The 'actual OS' supported those filenames just fine - it was the legacy APIs that didn't, which is why you got 16-bit apps that always produced the c:\progra~1 type stuff in their file dialogs - Windows 9X/NT assumed such apps would die horribly if given a long filename, so the compatibility shim for 8.3 was used.
What you're probably referring to is that annoyingly, some standard parts of the GUI etc were not upgraded for ages - iirc, the standard setup/inf file installation routines (amongst other things) were always reverting to 8.3 compatibility mode, which was irritating to say the least.
But to return to the topic at hand, I for one am glad that filenames can have spaces in them. If only to stop Mac users gloating (although they can still do that about most punctuation characters in filenames). Seriously though, I use spaces in filenames all the time - part of that whole 'computer working the way the user thinks' thing, I guess.
It was originally a suspicion of myself and a friend of mine, but when I suggested it on slashdot a while back, someone else confirmed that it was a deliberate ploy by MS to drive adoption of LFN.
Of course, they were also just some random slashdot poster, so adjust salinity accordingly.
...longer life, the colors won't be mostly faded out 5 years after you buy it, you won't have to spend an hour trying to get the image shape correct, it won't be distorted around the edges, it won't use anywhere near as much electricity, it won't weigh a ton, and it will definitely be much sexier. To me, it's easily worth the extra cash.
To paraphrase Garry Shandling, there's a joke in there about slashdot and men/women somewhere, but I can't be bothered to find it:)
Reminds me of a call I got when working in tech support at BT - users would often offer up their own explanation of the cause of a problem, so once we had a computer that was "overheating because there were too many files in the root directory."
I guess I am way beyond addicted- but it is pretty nice.
So basically you're checking your email manually more often than every five minutes. I'd say that was a problem if your work requires any kind of concentration, immersion, or 'flow'.
Besides, why don't you just configure your email program to check every minute if you're that bothered. With your current habits, you'll probably save time.
I *hate* when people only check their e-mail once a day, or even worse, once a week.
"I know, but y'know condoms only work like 97% of the time."
"What? What? What?! Well they should put that on the box!"
"They do!"
"No they don't...well they should put it in huge black letters!"
A few years ago, I was filling out a webform for a ticket to ECTS.
I got to the part where you had to tell them your job title. Now, there were about a million slightly different ways of saying you were a marketer, distributor, retail buyer, till jockey, etc, but the jobs Programmer, Engineer or even the more generic Developer did not feature in the drop-down list.
I emailed the organisers to say "Hello? You remember us? We're the guys who actually write the games? You know..?" and their reply was basically "Meh."
It was about then that I figured something was rotten in the state of Denmark.
I believe the job titles Artist and Designer were still available, but I figured that was an oversight.
(Sometimes I wonder if it was a test - like if I was a real programmer, I would have edited the html input tag to allow programmer as a job title, and used that version of the form...)
Maybe Ep III is fun to look at, but I was bored to death while watching it, going on fast forward ever so often, because I couldn't stand it. Sometimes i wasn't bored, but got angry at the stupidness. Fast forwarding in a StarWars movie!
You fast-forwarded the movie? Didn't the other people in the cinema get upset?
Agreed - similarly, one of the most important attitudes I want to see in a programmer (or, come to that, most people I work with) is the ability to tell me when they don't know something. As opposed to pretending they do (for whatever dumb reason), and messing up as a result.
I once sat in an interview for a tech support position at Sequent, and the interviewer was picked up on something I said about files, and asked me about files. I explained the standard C file I/O. He then asked what a file handle was, so I told him. He then said, But what is it actually?, so I explained it was an integer index into the process' file handle table. He kept pressing me further, and when we got down to disk channels, I had to admit that I didn't know how they worked. He said 'Ok', and moved on to the next question.
I realised later that he was simply trying to find out if I would say "I don't know" when asked about something I didn't know about. Which is often a useful characteristic for someone working in a TS department. And other places.
If Windows just shut down without warning, you'd have a point. But it doesn't. If you're at the computer, you know it's downloading a patch, and it tells you it'll restart the computer.
If you'd bothered to read the story, I was moaning about not being able to enable auto-updating on my Dad's PC, precisely because if you do, Windows will shutdown at some random point in the future, without warning you first. Believe me, I've watched it do it. A friend who spent a long evening bringing his accounts up to date in Excel has also experienced the "where did all my data go?" feeling the next morning, thanks to auto-updates.
Really, what is so hard to understand about this? Forcing a shutdown when the user is likely to be not present, and abandoning their data if they're not, is bad.
The reason I get the Restart Now/Later button is because I don't use full auto-update (I just get it to download the udpates and tell me about them) precisely because of this reason.
Regardless, that doesn't mean that the restart dialog not having a "go away for a day" button is not stupid. It is. But that's not my point.
My point is that I don't enable auto-update on my Dad's PC because if I do, he will lose data.
Guaranteed.
My favourite part of Starforce is that it installs a device driver without asking the user first - you run the game, it silently installs a device driver.
This shows the absurd mindsets that computer enthusiasts adopt. <snip>
Agreed, 100%. I knew some jackass would decide it was my Dad's fault and not Microsoft's that they wrote some code to deliberately trash his data at random intervals, because they decided that the OS being up to date was more important than his data.
Reminds me of those people who say that if Windows (or whatever OS) was properly secure, then the only things that viruses/trojans could destroy is the user data. As if that data wasn't the most important data on the computer.
Or you can turn on fully automatic updates. If you do this, then Windows will quite happily shutdown the OS after installing an update even if you have unsaved data.
It's a joy to behold. My Dad will often keep docs open in Word or Excel for days - the practical upshot of which is that I can't leave his system configured to auto-update, because this means he can go to use his PC only to find Windows has trashed all the changes he made since he last saved his documents.
I'd like to know what genius made that decision - it means my Dad's PC doesn't get updated automatically (I'm sure as hell not turning on an option to randomly trash his data now and again). I'm sure that's not what they had in mind.
Even if you leave the updates to be auto-downloaded but installed manually, once you've installed an update that requires rebooting, you're in the same boat. Windows Update is dying to reboot then - you get the "Restart Now or Later?" dialog. If you do click Later, it asks you about ten minutes later. Over and over. Those are your options - restart now, or ask me again in about 10 minutes. How about the "I'm using this PC to serve a download that will take a few hours, so why not stop bugging me about rebooting?" option. If you're not around to click Later again, once again Windows Update will force a reboot and trash your unsaved data.
It's mind-bendingly stupid. It's almost as if they saw the "Format disk - Now or Later?" example from About Face and thought that it wasn't stupid enough.
Slashdot Mirror
"I'd hate to be a dustbin in Shaftsbury tonight!"
Why? Or is this a form of 'truth by repeated assertion'?
But to be fair, that is only because you are educated singularity stupid by academic bastards
The 'actual OS' supported those filenames just fine - it was the legacy APIs that didn't, which is why you got 16-bit apps that always produced the c:\progra~1 type stuff in their file dialogs - Windows 9X/NT assumed such apps would die horribly if given a long filename, so the compatibility shim for 8.3 was used.
What you're probably referring to is that annoyingly, some standard parts of the GUI etc were not upgraded for ages - iirc, the standard setup/inf file installation routines (amongst other things) were always reverting to 8.3 compatibility mode, which was irritating to say the least.
But to return to the topic at hand, I for one am glad that filenames can have spaces in them. If only to stop Mac users gloating (although they can still do that about most punctuation characters in filenames). Seriously though, I use spaces in filenames all the time - part of that whole 'computer working the way the user thinks' thing, I guess.
It was originally a suspicion of myself and a friend of mine, but when I suggested it on slashdot a while back, someone else confirmed that it was a deliberate ploy by MS to drive adoption of LFN.
Of course, they were also just some random slashdot poster, so adjust salinity accordingly.
To paraphrase Garry Shandling, there's a joke in there about slashdot and men/women somewhere, but I can't be bothered to find it :)
Reminds me of a call I got when working in tech support at BT - users would often offer up their own explanation of the cause of a problem, so once we had a computer that was "overheating because there were too many files in the root directory."
Still makes me laugh.
Sorry.
As you were.
All the spaces in default folders are (were) Microsoft's way of forcing app developers to cope with spaces in filenames.
Quite an elegant way of doing it, imho.
So basically you're checking your email manually more often than every five minutes. I'd say that was a problem if your work requires any kind of concentration, immersion, or 'flow'.
Besides, why don't you just configure your email program to check every minute if you're that bothered. With your current habits, you'll probably save time.
I am reminded of the line "The telephone has no consitutional right to be answered."
This is slashdot. Didn't you get the memo about patents? :-)
"I know, but y'know condoms only work like 97% of the time."
"What? What? What?! Well they should put that on the box!"
"They do!"
"No they don't...well they should put it in huge black letters!"
Shame Taco beat you to it.
:-)
Own3d by the zeroth post.
A few years ago, I was filling out a webform for a ticket to ECTS.
I got to the part where you had to tell them your job title. Now, there were about a million slightly different ways of saying you were a marketer, distributor, retail buyer, till jockey, etc, but the jobs Programmer, Engineer or even the more generic Developer did not feature in the drop-down list.
I emailed the organisers to say "Hello? You remember us? We're the guys who actually write the games? You know..?" and their reply was basically "Meh."
It was about then that I figured something was rotten in the state of Denmark.
I believe the job titles Artist and Designer were still available, but I figured that was an oversight.
(Sometimes I wonder if it was a test - like if I was a real programmer, I would have edited the html input tag to allow programmer as a job title, and used that version of the form...)
You fast-forwarded the movie? Didn't the other people in the cinema get upset?
Indeed - when I read that, I felt a great disturbance in the slashdot, as if a million voices moaned out, and then were silenced.
A classic :)
It's called "Mahna Mahna", or "Manamana" or some variation, depending on who you're talking to, and featured on an episode of the Muppet Show.
It featured a strange muppet (aren't they all?) singing the main part, with two odd pink cow type things singing the other part in the background.
It was very funny to watch, which helped its popularity I think. Google reveals many references to it, of course.
Agreed - similarly, one of the most important attitudes I want to see in a programmer (or, come to that, most people I work with) is the ability to tell me when they don't know something. As opposed to pretending they do (for whatever dumb reason), and messing up as a result.
I once sat in an interview for a tech support position at Sequent, and the interviewer was picked up on something I said about files, and asked me about files. I explained the standard C file I/O. He then asked what a file handle was, so I told him. He then said, But what is it actually?, so I explained it was an integer index into the process' file handle table. He kept pressing me further, and when we got down to disk channels, I had to admit that I didn't know how they worked. He said 'Ok', and moved on to the next question.
I realised later that he was simply trying to find out if I would say "I don't know" when asked about something I didn't know about. Which is often a useful characteristic for someone working in a TS department. And other places.
Phenomenon!
(Doo doooo de-doo-doo!)
If you'd bothered to read the story, I was moaning about not being able to enable auto-updating on my Dad's PC, precisely because if you do, Windows will shutdown at some random point in the future, without warning you first. Believe me, I've watched it do it. A friend who spent a long evening bringing his accounts up to date in Excel has also experienced the "where did all my data go?" feeling the next morning, thanks to auto-updates.
Really, what is so hard to understand about this? Forcing a shutdown when the user is likely to be not present, and abandoning their data if they're not, is bad.
The reason I get the Restart Now/Later button is because I don't use full auto-update (I just get it to download the udpates and tell me about them) precisely because of this reason.
Regardless, that doesn't mean that the restart dialog not having a "go away for a day" button is not stupid. It is. But that's not my point.
My point is that I don't enable auto-update on my Dad's PC because if I do, he will lose data. Guaranteed.
My favourite part of Starforce is that it installs a device driver without asking the user first - you run the game, it silently installs a device driver.
Nice.
Agreed, 100%. I knew some jackass would decide it was my Dad's fault and not Microsoft's that they wrote some code to deliberately trash his data at random intervals, because they decided that the OS being up to date was more important than his data.
Reminds me of those people who say that if Windows (or whatever OS) was properly secure, then the only things that viruses/trojans could destroy is the user data. As if that data wasn't the most important data on the computer.
Or you can turn on fully automatic updates. If you do this, then Windows will quite happily shutdown the OS after installing an update even if you have unsaved data.
It's a joy to behold. My Dad will often keep docs open in Word or Excel for days - the practical upshot of which is that I can't leave his system configured to auto-update, because this means he can go to use his PC only to find Windows has trashed all the changes he made since he last saved his documents.
I'd like to know what genius made that decision - it means my Dad's PC doesn't get updated automatically (I'm sure as hell not turning on an option to randomly trash his data now and again). I'm sure that's not what they had in mind.
Even if you leave the updates to be auto-downloaded but installed manually, once you've installed an update that requires rebooting, you're in the same boat. Windows Update is dying to reboot then - you get the "Restart Now or Later?" dialog. If you do click Later, it asks you about ten minutes later. Over and over. Those are your options - restart now, or ask me again in about 10 minutes. How about the "I'm using this PC to serve a download that will take a few hours, so why not stop bugging me about rebooting?" option. If you're not around to click Later again, once again Windows Update will force a reboot and trash your unsaved data.
It's mind-bendingly stupid. It's almost as if they saw the "Format disk - Now or Later?" example from About Face and thought that it wasn't stupid enough.
Or, as we say around here, "+5, Insightful"...
You must be used to that though, being a user of Sony AV equipment :)