Darren New wrote:
> 
> What, watching for changes without polling?  There have been multiple
> ways to do that sort of thing for years and years. I think Win95 had it,
> and more recently with NTFS you have the USN journal, so your program
> doesn't even need to be running to watch for changes.

No, snapshotting, which you answered on the another message.

>> I'll shout "Finally" rather than croon. One thing I've been missing on
>> Windows since the 90's.
> 
> Well, there's a bunch of add-on packages that do a decent job of it.
> 

I've found one (don't remember the name tho - that was 10 years ago),
but honestly I haven't checked in couple of years. It not so bothering
anymore, while I'm having almost enough desktop at work (2*24" LCD,
total being 2400x1920 pixels), but when running on laptop, it would ease
up a lot.

-Aero

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Darren New wrote:
> Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>> and I don't actually *care* any more. I know I'm right, 
> 
> Excellent!  Glad to hear it. It's a stupid thing to argue about anyway. :-)

Mmm, let's all go render spheres. 8-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Invisible wrote:
>> However we did pay 10 thousand pounds for some CAD software, and that 
>> crashes occasionally (which is infinitly more often than the OS!).
> 
> OK, that's pretty lame. I'd ask why you don't go use a better package 
> instead, but I suspect the answer is going to be some combination of
> 
> - There aren't any better products to choose from.
> - Our clients use this product and we need to be compatible.
> - We've bought it now so we can't get our money back anyway.

Scott's answer was on the nose, but there's another thing worth 
mentioning - if it's very high-end industrial software, the number of 
people using it is going to be relatively sparse. Maybe only a few 
thousand users. This means it will take longer to find the bugs in the 
first place - MS, by comparison, have a hundred million testers and an 
automatic bug-reporting system.

The upside to this sort of software is it's possible to have a much 
closer relationship with the developer - bugs can be acted upon faster 
and you might even get to suggest/influence new features.

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> Scott's answer was on the nose, but there's another thing worth 
> mentioning - if it's very high-end industrial software, the number of 
> people using it is going to be relatively sparse. Maybe only a few 
> thousand users. This means it will take longer to find the bugs in the 
> first place - MS, by comparison, have a hundred million testers and an 
> automatic bug-reporting system.
> 
> The upside to this sort of software is it's possible to have a much 
> closer relationship with the developer - bugs can be acted upon faster 
> and you might even get to suggest/influence new features.

IME, there are two kinds of high-end software:

- The software that costs the Earth and doesn't actually work very well, 
but the developers don't give a damn.

- The software that costs the Earth, but as you say, the people work on 
it take you seriously.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Mmm, let's all go render spheres. 8-)

I've been learning Blender, myself. Or at least going thru the noob 
tutorials trying to get a feel for it.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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Eero Ahonen wrote:
> Word seems to "suck" more on the easy part 

Yeah. It's gotten to the point where if your dashed-off note isn't justified 
with boldface headings, it's not acceptable. What ever happened to a plain 
old typed letter. Can you imagine giving someone a resume that looks like it 
came out of a typewriter?

Do kids doing grade-school book reports these days have to have all kinds of 
fancy fonts and styles to make it acceptable, I wonder?

> Excel is one of the very few graphical programs that I've actually had
> help from the help system - because it's help documentation is freaking
> good.

I never had something I needed to do with Lotus 1-2-3 that wasn't in the 
first page or two of documentation after asking for context-sensitive help. 
I'm convinced that's what killed Jazz more then Excel did - the help for 
Jazz was the generic useless "enter a formula here" instead of stuff telling 
you what formulas start with the two letters you just entered.

>> Somewhat. Much of that is due to people not installing patches or people
>> not using the system as designed.
> 
> And another much is just the users, which break the security of any
> system :).\

That would be the "people not using the system as designed."  Like, always 
being logged in as administrator.

> I think mostly because the developers haven't seen those features
> necessary (at least yet) and not enough users have asked for them.

I was being rhetorical there. :-)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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Eero Ahonen wrote:
> Since 2k Windows has supported mounting partitions to directories. It
> doesn't come up on the normal installation, but wouldn't it be possible
> to just mount another partition to C:\Documents and settings or
> C:\Users? 

It should, yes.

What I did is just copy the entire \users\public to my other drive, then 
told Vista that public's home directory was m:\public

I've had zero problems with that.

 > Of course using both styles makes it more complicated to
> think, but I don't see why it wouldn't work just like mounting another
> partition to /home in Linux.

The only problems I can see are
1) making the change. I.e., you'd have to actually manage to delete \users 
before you could mount another partition as \users. However, Vista now has 
symlink-style reparse points, so you could probably use them.

2) if something tries to access \users in the boot process before it 
finishes mounting all the drives, you could have a problem.

> Running defragger on Windows 3.1 sounds somewhat frightening.

IIRC, defraggers for the 16-bit OSes all ran under DOS, not Windows. But 
some of them used the usage stats from Win95 to put common programs near the 
front of the drive, and the ones for Win3 would put files in the same 
directory next to each other if you told it to.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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Eero Ahonen wrote:
> I've found one (don't remember the name tho - that was 10 years ago),

"Shock 4 Way 3D" works nicely (at least under Vista) as does QTTaskbar. 
(QTTaskbar isn't, IIRC, a virtual desktop, but something else that gives 
nice window management.)

Did a bunch of research into it when I was first setting up Vista here, 
since it was easy to say "Gee, that piece of freeware hosed my whole 
machine, but no biggie." :-)  Avoid "Start++", as it doesn't uninstall 
completely if you don't want it, and thus continues to try to do automatic 
type-ahead completion and stuff then invokes code you've removed from the 
machine.  Bleh.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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Darren New wrote:
> Patrick Elliott wrote:
>> Darren New wrote:
>>> I had no problem moving my home directory to a different partition.
>>>
>> Home, yeah. But.. You don't want to do this "before" you install some 
>> things, or they break (and yeah, yeah, they don't follow spec, blah, 
>> blah.. But geeze...), and somehow I doubt that it moved "everything", 
>> not just the documents.
> 
> Um, no.  Zero problems with it.  Indeed, it's done *exactly* the same 
> way you do it in Linux.
> 
> Alternately, you can go and change your home directory setting in the 
> registry after you copy all the files over, and you're good again.
> 
> Since you haven't any idea how I moved things, I'm not sure what basis 
> you have for doubting it moved everything.
> 
> But OK, we get it, no amount of actual rational discussion will change 
> your mind about how evil Microsoft is or how sucky their products are.
> 
When I hear rational discussion that includes facts, instead of 
assertions, or facts not contradicted by other evidence, then, I would 
give it credence. Their products don't suck, they are just **not as good 
as they could be, given the amount of fracking time and money they have 
to fix them**, then they are no more evil that Apple for DRMing iPods, 
or Palm for insisting on keeping that insanely stupid DB based file 
system, all the way up into their line of phones, instead of replacing 
it with a) a real file system, and b) installing drivers for such a file 
system that could "use" HDSD cards, or just a bigger hard drive, in the 
last model of their true "PDA" lines. I am sure MS has all sorts of 
reasons for making choices I find totally incomprehensible and makes 
people's lives more annoying. I am sure the others did too. I am also 
sure that I can't fathom what it could be, short of either intentional 
sabotage (which MS **is** known for, and has been documented doing to 
protocols all the time in their own internal memos), or plain laziness.

I suspect its a mix of the two. On one hand, anything you can do to make 
it harder for someone else to replicate your work, keeps you alive a few 
more years, even if it drives tech-aware people completely mad, from the 
irrationality of it. On the other, there is no incentive to fix "minor" 
issues, if 90% of your user base either doesn't care, doesn't mind using 
some convoluted method to get around it, doesn't mind "changing" a 
setting after the fact, instead of being asked in the first place, and 
everyone figured you are going to relocate menu items, hide features, 
place useful settings in registry edit only keys, and/or just not bother 
to implement a way to do it, figuring someone else will "fill the niche".

I find it irritating. That isn't the same as thinking they are evil. 
That comes from actually reading about how they "came to" some of those 
choices. ;) lol

>> Main point is, must Linux allow you do do this when setting it up, 
> 
> So does Windows.   Not by default, but certainly if you use the more 
> advanced setting up options.
> 
Sigh.. Ok, where then? Because I couldn't find any, and that was 
googling on it, and even trying to find it on MS' online archives. Short 
of editing the registry, at least in XP, you can move some stuff, sort 
of, but doing so isn't 100% reliable. That this may be due to software 
in transition, which some times "assumed" that the directory location 
would always be the same, could also be true. But, the people whose 
programs broke "thought" they where following spec, which says something 
about the documentation itself, that it wasn't clear enough to keep them 
from making a mistake like that.

In any case, I don't fracking want things that install where "they" 
want, no matter who makes them, instead of where I want. And, I have 
found 1-2 other produces, "from" MS, that presume to install where they 
want, without asking where you want to put them too. Its a pain in the 
ass from the perspective of backups, organization and general common 
sense, in trying to keep "data", "applications" and "system" all in sane 
places, instead of all woven together in some huge ball of unmanageable wax.

> They don't optimize program access? It's been doing that since like Win 
> 3.1 or so. What's "the other" you're talking about?
> 
Well, MS' defrager didn't, and as far as I can tell, since it certainly 
doesn't show or tell you, it probably still doesn't. The first one that 
"ever" did it was from Norton, and it defragged "everything" that it 
could, and optimized based on usage. It was also "still" the #1 
defragmentation program for Windows, until at least 98, when decisions 
in how Norton packaged, designed, and made work, their newer versions, 
made them all but useless and laggy. I.e., it wasn't that MS built a 
better defragger, it was that Norton made theirs harder to get without 
high cost, tied it in with stuff that lagged the machine to hell, and 
took up space for a bunch of other "mandatory" software installs, with 
the defragger, to get one. It also costs a bit more processing time to 
do it, since it meant that the "watcher" for telling what got used the 
most had to run all the time, and not just to count how many times you 
"application" ran, but how often you opened specific documents, used 
specific folders, etc.

Now, its possible MS *could have* added it since they introduced, in 
like 98 or so?, the capacity of the OS to track "recently used" 
applications. But, I have seen no evidence of anything saying that this 
behavior was ever added.
>> No they don't. Or not visibly, and/or obviously. If anything, load 
>> times on some things have gotten "worse" since the last defrag I did...
> 
> You've actually measured this scientifically, then?
> 


-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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3D Content, and 3D Software at DAZ3D!</A>

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Eero Ahonen wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
>>> Home, yeah. But.. You don't want to do this "before" you install some
>>> things, or they break (and yeah, yeah, they don't follow spec, blah,
>>> blah.. But geeze...), and somehow I doubt that it moved "everything",
>>> not just the documents.
> 
> Since 2k Windows has supported mounting partitions to directories. It
> doesn't come up on the normal installation, but wouldn't it be possible
> to just mount another partition to C:\Documents and settings or
> C:\Users? Of course using both styles makes it more complicated to
> think, but I don't see why it wouldn't work just like mounting another
> partition to /home in Linux.
> 
Well.. Windows XP and Vista basically mount a "directory" called "My 
Documents", which can be pretty much any place. In the "default" state 
its usually something like "C:\Documents and Settings\Patrick\My 
Documents". This "Can be" changed, but doing so is a bit... obscure, and 
it **won't** move the folder contents that are already there. Worse, 
just to make things sillier, when you "do" change it, unless you have 
"full" rights on the machine (or even if you do, if you are using some 
"other" application to copy things, not just the inbuilt stuff), you 
lose the rights to access the files, as soon as you move the location, 
so, you can't then fix it.

Basically, its way more complicated than it needed to be, and doesn't do 
some of the things you "might" presume makes some sort of sense, like 
taking "existing" documents, belonging to that user, and moving them 
too, not just the "mount point"...

Now, where this gets fun is if you have something that asked the OS 
where to "install" documents and settings, then stored that, but never 
double checks to see if its "still" the same place. I.e., its not a true 
mount, which would also move not just the symbolic lookup, but the 
"logical" location of the files, such that accessing "My Documents" 
would "still" give you the right thing, so.. unless it presents what 
"should be", based on what it "appears" to be doing, a redundant call to 
"what is Patrick's document folder", ever time it tries to access, it 
instead uses the "prior" location, which is no not only invalid, but 
unprivileged, which leads to all sorts of whining by the application 
that it can't open the files.

Of course, one of the odder "glitches" this presented was a case where 
save games where somehow marked as "temp" in the mess of the file 
system, under this design, such that, "clearing temporary files", also 
somehow wiped all the save games... I still haven't worked out how that 
happened..

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

<A HREF='http://www.daz3d.com/index.php?refid=16130551'>Get 3D Models, 
3D Content, and 3D Software at DAZ3D!</A>

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