>> It also amuses me that there exists something that
>> Windows can actually do better than Linux.
>
> There's actually quite a bit that Windows now does better than Linux,
> and quite a bit that Linux today does better than Linux five years ago.
> For example, I read that the clock is now *finally* a file handle, like
> the Amiga figured out 20 years ago and which everyone seemed to
> conveniently ignore for the past 40 years when arguing "Everything's a
> file in UNIX!"
>
>> (I gather it's a similar story for figuring out when a file changed...)
>
> Yes. The IPC stuff in Linux honestly still hasn't caught up to Windows.
> There's no kernel transactions, the file locking is still a mess
> especially over the network, the privilege and authentication system (at
> the kernel level) is still comparatively weak, performance monitoring
> and error logging is not unified, etc.

I don't know a great deal about the inner workings of Windows or Unix. 
But there are a number of things that Windows seems to do better:

- File permissions. None of this chmod 664 nonsense. You can set 
arbitrary combinations of permissions for any number of users and groups.

[But then they tried to retro-fit permission inheritance, which doesn't 
actually work how you'd think it works. And don't even get me started on 
the whole Active Directory thing with three different sorts of security 
groups that nobody understands...]

- The registry provides a unified place to store configuration, whether 
per-user or per-system. (Just a shame that there's no real interface for 
managing it yourself - e.g., if you want to revert your MS Word 
configuration to how it was yesterday.)

- File types [or, more accurately, file extensions] are associated with 
programs. (Shame there's no CLI access to this.)

>> be unique." Well, uh, they do if you want to use names to identify
>> threads.
>
> No. You might want to kill all database worker threads and not all web
> server worker threads. I.e., the same thing you were talking about in
> Haskell code upgrades, where you want to kill all the threads running
> *this* code but not *that* code.
>
> "Identify" doesn't necessarily imply "identity" except in math. :-)

...and here I was thinking that's what the ThreadGroup class is for...

>> Neither can you do this with Haskell. But the definition of "list" can
>> refer to "list" itself.
>
> Oh. No, you can't do that in Erlang, since "list" doesn't exist until
> you've assigned it.

Right. So a variable doesn't come into scope until after it's defined?

Post a reply to this message