Have you never wondered how the soylent green was made ?
That's it, they take the old programmers, poison them while they're looking at a movie which shows a woman operating a lisp machine so they can remember the good old days, and grind them until they're just little tablets !
First because it seems you'll ignore my comment if i don't say that, i did not try out Linux for a few days in 97. I've been using it as my primary platform for four years, at which point i decided that the desktop would never be polished enough. But i still use Linux most of the time, remotly, and in fact my work is something like maybe 50% development 50% Linux admin. I've pushed my company to use Linux servers and it's been really a success for us. Because Linux does shine server side, you can fix most problems with a 10 lines perl script in the worst cases instead of banging your head on MSDN for a week...
I will agree, explorer does suck. But why did it take them this long to finally rewrite it? Knowing Microsoft and their coding practices, there will still be many bugs and just as many security holes as before. M$ has not been known for releasing stable / bug free / secure software. Now maybe they will prove me wrong, but honestly I don't care because I already have a stable and secure browser in Firefox. No need for me to try out a commercial product that comes bundled with a horrible OS when I have an OSS alternative that is much better and costs nothing.
Dude if i took the time to write explorer.exe it's because i'm not talking about internet explorer, but about explorer.exe . The Windows's shell and window manager, that is.
How are the drivers "bloody?" Drivers, if you don't know, are what make your computer work. Without them, your computer would be pretty "bloody" useless. 2000 and XP as stable as Linux? Maybe more? Are you ignorant, or being payed off by M$? Windows has numerous problems with memory leaks and Windows boxes crash ALL the time
Look i know what drivers are, you know. I chose to call them bloody because they're the single point of failure in most OSes and it's getting old.
And No, Windows box do not "crash ALL the time". It's just that you're so sure of it that
you've never taken the time to understand how Windows works, and you're probably using it in totally stupid ways. That's what makes me laugh about people like you: you can't be bothered to learn a single thing about windows, and yet when something goes wrong you decide that it's the system's fault. If it was Linux, you'd be thinking that you must have done something wrong, because linux IS stable, you've been taughted. But no, you act like the most braindead user you can find, run as admin, and basically act in ways you wouldn't even think of in Linux.
I know that, because let me tell you i've had several XP boxes, and I can't remember a *SINGLE* crash on any of them. I've have some BSODs but they were all due to bad hardware and the issue was resolved as soon as i changed the hardware. You don't seem to understand that the 9x era is over, and that the NT branch is a totally different system, as different from 9x that linux was different from 9x. But you just look at the UI and think that it's the same thing because you can't see the difference... I guess if you used HURD with kde you'd be saying that it's exactly the same thing as Linux because it looks the same too.
Big deal, a hardware rendered GUI. OS-X has been doing it for a while now, and there are projects in Linux for KDE and Gnome to have hardware accelerated graphics. Nothing new here, just MS hopping on the bandwagon again.
So what ? I don't care who is the first, who have have some alpha code working or not. I care about the fact that the GUI i'm using will be hardware accelerated.
Besides, wake me up when you'll see a solution in Linux which works like it should, w on all window managers and basically is done the right way (that is, a layer just above or inside X11...). It's the same thing again, you'll have different versions for enlightenment, kde, gnome, all with different pros and cons, some with fantastic ideas but not enough developpers, etc etc.
Comparing Windows 95 to Linux? Back in '95? Yeah, I'm sure Win
Hum, i'd say maybe one of your drivers as a problem, or and app is leaking memory.
I leave xp running all the time on my laptop, i hibernate instead of shutting it down.
I've seen a few BSOD on Xp, but they were always all the result of bad ram, of graphic driver. Besides that the only thing that could make me reboot is some app which leaks ram and slowly eats all the memory until the system is slow as hell. Because of that i've started a few years ago to actively monitor all apps i install. And in a lot of cases I uninstall them after a few day because they do leak some ram...
That said i don't think i've ever had a 100 days uptime because there is always an update that will force me to reboot at some point;)
I'm talking about explorer.exe, the windows shell, or window manager. They're rewriting it from scratch to use.net (i think) and the new graphic system.
Despite the general feeling here, i'm starting to be really interested in vista...
It seems they have fixed almost everything that was wrong with windows.
I mean:
Explorer rewriten from scratch. This was long, long overdue and that alone would make me interested in Vista. Explorer makes windows looks buggy sometimes but it's only explorer.exe which sucks...
Monad. A real shell, which could possibly be much more powerfull than say bash+ standard Unix commands (or cygwin...)
They're moving the graphics subsystems and all the bloody drivers in userland. That means it will be dead stable, period. 2000 and Xp are already at least as stable as Linux, and maybe more. After that i'm sorry but Linux will compare the same way to Windows that Win95 did to Linux...
A hardware accelerated graphic system, ala Quartz. It should rock even if They'll probably make it look and act totally stupid out of the box, overusing their new power...
And people complain that there is nothing new in Vista, phew... I mean if they manage to do all those things, and do them the right way like they seem to be decided to (for once...) it will be damn worth a new release...
And no, i'm not a microsoft fanboy, i've been using Linux since 97 and I really like it where it shines. But if you have even a little objectivity you can't say the stuff they're putting here is not interesting...
Blah blah blah, this has nothing to do with Unix. Having the graphics subsystem outside of the kernel is not special to Unix.
And it is much better than say the linux kernel, because they're also moving all the drivers in userland (this was posted yesterday somewhere, don't remember where...). It's the only thing that could still make Windows crash, a driver crash. Now it will be really far more stable than Linux. Now mod me down, I know i've been way too far...
About the genres : I found a solution to that which works 99% of the time.
Just ditch the category browser you have in your mp3 library, and use dynamic views instead of it. Then have the views regroup the categories...
For example, make a view called "rock", and have it group every genre name which contains *rock* but not *hard* if you want to have a special category for hard rock. Then create a metal category, which groupe *heavy*, "hard rock", *trash*... etc.
This way you don't have to touch what was entered in freedb most of the time, and it just works. "Classic rock", "classic-rock" and "rock'n'roll" will all end up in the rock view, which is probably where they should belong. Then you don't end up with 100+ categories which make the thing useless. And you can add an "other" view which takes all the genres that did not match previous views, and edit the genres listed in this view if you wish...
Can you think of some observable aspect of reality that would be different depending on whether the universe was designed vs. not designed?
Actually... I've always thought that the fact that we have to pee and procreate with the same organ was too sick and standardized to have been created randomly.
Clearly it is a sign that there is a designer, and that his mind is totally twisted and evil.
Easy, just install the slashdot effect firefox extension like everybody else and you too won't need to read the article in order to hammer the pages of those poor bastards who have their sites posted on the frontpage That way we can all keep on complaining about not being able to read the article and make stupid offtopic and misinformed comments like this one, yay.
Am i the only one to thing that a corporation like Mozilla should put money into developpers or bounties instead of marketing campaigns ? I don't remember exactly how many cost the Times ad, but it was way too much... Marketing is a necessary evil for those companies which must have a return on their money. Mozilla just want market shares, and would probably be better served by paying coders to make the browser better instead of hyping it.
I'm sorry but no i'm trying to convince the germans to swap bastille day with the beer festival. It's longer, much more alcoolized and you get to pee while standing at the bar. But once it's here you guys sure can come. We never refuse an invasion of alcoolized streakers in our beer festival.
To be fair, all the people i know here really hate the infiltration of American culture... Which doesn't means that they hate American citizens, it's totally different. Mostly what they don't like is that the US culture is everywhere since the 80's, and i mean everywhere. It's infiltrating our lives, our habits. We're slowly becoming Americans and it seems we can't do anything about it.
Let me give you an example: Do you know that since maybe 8 years we have halloween day here too ? It didn't exist before that, it has never been in our culture. All we knew about halloween was from the US movies. But suddently one day in october we've seen all the halloween merchandising invade the supermarkets, shops in town decorating their windows with spooky themes, disco clubs having halloween nights and children coming at our home asking for candy. That's it, some bright bastards had managed to make a huge campaign to sell their merchandising for a nonexisting celebration in france, and had managed to involve schools, and whatnot to create a tradition. You might say that we could just refuse to celebrate it if we don't like it, but the children had been intoxicated with the stuff with all the "halloween special" shows they had seen on tv during the preceding month, and their teachers who realized that children love to make spooky masks. So the children genuinely wanted to celebrate Halloween, even if they didn't had the slightest idea of the cultural background behind it, like their parents. So now they come for candy, try to say the same phrase that children say is the US to have their candy and we try to react like the american characters we've seen in the movies because we don't know what we're really supposed to do. It's just surreal...
It's not that we don't like american culture, I mean american movies are quite watched around here, but we don't like to have a different culture , any culture, pushed down our throat like that.
My sister in law is student in "teacher's school" (no idea how you call that in english) in france. She'll be a teacher in primary school next year. They have computer courses to be able to teach children how to use a word processor, web browser or graphic editor. What's interesting is that they learn everything on free software, are given a cd full of OSS (for Windows), and encouraged to distribute it around them. They're told not to use commercial software with children, simply because their parents are not necessary wealthy enough to pay for the stuff at home so it would create ineqalities among the children. Very good idea if you ask me. Now if they could make a program to build very cheap computers and give one to each child it would be even better. But that's a start.
So what ? I bought several fusion reactors on ebay,
and I should receive my MIR station in a few days.
When i'll turn on all the flashing lights this things have on them for
christmas, the whole town will bow before me, haha.
Rubbish. A firewall is not a security measure. If you have port {whatever this week's virus uses} opened, you are just as vulnerable as if you don't use a firewall. Similarly, if you have NAT with a public IP between you and the Internet which doesn't forward anything to that port, you are secure.
Your example is totally bogus, and just proves that in most cases NAT is as efficient as firewalls when it comes to protecting computers behind it. Yes it's not the purpose of the thing, it's just a coincidence that it enhance security, but who cares ?
Now i agree that NAT is a kludge, causes a lot of headaches and i just like the static routable ip for everything because it's the internet as it should always have been, but that's another story. Security wise, NAT is MUCH better than nothing, and i'd go as far as saying that it is better than a firewall for most users, because real firewalls are really, really difficult to configure, and 99% of the population will misconfigure them.
The schema you're talking about is wrong, wrong, wrong. You've made a schema based on how you want to display the information, not based on what this information is carrying.
How can you make a request to find which user responded to more than 3 questions, for example ? you'd have to test each column individually, and then you'd have to modify the request if you add or remove some columns. Furthermore, you have to change the schema itself each time you add or remove a question. And finally, you don't use the relationnal part of the database, at all. Your schema supposes that there is a question table, with a questionid. And in your anwsers table, you have columns named after the ids, right ? Now how can the database check if you delete a question that there are no answers pointing to it ? it can't, because you're using the database as if it was a flat file. So the database can't check data integrity for you, because your schema isn't normalized at all. as Johnno74 says, you need at least a question table, a response table, and an user/question/response association table. If you don't do that, the database has zero advantages over a flat file.
A much better structure is to have a table of questions, and a table of responses (with something like a response id, and maybe an identifier on who answered the questionare) and a question-answer table with each row pointing at a response and a question, and giving the answer that person gave for that question.
An answer has to point to a specific question and makes no sense with just an answerid and a userid, so you should have the questionid in the answers table, it's a nonsense to asssociate them in another table in this instance. It takes more space, and requires an useless join. Unless the questions are just choices the user can choose from, like in a poll.
This Tony hoar guy looks nuts. I mean, look at that... was he wearing his pajamas, or did he stole his wife sticking ? And why did he put this protograph on his bio ? Even the worse geek would take more care of what he gives to see. He must of an ancient, forgotten species. The uber alpha geek, or the Meta Punk Geek Granny ! Anyway, i like his pants.
Well one could argue that scrapping symlinks was a really bad idea. Yes they can lead to messy filesystems if they are used in a bad way, but they are also the only way to solve a myriad of problems. For example, i have dozens of webapps deployed in their own directories, and they all need a configuration file in a their own directory. Since this config file is the same for each webapp, it certaily makes a lot of sense to have the file be a symlink to a real file somewhere else, in a kind of meta directory. Then I can just edit this file instead of having to edit each copies. There is no way around this type of problem without symlinks. You have to make the thing less maintenable, more error prone, and futhermore you'll need to do more work, like maybe creating a script to copy the file in each directory.
From TFA : Now why is this relevant to the SMB2 protocol? This is because, for symbolic links to behave correctly, they should be interpreted on the client side of a file sharing protocol (otherwise this can lead to security holes). SMB2 understands the concept of symbolic links and evaluates the links on the client
I don't quite understand, if I make a symlink called softs in a folder called share for example, of course i want the SMB clients to be able to follow the link as it is evaluated server side. It ain't a security risk, it's how it should be. Now if you do the opposite and have the client evaluate the link, yes you can have deep security issues since you can have the client do things on a file which he thinks is remote while he's in fact treating a local file... I hope the author just mixed up client/server concepts, or it will indeed suck...
There have been soft links in ntfs since at least w2K, and probably NT4. I believe they're called junctions in the NTFS jargon. You need the administrative tools to be able to create them. And at least now they're kinda problematic in the sense that there is no way to distinguish them from real folder or files ince they've been created unless you bring up cmd.exe and check with junction.exe if they are indeed symlinks. So it would certainly be a good idea to integrate them better and have them in the main release. (Plus i don't know how it is now, but when i tried to install the administrative pack there was a big warning saying that you shouldn't do that unless your windows locale is english american, and that it was likely to cause unsupported problems if you did otherwise...)
Slashdot Mirror
Have you never wondered how the soylent green was made ?
That's it, they take the old programmers, poison them while they're looking at a movie which shows a woman operating a lisp machine so they can remember the good old days, and grind them until they're just little tablets !
First because it seems you'll ignore my comment if i don't say that, i did not try out Linux for a few days in 97. I've been using it as my primary platform for four years, at which point i decided that the desktop would never be polished enough. But i still use Linux most of the time, remotly, and in fact my work is something like maybe 50% development 50% Linux admin. I've pushed my company to use Linux servers and it's been really a success for us. Because Linux does shine server side, you can fix most problems with a 10 lines perl script in the worst cases instead of banging your head on MSDN for a week...
I will agree, explorer does suck. But why did it take them this long to finally rewrite it? Knowing Microsoft and their coding practices, there will still be many bugs and just as many security holes as before. M$ has not been known for releasing stable / bug free / secure software. Now maybe they will prove me wrong, but honestly I don't care because I already have a stable and secure browser in Firefox. No need for me to try out a commercial product that comes bundled with a horrible OS when I have an OSS alternative that is much better and costs nothing.
Dude if i took the time to write explorer.exe it's because i'm not talking about internet explorer, but about explorer.exe . The Windows's shell and window manager, that is.
How are the drivers "bloody?" Drivers, if you don't know, are what make your computer work. Without them, your computer would be pretty "bloody" useless. 2000 and XP as stable as Linux? Maybe more? Are you ignorant, or being payed off by M$? Windows has numerous problems with memory leaks and Windows boxes crash ALL the time
Look i know what drivers are, you know. I chose to call them bloody because they're the single point of failure in most OSes and it's getting old.
And No, Windows box do not "crash ALL the time". It's just that you're so sure of it that you've never taken the time to understand how Windows works, and you're probably using it in totally stupid ways. That's what makes me laugh about people like you: you can't be bothered to learn a single thing about windows, and yet when something goes wrong you decide that it's the system's fault. If it was Linux, you'd be thinking that you must have done something wrong, because linux IS stable, you've been taughted. But no, you act like the most braindead user you can find, run as admin, and basically act in ways you wouldn't even think of in Linux.
I know that, because let me tell you i've had several XP boxes, and I can't remember a *SINGLE* crash on any of them. I've have some BSODs but they were all due to bad hardware and the issue was resolved as soon as i changed the hardware. You don't seem to understand that the 9x era is over, and that the NT branch is a totally different system, as different from 9x that linux was different from 9x. But you just look at the UI and think that it's the same thing because you can't see the difference...
I guess if you used HURD with kde you'd be saying that it's exactly the same thing as Linux because it looks the same too.
Big deal, a hardware rendered GUI. OS-X has been doing it for a while now, and there are projects in Linux for KDE and Gnome to have hardware accelerated graphics. Nothing new here, just MS hopping on the bandwagon again.
So what ? I don't care who is the first, who have have some alpha code working or not. I care about the fact that the GUI i'm using will be hardware accelerated. Besides, wake me up when you'll see a solution in Linux which works like it should, w on all window managers and basically is done the right way (that is, a layer just above or inside X11...). It's the same thing again, you'll have different versions for enlightenment, kde, gnome, all with different pros and cons, some with fantastic ideas but not enough developpers, etc etc.
Comparing Windows 95 to Linux? Back in '95? Yeah, I'm sure Win
Hum, i'd say maybe one of your drivers as a problem, or and app is leaking memory. ;)
I leave xp running all the time on my laptop, i hibernate instead of shutting it down. I've seen a few BSOD on Xp, but they were always all the result of bad ram, of graphic driver. Besides that the only thing that could make me reboot is some app which leaks ram and slowly eats all the memory until the system is slow as hell. Because of that i've started a few years ago to actively monitor all apps i install. And in a lot of cases I uninstall them after a few day because they do leak some ram...
That said i don't think i've ever had a 100 days uptime because there is always an update that will force me to reboot at some point
I'm talking about explorer.exe, the windows shell, or window manager. They're rewriting it from scratch to use .net (i think) and the new graphic system.
It seems they have fixed almost everything that was wrong with windows. I mean:
And people complain that there is nothing new in Vista, phew... I mean if they manage to do all those things, and do them the right way like they seem to be decided to (for once...) it will be damn worth a new release...
And no, i'm not a microsoft fanboy, i've been using Linux since 97 and I really like it where it shines. But if you have even a little objectivity you can't say the stuff they're putting here is not interesting...
Blah blah blah, this has nothing to do with Unix. Having the graphics subsystem outside of the kernel is not special to Unix.
And it is much better than say the linux kernel, because they're also moving all the drivers in userland (this was posted yesterday somewhere, don't remember where...). It's the only thing that could still make Windows crash, a driver crash. Now it will be really far more stable than Linux. Now mod me down, I know i've been way too far...
About the genres : I found a solution to that which works 99% of the time.
Just ditch the category browser you have in your mp3 library, and use dynamic views instead of it. Then have the views regroup the categories...
For example, make a view called "rock", and have it group every genre name which contains *rock* but not *hard* if you want to have a special category for hard rock. Then create a metal category, which groupe *heavy*, "hard rock", *trash*... etc. This way you don't have to touch what was entered in freedb most of the time, and it just works. "Classic rock", "classic-rock" and "rock'n'roll" will all end up in the rock view, which is probably where they should belong. Then you don't end up with 100+ categories which make the thing useless. And you can add an "other" view which takes all the genres that did not match previous views, and edit the genres listed in this view if you wish...
Actually... I've always thought that the fact that we have to pee and procreate with the same organ was too sick and standardized to have been created randomly.
Clearly it is a sign that there is a designer, and that his mind is totally twisted and evil.
If the problem was with the flash player, you could see the same problem in ie.
And you don't.
Runs on intel inside, and have a geforce5FX sticker for better water flush effects.
Easy, just install the slashdot effect firefox extension like everybody else and you too won't need to read the article in order to hammer the pages of those poor bastards who have their sites posted on the frontpage
That way we can all keep on complaining about not being able to read the article and make stupid offtopic and misinformed comments like this one, yay.
Am i the only one to thing that a corporation like Mozilla should put money into developpers or bounties instead of marketing campaigns ? I don't remember exactly how many cost the Times ad, but it was way too much...
Marketing is a necessary evil for those companies which must have a return on their money. Mozilla just want market shares, and would probably be better served by paying coders to make the browser better instead of hyping it.
I'm sorry but no i'm trying to convince the germans to swap bastille day with the beer festival. It's longer, much more alcoolized and you get to pee while standing at the bar. But once it's here you guys sure can come. We never refuse an invasion of alcoolized streakers in our beer festival.
Let me give you an example:
Do you know that since maybe 8 years we have halloween day here too ? It didn't exist before that, it has never been in our culture. All we knew about halloween was from the US movies. But suddently one day in october we've seen all the halloween merchandising invade the supermarkets, shops in town decorating their windows with spooky themes, disco clubs having halloween nights and children coming at our home asking for candy. That's it, some bright bastards had managed to make a huge campaign to sell their merchandising for a nonexisting celebration in france, and had managed to involve schools, and whatnot to create a tradition.
You might say that we could just refuse to celebrate it if we don't like it, but the children had been intoxicated with the stuff with all the "halloween special" shows they had seen on tv during the preceding month, and their teachers who realized that children love to make spooky masks. So the children genuinely wanted to celebrate Halloween, even if they didn't had the slightest idea of the cultural background behind it, like their parents.
So now they come for candy, try to say the same phrase that children say is the US to have their candy and we try to react like the american characters we've seen in the movies because we don't know what we're really supposed to do. It's just surreal...
It's not that we don't like american culture, I mean american movies are quite watched around here, but we don't like to have a different culture , any culture, pushed down our throat like that.
My sister in law is student in "teacher's school" (no idea how you call that in english) in france.
She'll be a teacher in primary school next year. They have computer courses to be able to teach children how to use a word processor, web browser or graphic editor. What's interesting is that they learn everything on free software, are given a cd full of OSS (for Windows), and encouraged to distribute it around them.
They're told not to use commercial software with children, simply because their parents are not necessary wealthy enough to pay for the stuff at home so it would create ineqalities among the children. Very good idea if you ask me. Now if they could make a program to build very cheap computers and give one to each child it would be even better. But that's a start.
So what ? I bought several fusion reactors on ebay, and I should receive my MIR station in a few days.
When i'll turn on all the flashing lights this things have on them for christmas, the whole town will bow before me, haha.
Your example is totally bogus, and just proves that in most cases NAT is as efficient as firewalls when it comes to protecting computers behind it. Yes it's not the purpose of the thing, it's just a coincidence that it enhance security, but who cares ? Now i agree that NAT is a kludge, causes a lot of headaches and i just like the static routable ip for everything because it's the internet as it should always have been, but that's another story.
Security wise, NAT is MUCH better than nothing, and i'd go as far as saying that it is better than a firewall for most users, because real firewalls are really, really difficult to configure, and 99% of the population will misconfigure them.
The schema you're talking about is wrong, wrong, wrong. You've made a schema based on how you want to display the information, not based on what this information is carrying.
How can you make a request to find which user responded to more than 3 questions, for example ? you'd have to test each column individually, and then you'd have to modify the request if you add or remove some columns. Furthermore, you have to change the schema itself each time you add or remove a question.
And finally, you don't use the relationnal part of the database, at all. Your schema supposes that there is a question table, with a questionid. And in your anwsers table, you have columns named after the ids, right ? Now how can the database check if you delete a question that there are no answers pointing to it ? it can't, because you're using the database as if it was a flat file. So the database can't check data integrity for you, because your schema isn't normalized at all. as Johnno74 says, you need at least a question table, a response table, and an user/question/response association table. If you don't do that, the database has zero advantages over a flat file.
Hum after reading the GP post again he does indeed seem to be referring to static yes/no responses, sorry about that :)
A much better structure is to have a table of questions, and a table of responses (with something like a response id, and maybe an identifier on who answered the questionare) and a question-answer table with each row pointing at a response and a question, and giving the answer that person gave for that question.
An answer has to point to a specific question and makes no sense with just an answerid and a userid, so you should have the questionid in the answers table, it's a nonsense to asssociate them in another table in this instance. It takes more space, and requires an useless join. Unless the questions are just choices the user can choose from, like in a poll.
This Tony hoar guy looks nuts. I mean, look at that... was he wearing his pajamas, or did he stole his wife sticking ? And why did he put this protograph on his bio ? Even the worse geek would take more care of what he gives to see. He must of an ancient, forgotten species. The uber alpha geek, or the Meta Punk Geek Granny ! Anyway, i like his pants.
Because in this particular case, the framework sandboxes the webapp in it's base rep for security reasons
Well one could argue that scrapping symlinks was a really bad idea. Yes they can lead to messy filesystems if they are used in a bad way, but they are also the only way to solve a myriad of problems.
For example, i have dozens of webapps deployed in their own directories, and they all need a configuration file in a their own directory. Since this config file is the same for each webapp, it certaily makes a lot of sense to have the file be a symlink to a real file somewhere else, in a kind of meta directory. Then I can just edit this file instead of having to edit each copies. There is no way around this type of problem without symlinks. You have to make the thing less maintenable, more error prone, and futhermore you'll need to do more work, like maybe creating a script to copy the file in each directory.
I don't quite understand, if I make a symlink called softs in a folder called share for example, of course i want the SMB clients to be able to follow the link as it is evaluated server side. It ain't a security risk, it's how it should be. Now if you do the opposite and have the client evaluate the link, yes you can have deep security issues since you can have the client do things on a file which he thinks is remote while he's in fact treating a local file... I hope the author just mixed up client/server concepts, or it will indeed suck...
There have been soft links in ntfs since at least w2K, and probably NT4. I believe they're called junctions in the NTFS jargon. You need the administrative tools to be able to create them. And at least now they're kinda problematic in the sense that there is no way to distinguish them from real folder or files ince they've been created unless you bring up cmd.exe and check with junction.exe if they are indeed symlinks. So it would certainly be a good idea to integrate them better and have them in the main release. (Plus i don't know how it is now, but when i tried to install the administrative pack there was a big warning saying that you shouldn't do that unless your windows locale is english american, and that it was likely to cause unsupported problems if you did otherwise...)