are silly. Plus Windows has a design flaw where there's stuff you can do through the posix APIs that you can't undo through the system32 APIs, and malware just loves that.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[lgw]

How would you like them shown?

Anywhere else I write a date I use slashes. Not being able to do that in a file name is very 1980s. The days when we needed to made things easy for the computer instead of for the user are long past.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[rhendershot]

Why are mount points better than drive letters

from within your filesystem perspective there can be only one top level "/" and everything is referenced from there. /usr/local/src/slashcode will always resolve to a specific place. Is that better than DOS's "collection of roots" ? It is more predictable and all the tools integrate with the idea that any directory beneath the current directory can be a different filesystem (eg. find, grep, etc).

The broad support for mounts on *nix also simplifies partitioning of data. For example, /home is often a different disk or partition from most of the system and can be encrypted, mirrored, backed up more easily since it contains virtually 100% dynamic (ie. important) data.

Microsoft's 'Drive Extender' appears to have allowed for similar concepts but has been removed from WHS2011 - http://www.ghacks.net/2011/02/28/drive-bender-merge-hard-drives-into-one/

I'm not too interested in the Why so I'm going to skip looking up their rationale.

Uniform Naming Convention - https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Path_(computing)#Uniform_Naming_Convention - is another bit of Windows ecosystem that approximates the concepts of *nix top level containing mounts. That's more of a user-space thing though since it's only context is application, not something defined by the system. Mounted resources are available outside of a logged-in user.

*nix also has the /mnt node wherein most (/media notwithstanding) temporary mounts are defined. It's nice to be able to iterate or list the transient attachments your system might have.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[Gr8Apes]

To be really fair, you'd have to admit that assigning them only applies while the drive is connected, once disconnected, any newly connected drive can take that drive letter.

And the question wasn't concerned about mount points in windows, it concerned drive letters.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

Not if you're not an administrator, you can't.

Which sucks if you plug 2 or 3 flash drives into a lab computer at the same time and discover that between twelve dozen network drives and a max drive letter of N, it didn't assign a drive letter to the last one you plugged in, making it completely unusable on that computer - permanently, since it'll remember this next time you plug it in. And you can't fix it, since you're not an administrator. Fuck whatever idiot didn't think that one through... if the last drive letter used by a device was "none", it damn well better get a valid drive letter if one is available next time it's plugged in. This was a serious problem in XP. Don't know if it's still a problem in Vista or Win7, as I've never used a lab computer that was running anything later than XP.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[Quirkz]

I never use slashes in dates because the slash tends to look like a 1 and confuse things. I always use a dash as a separator, so that's just not an issue for me. I would, however, like to be able to put more punctuation in file names. Question marks in particular.

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[Quirkz]

I constantly want to include question marks in file names, and it's really frustrating when I can't. Maybe I'm just a really tentative guy?

Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage

[Kalriath]

So, just a folder then. Right, got it.

And actually, it does not under any circumstances mean everything to do with that application is in that folder at all. Safari is a great example, with its components spread across /Applications/, /Library/Application Support/, /Users/Username/Library/Application Support/, and who knows where else. VMWare scatters itself across an equally large number of locations, as does MySQL.

Windows really does that?

[Anon-Admin]

Wow, I guess I am out of touch with windows flaws. I quit running windows back at windows 3.1.

Ill stick with Linux until windows is ready for the desktop. ;P

Re:Windows really does that?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, the people who haven't run windows in 20 years commenting on its shortcomings. Wondered when they would show up.

Re:Windows really does that?

[Anonymous Coward]

Better buy that superglue buddy and glue [your favorite free operating system] where it sticks because desktop is an asymptote to Windows, pal. Oh, fuck I just ruined the joke about Canadians.

I have a song for this...

[timestride]

"In a Microsoft minute-- oooeeeeooooo, everything can change!"

Re:I have a song for this...

[Anonymous Coward]

I laughed :)

where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[BroadbandBradley]

It's so hard for me to believe that so many people still use Windows. As a Ubuntu Desktop user and administrator of a small business network, I've been patiently waiting since 1999 for enough people to just ditch windows all together so that we could all move on to better times. Everyone I know who has tried Linux in the past few years hasn't gone back to Windows, and were all amazed that the computer 'Just Worked'. People are so used to struggling with Windows issues that they don't expect using a computer to be easy and it really doesn't have to be that way.

So perhaps this is a bit off topic, but every time an article comes out touting some new enhancement of the Microsoft Windows Operating system, I just feel compelled to say "Who fucking cares?" and "Why does anyone even bother with this Operating System designed with the main purpose being to lock up your computer spending dollar into Microsoft?" Don't we all know better already?

Please people, get over MS Windows already, let it die.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[Elbart]

No.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[microbee]

Why do you want to kill off Windows anyways? Let people use whatever they want. Isn't this what freedom is about? Choice is always good.

So put aside the arrogance that you are the one that knows the best, please?

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used Windows, Linux, BeOS, Mac OS X, etc. Mostly Windows and Mac. I have no major issues with Windows 7. Sure, Ubuntu and Mac OS X are superior in many ways, but I love Steam.

My reason is simply an opinion that reflects my use on PCs. We all have our own opinions.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[Anonymous Coward]

On August 23, 2011, I ditched Windows at home and switched to... a Mac. As a long time Ubuntu user at work, I find that Ubuntu has too many glitchy and unpolished areas for me to feel comfortable switching my home environment to that.

But for dev work, it's fine.

The Mac gives me access to useful programs like Photoshop, and a decent GUI, as well as the power of BSD.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[Drogo007]

I have four words: "Games and Legacy Apps"

That explains pretty much every windows install I'm personally aware of (including my own)

Either people want to play their games or they have to use/support legacy apps for a business that it doesn't want to take the time, expense and risk of replacing.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[andersa]

You can't play games and record the video on linux.

Well yeah, you can, maybe. Compared to fraps it is a pita.

I play games on my windows box and occationally I want to record something for youtube. It's just not viable to do that in linux, even if you could run the game in Wine. I switch to linux for editing. Kdenlive is very nice for that.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because linux on the desktop and especially ubuntu is a steaming pile of shit that normal people (not basement dwelling dweebs) DO NOT WANT. My own fucking 3 year old couldn't stand ubuntu and I had to put a pirated (yyyyyaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrr!) copy of windows 7 ultimate on her computer. Was nice for the wireless card to just fucking work too. With ubuntu, I had to put ddwrt on a linksys and put it in wireless bridge mode. Surprised linux could even handle her nic.

And yea, I know ddwrt is linux. Quite nicely done too. It's junk for a nice usable desktop experience.

I don't have hours to spend compiling kernels, reading shitty how to guides, and interfacing with people like you on forums.

Does linux have anything that compares in functionality to Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate? I don't think so. Until it does, it's fucking useless for me. Does it have any debuggers that can do what Intellitrace does? Do you know what that is? Doubt you do, because you like to use stone age computer shit.

As far as "spending dollar into Microsoft" : I already addressed that earlier (yyyyyyyaaaaaaaaaRRRRRRRR!!!!!)

Visual Studio Ultimate is a free download as well, provided by MS. When it stops working, a google search will yield many keys to make it start working again. No DRM at all. Just fucking works. You can download and install all the updates. Give it a try asshole.

Answer your question?

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[LWATCDR]

Simple there is too much software that runs only on windows that people need and or want. For the enterprise VB was a brillant lock in. It because fast and easy to write applications that ran on Windows and no where else.
People talk about Office but the real lock in was VB and now it looks like C# is trying to take it's place. You can make an effort to make it portable or just go the easy way and make it only run on Windows.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[Anonymous Coward]

We're being held down by "but it's always been this way." I have 15 applications required for my research and not a single one is produced by the vendors for anything but Windows. We're scientists, not software developers, so we're not going to stop to rewrite everything from the ground up, and the installed base globally for these specialized apps isn't big enough to make it profitable (or even recoup the expenses) of rebuilding it. That said, two of our packages have been replaced recently by new offerings, but they're Java, which has essentially solved platform portability issues at my company, which has a mix of Apple, Windows, and some Linux.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to tell you, but Ubuntu is NOT ready yet (and maybe will never be for many many people). I used Debian and Ubuntu only for about 7 years and about 8 months ago I decided to give Mac a chance... that was the best thing I ever did for myself! Not just because the OS is better, but mostly because of the applications... give me Garage Band, Logic Express and iMovie and maybe I will come back to Linux as my main desktop OS (and I really don't care if I have to pay for it).

Same apply to many Windows user. There is NO replacement for many popular applications.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[daern]

It's so hard for me to believe that so many people still use Windows. As a Ubuntu Desktop user and administrator of a small business network, I've been patiently waiting since 1999 for enough people to just ditch windows all together so that we could all move on to better times. Everyone I know who has tried Linux in the past few years hasn't gone back to Windows, and were all amazed that the computer 'Just Worked'. People are so used to struggling with Windows issues that they don't expect using a computer to be easy and it really doesn't have to be that way.

So perhaps this is a bit off topic, but every time an article comes out touting some new enhancement of the Microsoft Windows Operating system, I just feel compelled to say "Who fucking cares?" and "Why does anyone even bother with this Operating System designed with the main purpose being to lock up your computer spending dollar into Microsoft?" Don't we all know better already?

Please people, get over MS Windows already, let it die.

Everyone you know?

Ok, well I don't know you but, hey, we're all friends on here so I kinda feel thatI know you ;-)

I /did/ use Linux on my primary laptop for a while (Ubuntu and Fedora, if you're interested) and while I like parts of it, other parts of it stank. Badly. Multi-monitor support was, frankly, embarrassing and suspend/resume was patchy at best. It certainly wasn't more reliable as I found it more likely to "lock up" in a given situation than Windows 7, which TBH, is very usable and a good workhorse.

Don't get me wrong, I use Linux as much as the next one....in the data centre...but it's /still/ got a long way to go on the desktop. Personally, I've got real work to do...and I'm sticking with Windows for now.

Daern

ps. Oh, I do love XBMC Live for the tellybox though :-)

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[Sir_Eptishous]

Try supporting software that only runs on Windows and then talk to me... Sure Linux is great, Ubuntu and Centos are awesome, I support those also. But the fact remains that most of the software that I've supported down through the years(accounting, security, scientific, point of sale, crm, etc;...) in an administrative function ONLY RUNS ON WINDOWS. If anything, I would imagine that your "wide-world-of-linux" worldview is an anomaly, and doesn't represent the majority of admins out there, who support both Windows and Linux. The only that turns my stomach more than a Linux Snob is an Apple Snob.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[Anonymous Coward]

People want to actually use their computer, which is why many choose Windows rather than Linux. Most of them don't have any of the issues you mention, and they'll be wanting to go back to Windows rather than NOT want to go back (which is a minority, mind you).

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[icebrain]

I tried installing Ubuntu on a home server, and eventually gave up on it after spending 40+ hours dicking around on the command line to make what should have been simple changes in a GUI. And the process that couldn't be stopped because it wasn't running, but couldn't be started because it was running... yeah, that one bothered me too.

Yeah, I guess Ubuntu "just works" if all you ever do is browse the internet, send email, and write the occasional text document. But it utterly starts to fail if you need to do anything more. That's not to say Windows is great--it certainly isn't--but at least it works. That may change, though, if they continue with the apparently industry-wide trend of removing all but the grandma-level features from software.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[bigstrat2003]

Funny. I use Windows, and it just works. I'm going to guess that the problem is the users you've been working with, not the OS.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. Talking about bias. Has it ever occurred to you that the reason hardly anyone uses Linux on the desktop is because it sucks? It has sucked for ages and it keeps on sucking. Every update you do is a gamble on which important basic system functionality they screwed up this time. Oh gosh, we had to switch to a new audio stack, sorry pal, we'll fix that soon, till then you can google to figure out how to work around it yourself. What, we broke your wlan with the latest kernel update? Oh duh, we'll get it right next time. Huh? We activated compositing for your desktop even though the driver for your card is broken and makes it crash?....

The linux desktop - and a lot of its applications - is a free for all hackfest being broken over and over as people only work on the latest and greatest (which ofc only is working decently when it's about time to jump ship again). That combined with a stable desktop system meaning "we quit working on that a while ago but at least we'll not break stuff that isn't broken already" makes for a very poor user experience with guaranteed google orgies, a lot of man-page digging and copy and pasting arcane fixes from forums.

Linux on the desktop would be used if it didn't suck. It's free as in beer for gods sake (noone cares about the freedom part). Look at google's android. Works great in the mobile space because they completely ignored the swamp that is existing desktop linux and spun their own. Look at OSX, unix roots with a proper desktop --> Success. Look at Win7, broadly positive reception and everyone I know has already updated their home machines.

(I like linux on servers. The desktop makes me wanne puke though)

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

every time an article comes out touting some new enhancement of the Microsoft Windows Operating system, I just feel compelled to say "Who fucking cares?"

I thought it was just me.
I use a Mac, and it isn't much better. The most hated words on my Mac. "Preparing to Copy." Gets me thinking of:

Dark Helmet: "Your Preparing, your always preparing, just Go!"

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I safely assume you don't know that many people who have switched in the last few years? lol

I agree the operating system in general is very very very easy to use. More so for particular distributions at at the desktop which have significant commercial support. Hardware though is a bitch and not exclusive to GNU/Linux.

Ok- so I switch people on a daily basis and don't even install GNU/Linux on MS Windows systems (usually- it is too expensive from a support stand point). I sell them new inexpensive computers usually. We're talking a $249 starting price and by the end they tend to end up spending $500-$1200 between services, accessories, and other peripherals. Of course this varies depending on if it is a desktop or laptop. I sell people cheap laptops and cheap desktops in addition to more expensive ones although the more expensive ones are a rarity for less technical users. Partly because I am one of the few people who understand web browsing doesn't require an i7 cpu and I can make more money by selling less and charging more for my services (which is fair given people are willingly and knowingly paying for better service, advice, etc).

The biggest issue with all computers is that there are a mix of chipsets of which have different levels of support. Most systems lack full support for free software systems. Most systems work "good enough" for a little while. Until... you wait for it. Crash. An upgrade causes the sound and video to stop working. You see those proprietary drivers are a bitch. Without manufacturer support they tend to get left by the weigh side and we all know how bad manufacturers are in regards to supporting discontinued products.

No. I don't sell such hardware. I get hardware from companies who actually know what they are doing. I require companies I'm purchasing from to actually support the products they are selling.

I ask what versions work? Ubuntu 10.04, 10.10, 11.04? Mint? gNewSense?

Will the hardware continue working with each progressive upgrade? That is do the chipsets have free drivers / firmware available? Are these pieces in the mainline kernel or another major driver project like ALSA?

I go through this documentation all the time and it can be extremely difficult to digest and impossible to get right in practice. Fortunately there is now a company who gets it and only sells freedom respecting hardware so it has gotten easier. ie https://www.thinkpenguin.com

My whole point here is that you can't just install GNU/Linux and things will work. You do need to purchase the right hardware. This is really no different than Microsoft Windows or Mac although can have more of an impact as there are no-cost frequent releases that for the most part you need to upgrade to.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just legacy apps that are the problem. Basically, any application that actually does something and doesn't requires a masters degree in CS to use is windows only. CAD packages, for example. I think there is one piece of CAD software that will run on linux but I've heard it's of poor quality. Regardless of the quality, no company uses it so any experience with it is literally worthless.

Also, most video and image editing is windows/apple only. There is some OSS video edit software but it is also of very poor quality compared to commercial solutions.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[vawwyakr]

I have a Linux laptop that I keep around (running Ubuntu 10.something) and I have not been convinced to leave Windows. I have had a total of one blue screen in the last 5 years and that was on a Windows machine running in a VM...I think something was unhappy when the host machine went to sleep. Generally I have zero issues with Windows as much as the Slashdot crowd wants to believe otherwise. I consider myself a geek and would love to find something out there worth leaving windows for but nothing has shown itself to be better in any noticeable way and have mostly involved notable downsides. I've had FAR more problems getting my Ubuntu machine working right though it has been significantly better than my previous experiences with Linux.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[Anonymous Coward]

But Windows 7 doesn't support legacy apps!

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have noticed an opposte trend. Sites like the gs.statcounter.com which show Linux lost half its marketshare. THe first thing the early Asus Aee users did was freak out when Office or their latest game could not run on their Linux netbook. This is why BestBuy wont stock it unless it comes with Windows. www.zdnet.com also showed Microsoft having a victory party over Linux as it won the desktop war. Basically, their threats report that comes out every year now ignores it and focuses on Andriod.

Windows is not the same since 1999. It is quite stable and many slashdotters use 10 year old arguments on why it sucks or I remember how much IE 6 sucked when IE 9 is one of the most secure browsers out there today.

Ubuntu it too unstable and flakey compared to Windows in my experience and is a very cutting edge distro. I figured I might be modded down for such a statement but for me it is true. I can never get it to work right with some issue in flash, or Java looking ugly with incorrectly rendered fonts, or my wifi disconnecting every 5 minutes and so on. Grandma or Joe sixpack does not want to download patches and mess with /etc/*.conf files.

Linux is stable in OS likes Debain Stable or CentOS in the server room but not on a desktop.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[VGPowerlord]

Everyone I know who has tried Linux in the past few years hasn't gone back to Windows, and were all amazed that the computer 'Just Worked'.

Hi, I'm R. Bemrose. Pleased to meet you.

I've tried several times to switch my desktop PC to Linux, and every time (across, what, 4 distros now? Redhat 9, Debian Sarge, Ubuntu 8.10, and Ubuntu 10.04) there's been some issue that caused me to move back to the platform that really does "just work" even if it does require me to use the CD/DVDs given to me by the hardware manufacturers for my computer's parts.

It hasn't been the same reason every time either. As I recall, one wouldn't start XWindows at all if I had any resolution larger than 640x480, one didn't properly support my network card, one didn't support my sound device, one decided to hose Wine on me (which I was going to use to run certain games) in addition to having weirdness with the sound device (it would randomly stop working).

Having said that, I've used Debian for servers for years, and recently set up a Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit server.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[Piata]

I gave ubuntu a shot about a year ago. It was on relatively old hardware... 1.8Ghz Athlon, GeForce 6600, etc.

It did not work. In fact, it was an absolute disaster. I hand to manually edit my grub file to even get it to boot properly, and then there was no proper drivers for my video card so I ended up installing 3 different ones before I found one that would work, nor did I even bother trying to get the video out on my vid card to work. Software was also abysmal. There's nothing comparable to Photoshop for the platform (don't even say a word about GIMP, it's not in the same league at all). I tend to listen to a lot of music while I work, so I went through several different music players, most of which was atrocious. Eventually I came across Banshee which was decent but had some absolutely horrible UI design.

Last spring I built myself a new computer. I didn't even hesitate to purchase a copy of Windows 7 to go with it. And guess what? When I installed Windows 7 it 'Just Worked'. Linux only works for servers or people who have simple computing needs that could just as easily be accommodated by using a tablet. Don't get me wrong, I would absolutely LOVE to ditch Windows just because I prefer open source (especially for something as fundamental as an OS) but it's just not there yet. It does not meet my needs. It's unfortunate, but Windows still has a use and I don't see that changing any time soon.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[tekrat]

"Operating System designed with the main purpose being to lock up your computer"

I think you could have ended your sentence right there.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[watermark]

I administer ~10 Ubuntu Server systems, so I'm no sop. My wife uses her laptop for basic stuff: facebook, email, type a paper, and media. She's not amazing with computers, but she's better than most. I installed Ubuntu 11.04 and set it to the classic Gnome. I even put MS Office 07 running under Wine because the docx support is still not quite there in libreoffice. She loves the idea of moving to Ubuntu, but after about 2 weeks, she insisted to be put back to Windows.

Chrome wouldn't run many of her Facebook games. It worked fine in Firefox and works fine in Chrome on Windows.

Full screen flash videos drop frames left and right, they played fine in Windows.

The final thing that pushed her over was the torrent software. Transmission sucks compared to uTorrent and Vuze is a joke (I wish Azureus was still developed.) When you visit the uTorrent site in a Linux browser, it tries to get you to install some "command line only" version of their software...and it's not even clear about that. I know it will run in Wine, but you have to dig to find the Windows version when you visit their site on Linux. She was frustrated because she had to come to me to install new software that wasn't in a repository.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[Capt. Skinny]

I've been patiently waiting since 1999

You're impressions of Windows are outdated. It has been a stable OS since XP was released.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[Capt. Skinny]

Your...

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[BasilBrush]

It's so hard for me to believe that so many people still use Windows.

So there's something wrong with your belief system.

Everyone I know who has tried Linux in the past few years hasn't gone back to Windows, and were all amazed that the computer 'Just Worked'.

So clearly you're atypical. It looked like Linux was going to make some progress when it seemed to be the right thing for manufacturers to ship on low-power and cheap netbooks. But it turned out that was a mistake as they had such a large return rate. People wanted Windows.

Windows market share is very slowly erroding, but mostly towards OS X, not desktop Linux.

There's no sign of Linux ever being ready for ordinary desktop users.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[Anonymous Coward]

Trolls like you, modded "insightful" as I type this, are the main reason I quit using my Slashdot ID and occasionally post anonymously if I have something worthwhile to say.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pirating is not an acceptable answer.

Besides, many of us actually want to use a computer, rather then constantly having it crash or reboot. And VS2010? Who cares? I'm not developing software for Windows or .NET.

Finally, I'm going to call BS on your WiFi issue. The software that the router is running doesn't make a difference to what the client machine can do.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[armanox]

The ten year old arguments still apply because, well, people are still using software that old. We have clients running IE6 on Windows 2K and XP (Federal gvt, in case you're wondering). Two years ago we still saw NT4 on occasion.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[Anonymous Coward]

I installed Ubuntu on an old laptop to play around with. My son asked if I could install Minecraft on it, and I thought, "Sure, how hard could it be, it's java". Holy crap, it was not something I can do, being a newb, luckily someone make a script to do the heavy lifting. That's why Windows is persistent, it's just easier to do this kind of stuff.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've "tried" Linux several times in the past, and each time it keeps geting *worse*.

At first, I thought it was cool that something worked with minimal fuss and did the basics very well. Also, it had a nice CLI under the GUI. Much nicer than MacOS X's.

The next time, I just didn't have a valid Windows install key that would validate/authorize without causing me trouble (I had reloaded a couple of machines a couple of times, and faulty hardware had me installing for the 5th or 6th time within a week, and the licensing was all b0rked for a few months until they reset the count and stopped caring.) So, yeah, a free-as-in-beer OS was pretty sweet, especially since I didn't have any Windows-only software to deal with.

After that, Windows stopped sucking. Don't ask me how, but I suspect it has a lot to do with how much control I gained over it once I started developing software for it. Windows is a toy... until you become valuable to Microsoft. Developers and server admins are valued by Microsoft, and they unlock Windows for us. And you don't even have to be a "real" developer or admin. Just start reading up on MSDN topics. Find out what makes Windows tick. Under the hood, Windows isn't any less flexible than Linux.

Bottom line: Windows sucks as an appliance OS, but so does Linux. If you want an appliance, get a Mac. As a real desktop OS, Windows is just as good as Linux (except the CLI, and no, Powershell isn't good enough). And Windows has more games for your downtime.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been patiently waiting since 1999 for enough people to just ditch windows all together
Well, in 1999 most were using Win95, Win98, Win ME, or NT4. I think everyone wanted it to die then!

Everyone I know who has tried Linux in the past few years hasn't gone back to Windows... ...and were all amazed that the computer 'Just Worked'.
Sure that's true if you want to use a console 100% of the time and never want to run any sort of GUI. Every six months or so when I give Linux another whirl I'm amazed how unstable any desktop manager/windows manager/whatever they are called is-much worse than windows.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[EvanED]

I use Windows at home, mostly by choice. Why? Because I use Linux at work, and I hate both of them, and it's nice to be pissed off for different reasons at work and at home.

There's plenty to like about Windows, and a lot to dislike about Linux.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux, the most compatible operating system available. Now available in hundreds of incompatible variants!

Seriously though I haven't yet met anyone who ditched Windows for linux and HASN'T switched back.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[drinkypoo]

I'm using windows XP right now because one of the things I do most with my PC is run Civilization 2. It won't run on WINE, and it won't run on Windows later than XP. It won't even run in XP mode on Windows 7.

I also have Ubuntu on this system but I spend more time in XP.

I'd like Windows to die, but I'm still playing classic games and don't want to have to use a separate system or a virtual machine. (I got tired of vmware vms dying on me, and nothing else has working 3d.)

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[shutdown -p now]

It does support many directly, actually. And for the rest, there's XP Mode.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is free? Since when? Visual Studio Express is free and it sucks goatballs. I do not program in C so Eclipse is fine for me but I would certainly be interested if costs wasn't an issue.

FYI your copy of Windows is likely rootkited. It is the only way to defeat the DRM and WGA

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[Kalriath]

No it's not free, it's pirated. But he is correct on one point: Visual Studio has no DRM. In fact, Microsoft's developer tools are the only products they make with absolutely no real attempt at copy protection. No DRM, no Activation, not even a disk check or something. Just a product key and you're away. And since the only real place people get Visual Studio is MSDN, they don't even see that as Microsoft bakes the key into the installer.

But this guy's computer is probably running 8 botnet nodes and a couple of viruses. And Norton.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[Gr8Apes]

You're impressions of Windows are outdated. It has been a stable OS since XP was released.

Not hardly. It wasn't until SP2 and serious tweaking that it became anything close to "stable", and it still has issues even today.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[Gr8Apes]

I gave ubuntu a shot about a year ago, installing it on relatively old hardware.... 2.4GHz Athlon X4 with GeForce 3200 integrated graphics, etc.

It works flawlessly, installed in less than 20 minutes, and only took another hour to configure various items to make it a media server, share screens with other systems, install an AFP file share, a couple of DBs, handbrake, etc. It all just worked.

I also have a copy of W7 Ultimate. It sits on the shelf, unused after the initial install on another system. That system now runs OSX, which is much more user friendly and useful.

So, do my anecdotes beat your anecdote?

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[Gr8Apes]

the obvious answer here would be:

get a mac.

Re:where is our critical mass of Linux Users?

[vawwyakr]

Why? I have no reason to leave Windows.

queue

[eddy]

I wish the transfer window created had a pause function, and was actually a queue so that I could queue up more files for the same action (copy/move).

Re:queue

[WuphonsReach]

Did you not RTFA? Of course you didn't. It's there. Multiple copy operations to the same destination result in a queue-like behavior.

Which is wonderful for magnetic hard drives - and a featured added just in time for the sunset of those magnetic hard drives.

Because probably by the time Win8 ships, even more people will be using SSDs for their primary drives and those don't care about trying to do multiple writes/reads from the same drive at the same time.

The 64GB SSDs are now down around $100. Use that for the boot drive, keep your bulk files on a 2nd, larger, cheaper, magnetic drive.

I still think the magic number is around $1/GB or $0.80/GB for SSD mass adoption. The cheapest drives this year are still in the $1.60/GB range (up to $2/GB for the Intel 320). So we either need one more die shrink or for process improvements to drive the cost down.

Re:queue

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a pause function now just look at the screenshots. - http://www.winrumors.com/microsoft-details-new-windows-8-file-copy-and-move-ui-video/

Re:queue

[dotancohen]

I think that Gnome 2 did that. I use KDE and filed a feature request for it.

Re:queue

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you watch the video in the article? It does exactly what you're asking for.

Re:queue

[GuldKalle]

Try Teracopy. It brings pause button and add to queue, for free. The pro version lets you edit the queue, afaik.

Re:queue

[Kalriath]

$1/GB? You think the magic number is $500 for a 500GB hard drive?

If you really believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you.

Re:queue

[timbo234]

Have you used KDE recently? It has both features - a pause button and file transfers are done as a queue. You just click on the little notification area icon that comes up. This is on KDE 4.6 at least.

Re:queue

[dotancohen]

The KDE feature isn't really a queue, though the GUI does present all the file transfers in the same (i) popup. I am a happy KDE user!

Re:queue

[WuphonsReach]

Very few people really need a 500GB primary drive (laptops being the exception due to most only having 1 drive slot, but once you use a SSD in a laptop you'll give up on that and keep the bulk files on external drives). It will still be 5-10 years until SSDs are used for bulk storage. For that, prices will have to get below $0.20/GB (give or take 50%). In a desktop, you run with a SSD as the primary and have a few magnetic drives for handling the bulk storage.

There's a large segment of the population who can do just fine with 64GB drives. Those are already flirting with the $100 point, but they still feel a bit limiting for a lot of users. Most users that I deal with will be more comfortable with a 128GB sized SSD, but those are still in the $250-$350 range which is too much for most people. Those who need the 250-300GB drives are also willing to pay current prices for the capacity. (Generally business users where the lack of wasted time due to waiting on the hard drive saves way more then the incidental cost of the SSD over a year.)

It's the same thing we saw with dual-core a few years ago. As long as the CPUs were all $300+, very few people got onto the dual-core or multi-CPU bandwagon. But once dual-core CPUs got below $200, a lot of people no longer saw it as a big ticket item and started switching in droves.

Get those 128GB units below $150 (and ideally below $100) and you're going to see a lot of people switching because the drives are big enough and cheap enough for their needs. They'll gladly be willing to make the sacrifice in capacity in exchange for the responsiveness of the SSD.

W7 is pretty good about it

[Haven]

The real problem with incorrect reporting times is when you have a very large number of 10-100kB files to transfer. Windows spends a very long time starting up the transfer of a new file, and that is where I have seen the greatest slowdown and most inaccurate time estimates.

Windows 7 performs better with smaller files, and provides a transfer rate indicator, but everyone already knows this.

What a weird thing to take out...

Re:W7 is pretty good about it

[billcopc]

I think you meant to say "... performs better with larger files".

You nailed it though. My big gripe with Windows it how it seems to spend more time fiddling with metadata / directory entries than the actual contents. On an SSD with 700mb/sec writes and 0.1 msec access times, I'd expect it to churn through a few thousand files per second at the very least. That's not even factoring the disk cache. All those MFT updates seem to drag it right back down to spinning-disk speeds when dealing with numerous small files. You know, like a source tree or a directory full of images.

As sequential storage performance continues to improve, filesystem overhead is becoming the primary bottleneck.

Re:W7 is pretty good about it

[0123456]

Don't forget that Windows (at least XP) will also be busy swapping out the applications you're using so that it can cache the files you're copying in memory.

Ah, the joy of moving 2GB files from one drive to another on an XP machine with 1GB of RAM and watching your web browser thrashing the disk as it desperately tries to swap itself back in while Windows is desperately trying to swap it out. I miss that so much.

Re:W7 is pretty good about it

[Anonymous Coward]

Then again, I expected that ext3 was syncing files properly. Now we find out that ext4 and btrfs are much slower because they finally sync stuff.

Re:W7 is pretty good about it

[Anonymous Coward]

This is also where the estimation technology seems weakest - it assumes megabytes per second is a good estimator, which if you have a mix of small and large files is incredibly far from the truth. If they want a good estimate, they need to look at the megabytes per second for the raw data copy section of time only, and convert that into a time given the total megabytes to copy and add the number of files remaining times files per second for the file system interaction section of time.

Re:W7 is pretty good about it

[m50d]

Then again, I expected that ext3 was syncing files properly.

Then you weren't paying attention. The difference between ext3 and ext2 is that ext3 won't corrupt *metadata*, from which it should be obvious that either can corrupt files.

so just like....

[Anonymous Coward]

.....a normal OS then

They brought in an Irish development team

[Anonymous Coward]

New time warnings

"It's gonna take 20 fuckin' minutes so grab a pint"

"The file will take 45 minutes to fuckin' transfer. Buy a faster computer ya cheap bastard"

"It's almost finished deleting, about bloody time"

The hourglass has also been updated to a pint glass being tipped and drained.

Re:They brought in an Irish development team

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to be implying Irish folk are known for being drunk and swearing a lot. What could have provided you with such an impression?

Estimating time to delete

[Tony Isaac]

Deleting folders with large numbers of files and sub-folders in Windows 7 takes inordinately long, far longer than rd /s. This is partly because it first scans the entire structure to count the files that will be deleted, so it can then try to estimate how long it will take for the delete to complete. The scan takes nearly as long as the delete itself! I hope they fix this in Windows 8.

Re:Estimating time to delete

[Anonymous Coward]

It also scans for fun system files and share points to try to warn you something might break.

Re:Estimating time to delete

[AmberBlackCat]

I think (Scanning every file before deleting them) might not take twice as long as just deleting them because, after the scan, the file structure is in a cache in memory. And this data has to be ready anyway, to know what files to delete. It may take a little longer, but not much longer. I suspect what takes the most time is removing the oldest files from the recycle bin while adding new deleted files to the bin.

This may take from a few minutes to a few hours..

[tunapez]

Hey, it worked for disk defragmenter in Vista. I'm sure Pririform agrees.

also changing

[nimbius]

in this version: the blue screen of death will now be a somber black screen
federal agents need no longer work to violate your fourth amendment, the history vault and facial recognition make sure of that
the windows app store is poised to offer features and products you never thought you needed. no really, please buy them
cloud based roaming profiles put the shine on a classically bad idea
and finally simple system reset means never having to bother with hard copies of the operating system you technically purchased with the PC anyway.

Re:also changing

[md65536]

in this version: the blue screen of death will now be a somber black screen

If the BSOD is completely black, how can you tell when windows is working as designed vs. the computer is off???

How about "No to all?"

[gatkinso]

Or at least *telling* the user that holding down shift key while clicking No accomplishes the same thing as a "No to All" button!

Re:How about "No to all?"

[Abstrackt]

Have you ever tried telling a user to use a button to accomplish something? A small percentage of them will genuinely appreciate learning a useful new trick but majority's eyes will glaze over the moment they realize the keyboard is involved.

Re:How about "No to all?"

[UnknownSoldier]

> Have you ever tried telling a user to use a button to accomplish something?

The grand-parent is right. The way to do it is called a ToolTip or HoverBar over the Yes, or No button. (Of course, there needs to be an option in the Control Panel / System Preferences, to disable "UI Help".)

It's not rocket science, just computer science. This is why computers -- namely the UI -- still suck ass. Because almost no one gives a shit about making the interface _friendly_ to people. The way we use computers is completely ass backwards. We make people adapt to computers, instead of the other way around.

Re:How about "No to all?"

[L0rdJedi]

Oh bullshit. Even a tooltip or hoverbar just gets in the way.

It doesn't matter how friendly you make the interface, users will still be put off by it. You will still get calls like "I got an error doing this" and most users won't even be able to tell you what the error was. They'll say "I just clicked ok and it hasn't happened again".

I have had engineers, you know, people with degrees that should be very intelligent when it comes to computers, deal with bsods for days on end because they didn't want to pick up their phone. They end up telling you when they see you, but even they don't think it's a big deal. Their system has been crashing for days and they don't think it's a problem. A simple driver update fixes the problem. And the ones that do think it's a big deal will call you right away, but then expect a permanent fix for a complex problem right away. Heaven forbid you need to go do some research that might take a day or a week. And then if the fix doesn't fix it, then they bitch because the one fix you tried didn't work. Forget that there might be five different possible fixes for what looks like a simple problem. Since that one fix didn't work, they had to go do a google search themselves to find the "easy fix" that involves a BIOS update that might fix the problem. And they won't actually do that fix, they'll just tell you "I looked around on Google and this is really an easy fix. I can't understand why you guys can't fix it." Then, when you confront the boss about the "easy fix" and tell them that the "easy fix" involves said BIOS update that didn't work (because you've done it already), then the boss backs down and realizes that you really are doing your best to please this one person and it doesn't matter what work arounds you come up with, this one person isn't happy unless the system works exactly the way they want it to work. Heaven forbid a 3 year old laptop have bugs in its BIOS that simply aren't going to be fixed because it's totally outdated!

I recently had an engineer actually tell me "I figured you forgot about it" because I took the laptop he was using to my office to update his MS Office install and fully update his computer. I had it for one day. I took it back the next and he said "I figured you forgot about it".

The more friendly you make the interface the more they either hate it or they get dumber. It's that simple. The more friendly it gets, the more they expect it to do shit on its own without them having to think. I've had people tell me they'd love to have a program sitting there doing their job for them. Then they say they'd find something else to do. Problem is there is nothing else for them to do.

In short, people are idiots and want the computer to think for them.

Re:How about "No to all?"

[gatkinso]

Well after using Windows for well over a decade, I just learned the "No to All" trick last year.

It isn't even mentioned in the help.

Re:How about "No to all?"

[bell.colin]

Except with multiple attribute types.

I usually deal with the following when trying to delete large directory structures:

"Yes to All" prompt for Directories
5mins later...
"Yes to All" prompt for "Hidden" files
5mins later...
"Yes to All" prompt for what it thinks are "System" files
5mins later...
"Yes to All" prompt for "Application" files
5mins later...
"Yes to All" prompt for "Archive" files
2mins later...
"Yes to All" prompt for "Insert type you never heard of until now" files

What we need it a "Yes to MOTHER-FUCKING ALL" button with no further prompts!

Then there is the way it handles errors during copy/move/delete prompts (how about a skip option and keep going instead of just stopping?)

And while we're at it quit scanning/previewing every damn file when listing a folder (i just love how the system halts whenever it hits an .exe file that some dumb-ass developer left a UNC path to a non-existent path on my system for the icon before it gives up and just renders what is cached in the EXE itself) The only thing that should be scanned is Filename, Size, and Date (at least give me an option to turn off this crap. (which should already be readily available to the FS index anyway)

Re:How about "No to all?"

[Anonymous Coward]

Mother of pearl, I need to try that. Sweet jesus, I always wondered why there was no 'no to all'.
"No, I DON'T want to overwrite, that'll just take twice as long"

*15 clicks of 'no' later*

"FINE, YES, WHAT THE F#$% EVER!"

Re:How about "No to all?"

[swalve]

No, they just don't know how computers work. You'll see them manually adding columns in their "database" (Excel), but be absolutely incredulous that you can't change the font in some picture they downloaded. They will say "I'm not going to do anything hard, I just want it to play games."

That's why god invented the setup wizard. Question and answer is the way to go. (Even for power users: the best way to configure something is a well documented program.conf file, where you can look at each option, see what it does, and change it if you suit.) Or the context menu: I want to change the properties of some object, I should click the "change the properties of this object" button on the mouse.

The absolute worst way to do configurations is the way that the whole industry seems to be moving to: databases and registries. I absolutely cannot stand that concept, as it seems purposefully designed to keep people confused.

Also, 3 years isn't outdated, and updating anything never fixes new problems. If it worked fine at one time, then something changed. Un-change it, don't add to the complexity.

Having actually read the article ...

[MacTO]

... it looks like the new dialogs are going to include some useful diagnostic information in detailed view. Wondering why it went from 15 minutes to 2 hours? Oh, that's because the transfer rates dropped 90% around the time that I launched such-and-such a program. Maybe I shouldn't do that next time.

Granted, my biggest criticism is that the copy process grinds to a halt every time Windows Explorer doesn't know what to do. They should either figure out the problem before the copy happens (which they can do in most of the cases where you want to merge folders or have identical file names) so that you don't have a half-botched job; or keep copying the files that can be copied in the background while you're waiting for input from the user on the troublesome cases. If Windows 8 fixes that problem, I'll be gleefully happy because I don't like babysitting copy operations.

Re:Having actually read the article ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Granted, my biggest criticism is that the copy process grinds to a halt every time Windows Explorer doesn't know what to do. They should either figure out the problem before the copy happens (which they can do in most of the cases where you want to merge folders or have identical file names) so that you don't have a half-botched job; or keep copying the files that can be copied in the background while you're waiting for input from the user on the troublesome cases. If Windows 8 fixes that problem, I'll be gleefully happy because I don't like babysitting copy operations.

It was fixed in Windows 7.

Re:Having actually read the article ...

[nabsltd]

They should either figure out the problem before the copy happens (which they can do in most of the cases where you want to merge folders or have identical file names) so that you don't have a half-botched job; or keep copying the files that can be copied in the background while you're waiting for input from the user on the troublesome cases. If Windows 8 fixes that problem, I'll be gleefully happy because I don't like babysitting copy operations.

Other than cases where I'm cherry-picking files to copy, robocopy gets all my copying business.

Microsoft could pretty much solve every file copying issue with Explorer by adding a shell extension that allowed you to right-mouse drag the files and choose "copy with robocopy".

Re:Having actually read the article ...

[vlueboy]

The only solution I've found to multi-gig "backups" is actually MOVING the files first, and then copying them back if I really did mean to back them up. That also *partly* takes care of not messing up the modification dates except for resetting to "now" folders and maybe creation dates. In a file move, I just have to keep selecting the remaining source files until only the "File is in use" and "CRC error" ones are left.

xcopy is not a default program, and command lines don't work well for deeply nested folders, let alone network shares. Robocopy isn't free, last I checked.

Gnome tends to give me fewer problems when moving files. That said, LET NO SLASHDOTTER continue to try backing up whole volumes over Wifi, even on a quiet 5Ghz N channel 5 feet away. It didn't work back in 2005, and it still doesn't work today on Windows, Macs or Ubuntu. Out of the obligatory 100,000+ filecounts per partition these days, even a select couple of hundred weigh into a gig or two just ALWAYS stops copying a minimum of 3 times. You end up grabbing the wires; wireless drops way below halfway through the handshake'd 300MBps N speeds but even at fractions of the 100MBps on Cat5, the increase increases to simply perfect. I just don't know why Operating Systems that thrive on wireless don't just quietly renegotiate SMB connections on wireless or when someone trips on a cable. Delivery and automated failure correction is much better over the internet.

Hmmm. I should give that Windows Teracopy thing a try next time to see if it gets around unavoidable wireless signal reconnects.

Experience?

[interval1066]

Why does everything have to be an "experience" now? I'm not really looking for an experience from my workstation; what I have are a list of tasks that need to be completed. When I go on vacation is when I look for an experience. Why don't they concentrate on helping me get actual work done?

Re:Experience?

[0123456]

Why don't they concentrate on helping me get actual work done?

Because then why would you buy a new version of Windows when XP was perfectly fine for doing actual useful work?

Re:Experience?

[mehrotra.akash]

there will be a special "professional" edition for people like you, and others who want to work with their computer.

Ofc.. since it will be "professional" it will cost 2-3x the normal editions

Re:Experience?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I hear they are even planning on naming their next OS "Windows eXPerience".
What a silly name.

Re:Experience?

[nine-times]

I think you're misunderstanding the idea of focusing on "user experience". It doesn't necessarily mean making things pretty or giving you fun animations, but it is precisely about helping you get your tasks completed with as little nonsense and as few annoyances as possible.

Re:Experience?

[interval1066]

I'm not really interested in Microsoft's term of the day. Really. Just let me get my stuff done.

Re:Experience?

[mgblst]

What? Next you will be complaining because it automatically tweets and updates facebook about what files you are copying and deleting.

Re:Experience?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not really interested in Microsoft's term of the day. Really. Just let me get my stuff done.

Well you're not going to get anything done by reading slashdot.

Use Directory Opus

[jomcty]

Not an issue for me, I use Directory Opus.

Re:Use Directory Opus

[phatrabt]

So did I until recently. I just decided to stay off the major version update bandwagon at US$80 a pop. Bought a copy for Vista? Doesn't work correctly in Win7, and if you want a version that works correctly that's another $80. Got your Win7 copy? Oops, Win8 is out, need a new version for that too! I switched to Q-Dir (free) and while it's not the powerhouse that DO is it does what I need.

Another vista?

[Anonymous Coward]

How are we supposed to know that this wont just turn into another vista experience, honestly we got lucky with windows 7, why are we pushing our luck any further?

Stick with 7 people.

Interesting idea

[Pop69]

Why not just go back to the file copy from XP ?

It worked great until somone had the bright idea of rewriting it for the sake of it in Vista. It might say Windows 7 when it starts up, but it's still got big chunks of Vista underneath.

Re:Interesting idea

[mgblst]

Don't be ridiculous. At least 20% of windows has to be rewritten for no apparent reason or it does not count as a new version. Of course, this includes adding new themes, so it is not that much programming.

It's hard to calculate this properly?

[or-switch]

What's wrong with them. I've been doing some mega transfers on my Macs lately and those progress bars are right on, even for transfers that took two days to complete. When it says an hour left, it pretty damn well means it. By-hand calculations based on file size and sustained transfer speeds match their's straight on. From the behavior I think Macs sum up the total size of all files and divides by the current transfer rate (or recent average). If there's a dip (router gets slow) the time adjusts accordingly. In Windows I see it jump around dramatically as files move. I THINK what it's doing is looking at average-time-to-transfer-a-file. If you have a mxi of large and small files (I move huge data file along-side the tiny scripts that generated them) and I think it thinks that the 10 minutes it took to move a data file means the next 5 KB text file is going to take the same amoutn of time, but then it starts that file and thinks, "Oh no, this is going fast now, shorten the time." I think they're changes are probably a lot of smoke and mirrors

Re:It's hard to calculate this properly?

[_0xd0ad]

It's not hard, it just takes time.

Old versions of windows did it on the basis of (size_of_items_to_copy) / (sustained_transfer_speed), but didn't search subfolders recursively when calculating the size of the items to copy, because that takes quite some time. A folder is just "one item" (with a size of 0) until it's copied, and then it searches the contents of the folder (again not recursively) and adds them to size_of_items_to_copy.

Mac OS recursively searches subfolders before it copies anything, so of course it calculates the correct size and can estimate the time to complete much better. And Windows 7 adopted this behavior. But it does take longer at the beginning of the copy when it's searching for all the files it needs to copy.

MidnightCommander

[thelexx]

The MC folks should donate their progress bar code to MS. It's by far the most informative and accurate I've ever seen.

What about search?

[CCarrot]

I'm still mad about the (basically) neutered search capability for desktop/LAN files in Windows 7.

What used to be a consistent
"right-click, choose 'Search', enter 'filename' OR 'phrase in file', tick off search parameters, optionally expand and enter detailed parameters, hit 'Search' button->Results"

workflow has been 'simplified' to

"enter your search string in this little text window and we'll search inside every goddamn file in this directory/subdirectory (oh, and across teh internets and rifling through your emails too, if you want!) for that search term, no matter how long it takes -> wait for freaking ever -> more results than you ever needed, or no results if it's a system file, not in an indexed location or Windows simply doesn't like it for some reason. Oh, you want additional search parameters? Good luck finding any besides filesize and date modified!"

You used to be able to re-enable old-style search on Vista (somewhat), but I guess they thought it was too much of a dinosaur (or too useful, perhaps) to include in Win 7. Bah. Get off my lawn!

Re:What about search?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up. This is exactly the kind of "fixing" that Microsoft has in mind for Windows 8: fixing by removing or neutering.

I am using Classic Shell which fixes quite a number of issues, but the search isn't still up to XP specs.

Re:What about search?

[Anonymous Coward]

In Windows 7, search Windows Help for "Advanced tips for searching in Windows" :-)

Re:What about search?

[vlueboy]

You probably know already, but the Windows search has options to disable the index. That kills some problems because metadata is no longer sought. Then you click around and set it to only search by filenames rather than inside the files, and it's done.

I still miss the old no-nonsense search that came as its own separate program back in the Windows 95 days. I swear Windows 7 still hides some results that you can find manually.

Re:What about search?

[sbjornda]

I'm still mad about the (basically) neutered search capability for desktop/LAN files in Windows 7.

I keep a command prompt window open and use DIR a lot. Or, if you prefer, you can have a bash prompt (e.g. using Cygwin).

--
Don't just get off my lawn. Get off my neighbour's lawn too.

Re:What about search?

[Anonymous Coward]

more results than you ever needed, or no results if it's a system file, not in an indexed location or Windows simply doesn't like it for some reason

windows Explorer -> Alt T -> folder options -> Search.
 

Oh, you want additional search parameters? Good luck finding any besides filesize and date modified!"

It is a pain in the butt that the search has been dumbed down so much, but most of that can be restored to its former functionality. eg a quick google will find you stuff like http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/129437-windows-search-configure-use.html

Re:What about search?

[Anonymous Coward]

It was also possible before to just use "*.jpg;*.jpeg" before to search for multiple Filetypes. "*.jpg OR *.jpeg" does not seem to work as relieably.

Re:What about search?

[Bensam123]

Directories are indexed now (except for some) so it takes a lot less time to just search everything. In windows 98 or XP it wasn't indexed, although XP added a search 4.0 addon that added indexing that wasn't till after vista came out.

Re:What about search?

[fnj]

This alone would be more than enough to make me contemplate installing cygwin and typing a proper "find" command at a shell prompt.

Re:What about search?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not how it works.

If you're in a directory and type something in the search box it'll only search the contents of files which have already been indexed.
Otherwise it's just the file names.
Even if it's a directory that's been indexed, it will only search the contents of files it knows how to parse (word/pdf, etc) and not every random binary file.
If you want to be certain you're searching ONLY the file name, just do "name:foo".

Now, if you're doing "global" searches and not telling it to reduce the searchset - and then you're angry because it's returning e-mails... then you're doing it wrong.

Re:What about search?

[failedlogic]

If you know some or part of the file name and/or want to search directories easily, Everything http://www.voidtools.com/ is the best utility for the job. It keeps a and db searches everything in seconds.

It does not search file contents.

Re:What about search?

[kb7oeb]

Get Agent Ransack http://mythicsoft.com/agentransack

Re:What about search?

[networkzombie]

You should try reading the manual. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/desktopsearch/technicalresources/advquery.mspx It is called Advanced Query Syntax and it is very powerful and easy to learn. Use it like this: ext:.cmd folder:bin filename:*z*

Re:What about search?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just popped open my pictures directory on Win7 Premium. Hit the search box and typed "folderpath:2011-08* name:*.jpg" to get a list of all the jpegs that I've taken so far this August. It completed this search in under a second...

You heard me. I'm on you lawn and making you learn something new ya old dinosaur. /posts anon :D

Re:What about search?

[Anonymous Coward]

But... it's so Apple-like... how could you possibly complain!

Re:What about search?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seconded! WTF is with 7's search 'function' ?
It's seriously the worst POS ever. And this libraries and indexing grabage, hell it's actually SLOWER to search through things than XP or probably 98.

I deindexed half the 'libraries' and moved most of my important things to their own directory/s straight off root dir and performance is vastly improved. However where the hell is the OPTIONS for search now? Is the userbase seriously that stupid? Or does MS just arrogantly assume this to be the case. Windows 7 is an improvement in a lot of areas. Explorer itself certainly is not.

Re:What about search?

[I(rispee_I(reme]

I keep Windows' indexing service disabled and use Everything instead. It also works over a network pretty easily, and can double as an ftp server in a pinch. The latter two features can be disabled, of course.

Re:What about search?

[maglor_83]

And then you decide you want to order the results by something, and it decides it has to do the search AGAIN to do that!

Re:What about search?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea as a programmer, a good search tool is indispensable; the best free and open source one I found so far is WinGrep:
http://www.wingrep.com/

Re:What about search?

[Anonymous Coward]

agent ransack

Re:What about search?

[CCarrot]

YES! This!

I hear and share your pain...

Re:What about search?

[CCarrot]

In Windows 7, search Windows Help for "Advanced tips for searching in Windows" :-)

Good point...however it begs the question: why didn't we have to do this in XP? Answer: because it was *much* more intuitive!

I mean, c'mon, who's going to be trying to run Win 7 on a tablet, or something else with a screen smaller than 10 inches? So 'waste' the real estate and give your users easy to configure search options! Or at least have an 'advanced' search option available!

Re:What about search?

[CCarrot]

You probably know already, but the Windows search has options to disable the index. That kills some problems because metadata is no longer sought. Then you click around and set it to only search by filenames rather than inside the files, and it's done.

I still miss the old no-nonsense search that came as its own separate program back in the Windows 95 days. I swear Windows 7 still hides some results that you can find manually.

Yess...however on the rare occasion, I do want to be able to search in files. I haven't checked: can you tell it to search inside files with indexing off? Does it have to re-index *everything* before it can do that?

I too miss the no-nonsense search, even if it did take quite a while if you wanted to search inside a bunch of files...although looking at some of the replies, I appreciate people suggesting their fav. third party alternatives and workarounds. Thanks guys!

Re:What about search?

[CCarrot]

I keep Windows' indexing service disabled and use Everything instead. It also works over a network pretty easily, and can double as an ftp server in a pinch. The latter two features can be disabled, of course.

Hmmm...thanks, I'll check it out!

Re:What about search?

[CCarrot]

I'm still mad about the (basically) neutered search capability for desktop/LAN files in Windows 7.

I keep a command prompt window open and use DIR a lot. Or, if you prefer, you can have a bash prompt (e.g. using Cygwin).

--
Don't just get off my lawn. Get off my neighbour's lawn too.

Unfortunately, my typing speed is approximately 10 wpm (yes, I'm a two, sometimes four-finger typist). While I can muddle by using the command line, I definitely appreciate a well-designed GUI. But thanks for the tip!

Re:What about search?

[CCarrot]

more results than you ever needed, or no results if it's a system file, not in an indexed location or Windows simply doesn't like it for some reason

windows Explorer -> Alt T -> folder options -> Search.

Oh, you want additional search parameters? Good luck finding any besides filesize and date modified!"

It is a pain in the butt that the search has been dumbed down so much, but most of that can be restored to its former functionality. eg a quick google will find you stuff like http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/129437-windows-search-configure-use.html

Okay, that site tells me how to set up global options for all searches everywhere in my system. Sure, some of them could be useful, but what if I change my mind? Maybe I don't want to search inside encrypted files under this directory, but I do want to in this other one? What if I want to search inside files in my C:/windows directory, which is *never* indexed, ever? (I see that Alt-T gives you a *few* more real-time search options [under 'folder options'? WTF? really??], but it's still pretty anemic)

I think it's mostly the indexing that's the problem. I don't really need another database on my computer to track what's in all my files, and where they are. That's what the filesystem is for (well, tracking where they are, at least). Besides the security and performance hits, it isn't terribly reliable and has to be rebuilt *from scratch* if you make trivial changes to the way you want things 'searchable'. Sure, without indexing, sometimes a search for a phrase inside a file could take a half-hour or more...but at least I knew that a) if it was in there, it would find it, and b) it's not copying the contents of sensitive files to another location for my 'convenience'.

Thanks for the tips, but I think it'll be a third-party solution for me...now I just got to get out there and try some, instead of bemoaning the 'old days'! ;)

Re:What about search?

[CCarrot]

Directories are indexed now (except for some) so it takes a lot less time to just search everything. In windows 98 or XP it wasn't indexed, although XP added a search 4.0 addon that added indexing that wasn't till after vista came out.

Yeah...except you don't know if your index is up to date unless you specifically dig into the control panel and check, there's a *huge* performance hit if you have to re-index for any reason (like deciding 'no, I don't want to search inside encrypted files, thanks!'), and hey, how about that huge security/privacy hole that is your indexed data, all nicely collected in one place for an attacker (or, if you're unfortunate, a police investigator) to riffle through? Sure, it may not be easy for them to get in there, depending on how you have it set up, but if/when they do...

Re:What about search?

[CCarrot]

That's not how it works.

If you're in a directory and type something in the search box it'll only search the contents of files which have already been indexed.
Otherwise it's just the file names.

Okay, quick question for you: how do I make it search inside files for non-indexed locations (okay, okay, another poster pointed out the 'search' parameters under Folder Options)? And if I do, does it then add that location to the index?

Even if it's a directory that's been indexed, it will only search the contents of files it knows how to parse (word/pdf, etc) and not every random binary file.

Yes, that's how it worked in Windows XP, too, only they didn't need to build a global index to do it...and it did find every actual file in that directory matching the search criteria, regardless of age...

If you want to be certain you're searching ONLY the file name, just do "name:foo".

Now, if you're doing "global" searches and not telling it to reduce the searchset - and then you're angry because it's returning e-mails... then you're doing it wrong.

And this is an increase in efficiency how, exactly? So every little search, I have to type an additional 5 to 9characters ("file:" or "filename:", actually, not just "name:") to tell the system *not* to search inside the bloody files? And I have to remember a list of keywords (which even you didn't remember properly)? And I can't set these options as persistent unless I change global search settings? Yes, this is *ever* so much better!

Re:What about search?

[CCarrot]

I just popped open my pictures directory on Win7 Premium. Hit the search box and typed "folderpath:2011-08* name:*.jpg" to get a list of all the jpegs that I've taken so far this August. It completed this search in under a second...

You heard me. I'm on you lawn and making you learn something new ya old dinosaur. /posts anon :D

;p

Just for shits and giggles, try doing that with files you've just copied over...or that are in a location you haven't included in your index. I'm curious, does it still work?

Unfortunately, us old dinosaurs are terrible at remembering all those keywords...*sigh* yet another 'cheat sheet' to keep on hand...or scrap it all together and go with a third party solution that actually works, consistently...

Re:What about search?

[CCarrot]

Yea as a programmer, a good search tool is indispensable; the best free and open source one I found so far is WinGrep:
http://www.wingrep.com/

Hmmm...maybe it used to be, but now it looks like it's shareware...which isn't necessarily a deal-breaker, if it does what I need.

Also, it seems to default to searching contents as well as filenames for everything...? In fact, I can't see the option to tell it not to search file contents (ooh, there it is, 'Search files in list', however then it won't search in zip files)? The quick context preview is nice, although you can't see the previews until the whole search is done, and the ability to run another search restricted to the results of the first could be handy...hmmm. It also seems to be quite thorough, if also quite slow (I had no idea how many photos I had with the word 'test' in their metadata). And I see it automagically adds itself to the context menu for Windows Explorer...not sure if I consider that a 'good thing' or not.

Oh, wow. I haven't seen an app crash that hard on XP in a long time. Apparently it *really* doesn't like it when you cancel a search in progress...nothing but endless 'Out of resource' message boxes...

Overall, thanks for the tip, but I think I'll look elsewhere, unless it performs *much* better under Windows 7. *sigh*

Re:What about search?

[CCarrot]

But... it's so Apple-like... how could you possibly complain!

The only apples allowed in my house are the edible kind...;)

Re:What about search?

[CCarrot]

Seconded! WTF is with 7's search 'function' ?
It's seriously the worst POS ever. And this libraries and indexing grabage, hell it's actually SLOWER to search through things than XP or probably 98.

I deindexed half the 'libraries' and moved most of my important things to their own directory/s straight off root dir and performance is vastly improved. However where the hell is the OPTIONS for search now? Is the userbase seriously that stupid? Or does MS just arrogantly assume this to be the case. Windows 7 is an improvement in a lot of areas. Explorer itself certainly is not.

Yes, I agree. Explorer (and Media Player, for that matter) have both generally degraded in usability with the switch. And the Control Panel. Oh, wait, don't forget the 'Network settings' interface, that's been dumbed down considerably, too...not to mention 'Homegroup' vs. 'Workgroup' fun and games, especially on a mixed-system network...

Overall, 'upgrading' to Windows 7 gave me what advantages again? Somebody please remind me...oh, right, I can rate my photos right in Explorer. Well, then it was all worthwhile! >:(

Re:What about search?

[CCarrot]

You should try reading the manual. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/desktopsearch/technicalresources/advquery.mspx It is called Advanced Query Syntax and it is very powerful and easy to learn. Use it like this: ext:.cmd folder:bin filename:*z*

Powerful, perhaps. I suppose if I want to, I can search for businesspostalcode:90210 in my email contacts. (WTF? Why would I be doing this from Explorer? Why do I need to be able to do this from anywhere in Windows other than in the email client, or possibly an address book application??)

Easy to learn? Easier than the old search GUI? I think not. Also, it is restricted to files that have been indexed, unless you set up the 'hidden' search options under Folder Options to search non-indexed locations as well, which loses you the supposed performance benefit...in which case, what's the point?

Re:What about search?

[CCarrot]

agent ransack

Thanks, I'll try out the latest version. ;)

Re:What about search?

[Anonymous Coward]

And if I do, does it then add that location to the index?

No, but the "searches might be slow in non-indexed locations, click to add to index..." prompt which appears at the top of the screen will.

Sorry that it doesn't work exactly to your specific requirements - by default.
Of course, you're always welcome to go back to the command line with FINDSTR or DIR.

But it really seems like you're just digging for stuff to complain about.

Re:What about search?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with the inanity of Windows 7 search. But the old function is still there, at least on a dozen of my Win7 boxes. I forget now the name, but if the upper right area has Search, then the old function is Find. Look around on the screen for it.

Re:What about search?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you open the Search sidebar (click the advanced search link, if I remember correctly) and scroll down there's a rectangle that says if you need to search for something in a non-indexed folder, use the old Search assistant. There's a link to the old Search assistant. Click it.

You're welcome.

Re:What about search?

[CCarrot]

If you open the Search sidebar (click the advanced search link, if I remember correctly) and scroll down there's a rectangle that says if you need to search for something in a non-indexed folder, use the old Search assistant. There's a link to the old Search assistant. Click it.

You're welcome.

Really?!? If so, mod parent informative! I'm checking that as soon as I get to a Win7 box!

From all my searching, I have not been able to find anything that will let me use the old search client on Windows 7. That's all I really want... ;) I just hope you're not thinking about Vista...

Re:What about search?

[CCarrot]

Of course, you're always welcome to go back to the command line with FINDSTR or DIR.

Or, you know, Windows could have left their perfectly valid search client in there for users who prefer no-nonsense searches, without having to piss around with labels and indexing. It's not like leaving it in would've increased their already bloated code very much, after all...

Re:What about search?

[_0xd0ad]

Yes, Win 7. I know I've done it before. I'll try to post screenshots when I get a chance.

Re:What about search?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe what you are looking for (in Windows 7) would be FileSearchEx

http://goffconcepts.com/products/filesearchex/

Follow the instructions and apply the REG files, and *poof* you have the classic search window back.

It's kind of sad you have to install a 3rd party feature to make a new OS work as well as an old OS, but Microsoft is nutty like that.

Re:What about search?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I was mistaken about how you do it... after you've entered the search term you have to scroll to the bottom and select a "custom" scope (or "computer"). Then it will revert to the old search behavior.

Re:What about search?

[haruchai]

Everything Search is pretty awesome, for such a small program - but there are some caveats. One is that you'll use it to find, well, everything so your memory of where you put files will go straight to hell. But don't try to use it to search files by size - it's terrible at sorting a long list, especially across different devices and will warn you IF the attribute is anything other than the file name. For filename searching, it's fantastic and fast.
If you want to find where your biggest files are, use another tool or filter your Everything searches by file type and then sort by size - of course this depends on how powerful your PC is, how fast your disks are and how many files of that type it finds.
A few thousand isn't a problem for my PC, above that the program will hang for minutes at a time. But for filenames, it has no trouble keeping track of nearly a million files spread across 6 hard disks / 15 partitions

Re:What about search?

[swalve]

Yeah, Microsoft fucked that up. Instead of helping users along in understanding that different things are different things, they confused everything, and now everyone is doing it. You shouldn't be able to enter a web url into windows explorer and have it work. You shouldn't be able to enter a search term into the URL box of a web browser and have it work.

You don't smarten people up by making it easier to be ignorant. You do it by making it easier to be smart.

Teracopy

[Anonymous Coward]

If you copy files a lot you should be using TeraCopy anyways.

http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php

Linux can't last

[Anonymous Coward]

I run a small business too and quite frankly Ubuntu LTS has moved me to Windows 7 for my desktop requirements.

You see; Ubuntu makes for a fine desktop (I favor KDE). Add OpenOffice in its good days to it and you had a fine desktop which could perform all daily office tasks. Until that day when you had to upgrade to a new version. With LTS this occurs every 3 years. The main problem, obviously, is that there are many releases between LTS releases, which makes the whole transaction far from painless.

Last time I tried I ended up with a dead system several times, eventually to come to the conclusion that the best way to upgrade would be to perform a clean installation. After already having spend ('wasted') 2 days over this I had enough and moved to Windows 7 (this happened last year with going from LTS 8 to LTS 10).

With Linux you are required to upgrade AT LEAST once every 3 years. With Windows 7 I can easily continue without having to worry until 2018 or so; that's at least 7 more years to go. Don't forget here: messing with your server may seem like fun, in the end its a major cost because you cannot spend that time working (and I do NOT feel like doing all that stuff in my own time anymore).

Same applied to my office servers. They ran Solaris, but I was forced to ditch that one and then had a choice. Which went to Windows 2k3. Cheap to pick up, runs just fine on my older (basically somewhat outdated) hardware and right now I can easily use it for another 4 years. And this is an OS which has been available for 8 years already.

Don't get me wrong here.. When it comes to Internet servers my pick would be Linux or perhaps BSD, never Windows. But for my office requirements Linux would be the last thing I'd pick up or advice to my customers. Not because it can't cope, it can quite well. But because it can't last and it ends up being just as expensive as Windows, maybe even more.

Having to upgrade my stuff every 3 years (which isn't merely upgrading and discover where things fail later mind you!) is a tedious and time consuming process, especially since my income depends on it. And if I then have to chose between a system which "possibly" will do a clean upgrade but which I will most likely have to re-install from scratch (thus taking me at least 2 - 3 days to get everything going again) OR a Windows environment which I can use for YEARS to come (and in all honesty is usually also easier to upgrade) then my pick is for Windows anytime.

Re:Linux can't last

[mikechant]

With Linux you are required to upgrade AT LEAST once every 3 years.

Not if you run Centos etc.
7 years' support, same as RHEL.

Now

[JonJ]

If only Apple would fix the disgrace that is Finder, the two leading commercial operating systems might be almost usable.

Re:Now

[nyctopterus]

I'm genuinely curious, what is it that everyone hates so much about the Finder?

Summary is incorrect

[microbee]

The time remaining is not gone. See it in the actual screenshots for the detailed view.

Could we link to the actual source please? Building Windows 8 blog

Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't estimate based on the exact current transfer speed (which is highly variable). You use a sliding average over, say 10-30 seconds, to get a reasonable estimate of current average speed, and then estimate based on that.

(Incidentally, you also don't just use the current number of bytes transferred vs. the total number of bytes. Estimates based on this measure don't adapt well to fluctuating speed.)

Re:Simple

[Gordonjcp]

You use a sliding average over, say 10-30 seconds, to get a reasonable estimate of current average speed, and then estimate based on that.

Have you noticed how when the network goes away, the "Estimated Transfer Time" starts to decay towards *really really long*, taking about 30 seconds to level off at "never"?

Yeah. I thought you might have.

Really? Not that it's a samzenpus story?

[denzacar]

And here I thought the problem is that it's a samzenpus summary and as such trollific and inaccurate by definition.

Obligitory Amiga comment - Two more weeks!

[Anonymous Coward]

Obligitory Amiga comment - Two more weeks!

Thank you

[warrax_666]

You seem to be about the only responder in this thread who actually understands how files work.

It's pretty sad that people don't understand the pseudo-atomicity of the POSIXish way of handling file names (as opposed to files).

(You could also have mentioned the distinction between file handles and inodes (and lazy unlinking) to explain the "program can write to a deleted file without causing harm" bit, but whatever.)

Oh Boy

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure hope it doesn't break file sharing over heterogeneous networks.

Summary is misleading.

[nuckfuts]

The article shows clearly in both a screen shot and a video that the "Time remaining" estimate is still there in Windows 8 Explorer. It's simply hidden under a "More details" button by default.

Gee, welcome to the 90's, Microsoft.

[darkuni]

It's called DIRECTORY OPUS. Look it up, steal it or buy it - and your problems would have been solved a decade ago.

The next great excuse...

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 8 my files!

KDE

[Geheimagent]

Looks like KDE to me.

Re:KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

they both look like Windows to me. and yes KDE *is* known for its superb customisation abilities, it can even look like KDE ..

Re:What about dir /b /s

[b4dc0d3r]

I gave up on search, I use "dir /b /s *term*" every single time. It's a lot faster, and you don't lose out on the GUI because it doesn't do things like sort anyway (not on large file searches), and it likes to start over just when you found your file.

Redirect the output to a file and open it with something better than notepad, and you got your search working again.

Re:What about dir /b /s

[antdude]

How about all HDDs? I have to do this one by one and I have seven drives from HDDs! :(

microshaft

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope they fix the bug where you can name a file a long name, but then cannot copy it or move it.

greatly improved file management experience?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about I don't have to sit there waiting for the dialog box to disappear, the box telling me what I just told it to do. And if on moving a whole directory, when it sees a similar file half way through the copy process it asks me if I want to cancel. If I say yes, why am I wrong in assuming the files will be restored to their original location, instead of half-copied files in both locations. And why does it take minutes to empty the recycle bin !!!

They should use Konqueror

[Anonymous Coward]

Screenshots

try reiser4 on linux you will be amazed

[Anonymous Coward]

try reiser4 on linux you will be amazed. i was 10yrs ago

Finally ...

[Anonymous Coward]

caught up with Gnome 2.x, did they? ;)

Already there since 1993

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact.. it was added for POSIX compatibility. *gasp*

Ofcource any application that opens a file can deny this behavior passing appropriate flags to the API. Not much the OS can do about it.

(FILE_SHARE_DELETE) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa363858.aspx

KDE Clone

[rdnetto]

I'm surprised no one else has picked up on the fact that it bears starting similarities to the KDE file copy dialog.

Here are the images, for those who didn't RTFA:
Link 1
Link 2

Re:KDE Clone

[paulo.casanova]

If only KDE had a patent on that file copy dialog :) Oh, wait, no, patents are evil! :P

But, nevertheless, both Windows and MacOS have waaaaay to go to even get close to KDE as desktop management. The only think I'm not totally sure I like on KDE is its file selection/click concept. I prefer clicking on buttons and double-clicking on icons... but that's maybe just a bad habit...

Re:KDE Clone

[rdnetto]

Agreed, but the best thing about KDE is how flexible it is while still providing extremely usable defaults. Also, the selection/click metaphor works great on tablets.

File management experience?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow - to think I might have lived an empty shallow life if I hadn't had a wonderful 'file mangement experience'.

didn't MS say ...

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm sure they said they were going to do something like this when they were teling us all about how good Vista was going to be ..
- it was going to check it actually had space on the destination drive *before* it set off moving/copying, ..maybe my mind is playing tricks

Windows 7 was much better

[Vrtigo1]

Windows 7 by itself was a huge improvement over the file copying in XP. I didn't bother with VIsta, so maybe that's when it got better. I don't know.

not even slightly impressed

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not have those issues on my Linux boxes. Things are accurate. I gave up on windows a looooong time ago. So many things do *not* work as expected and to act as if it did would be weird.

Major issues atleast AFAIK with windows.

a) system recovery, how many times did that thingy fail?
b) progress bars, yes minor detail but come on,, make the stuff work accurately. The progress bar is pointless in windows on almost ALL operations including file copies and moves.
c) instead of playing with those task bars maybe they can lock down their OS so its not a virus haven.
d) I hear the weirdest excuses for Windows issues, the other day, I heard "Sounds like a corrupt binary"... umm OK, how did that occur? Do the binaries grow old and corrupt them selves? Or does windows do some odd action incorrectly and break it self?
e) Powershell was a great effort, the command line still blows chunks though.
f) Enter Windows Server editions, which many times will sit in a server rack at some remote DC and the only access will be from remote, fine. Why is there a GUI only management for windows? Why should this box waste CPU cycles and etc with explorer? If the OS is modular, why is the GUI stuck to it?

If they can fix above issues, maybe they would have a chance on my computer. For now, I go with what works and is tried and true.

I honestly at one point didn't hate windows. And I honestly am not the average user, clicking every spam/ad and "infect me" link. However to many times I had run into issues where, "System Recovery Ran for hours and failed", "Progress Bars LIED about PROGRESS!", "Binaries became corrupt in between me going to work and coming back", "Startup Repair can't repair startup", "Horrible File System which leads to worst FS issues".

VS Linux

- Seamless upgrades of packages and the OS. Keeping all my files in tact.
- Responsive/Functional community, the M$ community appears to be all redirects to pointless KB articles.
- Accurate functions, meaning when I do something,, I expect it to work, if it doesn't I feel I have done something wrong. With M$ I mean come on,, click a couple of buttons and get a fail. That is a supreme let down.
- Truly modular, restarting the complete window system, or upgrading it, or removing it, multiple options for a Desktop Manager, (the idea that they understood how valuable it is to seperate these layers is enough for me, and provides way better options than killing explorer.exe and watching it come back automatically)
- The command line management is superb on Linux (I know duh) . Allowing for very simple scripting and automation, built in!! Windows falls majorly short of this.

please let me know again,, why is windows even around? Oh right,, you guys play those games on it. =). Well for that argument, I am a console junky. Speaking of junk,, windows is it.

But what am I going to do for random numbers now?

[RockDoctor]

I used to start big transfers going under Windows, then write down the completion times to populate my /dev/random from.

What ma I going to do now for cryptographically strong random numbers now? Count radioactive decays or something?