Sinofsky: Classic Desktop Is a Separate Application in Windows 8
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 31st Aug 2011 19:42 UTC
Windows Over the past few days, Microsoft has been talking about improvements made to Windows 8 on its 'Building Windows 8' blog at MSDN. Strangely enough, the improvements mentioned were either dealing with the classic desktop, or were demonstrated using the classic desktop - and not the fancy Metro user interface which is supposed to be Windows 8's big new thing. Today's post finally gives a little more detail about how the classic and Metro UI work together, but questions still remain.
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RE: Gates rant
by atsureki on Thu 1st Sep 2011 07:29 UTC in reply to "Gates rant"
atsureki
Member since:
2006-03-12

What's wrong with file system?


For starters, the massive depths you have to go to to change permissions just to allow yourself to see some of the files on it, and the opaquely named directories those files reside in. Basically, the fact that the OS itself has decided you're not allowed to modify things you might actually want or need to modify, not that you can tell because the file and directory names are useless.

Does he mean the explorer file manager? It didn't become too bad until vista I thought. But in 2003, he says unusable? Surely he isn't talking about the actual fs, because what casual users ever mess with file permissions, etc?


In Mac OS X, I can copy my home directory or ~/Library across installations and be completely migrated. In Windows XP or newer, if I try to copy my Documents and Settings or User folder, I get an endless stream of permissions errors. You need tools specially designed to work around the Windows voodoo. In short, you are not in control, because the filesystem is not usable.

And complaining in 2003 that the registry isn't usable? Wikipedia tells me that the registry originated in 1992, so Bill is about 11 years too late here. The registry was always doomed to failure.


Only because Microsoft names everything with hashes or serial numbers like Q329048, which, as Gates points out, is meaningless.

And last, about the add/remove programs thing, he actually has a point here. I have no idea how they managed to so royally screw this up between 2000 and xp. Maybe I have rose-colored glasses, but I don't remember things being that bad in 2000. But again, this is the result of not having something like aptitude.


I remember Windows 95 being unable to uninstall Red Alert from my mom's work laptop. She didn't use it for anything, so I played RTSes on it. She got in some trouble for that. The Add/Remove Programs pane is nothing but registry entries pointing to scripts. It's a tenuous system with many weak links, but yes, it used to at least look clean.

Reply Parent Score: 6

RE[2]: Gates rant
by justSomeGuy on Thu 1st Sep 2011 08:05 in reply to "RE: Gates rant"
justSomeGuy Member since:
2011-08-30

Good points. I completely agree about trying to migrate windows profiles.

Reply Parent Score: 2

RE[2]: Gates rant
by Bill Shooter of Bul on Thu 1st Sep 2011 13:56 in reply to "RE: Gates rant"
Bill Shooter of Bul Member since:
2006-07-14

Pretty much true. I always thought Gates was referring to different things that were originally meant to be human understandable but now aren't. The registry seemed like a good idea at some point. A central registry for all settings. So all of your programs would be have the same way! But then COM got its hands on it so each com control had to install itself in the registry to let every program that could ever use it could figure out what features it provided.

Reply Parent Score: 2