Amazingly screwed-up installation experience
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@Snooder said:
Well, it was made not too long before their divorce, so I would imagine that maybe some lingering real-life issues filtered through the production.
Like Tom Cruise being a gay, crazy, Scientologist midget? And Kidman being shudder Australian?
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@morbiuswilters said:
@El_Heffe said:
http://forums.thedailywtf.com/forums/p/25493/276214.aspx
TRWTF is that Blakey thinks Kubrick can do no wrong. I was a huge fan of his, until I saw Eyes Wide Shit. As soon as it was finished playing, my first thought was "You know, it's probably a good thing he died so that no more movies like that could ever be made."
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@blakeyrat said:
@morbiuswilters said:
@El_Heffe said:
http://forums.thedailywtf.com/forums/p/25493/276214.aspx
TRWTF is that Blakey thinks Kubrick can do no wrong. I was a huge fan of his, until I saw Eyes Wide Shit. As soon as it was finished playing, my first thought was "You know, it's probably a good thing he died so that no more movies like that could ever be made."
Have you seen the movie since then? Because, seriously, the only way editing could have fixed that movie is if the dailies contained the entire footage to Full Metal Jacket 2: Joker's Revenge and the inclusion of a minute or so of Cruise/Kidman flick was just supposed to serve as a torture device used by Viet Cong against American Marines.
That said, you have a point: the movie technically wasn't his, and as hard as it is to imagine that there was a pony hiding in that pile of horseshit, we don't know what might have been. At the very least, he could have asked to have his name removed if the final product looked as inevitably dismal as it turned out. So, really, his name shouldn't have been on the film.
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@morbiuswilters said:
Have you seen the movie since then?
I've never seen it ever. Nor do I have any desire to.
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@the guy I agree with said:
Heil Honey I'm Home! (September 30, 1990)
I don't know about you guys, but that sounds like a fucking winner to me.
British TV's Galaxy comedy that spoofed American sitcoms of the 1950s and 1960s by featuring caricatures of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun who live in matrimonial bliss until they become neighbours to a Jewish couple.It lasted 1 episode. That's 7 seasons on British TV.
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@Brother Laz said:
(gray face feature)
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@Lorne Kates said:
It lasted 1 episode. That's 7 seasons on British TV.
Hell, it's tied for second place for "Longest-running Britcom".
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@morbiuswilters said:
That said, you have a point: the movie technically wasn't his, and as hard as it is to imagine that there was a pony hiding in that pile of horseshit, we don't know what might have been.
Kubrick was writer, director and producer. He was there for every frame of film that was shot and all accounts of the production say that he was deeply involved in every tiny detail of the filming. Kubrick was also involved in lengthy post production and he showed a cut of the film to Cruise, Kidman, and movie studio executives five days before he died. Unless you're claiming that a bunch of really good scenes were cut out of the film after he died, the claim that the film "wasn't his" is bullshit. The movie was a turd and no amount of editing, by Kubrick or anyone else, could fix it.
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@El_Heffe said:
@morbiuswilters said:
That said, you have a point: the movie technically wasn't his, and as hard as it is to imagine that there was a pony hiding in that pile of horseshit, we don't know what might have been.
Kubrick was writer, director and producer. He was there for every frame of film that was shot and all accounts of the production say that he was deeply involved in every tiny detail of the filming. Kubrick was also involved in lengthy post production and he showed a cut of the film to Cruise, Kidman, and movie studio executives five days before he died. Unless you're claiming that a bunch of really good scenes were cut out of the film after he died, the claim that the film "wasn't his" is bullshit. The movie was a turd and no amount of editing, by Kubrick or anyone else, could fix it.I have no idea what editing was done after he died, but it's possible he intended for it to be a very different movie. Also, the wrote and directed isn't as important as it seems, because films can deviate quite a bit from the script and a script that's good can result in a crappy film and vice-versa. (Seriously, 2001 probably looked like absolute balls on paper, but it's a great film.)
Now, realistically, do I buy that EWS was a good movie that was ruined after Kubrick's death? No, it probably would've been a stinker if he had lived. The best you can say is maybe he would have realized it and asked to have his name removed, which would have resulted in a fight before the DGA.
But editing can really make or break a movie. And Kubrick was well-known for being obsessive and shooting scenes dozens of times, so the guy probably had a hundreds of hours of video. (Wiki even says it was held the world record for longest continuous movie shoot at the time: 15 months. That is a long, long time for a movie.) Selecting the right bits from the available film and then editing them together in a way that conveyed his meaning.. that's a really big part of making the movie. It's quite possible whoever took it over fucked it up badly and had no idea what he was trying to do.
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@morbiuswilters said:
But editing can really make or break a movie.
Absolutely true. But, most accounts say he showed a cut of the movie to studio execs right before he died, so he was involved in editing, and it seems hard to believe that someone else just came in and really fucked it up after he died. The whole 'not his movie' just sounds like fanboys unwilling to admit he made a shitty movie.
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@El_Heffe said:
@morbiuswilters said:
But editing can really make or break a movie.
Absolutely true. But, most accounts say he showed a cut of the movie to studio execs right before he died, so he was involved in editing, and it seems hard to believe that someone else just came in and really fucked it up after he died. The whole 'not his movie' just sounds like fanboys unwilling to admit he made a shitty movie.Hmm.. you make a good point. Morbs is undecided.
Solution: We will clone Kubrick and then entrap him in a simulation of the real Kubrick's life, down to the last detail. Then we will get him to make EWS and see how it turns out.
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@flabdablet said:
@anotherusername said:
If malicious code gets the ability to modify the files in your user profile, you're fucked anyway.
Well no, not really. Your user profile is the least protected part of any Windows installation because you need to be able to write stuff in there without any kind of elevated privileges - that's kind of the point of it.
Prickware installed inside your own profile can be intensely irritating, and may damage your own documents and whatnot enough that you need to restore them from backups, but it's not going to be able to ruin your whole Windows installation or rootkit you unless you go out of your way to run it or its installer with elevated privileges. As long as it's never had those, then in extremis you can always get rid of it just by wiping your profile, which is a lot faster than reinstalling the OS.
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@Ben L. said:
Goddammit, I miss when TheShadowMod was still alive and would not let people post xkcds.
@title said:
Before you say anything, no, I know not to leave my computer sitting out logged in to all my accounts. I have it set up so after a few minutes of inactivity it automatically switches to my brother's.
You have a brother? And you share accounts?
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@Scarlet Manuka said:
Checking afterwards, I was genuinely surprised to find that it was commercial, Windows-only software. The appalling usability screams FOSS (even if your product is for game developers, you shouldn't ignore the UI, especially if you claim that it also "caters to entry-level novices"), and the "let's not install into Program Files because we can't be bothered doing the security properly" bit is a classic trope for Linux software being ported to Windows.
That's nothing! The other day, I dragged an application bundle out of a dmg file onto my desktop and the app had the nerve to put my configuration files and preferences in ~/Library/Preferences/ ! I had to manually delete those when I decided I didn't want to keep the application.
At least Debian lets me run apt-get remove --purge app or even use a point-and-click tool to do it for me.
Oh wait.
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@morbiuswilters said:
@Ben L. said:
Goddammit, I miss when TheShadowMod was still alive and would not let people post xkcds.
@title said:
Before you say anything, no, I know not to leave my computer sitting out logged in to all my accounts. I have it set up so after a few minutes of inactivity it automatically switches to my brother's.
You have a brother? And you share accounts?
No, I don't have a brother. But Rosie O'Donnell probably does.
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@Captain Oblivious said:
@Scarlet Manuka said:
Checking afterwards, I was genuinely surprised to find that it was commercial, Windows-only software. The appalling usability screams FOSS (even if your product is for game developers, you shouldn't ignore the UI, especially if you claim that it also "caters to entry-level novices"), and the "let's not install into Program Files because we can't be bothered doing the security properly" bit is a classic trope for Linux software being ported to Windows.
That's nothing! The other day, I dragged an application bundle out of a dmg file onto my desktop and the app had the nerve to put my configuration files and preferences in ~/Library/Preferences/ ! I had to manually delete those when I decided I didn't want to keep the application.
At least Debian lets me run apt-get remove --purge app or even use a point-and-click tool to do it for me.
Oh wait.
Goddamn. What, did you create an account and then get kidnapped for 5 years?
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@morbiuswilters said:
@Captain Oblivious said:
@Scarlet Manuka said:
Checking afterwards, I was genuinely surprised to find that it was commercial, Windows-only software. The appalling usability screams FOSS (even if your product is for game developers, you shouldn't ignore the UI, especially if you claim that it also "caters to entry-level novices"), and the "let's not install into Program Files because we can't be bothered doing the security properly" bit is a classic trope for Linux software being ported to Windows.
That's nothing! The other day, I dragged an application bundle out of a dmg file onto my desktop and the app had the nerve to put my configuration files and preferences in ~/Library/Preferences/ ! I had to manually delete those when I decided I didn't want to keep the application.
At least Debian lets me run apt-get remove --purge app or even use a point-and-click tool to do it for me.
Oh wait.
Goddamn. What, did you create an account and then get kidnapped for 5 years?
If Captain Oblivious becomes a regular, I can finally retire from my job as a misinterpreter of jokes!
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@morbiuswilters said:
Goddamn. What, did you create an account and then get kidnapped for 5 years?
Nah, probably just a really high latency internet connection.
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@Ben L. said:
If Captain Oblivious becomes a regular, I can finally retire from my job as a misinterpreter of jokes!
I don't think that's a good career. I can't see people paying you to do that, and you'll need to support yourself somehow. Maybe stay in school for now, get your degree, and misinterpret jokes part time as a hobby. If, by some chance, you do start to make enough money of it to support yourself, great! But just don't plan on it.
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@Scarlet Manuka said:
Checking afterwards, I was genuinely surprised to find that it was commercial, Windows-only software. The appalling usability screams FOSS (even if your product is for game developers, you shouldn't ignore the UI, especially if you claim that it also "caters to entry-level novices"), and the "let's not install into Program Files because we can't be bothered doing the security properly" bit is a classic trope for Linux software being ported to Windows.
This isn't so much a problem with doing the security properly, as problems finding the appropriate directories.
I've been trying to port a program from Linux to Windows; it's already known and listed which files have to go into shared areas, local areas, are executable, shouldn't be user-modifiable, etc. The problem is, on Linux, you can correctly and safely hardcode all the paths; if I install an executable for all users into /usr/bin, it's going to find its platform-specific data files in /usr/lib, its platform-independent data files in /usr/share, etc. All these directory names are standard, and placed into the executable during compile.
On Windows, it's usual to ship executables, rather than compile by hand; and the official correct method (and the only one that actually works, and one that is rarely used in practice and thus creates a nice stream of WTFs) of locating things like platform-specifc data files is to call Windows-specific system calls to discover which directories they're in. This means that instead of locating directories being an issue for the installer, it's now an issue for the program, making it rather more porting work to change the directory location (instead of just changing the installer, now I have to change the program too).
The alternative is to just put everything in the same directory, and look in the current directory; this isn't correct, but it's easy and it works, and it's much easier to get it working-well-enough-for-99%-of-users than it is to add Windows-specific system calls into your executable to do the installer's job. So is it surprising that people take that alternative?
(That said, not working without admin credentials after doing something like that is a problem, and something that software lazily ported from Linux would be likely to get right. And that upgrade nonsense is just ridiculous.)
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@El_Heffe said:
@flabdablet said:
if you run the Chrome installer in such a way that it has write access to %ProgramFiles% it will put Chrome there, and if you don't it will put it in your profile.
I don't think that's true -- at least not the last time I installed Chrome. I have full access to everything on my home PC and Chrome defaulted to putting itself in the user profile. Maybe they finally reaized they were doing something stupid and changed itI just fired up my clean XP+SP3 virtual machine, logged on as an administrative user, opened IE, browsed to google.com, clicked the "Install Google Chrome" link in the top right corner, and ended up with Chrome installed to C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome. On Vista and later I don't believe that installer ever actually asks for elevation, so it's probably just trying to create a folder in Program Files, failing, then falling back to a profile install.
You can get a system-wide installation of Chrome on Vista/7/8 either by getting the MSI installer from the Chrome For Business site (Google chrome msi) or by running the standard installer via Ninite, which elevates itself before running the installers it downloads.
@El_Heffe said:
The last time I installed Chrome was at least a year ago, but now that I think about it I seem to remember it putting everything, including all the executables, in %LOCALAPPDATA% by default.
Apparenlty the excuse for this was to allow people to install Chrome on computers where they don't have proper permission to install into the normal location. Which I personally find to be a WTF -- if you don't have (or can't get) permssion to install into <font face="courier new,courier">C:\Program Files</font> then it typcially means it's not your computer and you're not supposed to be installing anything anyway.
Quoted for fucking truth. With a possible exception made for serfs in workplaces where IT is too fucked up to put anything on company workstations other than IE, because honestly, if you can't kill off all the advertising the Web is just a fucking wasteland. With landmines.
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@Lorne Kates said:
Totally agree. We all dream of founding the next big Web 2.0 startup about misinterpreting jokes, and selling out after a few years to live the high life on VC money. But for every Twitter activist who makes a name for herself for #CancelColbert, there are thirty others toiling in obscurity.@Ben L. said:
If Captain Oblivious becomes a regular, I can finally retire from my job as a misinterpreter of jokes!
I don't think that's a good career. I can't see people paying you to do that, and you'll need to support yourself somehow. Maybe stay in school for now, get your degree, and misinterpret jokes part time as a hobby. If, by some chance, you do start to make enough money of it to support yourself, great! But just don't plan on it.
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@morbiuswilters said:
mostly it just revolved around Tom Cruise being creepy
Competent casting, then.
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@ais523 said:
The problem is, on Linux, you can correctly and safely hardcode all the paths; if I install an executable for all users into /usr/bin, it's going to find its platform-specific data files in /usr/lib, its platform-independent data files in /usr/share, etc. All these directory names are standard, and placed into the executable during compile.
Linux chose a really, really shitty way to handle this. Hard-coding paths is always dumb.
@ais523 said:
On Windows, it's usual to ship executables, rather than compile by hand; and the official correct method (and the only one that actually works, and one that is rarely used in practice and thus creates a nice stream of WTFs) of locating things like platform-specifc data files is to call Windows-specific system calls to discover which directories they're in.
Right, as it should be. That was also the correct way in Mac Classic, and presumably is in OS X still. That is because these OSes were designed by non-morons.
@ais523 said:
This means that instead of locating directories being an issue for the installer, it's now an issue for the program, making it rather more porting work to change the directory location (instead of just changing the installer, now I have to change the program too).
You mean... after porting an app to Windows, it might have to make Windows-specific system calls!?!? Say it ain't so, Joe!
As an aside, do Linux/open source people even know what the word "port" means? Protip: it doesn't mean "barely compiles and kind of runs sometimes if you do stuff exactly right".
@ais523 said:
The alternative is to just put everything in the same directory, and look in the current directory; this isn't correct, but it's easy and it works,
Does not work. There's no OS contract that your working directory is the same directory your .exe resides in. Look it up.
@ais523 said:
and it's much easier to get it working-well-enough-for-99%-of-users than it is to add Windows-specific system calls into your executable to do the installer's job. So is it surprising that people take that alternative?
What's surprising is that people don't give a shit if their program is broken. I'd happy blame this on ignorance, but point out the problem and they continue not giving a shit. The only shocking thing here is how little regard the open source community has for their users, and how little they care about shipping working products.
@ais523 said:
(That said, not working without admin credentials after doing something like that is a problem, and something that software lazily ported from Linux would be likely to get right. And that upgrade nonsense is just ridiculous.)
I hope there's a missing "not" in that first sentence.
But hell, lazily ported Linux software can't even get "installed in a folder with spaces in the name" right and-- to remind you-- Linux itself supports spaces in folder names.
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@cvi said:
@morbiuswilters said:
Ethernet-over-comet.Goddamn. What, did you create an account and then get kidnapped for 5 years?
Nah, probably just a really high latency internet connection.
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@morbiuswilters said:
(Seriously, 2001 probably looked like absolute balls on paper, but it's a great film.)
2001 was a pretty good ninety-minute film.
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@blakeyrat said:
@ais523 said:
Every well-known resource needs some kind of well-known identifier. What is it, exactly, that makes "/usr/bin" dumb in a way that "CSIDL_PROGRAM_FILES" is not?The problem is, on Linux, you can correctly and safely hardcode all the paths; if I install an executable for all users into /usr/bin, it's going to find its platform-specific data files in /usr/lib, its platform-independent data files in /usr/share, etc. All these directory names are standard, and placed into the executable during compile.
Linux chose a really, really shitty way to handle this. Hard-coding paths is always dumb.
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@flabdablet said:
@blakeyrat said:
@ais523 said:
Every well-known resource needs some kind of well-known identifier. What is it, exactly, that makes "/usr/bin" dumb in a way that "CSIDL_PROGRAM_FILES" is not?The problem is, on Linux, you can correctly and safely hardcode all the paths; if I install an executable for all users into /usr/bin, it's going to find its platform-specific data files in /usr/lib, its platform-independent data files in /usr/share, etc. All these directory names are standard, and placed into the executable during compile.
Linux chose a really, really shitty way to handle this. Hard-coding paths is always dumb.
- Too easy to remember
- Too quick to type
- Doesn't require any extra system-specific calls
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@flabdablet said:
Every well-known resource needs some kind of well-known identifier. What is it, exactly, that makes "/usr/bin" dumb in a way that "CSIDL_PROGRAM_FILES" is not?
Well firstly, "Program Files" describes what goes into the folder in a way that "/usr/bin" does not. So the naming is shite.
But now you're calling /usr/bin an identifier, even though it's not... it's a hard-coded path. So I guess you have some magical explanation for that I should be aware of before continuing to answer your loaded-ass question? Are you now going to say, "it's not a hard coded path because symbolic links herp derp derp!" or something?
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@blakeyrat said:
What's surprising is that people don't give a shit if their program is broken. I'd happy blame this on ignorance, but point out the problem and they continue not giving a shit. The only shocking thing here is how little regard the open source community has for their users, and how little they care about shipping working products.
The not at all shocking thing here is your failure to acknowledge that "here" is a discussion about the shittiness of a proprietary Windows-only package, just so you have an excuse to wheel out one of your customarily tedious tirades.
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@blakeyrat said:
Well firstly, "Program Files" describes what goes into the folder in a way that "/usr/bin" does not. So the naming is shite.
And yet it still manages to be less misleading than System32.
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@blakeyrat said:
But now you're calling /usr/bin an identifier, even though it's not... it's a hard-coded path. So I guess you have some magical explanation for that I should be aware of before continuing to answer your loaded-ass question? Are you now going to say, "it's not a hard coded path because symbolic links herp derp derp!" or something?
I was using the word "identifier" in the general sense of a name for a thing, not in the more restricted sense you'd typically find in a programming language reference manual. The point is that if you're going to use some resource, you'll generally need a name to refer to it by. Whether that name is an actual file path, or something you need to pass to a library function to translate to a file path, seems to me to make very little difference; a well known resource needs a well known name.
So if there's a long established, well documented and almost universally accepted convention in place for laying out a system-wide file tree, then what exactly is it that you think makes simply taking advantage of that convention by hardcoding the appropriate pathnames "dumber" than requiring every program to translate the appropriate CSIDL_xxxx identifiers to arbitrary pathnames? The latter just seems like busywork to me.
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@anonymous234 said:
@Ben L. said:
...can't tell if serious...@blakeyrat said:
I still haven't managed to get the TF2 dedicated server running.game *tool* developers are the worst of the worst
If anyone disagrees with blakeyrat, find a family member who doesn't have experience with Valve's Hammer world editor and see how far they can get without reading a guide.Getting srcds running isn't that hard as long as you read the [url=https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/SteamCMD]SteamCMD wiki page[/url] and know that TF2's server Steam ID is 232250.
Once its installed, you run srcds on Windows and get a nice GUI to start it... or start it from the command line with srcds -console -game tf +maxplayers 24 +map ctf_2fort... on Linux, substitute ./srcds_run for srcds.
Hammer, on the other hand, is ridiculously complicated and also has a tendency to crash.
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@flabdablet said:
@blakeyrat said:
Did you mean to link to the [url=http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/lsb]LSB page[/url] for that well documented link? The one you're using is 404ing.But now you're calling /usr/bin an identifier, even though it's not... it's a hard-coded path. So I guess you have some magical explanation for that I should be aware of before continuing to answer your loaded-ass question? Are you now going to say, "it's not a hard coded path because symbolic links herp derp derp!" or something?
I was using the word "identifier" in the general sense of a name for a thing, not in the more restricted sense you'd typically find in a programming language reference manual. The point is that if you're going to use some resource, you'll generally need a name to refer to it by. Whether that name is an actual file path, or something you need to pass to a library function to translate to a file path, seems to me to make very little difference; a well known resource needs a well known name.
So if there's a long established, well documented and almost universally accepted convention in place for laying out a system-wide file tree, then what exactly is it that you think makes simply taking advantage of that convention by hardcoding the appropriate pathnames "dumber" than requiring every program to translate the appropriate CSIDL_xxxx identifiers to arbitrary pathnames? The latter just seems like busywork to me.
The LSB has changed over time and really only applies to Linux... other UNIX-based OSes are free to do whatever. Most implement the [url=http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap10.html]POSIX standard[/url], but that only specifies 6 directories... /bin, /lib, /etc, /usr, etcetera aren't even included in it.
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@powerlord said:
Did you mean to link to the LSB page for that well documented link? The one you're using is 404ing.
Dropped a quote while pasting. Fixed now.
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@flabdablet said:
I was using the word "identifier" in the general sense of a name for a thing, not in the more restricted sense you'd typically find in a programming language reference manual.
Right; but it's not just an identifier, it's an actual hard-coded path.
@flabdablet said:
The point is that if you're going to use some resource, you'll generally need a name to refer to it by. Whether that name is an actual file path, or something you need to pass to a library function to translate to a file path, seems to me to make very little difference; a well known resource needs a well known name.
Ok...
@flabdablet said:
So if there's a long established, well documented and almost universally accepted convention in place for laying out a system-wide file tree, then what exactly is it that you think makes simply taking advantage of that convention by hardcoding the appropriate pathnames "dumber" than requiring every program to translate the appropriate CSIDL_xxxx identifiers to arbitrary pathnames?
Because it gives the user/system administrator power. The power to ensure applications are installed on a network drive. The power to localize the folder name, if they so desire. The power to assign meaningful quotas to different types of data. Here's where you chime in with the tired old, "but most people don't do that!!!! Nyah!!" Right. Most don't. And it's harmless to them. But some do. And it's CRITICAL for them.
That power is why Windows is popular in the first place. That power is (one of the reasons) why Linux can't come close to the popularity of Windows, despite being free. The sooner the Linux people figure this out and fix their OS by making it even a third as good as the competition, the sooner we have meaningful competition in the OS market. But they won't, and we won't, and IT is a hopeless morass.
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@Lorne Kates said:
During the summer, while on break from college, you can tour the U.S. misinterpreting jokes.@Ben L. said:
If Captain Oblivious becomes a regular, I can finally retire from my job as a misinterpreter of jokes!
I don't think that's a good career. I can't see people paying you to do that, and you'll need to support yourself somehow. Maybe stay in school for now, get your degree, and misinterpret jokes part time as a hobby. If, by some chance, you do start to make enough money of it to support yourself, great! But just don't plan on it.
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@morbiuswilters said:
@Snooder said:
Well, it was made not too long before their divorce, so I would imagine that maybe some lingering real-life issues filtered through the production.
Like Tom Cruise being a gay, crazy, Scientologist midget? And Kidman being shudder Australian?
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@blakeyrat said:
The power to ensure applications are installed on a network drive.
There's nothing preventing /usr/bin from pointing to a network drive. I'm not trying to be overly pedantic here (for once); this is a feature of the unified filesystem. There are no drive letters, you can mount any device to any directory you want, no matter what kind of device (hard drive partition, disc based media, network share, FTP, whatever, it doesn't matter). I would kill for that kind of flexibility on Windows.
@blakeyrat said:The power to localize the folder name, if they so desire.
What's the point of localizing system directory names? That's like localizing the names of System32 and SysWOW64.Also note that /usr/bin contains no words, it's language agnostic.OK, brain fart, bin is a word, but it's an abbreviation for binary here so I didn't connect it. @blakeyrat said:The power to assign meaningful quotas to different types of data
It seems like the *nix file system gives you more granularity here, as instead of just "Program Files" you have a separate directory for libraries, for documentation, for executables, for settings files, and for user documents. There are more compartments for you to enforce your quotas on.
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@morbiuswilters said:
crazy, Scientologist
Brought to you by the Department of Repetitive Redundancy Department.
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@blakeyrat said:
@flabdablet said:
So if there's a long established, well documented and almost universally accepted convention in place for laying out a system-wide file tree, then what exactly is it that you think makes simply taking advantage of that convention by hardcoding the appropriate pathnames "dumber" than requiring every program to translate the appropriate CSIDL_xxxx identifiers to arbitrary pathnames?
Because it gives the user/system administrator power. The power to ensure applications are installed on a network drive. The power to localize the folder name, if they so desire. The power to assign meaningful quotas to different types of data. Here's where you chime in with the tired old, "but most people don't do that!!!! Nyah!!"
No, this is where I chime in with the fact that Unix also gives sysadmins ways to do all of those things, and that it has done so for longer than Windows has even existed.
One of Microsoft's most annoying tendencies is to trumpet every half-assed attempt to replicate some totally customary Unix facility as if it were a revolutionary new idea they've just come up with themselves. They've been playing that game since the early 80s and show no signs of giving it up.
@blakeyrat said:
That power is why Windows is popular in the first place.
The main reason Windows got popular in the first place has nothing at all to do with technical merit. It was all due to the savvy OS lock-in deals that MS made with a raft of microcomputer hardware vendors, in an era when most microcomputers weren't capable of running a minicomputer OS like Unix.
Once it was popular enough to make them some serious money, they improved it to the point where they could go after the corporate centralized management market. And again, the basis of their success there is a couple of technologies that were commonplace on Unix systems (LDAP and Kerberos) which they rebadged as Active Directory and sold the hell out of.
Now I'm not denying that MS has done a tremendous amount of technical work of their own, and I'm not denying that their corporate OS offerings have been competent competitors for Unix for at least a decade and a half. But if you honestly believe that most IT customers make purchasing decisions on the basis of technical merit, as opposed to marketing and herd behaviour, then I honestly believe you're deluded.
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@flabdablet said:
Dropbox (whose installation unpacks to about 70 MiB) does this as well, and since version 2.x they appear to have removed the setup option that used to let you specify the installation path explicitly. Gives me the shits. At least with Dropbox you can work around it by just grabbing a copy of "%APPDATA%\Dropbox\bin" and uninstalling the thing again; nothing its installer sticks in the HKLM branch of the registry seems to be vital, and Dropbox\bin\dropbox.exe does correctly set up all the HKCU keys and configure Explorer correctly for the user on first run regardless of where it's run from or how many people are running it concurrently.
Oh god, I hate Dropbox. They do this even on Linux. It's the only software I have on my PC that randomly decides to autoreinstall itself to $HOME/.local, without a single warning. It also happens to be the only non-open source software, so don't be that quick to assume this a "FOSS thing".
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@joe.edwards said:
There are no drive letters
Do kids these days ever ask, "Why 'C'?"
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@boomzilla said:
@joe.edwards said:
There are no drive letters
Do kids these days ever ask, "Why 'C'?"
Well obviously A: is for your 3½ diskettes and B: is for your 5¼... Oh my God, I'm fucking old.
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@ais523 said:
The problem is, on Linux, you can correctly and safely hardcode all the paths;
You know, that's not a point in Linux's favor. It's just lazy and shitty.
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@blakeyrat said:
Because it gives the user/system administrator power. The power to ensure applications are installed on a network drive. The power to localize the folder name, if they so desire. The power to assign meaningful quotas to different types of data. Here's where you chime in with the tired old, "but most people don't do that!!!! Nyah!!" Right. Most don't. And it's harmless to them. But some do. And it's CRITICAL for them.
That power is why Windows is popular in the first place. That power is (one of the reasons) why Linux can't come close to the popularity of Windows, despite being free. The sooner the Linux people figure this out and fix their OS by making it even a third as good as the competition, the sooner we have meaningful competition in the OS market. But they won't, and we won't, and IT is a hopeless morass.
Exactly. Hard-coded paths are fucking bullshit. This is twenty-fucking-fourteen, software should not just plop its ass down in one place and refuse to work when moved.
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@joe.edwards said:
There's nothing preventing /usr/bin from pointing to a network drive.
Yes there is, you really, really should not do that.
@joe.edwards said:
It seems like the *nix file system gives you more granularity here, as instead of just "Program Files" you have a separate directory for libraries, for documentation, for executables, for settings files, and for user documents. There are more compartments for you to enforce your quotas on.
Except you can't enforce them on a case-by-case basis. Every fucking library gets shat out into /usr/lib. Every fucking binary gets barfed up into /usr/bin or /usr/sbin*.
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@joe.edwards said:
@boomzilla said:
But what about your 8-inch floppies?@joe.edwards said:
There are no drive letters
Do kids these days ever ask, "Why 'C'?"
Well obviously A: is for your 3½ diskettes and B: is for your 5¼... Oh my God, I'm fucking old.
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@joe.edwards said:
Well obviously A: is for your 3½ diskettes and B: is for your 5¼... Oh my God, I'm fucking old.
Nah, this means you're young. A: is obviously for 5¼ floppy, and B: is for 3½ one, which was added a few years later when those newfangled not-so-floppy discs became more common.
