Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Warp wrote:
> >   What would be the problem of, for example, supporting soft links natively
> > in Windows Explorer? 

> Part of the problem comes from programs that don't support soft links 
> getting caught in loops.

  Soft links are and should be invisible to programs (unless the program
explicitly wants to distinguish them, as a file explorer would).

> Why the heck would

  Did you mispaste that?

> >   What would be the problem of adding an option to Windows Explorer to show
> > exact byte sizes of files?

> The properties page already tells you that.

  I don't want to see it in a separate dialog. I want to see it in the file
listing.

> And which byte count do you want?

  The size of the file. How many bytes it contains. If I opened it with a
program and started reading bytes, how many I would get before EOF. (And
please don't start nitpicking about special files. The file listing doesn't
need to show any byte size for special files.)

  Windows Explorer already shows that size in the file listing... but not
in bytes (unless the file happens to be smaller than 1 kB or such). That's
what's annoying about it.

> So write an extension, if it bothers you.

  You make it sound like it's easy.

> > I really can't think of any drawback. If someone
> > wants to use the current mode, go ahead, but why not offer exact byte counts
> > for people who want them? What would be the problem?

> There are a zillion things that some people want.

  Seeing the exact size of a file is a pretty common and useful thing to
want.

> >   (That's actually something I really hate in MacOS X Finder. There's no way
> > to make it list the actual size in bytes of files. Instead, it shows a rounded
> > size like Windows... but of the disk space the file is taking rather than the
> > actual size of the file.

> Which makes perfect sense if you care, because people want to know whether 
> the file will fit somewhere.

  Except that it doesn't tell that. If you try to copy it to another file
system or an archive file, it will most probably end up taking a completely
different amount of space.

  Showing how much disk space a file takes is *useless* information. *That*
is what should be in some info dialog. The file listing should show the
exact byte size. Apple has done it completely in reverse of what it should be.

> > You can get this info from a context menu the hard way, but it's very
> > inconvenient.)

> In Windows, you select the files and pick "properties" and it tells you the 
> size. Not that hard.

  Yeah, start doing that to a dozen files, rather than seeing it in one
glance in the file listing. It *is* extremely inconvenient.

> >   Why is it so hard to show exact byte counts in graphical file browsers?
> > Even Konqueror (the default file browser in OpenSUSE) is able to show them
> > easily.

> You're bitching that a nerd feature is convenient in Linux and not Windows? 
> You're a nerd. Exact file sizes are important to programmers, not users.

  And that's why they just *can't* include an option somewhere to turn on
showing exact byte sizes? "Hey, it's a nerd option, we must not include
such a thing! Heaven forbid if we start appealing to the nerd users!"

  I ask once again: What exactly would be the *problem* here?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message