Microsoft’s Really Hidden Files
The site is obviously a bit biased but this article in and of itself is all to legit.
AHunter:
As soon as I pressed submit, I knew someone was going to chant in AppleScript. I have done my share of messing with AppleScript, and it can be very handy. But it all depends on the support built into the end application, and again it depends entirely on how well the programmer has implemented the scripting.
I use the terminal in OS X every day (over the last two weeks since Ihave upgraded). I have some real dandy sh scripts that I have written to take care of the loads of DNA sequence processing I deal with, and I have finally the impetus to learn perl, awk, and sed. This is not my point.
My point is that GUIs are built with a lot of things in mind, but performing repetitive tasks or batch commands is just not one of them. The closest equivalent to it would be a macro recorder type dealy. I think the OS should have a global macro recorder built in, so that I don’t have to write an AppleScript or Unix SH or DOS .bat every time I want to do something like this. Let’s say I have a directory of GIFs that I want to resize and save as JPGs. So I run the macro recorder, I open the photo editing suite, open the photograph, resize and save as. I stop the recorder and then tell it which files to go to (the rest of the directory). And it lets me run the macro/batch whatever.
I know this is not how OSs work. But if I were building a GUI, I would worry about that before I would worry that people click on “Start” to turn off the computer or can’t delete open files (which are stupid, but liveable). At least there are no glaring holes in any current GUI like in the old Amiga GUI where you could drag a folder within itself, creating a loop thing which would reak havoc.
Meros
Thanks, I will check 'em out. And I already have two monitors hooked to this box…**
edwino: You might be interested in expect. It does essentially what you want - provide automated, pseudo-interactive input to any program that can accept any input at all. Unfortunately, it’s based on Tcl, which these days is everybody’s least-favorite scripting language - but it can basically automate anything.
Hey, I know this is a pit thread, but I’m allowed to be helpful, right?
This is totally inaccurate.
First of all, OS X v.10.1 was free for OS X v.10.0.x users. Free. In other words, $129 less than what you just claimed.
Also, as was pointed out above, the 10.1 and 10.2 releases are not service packs, they are feature reference releases, like Windows 98 or Windows Me was to Windows 95.
Service packs for OS X are released quite regularly, adn they are free. There have been 6 service packs for OS X Jaguar – 10.2.1 through 10.2.6.
*Originally posted by LordVor *
I’m all in favor or protecting aginst accidental or stupid deletion. What I’m against is not allowing a deletion that I think is non-stupid but the OS thinks is stupid.
Well, until you develop a computer that can somehow assess the technical competence of a given user, I think that “in use” is a fairly decent definition of stupid.
When the fuck did I say anything about moving files? Most version of Windows DO allow you to move or rename executable files that are running which, from a fucking stuff up standpoint, is just as bad as deleting them outright.
No it doesn’t. XP certainly doesn’t, 2000 doesn’t and to the best of my recollection neither did the others.
It’ll happily let you move entire directories to other drives, where the programs they contain won’t work because the registry didn’t get updated with the new path. So, to keep your arguement consistant, you’re the one who should be arguing against allowing files to be moved.
Hardly. To keep my argument consistent, I should be against allowing files to be moved or renamed while in use (which is the case in Windows), and in favour of folders containing important executables being installed by the administrator and not given write permissions for general users. And indeed I am.
And I certainly think that users should be allowed to delete and move and organize their own documents. I don’t think they need to delete, for the most part … Moving and organizing, however, is completely different.
Except that they are treated in exactly the same manner by the feature we are talking about, which slightly invalidates your argument. Files can not be deleted, renamed or moved while in use. This makes sense to me, and frankly the fact that you’re willing to contend that regular users don’t “need” to delete things suggests to me that you’re really not thinking this through from a mass-usability perspective.
Did I completely woosh you with my description of file deletion scenarios? … they have to be able to delete files that are in use.
No, this just seemed to me to be another fairly irrelevant argument. If uninstallers are shit and are incapable of cleaning up files that are in use when the uninstaller is run, write a better uninstaller. I know of several that mark the files for removal upon the next reboot, which seems to me to be a perfectly good solution. Yet again, this does not justify changing the behaviour of an entire OS.
No, FIRST you have to get into explorer. THEN you have to understand the basics of folders and directory structures. Then you have to find the file. Then you can select it and hit delete. Microsoft, in an effort to make it a “mass market OS that’s easy to use”, has really made these secondary skills.
So the creation of “My Documents” and “My Pictures” etc. aren’t MS’ attempt to make the file system more accessible? The whole flipping point of all this frippery and custom views and thumbnails and whatnot is to make the file browser more comprehensible to the average Joe, so your contention that it’s being rendered irrelevant is frankly bizarre.
You honestly think that the ideas I laid out before wouldn’t make it safer than it is now?
Which ideas? Allowing files to be deleted while in use, or properly protecting the program files directory from non-administrators (I think this was your point)? The former, no, the latter, yes.
But alas, my company has about 200 users per IT tech, and they told me to bugger off. OTOH, in 15 years of computer use I’ve allowed myself to be infected with exactly 0 viruses, so forgive me if I don’t have a heathy fear of them.
Once again, this is a great argument for you having a better IT department, not a great argument for rewriting the behaviour of the OS. You’re essentially saying that the OS ought to be designed so that you, the User Who Knows Best can subvert the intentions of your IT department. This is not going to gain wide support in the computing world, I can tell you.
Well, usually, but only because I’m a software developer, I develop tools that can only run as root, and most of my unix-time is spent running and debugging those tools. When I’m developing, I run as a normal-user. What the fuck does that have to do with anything?
I was interested to see what your general attitude to system safety was. It seemed relevant.
Basically, you seem to be arguing for relaxation/removal of concurrent file access control on the basis of a few unusual scenarios, while ignoring the effect your changes will have on general users and users in multi-user environments working on shared files. Both of these seem to me to be much more common cases than deleting an executable which is running as an unkillable process. This just seems to me to be counter-intuitive, given that there are indeed ways to circumvent the latter problem without redesigning the OS, on the rare occasions when it occurs.
DB, I’m done. I could go on, but I’m sick of it. Every time I make a valid point on why the world would work better if the change in the core behavior would be made, you change it into “well the world should just work differently instead”. How many more do I have to come up with before you’d think that Microsoft’s approach may well be flawed?
Not to mention the outright lies. You can indeed change the name of an executable file while it’s running. Under windows XP, the most advanced version of windows. I just did it, and you don’t even get a warning unless you change the extension. And this does indeed make the program fail to function in the future. So it seems obvious that Microsoft is preventing deletion while a program is in use is not, in fact, some sort of idiot-prevention, but is more how it just ended up.
I think I can come up with a scenario that we would both like. Let me try:
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Like all real OSes, Microsoft writes one installer that takes specially formatted packages as arguements. Software companies package their files up inthis format and let the system installer install/uninstall them. Making every company right an installer for every application is, quite frankly, a bit much.
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The installer runs as a super-user. Only certain accounts are allowed to run the installer. You can’t obviously log-in as this super-user, it’s only available from an obscure location that a normal user would never think to look for. A “Test” if you will, to prove that you really want to do this.
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The super-user has the ability to delete files no matter if they are in use or not. This way, the uninstaller has the ability to remove any files that the installer put in at any point in time.
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Since the program files were installed by the super-user, the normal user can’t modify/move/rename/etc program files.
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files created with the programs, however, would be subject to move/delete/etc in the normal manner. I can even live with not being able to delete them while they are “in use”, if Microsoft can, in general, be smarter about when a file is in use or not.
How bout it?
-lv
The most idiotic thing about Windows is people that bitch about it when they don’t have to use it. Linux has several different flavors of OSs that can be installed and run by any PC user. You can dual boot all of them. Before I get flamed for being a Linux elitest let me qualify myself. I am a high school escapee with no formal computer training. Six months back,I got absolutely disgusted with having to battle Windows constantly to do what I wanted. In sheer desparation I got a copy of Mandrake and gave myself the same amount of time to learn Linux that it took to learn Windows. I now have a dual boot XP and Slackware system and actually enjoy my PC. Microsoft forces people to buy their crap,not use it. Linux is no longer just for geeks. It’s an excellent system and getting better everyday. Why dual boot? In gaming and multimedia Linux still has a way to go but it’s coming on fast.
If you are forced to use a broken and flawed system in your work you have my condolences but at least you’re getting a paycheck for your frustration.
By “any program that can accept any input at all”, do you mean, for example, GUI apps that run under X or Aqua? Because if so, you’re mistaken. Expect works on stdin/stdout, meaning, basically, text-based apps. edwino was specifically asking about GUI apps.
By the way, as a datapoint for the folks who said it can’t be done, I just wrote a test app on windows which opens a file for writing and sits in an infinite loop writing to it once per second, then I deleted it from a command prompt while my program was running. The delete worked fine, and subsequent write operations to the file worked too. Most of the statements about how “Windows” behaves with respect to file operations are really reflections on how most Windows programs are written, not about the OS itself.
Well, that’s your prerogative. Most of your examples strike me as examples where bad design would be circumvented by a lack of concurrency control. Indeed it would, but I just don’t feel this means it’s a sensible solution. Obviously we disagree here, so there you go.
Back off with your accusations of “lies”. I tried it myself on a document, not an executable and could not rename or move the file. I’ve tried it just now with an executable and find that I am indeed able to rename the executable. This is odd, since I can’t build to a running executable from Visual Studio, which is why I didn’t bother to test executables first time round. I’ll heartily agree with you that this is really weird, and seems to be a major contradiction of the “in use” policy.
As for your scenario, I think it’s got a lot going for it. MS would get hammered for abusing its monopoly and eliminating the installer software market (e.g. Wise and Installshield, both profitable businesses that would disappear at a stroke), but I think this for once would be an area in which the benefit to the OS would outweigh the market stomping downside. It’d also help alleviate a lot of the problems noted earlier regarding the registry, as control of what additions are made could be restricted through the package manager.
I don’t think your “real OS” comment is entirely fair, as the unix world has hardly come up with a unified package management solution; I’m not a big fan of RPM, for example, although I loved FreeBSD’s ports collection and installation procedure. I’ve just installed Suse and am undecided about YaST.
I’d certainly agree with you that it’d be nice to have a more powerful administrator account in Windows, if you didn’t have to use it quite so much; I don’t think they’ve got the balance of permissions right yet. If it were more possible to run usefully under a restricted account and not resort to administrator access constantly, it’d be safe and desirable to subject the administrator account to fewer restrictions.
In a way, this is the same point I’ve been trying to make; yes, the delete behaviour is annoying sometimes, but not because of fundamental problems with the delete behaviour itself. The sort of thing you’ve suggested above would allow the retention of what I think is a fundamentally useful way to go about things, while also sorting out some of the valid complaints you have about installers and access to binaries folders.
DB, glad we could come to an understanding.
-lv