Oh, man, I just ride in 'em ... I don't know what makes 'em work.
Posted on 04/10/2013 5:50:05 AM PDT by ShadowAce
So? Doesn't mean I have to like it. And it doesn't mean other OSes aren't capable of it, like this one.
Hey, man... you are preaching to the choir - I am enough of a duffer to prefer .cfg/.ini right in the folder with the executable - I have never understood the need for a registry at all. Every now and then I still run into software designed that way - Simply DEL the directory and the program, and everything to do with the program is instantly 'uninstalled'.
I firmly believe that the only reason for a reg is for obfuscation purposes.
The majority of people who use computers are not technical, AND THEY DON’T WANT TO BE!
Yup... Maybe not quite as fervent as you - My favorite clients are the ones that knew their stuff back in the DOS-Win9x days... Not necessarily much more than super-user, let's say (which you kinda HAD to be back in the day)... But they aren't scared off if you have them open a cmdbox, and simple routines (AV scans, backup jobs, etc) are allowed for and assumed to be worthy of learning...
I think it is a shame to dumb-down the system for crayola-eating idiots. I think there is an inherent learning curve (albeit a fairly simple one) that must be accomplished for reasonable operation. And for the most part, my clients are happy to be taught the basics.
Oh, man, I just ride in 'em ... I don't know what makes 'em work.
I have been a redhat man since the 90’s, but it seems like fedora is going downhill. I have fedora 17/Gnome3.4.2 on my desktop. I can't get vmware player to run - moved to virtual box ( not that that is bad!!). Tried to get USB running with vitualbox and failed - now I get occasional system hangups. You have to go out and hunt down codecs. The list goes on and on - a lot of little things like that bugging me. I am thinking about moving to Linux Mint.
“The article is 100% spot on when he says users do not like change.”
This user agrees wholeheartedly. It takes a while to learn all this stuff, and when it changes you do not get training or time to relearn it. And when you are done, it is usually just different, not better. Instead of putting all the new stuff as the default and making the user roll it back, they should bury the new interface somewhere and let the persons so inclined “discover” it. They will have a good old time doing it, and if it really is better, the rest will come over in good time.
Up until the 60’s, you had to turn on the radio and wait a minute for the tubes to warm up before you could listen. Then we got transistors - turn it on and listen immediately. Now, the radio has a computer. Turn it on, wait a minute or 2 until it boots up, and if they don't force an immediate FW upgrade on you, you can listen to the radio. Seems like we are going in the wrong direction.
It all depends on whose side of the fence you’re sitting on. From a software maintenance point of view, once you’ve dropped the new big block v8 in the chassis, you don’t want to spend time maintaining the old v6 for the occasional use. Not saying that’s how the user wants it to be but it’s how the developers will tend to view things and they are the ones that ultimately make the call.
What is the hardware for OpenVMS?
Wikipedia says: VAX, Alpha, Itanium. [here]
If you'll allow my two-cents: the registry isn't a bad idea, in whole, the implementation, however, is. -- It would be useful for, say, file-associations and preserving them so that an uninstall doesn't destroy them if you had some other software for it. (Think map of file-types to stacks of programs, the 'top' would be your default application -- uninstall would remove that item from the stack.) -- It is horribly abused though.
But you're right about the ini-file, that was an excellent way to carry out configurations... especially when you might need it to be human-readable/editable. (Better than the pile that is XML.)
I think it is a shame to dumb-down the system for crayola-eating idiots. I think there is an inherent learning curve (albeit a fairly simple one) that must be accomplished for reasonable operation. And for the most part, my clients are happy to be taught the basics.
One of the bad things about the dumbing-down of a system [which is distinct from easy/reasonable to use] is that a lot of systems are now put together with a minimum of forethought, and many use poor tools for the job.
Case in point for programming languages: PHP. If your system handles money or life-impacting information (like medical records), and uses PHP, I would consider you to be liable for any damages. The reason is that PHP plays very fast-and-dirty with its types; and w/ automatic string conversion you can see this easily. "06" => Integer 3, "07" => Integer 7, "08" => Integer 0. Why? Because PHP treats the initial zero as a flag for octal numbers and '8' is an error [falling outside 0..7], which it returns as 0 [the error-flag], and then interprets that error as beint the value returned... instead of something sensible like raising an exception.
Or this:
// column indices are 1-based due to user specification of spreadsheet.
$column_index = array( 1, 2, 5, 4, 11 );
// column accesses are 0-based in the library.
foreach( $column_index as &$item )
$item = $item - 1;
// processing column data.
foreach( $column_index as &$item )
// process_column( $spreadsheet, $item );
/* DEBUGGING */
print "Col: {$item}" . NEW_LINE;
Instead of: Col: 0 Col: 1 Col: 4 Col: 3 Col: 10you get:Col: 0 Col: 1 Col: 4 Col: 3 Col: 3And they claim this is not a bug!
You can say that again. The Internet has made it worse by allowing people to push buggy software out and fix it later. This is going to go on until something really bad happens, and a bunch of people are killed or hurt. When that happens, there will be an investigation not unlike the one after the Challenger disaster, and the haphazard, ego driven methods used to slap code together will come under much needed scrutiny.
If that comes to be Ada is ahead of the game, the new Ada 2012 Standard introduces contracts pre-/post-conditions and type-invariants as part of the language rather than as stylized comments (meaning they won't "go stale" if a developer forgets to update the comments).
I don't disagree with you entirely - But the tendency of man to abuse what is available is inherently problematic, and responsible for unintended consequences as a matter of course. Ergo, 'they' should have known it would work that way.
I understand that a database (which the registry is) is functionally quicker than a flat file system, and is more robust in terms of scale. And if it were used prudently, as you suggest, you would be right in your assessment. But at some point, the value of db storage, when evolved into something as ponderous as we have now, must needfully be questioned. To wit: If the db was not there, folks couldn't abuse it...
I think we surpassed the usefulness of the registry long ago - It is similar to the startup/tsr phenomena. Everyone thinks their stuff is SO important to the user that it simply MUST start with the system... And at some point, the crap running from startup starts to surpass the ability of the machine to handle it. In the registry, the same sort of thing results in impossible and unessential super-integration - A veritable monkey-knot of layer upon layer of intricate dependencies which, for the most part, are overly complicated and entirely unnecessary.
And the reliance upon the registry also creates a reliance upon complicated install/uninstall routines as well- Something which sometimes borders upon disaster at my end of the spectrum. Unlike the tight controls in corporate environs, one never knows what one will encounter at the residential level. Who knows what has been put into or taken out of the system! Problems with viruses are still the number one problem, but if not viruses, The most likely culprit is a malformed installation (or system update), or an uninstall (or AV removal) that removed necessary dependencies, or left flotsam that it shouldn't have... ALL of which wind up being registry malfunctions.
In the end, it just stands to reason that simple systems are more durable and reliable. For that reason, I'd much prefer the old-school flat config system.
But you're right about the ini-file, that was an excellent way to carry out configurations... especially when you might need it to be human-readable/editable. (Better than the pile that is XML.)
Yeah. .XML sucks to read... I mean physically read. I have no idea what makes it 'superior' to an .ini. I guess it is 'kewl' factor, because it can't be anything else.
One of the bad things about the dumbing-down of a system [which is distinct from easy/reasonable to use] is that a lot of systems are now put together with a minimum of forethought, and many use poor tools for the job.
Right. I would point more toward 'improvement' bordering upon sophistry - one-up-man-ship for no purpose or reason. Conventional difference as an act of style. Microsoft's infamous ribbon being a great example. Fixing what ain't broke, and breaking it in the process. Efficiency was not improved, and it left folks flailing about instead of being able to intuitively use reliable standard industry conventions. What was trumpeted as a more intuitive layout resulted in the exact opposite. Windows 8 will turn out to be a similar experience, which allows me to admit that Microsoft is incapable of learning, or has some ulterior motive.
Case in point for programming languages: PHP.
Any of the higher languages have their quirks I would imagine - I was able to stay in BASIC and batch for the most part, although I graduated to Delphi a few years back (having experience with pascal back in the day) when all my stuff broke over XP SP-2 and again later, when everything went 64bit. I am quite good with HTML too - again, simple things tend to be better (I still HATE OOP, btw).
But then again, I am a system guy. We tend toward spartan efficiencies (I still spend more than half my time at a prompt), sacrificing the bouncy-jangly bits for raw power and a high degree of control. Those preferences tend to be limited to those of us in the basement (living large under florescent light, eating stale Cheetos and buckets of Mountain Dew). So I have never understood the tendencies toward style - and with that deficit, the necessity of complex higher languages escapes me entirely. Tight code and tiny, powerful executables are a thing of beauty. What need for anything else?
Interesting. The only difference I see so far between us is that I am running F18 and XFCE. I also run VirtualBox for the once-a-year taxes dance, but I have no issues with USB.
This is true, if by quirks you include styles (there are also quirks based on the style that is espoused by the system, take strings as an example: C's null-terminated strings vs Pascal's length-byte prefixed strings vs Ada's array of characters as examples -- all require a way about thinking about strings). But there is no excuse for the bugs exemplified: an error on type conversion should not silently/implicitly be ignored, neither should the intuitive foreach (in some cases) iterate over everything except the last element doubling the penultimate one instead.
The problem with OOP is that most people have been taught that it's the only way to program and therefore have the idea that "everything is an object" -- this same mentality is one of the reasons *nix sucks: one piece of it's design philosophy is "everything is a file".
Speaking of HTML, if you're concerned about layout (i.e. CSS tricks) then you're using it wrong: it was developed with the design philosophy that the client [browser] could render it in its own [appropriate] way (i.e. text only, braille, etc). When you start getting concerned about layout you, again, are using the wrong tool for the job -- if you're concerned about an exact layout you should be using something like postscript. And thus we come back to the crux of some of these issues: simple is better, but misusing even simple can cause terrible messes *cough*HTML5*cough*.
My point being that there are large changes in the current batch of PC desktops as compared to the old Windows XP (and earlier) desktop. If one is leaving WinXP, they're up against a learning curve no matter which desktop they choose, so why not take the opportunity to avoid the Microsoft tax?
Agreed. Thanks.
may have to try that one.
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