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I loved the Amiga, but I will grant you one thing: It wasn't so great at
switching between windows. Each window had two "gadgets" (what we today
call widgets), one to raise and one to lower the window. Today you just
click on a window and it comes to the front, but the Amiga did not do
this. You had to click the gadget.
An obvious consequence of this is that if the gadget was hidden behind
something else, it was impossible to bring the window to the front. Or
rather, you'd have to lower whatever was obscuring it. Suffice it to say
that you could occasionally get into tricky situations where a window
would get "lost" and it was quite hard to bring it to the front.
Initially I hated Windoze. Mostly because even on a PC with hardware far
in advance of what the Amiga has, Windows was *vastly* slower. (Today of
course, Windows is, as far as I can tell, the most useable OS available,
whether you like it or not. Linux is a nice idea, but sadly it's too
hard to use.)
One innotation Windows did add was the Task Bar. With this handy gizmo,
you can immediately access any window you have open. And then there's
the Alt+Tab shortcut - invaluable on crappy laptops that don't have a
real mouse.
Today it seems to be all the rage for applications to have "tabbed"
interfaces - most obviously web browsers, but also many other
applications. And that raises a bit of a problem. If I'm trying to look
at several things at once, and I want to switch between them,
*sometimes* I need to click something on the taskbar at the bottom of
the screen, and *sometimes* I need to click something on the tabbar at
the top of the screen. And my primitive little monkey brain is too
simple to get this right most of the time.
Does anybody else have this problem? Or is it just me?
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> One innotation Windows did add was the Task Bar.
Acorn's OS had a task bar almost a decade before Windows came along with it,
drives and other storage locations would build up from the left, and running
programs would build up from the right. It would even scroll left/right if
you ran so much stuff that there was no space left.
> applications. And that raises a bit of a problem. If I'm trying to look at
> several things at once, and I want to switch between them, *sometimes* I
> need to click something on the taskbar at the bottom of the screen, and
> *sometimes* I need to click something on the tabbar at the top of the
> screen. And my primitive little monkey brain is too simple to get this
> right most of the time.
Ctrl-Tab also works in most tabbed applications to switch between tabs, if
that helps at all. I guess if you have several instances of FF running,
each with several tabs you might get confused, but generally I only have one
instance of FF, one of Visual Studio, one of Excel etc, so mentally I
realise that there are tabs within each application.
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Invisible wrote:
> Today it seems to be all the rage for applications to have "tabbed"
> interfaces - most obviously web browsers, but also many other
> applications. And that raises a bit of a problem. If I'm trying to look
> at several things at once, and I want to switch between them,
> *sometimes* I need to click something on the taskbar at the bottom of
> the screen, and *sometimes* I need to click something on the tabbar at
> the top of the screen. And my primitive little monkey brain is too
> simple to get this right most of the time.
>
> Does anybody else have this problem? Or is it just me?
In Windows 7, apparently you can select a "tab" from the taskbar button.
Apps can tell the OS about the different tabs they have.
But I haven't used either Vista or 7, so that's not first-hand experience.
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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> In Windows 7, apparently you can select a "tab" from the taskbar button.
> Apps can tell the OS about the different tabs they have.
>
> But I haven't used either Vista or 7, so that's not first-hand experience.
Really? Mmm, interesting. I'll have to try that next time I fire up the
Windows 7 VM...
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scott wrote:
>> One innotation Windows did add was the Task Bar.
>
> Acorn's OS had a task bar almost a decade before Windows came along with
> it.
Heh, why does that not surprise me?
BTW, isn't it amusing that for a decade Linux has been trying to look
more like Windows, and with Windows 7, now Windows is trying to look
more like Linux. (!)
> Ctrl-Tab also works in most tabbed applications to switch between tabs,
> if that helps at all.
Really? Ooo, sweet!
> I guess if you have several instances of FF
> running, each with several tabs you might get confused, but generally I
> only have one instance of FF, one of Visual Studio, one of Excel etc, so
> mentally I realise that there are tabs within each application.
In theory you'd think it would be simple. But when I'm working on
several things at once, I quite often find myself trying to switch
between (say) a document and its source code, and switching to the wrong
window. When you're trying to quickly flip between several things, the
fact that sometimes you need to click the task bar and sometimes the tab
bar seems really confusing.
For example, I write a Haskell program that generates some HTML. I've
now got the Haskell source code and the HTML open in several tabs in my
text editor, and of course the HTML open in Firefox. So if I find
something in Firefox that's wrong, I need to use the taskbar to flip
back to the text editor, and then probably another mouse click to flip
to the right tab. Gets even more confusing if I have a console window
open and I'm editing the batch file it runs from within the text editor...
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Invisible <voi### [at] dev null> wrote:
> Mostly because even on a PC with hardware far
> in advance of what the Amiga has, Windows was *vastly* slower.
Far in advance? 12MHz CPU (if you were rich), no hardware graphics
acceleration of any kind, 16 colors (again, if you were rich)... How is
that "far in advance of what the Amiga has"?
Even Windows can't do magic if it doesn't have the graphics hardware
acceleration support.
Oh, you are not comparing PC's of the time, but more modern PC's? Well,
let's see your beloved amiga update its screen at 1600x1200 resolution with
16 million colors with a refresh rate of 80 Hz, playing a H.264 hi-def video
on the background while you write an email. Then we might perhaps start
talking about "vastly slower".
> (Today of
> course, Windows is, as far as I can tell, the most useable OS available,
> whether you like it or not. Linux is a nice idea, but sadly it's too
> hard to use.)
Yeah, that's probably why I use Linux 99% of the time, while I use Windows
only for playing PC games. I must be a masochist.
Honestly, I just can't do *anything* in Windows, other than play games or
perhaps watch multimedia (if I don't happen to be in Linux just then).
Trying to eg. develop anything is just a pain. I'm always hindered by not
being able to do things I can easily do in Linux. Heck, even just finding
a file with a certain string is so damn hard in Windows, not to talk about
anything more advanced than that.
(Yeah yeah, I know, you can do everything you can do in Linux and far more.
There are all these fancy scripting languages and whatnot, which you might be
able to use if you install something and something else. Nothing really
consistent, and always a pain.)
--
- Warp
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Warp wrote:
> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> Mostly because even on a PC with hardware far
>> in advance of what the Amiga has, Windows was *vastly* slower.
>
> Far in advance? 12MHz CPU (if you were rich), no hardware graphics
> acceleration of any kind, 16 colors (again, if you were rich)... How is
> that "far in advance of what the Amiga has"?
Because the PCs at college had 133 MHz CPUs and 32 MB of RAM - multiple
times the Amiga's 7 MHz CPU (admittedly of completely different design)
and 2 MB of RAM. And yet, on such a machine, even something as simple as
closing a window causes huge amounts of disk thrashing.
> Even Windows can't do magic if it doesn't have the graphics hardware
> acceleration support.
It didn't seem to me that that was the problem. Lacking graphics
hardware acceleration doesn't make the HD thrash. And anyway, I thought
the original VGA board had 2D acceleration?
> Oh, you are not comparing PC's of the time, but more modern PC's?
PCs today have finally reached the point where they're about as fast as
an Amiga for basic windowing operations. But it's taken an awfully long
time.
>> (Today of
>> course, Windows is, as far as I can tell, the most useable OS available,
>> whether you like it or not. Linux is a nice idea, but sadly it's too
>> hard to use.)
>
> Yeah, that's probably why I use Linux 99% of the time, while I use Windows
> only for playing PC games. I must be a masochist.
Or you know something I don't. (Such as... how to operate Linux.)
> Honestly, I just can't do *anything* in Windows, other than play games or
> perhaps watch multimedia (if I don't happen to be in Linux just then).
That pretty much describes me and Linux. Even something trivial like
configuring a network interface without DHCP seems excruciatingly hard
in Linux. (As best as I can tell, you have to hand-edit half a dozen
files, invoke cryptic commands, and so forth. It's a nightmare.) Under
Windows, you just right-click on the network interface and type in what
you want the settings to be.
> Trying to eg. develop anything is just a pain.
Presumably that depends on what you're trying to develop, and with that.
Certainly Windows is not designed with developers in mind.
> I'm always hindered by not
> being able to do things I can easily do in Linux. Heck, even just finding
> a file with a certain string is so damn hard in Windows, not to talk about
> anything more advanced than that.
...why in the name of god would you ever want to do such a thing? And
wouldn't that require reading every individual byte of data on the
entire HD anyway, regardless of OS?
> (Yeah yeah, I know, you can do everything you can do in Linux and far more.
> There are all these fancy scripting languages and whatnot, which you might be
> able to use if you install something and something else. Nothing really
> consistent, and always a pain.)
I'm not a fan of scripting languages. They tend to be too ugly and
messy. Besides, I've never found anything I wanted to script [which is
actually scriptable]...
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On 21/04/2010 2:32 PM, Invisible wrote:
> I loved the Amiga, but I will grant you one thing: It wasn't so great at
> switching between windows. Each window had two "gadgets" (what we today
> call widgets), one to raise and one to lower the window. Today you just
> click on a window and it comes to the front, but the Amiga did not do
> this. You had to click the gadget.
>
> An obvious consequence of this is that if the gadget was hidden behind
> something else, it was impossible to bring the window to the front. Or
> rather, you'd have to lower whatever was obscuring it. Suffice it to say
> that you could occasionally get into tricky situations where a window
> would get "lost" and it was quite hard to bring it to the front.
>
> Initially I hated Windoze. Mostly because even on a PC with hardware far
> in advance of what the Amiga has, Windows was *vastly* slower. (Today of
> course, Windows is, as far as I can tell, the most useable OS available,
> whether you like it or not. Linux is a nice idea, but sadly it's too
> hard to use.)
>
> One innotation Windows did add was the Task Bar. With this handy gizmo,
> you can immediately access any window you have open. And then there's
> the Alt+Tab shortcut - invaluable on crappy laptops that don't have a
> real mouse.
>
> Today it seems to be all the rage for applications to have "tabbed"
> interfaces - most obviously web browsers, but also many other
> applications. And that raises a bit of a problem. If I'm trying to look
> at several things at once, and I want to switch between them,
> *sometimes* I need to click something on the taskbar at the bottom of
> the screen, and *sometimes* I need to click something on the tabbar at
> the top of the screen. And my primitive little monkey brain is too
> simple to get this right most of the time.
>
> Does anybody else have this problem? Or is it just me?
No it is just you ;-)
--
Best Regards,
Stephen
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>> Does anybody else have this problem? Or is it just me?
>
> No it is just you ;-)
Oh thank god...
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>> Acorn's OS had a task bar almost a decade before Windows came along with
>> it.
>
> Heh, why does that not surprise me?
Here's a screenshot I found from 1987!
http://www.mjpye.org.uk/images/screens/arthur2.gif
And 1989:
http://www.mjpye.org.uk/images/screens/riscos2.gif
And 1991:
http://toastytech.com/guis/riscosnewlook.gif
And 1994, Windows still didn't have a task bar:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/73/Windows_3.11_workspace.png
I still remember my IT teacher at school telling me in 1995 that he heard
the new Windows OS was going to have a "task bar", and how they had copied
the Acorn design. In fairness I doubt that whoever decided on the task bar
had even seen an Acorn machine before. Although there is a classic anecdote
going around the Acorn world that apparently Bill Gates was once watching a
demo from Acorn of how to network machines together, and he asked "what's a
network?".
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"scott" <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
> I still remember my IT teacher at school telling me in 1995 that he heard
> the new Windows OS was going to have a "task bar", and how they had copied
> the Acorn design. In fairness I doubt that whoever decided on the task bar
> had even seen an Acorn machine before. Although there is a classic anecdote
> going around the Acorn world that apparently Bill Gates was once watching a
> demo from Acorn of how to network machines together, and he asked "what's a
> network?".
Heh, reminds me of font aa too. RISCOS had the most advanced font aa at the time
(still looks better than modern systems, although it doesn't matter so much with
screen res these days). I heard somewhere they tried to licence the tech to MS,
but didn't get anywhere... that might have changed the history of the uk pc
industry a little. Although I guess ARM did OK ;)
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Am 21.04.2010 16:33, schrieb Invisible:
> It didn't seem to me that that was the problem. Lacking graphics
> hardware acceleration doesn't make the HD thrash. And anyway, I thought
> the original VGA board had 2D acceleration?
Nope. Back then, even 2D hardware acceleration was still the sole domain
of specialized display adapters, such as IBM's 8514/A (which later
"fused" with VGA into XGA though if I'm not mistaken).
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> Heh, reminds me of font aa too. RISCOS had the most advanced font aa at
> the time
> (still looks better than modern systems, although it doesn't matter so
> much with
> screen res these days).
Shame they didn't use it for the default OS font until quite a lot later
(although I think I had a hack to force it to be used in earlier versions).
IIRC the default OS font was still using an 8x8x1bit bitmap from the old
days, which was scaled up crudely when used in higher resolution screen
modes. It could have been done better IMO.
> I heard somewhere they tried to licence the tech to MS,
> but didn't get anywhere... that might have changed the history of the uk
> pc
> industry a little. Although I guess ARM did OK ;)
Yeh, ARM designs are still used in a few processors last I heard :-)
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>> And anyway, I thought the original VGA board had 2D acceleration?
>
> Nope. Back then, even 2D hardware acceleration was still the sole domain
> of specialized display adapters, such as IBM's 8514/A (which later
> "fused" with VGA into XGA though if I'm not mistaken).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vga
Claims that the original VGA card has "some support for raster ops". Of
course, being Wikipedia, it doesn't elaborate further...
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Invisible wrote:
> Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
>
>> In Windows 7, apparently you can select a "tab" from the taskbar button.
>> Apps can tell the OS about the different tabs they have.
>>
>> But I haven't used either Vista or 7, so that's not first-hand
>> experience.
>
> Really? Mmm, interesting. I'll have to try that next time I fire up the
> Windows 7 VM...
Don't expect all your random apps to support the Win7-specific APIs to
notify the OS about those tabs though :) But you can experiment with
Internet Explorer.
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"scott" <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
> > Heh, reminds me of font aa too. RISCOS had the most advanced font aa at
> > the time
> > (still looks better than modern systems, although it doesn't matter so
> > much with
> > screen res these days).
>
> Shame they didn't use it for the default OS font until quite a lot later
> (although I think I had a hack to force it to be used in earlier versions).
Yeah agreed. Me too on the hack, although it became standard, what, mid-90s?
Just in time for everyone to go out and buy IBM-compatible PCs instead :(
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>>> In Windows 7, apparently you can select a "tab" from the taskbar button.
>>> Apps can tell the OS about the different tabs they have.
>>>
>>> But I haven't used either Vista or 7, so that's not first-hand
>>> experience.
>> Really? Mmm, interesting. I'll have to try that next time I fire up the
>> Windows 7 VM...
>
> Don't expect all your random apps to support the Win7-specific APIs to
> notify the OS about those tabs though :) But you can experiment with
> Internet Explorer.
Or Office 2007. ;-)
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Am 21.04.2010 17:19, schrieb Invisible:
>>> And anyway, I thought the original VGA board had 2D acceleration?
>>
>> Nope. Back then, even 2D hardware acceleration was still the sole
>> domain of specialized display adapters, such as IBM's 8514/A (which
>> later "fused" with VGA into XGA though if I'm not mistaken).
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vga
>
> Claims that the original VGA card has "some support for raster ops". Of
> course, being Wikipedia, it doesn't elaborate further...
IIRC from my old days of programming graphics output, there were
mechanisms in place to do fancy things that would allow you to do a
single write where you'd normally need a read/modify/write combo - such
as masking the pixels to affect with the write (as each byte would
control multiple pixels), and maybe stuff like automatical XORing (so
you could write a sprite on a background and later "un-write" it), but
that's about as good as it got. Kind of 1D acceleration, so to speak.
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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Warp wrote:
> > Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> >> Mostly because even on a PC with hardware far
> >> in advance of what the Amiga has, Windows was *vastly* slower.
> >
> > Far in advance? 12MHz CPU (if you were rich), no hardware graphics
> > acceleration of any kind, 16 colors (again, if you were rich)... How is
> > that "far in advance of what the Amiga has"?
> Because the PCs at college had 133 MHz CPUs and 32 MB of RAM - multiple
> times the Amiga's 7 MHz CPU (admittedly of completely different design)
> and 2 MB of RAM. And yet, on such a machine, even something as simple as
> closing a window causes huge amounts of disk thrashing.
You are blaming Windows for something that the applications do (iow.
consume lots of memory)?
If anything, you could blame Windows developers for being lazier or less
competent than Amiga developers, and I wouldn't have much to argue about
that. However, I don't really buy this "Windows was *vastly* slower than
Amiga, even though the hardware was considerably more advanced".
> > Honestly, I just can't do *anything* in Windows, other than play games or
> > perhaps watch multimedia (if I don't happen to be in Linux just then).
> That pretty much describes me and Linux. Even something trivial like
> configuring a network interface without DHCP seems excruciatingly hard
> in Linux.
Then you have either lied about trying OpenSUSE, or you have never even
opened Yast. Or you are exaggerating on purpose, for whatever reason.
> Under
> Windows, you just right-click on the network interface and type in what
> you want the settings to be.
Exactly how this is relevantly different from Yast?
> > I'm always hindered by not
> > being able to do things I can easily do in Linux. Heck, even just finding
> > a file with a certain string is so damn hard in Windows, not to talk about
> > anything more advanced than that.
> ...why in the name of god would you ever want to do such a thing?
That sounds such a "window'ish" question.
> And
> wouldn't that require reading every individual byte of data on the
> entire HD anyway, regardless of OS?
You know, not every search must be done on every single file in the system.
You can actually limit searches to certain directories. Even in Windows.
Ever heard of the magical word "grep"? Do you know what it's used for in
unix systems? If yes, and you understand why this utility has existed for,
like, forever, then why are you asking "why would you evern want to do such
a thing"?
Maybe you don't need to search files containing a certain string, but many
other people do.
--
- Warp
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Warp wrote:
> Far in advance? 12MHz CPU (if you were rich), no hardware graphics
> acceleration of any kind, 16 colors (again, if you were rich)... How is
> that "far in advance of what the Amiga has"?
Even years later, with 100+MHz CPUs and better-than-VGA graphics, Windows
still sucked balls at anything screen-oriented. I remember watching a
powerpoint slide ripple its way across the screen on a Windows machine a
good 7 to 10 years after Amiga had a bouncing ball. :-)
> Heck, even just finding
> a file with a certain string is so damn hard in Windows, not to talk about
> anything more advanced than that.
Vista actually does this quite nicely. Or in stall Agent Ransack.
> (Yeah yeah, I know, you can do everything you can do in Linux and far more.
> There are all these fancy scripting languages and whatnot, which you might be
> able to use if you install something and something else. Nothing really
> consistent, and always a pain.)
Actually, it's way more consistent than Linux in terms of that. Everything
is COM. Now, if you don't do COM, then sure, it's a pain in the ass. But the
simple languages that can run any DLL and any application come with Windows
nowadays. You just have to learn something Windows-specific, and you have
to stop trying to manipulate files that belong to other applications without
using that application. :-0
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> > Heck, even just finding
> > a file with a certain string is so damn hard in Windows, not to talk about
> > anything more advanced than that.
> Vista actually does this quite nicely. Or in stall Agent Ransack.
I suppose it supports extended regular expressions?
(Of course searching files is just one of the many things one might need
to do in a semi-regular basis. Searching and replacing a regular expression
on a bunch of files with a certain name patter in a directory structure is
not even a far-fetched thing to do. Or the myriad of other things which are
handy to do on a unix command line.)
--
- Warp
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Try ctrl-pgup and ctrl-pgdn - that works for me in FF.
Jim
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Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>>> Heck, even just finding
>>> a file with a certain string is so damn hard in Windows, not to talk about
>>> anything more advanced than that.
>
>> Vista actually does this quite nicely. Or in stall Agent Ransack.
>
> I suppose it supports extended regular expressions?
You said "a certain string". No, I don't think Vista does this natively.
For that, try Agent Ransack, which is quite nice and free. (I made the
perhaps mistaken assumption you were complaining about something that was
actually a problem for you. :-)
Or, you know, install the free tools.
> (Of course searching files is just one of the many things one might need
> to do in a semi-regular basis. Searching and replacing a regular expression
> on a bunch of files with a certain name patter in a directory structure is
> not even a far-fetched thing to do. Or the myriad of other things which are
> handy to do on a unix command line.)
Sure. UNIX definitely comes with a lot of text manipulation tools that
Windows doesn't. On the other hand, lots of Windows files aren't text, and
Windows has better tools than UNIX for manipulating structured files.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.
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Darren New wrote:
> Sure. UNIX definitely comes with a lot of text manipulation tools that
> Windows doesn't. On the other hand, lots of Windows files aren't text,
> and Windows has better tools than UNIX for manipulating structured files.
Just as an example, there's no UNIX text-processing tool that will look in
an ODF word processing file to find some text but only in the comments
submitted by a particular author of the ODF file, or only in boldface, or
only the author's names; nor is there a text processing tool in UNIX to find
every number in the third column of a particular spreadsheet whose value is
more than 50, or the word "POV-Ray" but only in emails from Darren sent
during February.
... just to clarify what I mean. Windows gives you ways of scripting this
information in standard scripting languages. You can write a script that
picks mail messages out of your email client by date and sender, runs them
through VIM to reverse each line of text, and then populate an Excel
spreadsheet with any line of text that has more than five characters, all in
the scripting languages that come with Windows.
Grep works great on easy-to-parse text files. Most Windows programs don't
use easy-to-parse text files. Hence, people tend not to miss that
functionality unless they're programmers.
The whole "Microsoft won't tell us their file formats" complaint is missing
the point. That's not how you do things in Windows.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Windows has better tools than UNIX for manipulating structured files.
It does a pretty good job at hiding them. And pretty much everything else
that could be even remotely useful (such as soft links).
--
- Warp
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Just as an example, there's no UNIX text-processing tool that will look in
> an ODF word processing file to find some text but only in the comments
> submitted by a particular author of the ODF file, or only in boldface, or
> only the author's names; nor is there a text processing tool in UNIX to find
> every number in the third column of a particular spreadsheet whose value is
> more than 50, or the word "POV-Ray" but only in emails from Darren sent
> during February.
> ... just to clarify what I mean. Windows gives you ways of scripting this
> information in standard scripting languages. You can write a script that
> picks mail messages out of your email client by date and sender, runs them
> through VIM to reverse each line of text, and then populate an Excel
> spreadsheet with any line of text that has more than five characters, all in
> the scripting languages that come with Windows.
Yet Windows fails to provide such a simple and essential thing as a
competent file search utility in Windows Explorer (the one at least in
XP just doesn't work).
Apparently Microsoft's idea of "easy to use" is to make it as hard to use
as possible if you want to do anything even slightly more complicated.
--
- Warp
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Warp wrote:
> You are blaming Windows for something that the applications do (iow.
> consume lots of memory)?
>
> If anything, you could blame Windows developers for being lazier or less
> competent than Amiga developers, and I wouldn't have much to argue about
> that. However, I don't really buy this "Windows was *vastly* slower than
> Amiga, even though the hardware was considerably more advanced".
I don't think multiple seconds to close a window is "responsive". The
Amiga always managed to do this instantly, on every occasion. Only
recently have PCs been able to duplicate this seemingly trivial feat.
Sounds like a huge inefficiency to me.
(Then again, the Amiga lacks the capability for virtual memory. It
doesn't physically possess the hardware to implement it. I guess that
makes software authors a little more careful...)
>> That pretty much describes me and Linux. Even something trivial like
>> configuring a network interface without DHCP seems excruciatingly hard
>> in Linux.
>
> Then you have either lied about trying OpenSUSE, or you have never even
> opened Yast. Or you are exaggerating on purpose, for whatever reason.
As part of the Disaster Recovery plan I keep going on about, I had to
set up a PC with two NICs and configure it as a NAT router. Now, in
fairness, as far as I can tell Windoze can't do this *at all*. But it
was pretty hard to do from Linux either.
I don't recall exactly which distro I used - I think I probably used
KNOPPIX (i.e., Debian). And I probably didn't find the "simplest" way of
doing it. I just dug through endless manpages and help files until I
found a combination that works. Basically the DNS configuration lives in
one file, DHCP settings in another file, and IP address settings have to
be frobbed using ifconfig. And then there's the route command, which
(logically enough) frobs the kernel routing table. Or something like
that... I don't have my notes any more.
>> Under
>> Windows, you just right-click on the network interface and type in what
>> you want the settings to be.
>
> Exactly how this is relevantly different from Yast?
I didn't know Yast could do this. (As I say, I haven't needed to do it
recently.)
>> ...why in the name of god would you ever want to do such a thing?
>
> That sounds such a "window'ish" question.
I just can't imagine a situation where you'd ever need to, that's all.
>> And
>> wouldn't that require reading every individual byte of data on the
>> entire HD anyway, regardless of OS?
>
> You know, not every search must be done on every single file in the system.
> You can actually limit searches to certain directories. Even in Windows.
Oh, right. You mean "find out which one of *these* files contains a
given string"? That makes a bit more sense...
> Ever heard of the magical word "grep"? Do you know what it's used for in
> unix systems? If yes, and you understand why this utility has existed for,
> like, forever, then why are you asking "why would you evern want to do such
> a thing"?
I throught that grep is an overly-complicated way of searching for the
location of a string within one particular file? (I usually just use my
text editor's "search" function.)
> Maybe you don't need to search files containing a certain string, but many
> other people do.
I guess I don't very often edit large files...
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Warp wrote:
> Yet Windows fails to provide such a simple and essential thing as a
> competent file search utility in Windows Explorer (the one at least in
> XP just doesn't work).
I can't say I've ever needed to use this more than about thrice. And
that was only to find temp files on the server so I could delete them to
free up some space. I've never needed to search *inside* files...
> Apparently Microsoft's idea of "easy to use" is to make it as hard to use
> as possible if you want to do anything even slightly more complicated.
Microsoft's idea of "easy to use" seems to be "figure out what 90% of
the population wants to do, and then make *that* so easy that a drooling
retard could do it". Anything outside the set of things that 90% of the
population are likely to want to do is... not so easy. [That was an
understatement, by the way.]
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> Windows has better tools than UNIX for manipulating structured files.
>
> It does a pretty good job at hiding them. And pretty much everything else
> that could be even remotely useful (such as soft links).
This discussion is starting to remind me of when people learn Haskell...
Newbies go "Man, Haskell sucks! Why the hell is it to hard to create
global variables that I can actually write to?"
And the Haskell experts go "Man, WHY THE HELL would you want to do such
a thing? Global variables are EVIL!"
And after a few iterations of this, it turns out that the newbie is
trying to perform a task which Haskell can do in a way that's 500x
easier than the way they're trying to do it, because they're used to
doing it the "normal" way...
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Darren New wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
>> Sure. UNIX definitely comes with a lot of text manipulation tools that
>> Windows doesn't. On the other hand, lots of Windows files aren't text,
>> and Windows has better tools than UNIX for manipulating structured files.
>
> Just as an example, there's no UNIX text-processing tool that will look
> in an ODF word processing file to find some text but only in the
> comments submitted by a particular author of the ODF file, or only in
> boldface, or only the author's names; nor is there a text processing
> tool in UNIX to find every number in the third column of a particular
> spreadsheet whose value is more than 50, or the word "POV-Ray" but only
> in emails from Darren sent during February.
>
> Windows gives you ways of scripting
> this information in standard scripting languages. You can write a script
> that picks mail messages out of your email client by date and sender,
> runs them through VIM to reverse each line of text, and then populate an
> Excel spreadsheet with any line of text that has more than five
> characters, all in the scripting languages that come with Windows.
...so how do you actually do this then?
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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On Wed, 21 Apr 2010 19:02:05 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Now, in fairness,
> as far as I can tell Windoze can't do this *at all*. But it was pretty
> hard to do from Linux either.
Windows = Internet Connection Sharing
Linux = at least with openSUSE 11.2, YaST -> Firewall -> Masquerading.
Two NICs need to be configured and running. You can even set port
forwarding there.
Jim
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On Wed, 21 Apr 2010 15:32:17 +0200, Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> I loved the Amiga, but I will grant you one thing: It wasn't so great at
> switching between windows. Each window had two "gadgets" (what we today
> call widgets), one to raise and one to lower the window. Today you just
> click on a window and it comes to the front, but the Amiga did not do
> this. You had to click the gadget.
>
> An obvious consequence of this is that if the gadget was hidden behind
> something else, it was impossible to bring the window to the front. Or
> rather, you'd have to lower whatever was obscuring it. Suffice it to say
> that you could occasionally get into tricky situations where a window
> would get "lost" and it was quite hard to bring it to the front.
>
> Initially I hated Windoze. Mostly because even on a PC with hardware far
> in advance of what the Amiga has, Windows was *vastly* slower. (Today of
> course, Windows is, as far as I can tell, the most useable OS available,
> whether you like it or not. Linux is a nice idea, but sadly it's too
> hard to use.)
>
> One innotation Windows did add was the Task Bar. With this handy gizmo,
> you can immediately access any window you have open. And then there's
> the Alt+Tab shortcut - invaluable on crappy laptops that don't have a
> real mouse.
>
> Today it seems to be all the rage for applications to have "tabbed"
> interfaces - most obviously web browsers, but also many other
> applications. And that raises a bit of a problem. If I'm trying to look
> at several things at once, and I want to switch between them,
> *sometimes* I need to click something on the taskbar at the bottom of
> the screen, and *sometimes* I need to click something on the tabbar at
> the top of the screen. And my primitive little monkey brain is too
> simple to get this right most of the time.
>
> Does anybody else have this problem? Or is it just me?
I love tabbed browsing. Then I have more space on the taskbar for all my
other windows.
When anyone else uses my PC at work they keep closing IE when they only
wanted to close a tab ;->
--
-Nekar Xenos-
"The spoon is not real"
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> fairness, as far as I can tell Windoze can't do this *at all*.
Nonsense. Windows has had Internet Connection Sharing since Win98. You just
have to know what it's called. :-)
I'm pretty sure that's not part of Yast, tho. I don't think connection
binding is, but maybe I didn't have the right packages installed to do NAT
on SuSE.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.
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Warp wrote:
> Yet Windows fails to provide such a simple and essential thing as a
> competent file search utility in Windows Explorer (the one at least in
> XP just doesn't work).
Agreed. But you're 2 generations back with that complaint. Vista fixed it so
it works well, and Vista is already obsolete.
Plus, it's a harder problem if you actually want it to be usable by
non-nerds. If I'm looking for "Richard" in my files, I don't want it pulling
up strings out of executables or inside "<Richard>" tags, even if I want it
pulling it out of "<author name='Richard'>". I want to find "Clang" in my
ID3 tags, but not if it shows up as a random string inside the compressed
music stream.
> Apparently Microsoft's idea of "easy to use" is to make it as hard to use
> as possible if you want to do anything even slightly more complicated.
More like "works well even for people who don't know how it works."
Combine that with "don't want to re-write code that's already available as a
free download", and you're set to understand what's going on.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> ...so how do you actually do this then?
That's what the whole COM thing is all about, along with things like
"Windows Scripting Host" and "Power Shell".
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.
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Nekar Xenos wrote:
> I love tabbed browsing. Then I have more space on the taskbar for all my
> other windows.
I put the task bar on the side. I can probably put 40 tabs on there before
it gets close to full.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.
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Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> > Ever heard of the magical word "grep"? Do you know what it's used for in
> > unix systems? If yes, and you understand why this utility has existed for,
> > like, forever, then why are you asking "why would you evern want to do such
> > a thing"?
> I throught that grep is an overly-complicated way of searching for the
> location of a string within one particular file? (I usually just use my
> text editor's "search" function.)
You use your text editor to tell you which files in a directory structure
contain a specified string? Talk about being overly complicated. grep is a
way, way simpler way to do that.
> > Maybe you don't need to search files containing a certain string, but many
> > other people do.
> I guess I don't very often edit large files...
What does file size have to do with anything?
--
- Warp
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Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Microsoft's idea of "easy to use" seems to be "figure out what 90% of
> the population wants to do, and then make *that* so easy that a drooling
> retard could do it".
And then they fail even at that.
"Windows is easy for a beginner to use" is a surprisingly widespread
misconception. I don't understand where it comes from. Probably Microsoft
propaganda.
--
- Warp
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Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> Windows has better tools than UNIX for manipulating structured files.
>
> It does a pretty good job at hiding them. And pretty much everything else
> that could be even remotely useful (such as soft links).
Yes, you don't like Windows, we get it. Plus, you use a version that's old
enough that it lacks the straightforward tools you're complaining about.
And yes, complex tools for manipulating structured files are hidden from the
people who would screw things up by using them wrong, then complain because
they don't understand the system well enough to know they did something
wrong. However, they're not that hard to find and they're mostly very well
documented. For popular files, the interfaces are very well documented.
You complaining you can't find the Windows stuff is like Andrew complaining
he can't work grep. :-)
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> > Apparently Microsoft's idea of "easy to use" is to make it as hard to use
> > as possible if you want to do anything even slightly more complicated.
> More like "works well even for people who don't know how it works."
> Combine that with "don't want to re-write code that's already available as a
> free download", and you're set to understand what's going on.
I don't really.
What would be the problem of, for example, supporting soft links natively
in Windows Explorer? If they are so scared of newbies getting confused, make
it an option somewhere.
What would be the problem of adding an option to Windows Explorer to show
exact byte sizes of files? 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?
(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. This means that if you have eg. 50 small png files
in one directory, it might report them taking 300 kilobytes of space... Which
is true, because that's the amount of *disk space* they are using. However,
that's not the summed size of the files, which might be eg. 30 kilobytes.
You can get this info from a context menu the hard way, but it's very
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.
--
- Warp
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> > ...so how do you actually do this then?
> That's what the whole COM thing is all about, along with things like
> "Windows Scripting Host" and "Power Shell".
I find it telling that if the question would have been something like
"how do you find files in the current directory containing a certain string"
the answer could have been given in one line, but when the question is how
to do those complex searches in Windows you mentioned... there's no simple
answer, only obscure references to something else.
--
- Warp
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Warp wrote:
> > Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> >> Windows has better tools than UNIX for manipulating structured files.
> >
> > It does a pretty good job at hiding them. And pretty much everything else
> > that could be even remotely useful (such as soft links).
> Yes, you don't like Windows, we get it. Plus, you use a version that's old
> enough that it lacks the straightforward tools you're complaining about.
I'm just not very eager to spend something like 200 euros on a Windows
which does things that my *current* Windows should do already (if nothing
else, as a free upgrade).
Maybe I'll buy it some day in the future, when games stop supporting XP.
(Although by that time I'll probably have to buy a new PC altogether because
games will stop supporting 32-bit CPUs in the near future.)
> You complaining you can't find the Windows stuff is like Andrew complaining
> he can't work grep. :-)
I have used Windows (98 and newer) for over 10 years, and I still can't
figure out how to do such things. I have been using Unix-likes for about
the same amount of time, and it didn't take me long to figure out, and it
just feels comfortable. (I'm not saying that you can do every possible
operation in existence easily, but common tasks just are much easier there
than in Windows, where often I don't know even where to start, even though
I'm not exactly a newbie. Windows is just that good at hiding all the stuff.)
--
- Warp
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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.
Why the heck would
> 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. And which byte count do you
want? Compressed bytes? Uncompressed bytes? Bytes of disk space occupied? Do
you count alternate streams? How about overhead streams like ACLs and crypto
keys? "dir" already shows that.
So write an extension, if it bothers you. That's the cool thing about
Windows. Once you learn how to talk between parts, you can do all kinds of
things. Like the tortise svn client, for example.
> 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.
> (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.
> 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.
> 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.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.
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Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>> ...so how do you actually do this then?
>
>> That's what the whole COM thing is all about, along with things like
>> "Windows Scripting Host" and "Power Shell".
>
> I find it telling that if the question would have been something like
> "how do you find files in the current directory containing a certain string"
> the answer could have been given in one line,
Yes. Every window has a search box on it.
> but when the question is how
> to do those complex searches in Windows you mentioned... there's no simple
> answer, only obscure references to something else.
Nope. Every window has a search box in it, *and* that search box handles the
complex file formats too. If all you want to do is search for a text string
in a directory tree, Windows has that. If all you want to do is search for a
regular expression in a directory tree, it's trivial to add that to Windows
either with a GUI or without. If you want to know how to do searches that
are difficult in Linux, then it's going to be complex in Windows too. I'm
not going to teach you how to do that any more than you're going to explain
how to write the same searches using Linux tools. If you want to do
something complex beyond searching strings, you have to use the parsers.
Unlike Linux, all the Windows tools are based on the same technology, so you
only have to learn that once.
It's no different than saying "what if I wanted to count the number of times
the Beatles show up in my music library" you'd have to ask where your music
library is storing those tags. I'm not going to show you how to do that in
Linux.
In other words, grep doesn't work on SQL databases. Simple string search is
there. Complex structured queries are there. Regular expressions requires
you download a free program, or to write a script that used the built-in
regular expression objects and directory tree objects to walk the tree and
regexp each file, because non-programmer users don't do that stuff.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.
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Warp wrote:
> I'm just not very eager to spend something like 200 euros on a Windows
> which does things that my *current* Windows should do already (if nothing
> else, as a free upgrade).
I didn't ask you to. :-)
> I have used Windows (98 and newer) for over 10 years, and I still can't
> figure out how to do such things.
Like what, grep? I already pointed you to Agent Ransack, and I've found
that putting "win32" on the front of a query usually gives you back the
ported version of that software.
> I have been using Unix-likes for about
> the same amount of time, and it didn't take me long to figure out, and it
> just feels comfortable. (I'm not saying that you can do every possible
> operation in existence easily, but common tasks just are much easier there
> than in Windows, where often I don't know even where to start, even though
> I'm not exactly a newbie. Windows is just that good at hiding all the stuff.)
Yeah. I sat down and read thru all the V7 man pages and source code, so I
know how the basics of UNIX works. I never did that with Windows. When I
want to do something complex, like rename all my new photographs based on
the camera that took them combined with the EXIF date, I write a program to
do that, just like I would in Linux. I don't use Windows like a regular user
does, because I'm a programmer. So I have added the tools a programmer
uses. These programs are not always well-advertised, and are often
distributed as part of "an SDK" which really doesn't tell you what's there.
There are a number of tasks I do frequently that I have little scripted
programs to do.
Similarly, people look at me funny when I say I don't use facebook,
linkedin, etc. But that's not the sort of thing I do. I imagine someone
working in an HR department has all different kinds of programs and scripts
and macros to use their Windows conveniently than I do.
If there's something you want to do on Windows that's hard to do, it's
probably because that's not how it's done on Windows. Just as an example, I
have never seen a soft link used in Windows, or seen the need for a soft
link other than to fix broken programs that hard-coded file names that they
were supposed to be pulling out of the environment. People don't use soft
links to point to the right location - they use configuration variables.
The whole "file format" issue is exactly that. People don't try to implement
programs that can create Excel files or pull information out of Word files
on Windows, any more than they write programs that can part MyISAM files on
Linux. They talk to the program that knows the format through a well defined
interface to manipulate the files in an upward-compatible way.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.
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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
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On 21-4-2010 22:15, Darren New wrote:
> Warp wrote:
>> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>>> Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>>> ...so how do you actually do this then?
>>
>>> That's what the whole COM thing is all about, along with things like
>>> "Windows Scripting Host" and "Power Shell".
>>
>> I find it telling that if the question would have been something like
>> "how do you find files in the current directory containing a certain
>> string"
>> the answer could have been given in one line,
>
> Yes. Every window has a search box on it.
>
>> but when the question is how
>> to do those complex searches in Windows you mentioned... there's no
>> simple
>> answer, only obscure references to something else.
>
> Nope. Every window has a search box in it, *and* that search box handles
> the complex file formats too. If all you want to do is search for a text
> string in a directory tree, Windows has that.
IME the Windows that I use indeed have those search options. Except that
they don't seem to work as advertised. They often don't find files that
are clearly there. Typical situation: I am editing a file that calls a
function. I search for all other files that call or contain that
function in a tree starting one level above the file I am editing. No
results, not even the file that I am editing. WTF? IIRC it can also give
results outside the search criteria and it is definitely slow. In short,
it drove me mad.
Then I tried googledesktop. Great program, much faster. Will also find
files and e-mails that contain the text item you searched for. Lots of
options to refine your search. If only it would be so kind to look at
the options it would be even greater. In short, it too drove me mad.
Sometimes I connect a removable disk to a PC with an older version of XP
or 2000 just to be able to do a reliable search.
I know it is probably something that I do wrong, but what?
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Warp wrote:
> > Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> >> Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> >>> ...so how do you actually do this then?
> >
> >> That's what the whole COM thing is all about, along with things like
> >> "Windows Scripting Host" and "Power Shell".
> >
> > I find it telling that if the question would have been something like
> > "how do you find files in the current directory containing a certain string"
> > the answer could have been given in one line,
> Yes. Every window has a search box on it.
I just wish it would work. It doesn't. Yes, I have tried, and I have
become exasperated.
> > but when the question is how
> > to do those complex searches in Windows you mentioned... there's no simple
> > answer, only obscure references to something else.
> Nope. Every window has a search box in it, *and* that search box handles the
> complex file formats too. If all you want to do is search for a text string
> in a directory tree, Windows has that.
Do you honestly think I would be claiming that it doesn't work if I hadn't
tried it already? It doesn't work.
I really got once stuck because I just *couldn't* find what I was
searching for. I knew the string was in some files and I wanted to know
which of them, but the damn thing simply refused to tell me, no matter
what I tried. (IIRC I was searching for C++ files which include a specific
header or something like that. I ended up having to figure that out by
other means.)
> If all you want to do is search for a
> regular expression in a directory tree, it's trivial to add that to Windows
> either with a GUI or without.
You have a really odd definition of "trivial".
My definition of "trivial" is if it would be something like "write 'xyz'
here, and it will work".
Apparently your definition of "trivial" is "not impossible".
> If you want to know how to do searches that
> are difficult in Linux, then it's going to be complex in Windows too.
"grep 'xyz.hh' *" isn't very difficult in Linux. It seems to be in Windows
(at least when using Windows Explorer).
> I'm
> not going to teach you how to do that any more than you're going to explain
> how to write the same searches using Linux tools.
Do you know why? Because it's *not* trivial in Windows.
--
- Warp
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Warp wrote:
> What would be the problem of, for example, supporting soft links natively
> in Windows Explorer?
> What would be the problem of adding an option to Windows Explorer to show
> exact byte sizes of files?
Go for it! :-)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb773177%28v=VS.85%29.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd940376%28v=VS.85%29.aspx
Note that all the interactions with explorer are via COM. If you wanted to
change how Gnome or KDE displays that sort of thing, out of curiosity, what
would you do? (Serious question there.) Would you have to change source
code, or is there some sort of interface like COM or REXX or something to
allow access?
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.
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On Wed, 21 Apr 2010 21:50:06 +0200, Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> Warp wrote:
> I have used Windows (98 and newer) for over 10 years, and I still can't
> figure out how to do such things. I have been using Unix-likes for about
> the same amount of time, and it didn't take me long to figure out, and it
> just feels comfortable. (I'm not saying that you can do every possible
> operation in existence easily, but common tasks just are much easier
> there
> than in Windows, where often I don't know even where to start, even
> though
> I'm not exactly a newbie. Windows is just that good at hiding all the
> stuff.)
>
I installed Ubuntu Ultimate Edition 2.4 recently.
Wow! I can change the way the OS looks and I don't have to buy Blinds to
do it! =D
I had a bit of trouble installing my 3G modem, but I managed - I need to
plug it in before I fire up Linux. Apparently that's fixed in 2.5 but I
don't have the bandwidth to download it. I also managed to install the
graphics card drivers.
I installed Code::Blocks but I need WXwidgets which is another big
download.
But I still haven't been able to install Pov-Ray except in Wine... :(
I'm a total n00b as I can't seem to install anything without the Package
Manager...
--
-Nekar Xenos-
"The spoon is not real"
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