h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Your experience is indicative of the larger problem much open source software has -- the implication that the user is expected to fix any problems themselves, just because the source code is available. This often inspires laziness and lack of concern for quality control in the main developers.

it isn't only a problem with open source developers, and has little to do with the source code being available.

it is basically the open source varient of what is refered to as "the last mile" problem.

In open source stuff this tends to manifest as poor documentation and a tendency for the developers to expect you to fix some of the config / install problems yourself, but in fairness to them, a lot of people moan about this for software that has yet to reach it's 1.0 (stable) release version.

In the windows world you see the same problem, but it has a diferent face. sometimes, if you have the right hardware / software combination, it guesses right, and you find a completely painless install process which everyone claims is what is really needed on linux. the rest of the time it fails to install, leaves a "broken" install on the system, which will niether install or uninstall, installs the wrong diver version, or in some other way breaks, forcing you to have to go into mode and try and manually install the stuff.

Unfortunately, you then have a much bigger problem of lack of documentation, because those who implimented the "nice" install routine just assumed that it would work, so you often have dificulty finding out which stuff you need to install, in what order, and what the dependencies are regarding versioning. often the programs or drivers have been written so they only work on specific versions of windows, so you have to jump through extra hoops to find the updates, in the specific os version you happen to be running.

As this will usually be binary only software with deliberately obscured registry tweaks needed, you can be left totally stuffed, and that is before the hardware board comes loose from its socket and windows decides to delete the stuff you just spent hours installing, and all of the config files as well.

All operating systems and big software packages have large amounts of complexity involved, often dictated by the nature of the task it is designed to do.

open source handles it by making the config files fairly self documenting (although some are less clear than others) and the code fully available so you can figure out what the options do.

Windows does it by hiding details, often behind inflexible gui's, and either it works like clockwork, or you just can't find out how to solvethe problems. even if you could, you can't usually fix them because you don't have the source code to recompile the software.

A few months ago, a linux magazine reviewed windows from a linux perspective in the same style as windows magazines review linux, just for fun to see how it would compare, and giving it the benefit of the doubt where possible.

the answers were extremely conclusive. Both systems have their intended audiences and related ethos. when viewed from the other perspective, neither do partiularly well.

However as a proprietary system hiding details in the name of simple user interfaces the conclusion was undeniable. when windows software has a problem, it is usually a catastrophic failure of capabilities, which can only be fixed by starting again with someone elses software.

open source users generally prefer the idea that if there is something minor wrong with the software, it can be easily extended or fixed, and the changes given back to the authors so we all benefit.

it is a matter of taste.

All good points, but none of them excuse releasing an installer that, *after* it's started changing files on your HDD, pops up a message to say the options you selected haven't been coded yet, and that it's now your problem to fix.

And it's not like it's a niche package with a couple of dozen users - PHP is one of the most common non-Micro$oft packages in the world! If it offers a "hassle-free" Win32 installer, the least the developers could do is make sure it works before releasing it!

Have you installed Windows recently? That experience you describe is not typical.

I agree that sometimes it will not detect the drivers for your hardware and you'll have to install them manually, but that is not difficult. At worst, you may have to extract the "inf" files, which describe to Windows how to install the driver, and the driver software from a .zip archive or similar, and then install them.

Also, any driver that is 'Microsoft certified' (and subsequently signed by their hardware test labs) will have undergone testing and is usually of a high quality.

"... and that is before the hardware board comes loose from its socket and windows decides to delete the stuff you just spent hours installing, and all of the config files as well."

You can't blame Windows or any other closed source software for not fitting your hardware correctly.

I have had this happen to board which were screwed in, but the same thing happens if you need to movethe board allong 1 slot to allow an extra board to fit. this is never reasonable.

As for "microsoft certified" drivers, there has been a persistent problem for years that the certified driver is very out of date, because they take so long to test them. I have seen hardware where it was unavailable before the driver had been certified, so certification is no help.

The bigger problem is not where it doesn't recognise your hardware, because you know that it will be akward to fix.

Often the problem is that it misrecognises the hardware, and insists on installing the wrong driver. then you have to first remove the broken drivers, and then find and install the right drivers.

It is especially akward when it just says that it's found new hardware, and won't tell you what sort it is.

As to installing windows recently, I have installed quite a few versions this year, but I won't install windows xp because of the large number of "features" which make your life massively more difficult than it needs to be.

examples include notepad insisting on looking for files in "my documents", even when you want to use it for modifying c source code, which you would never want to have parked there. there are similar problems with images.

If you only use out of date hardware which is brand name, the windows installation process has been mostly ok since windows 95. if you use cheaper generic hardware or bleeding edge software, then the it is definately a much ropier situation.

I know it is fashionable now to buy preinstalled hardware with the software on a "recovery cd", but some of us actually use hardware for longer than the six months or so that it takes for windows to break.

Regarding the driver problems, what version of Windows are you talking about here? If you're referring to Windows 95 or 98 then that's rather irrelevant these days. As for Windows Me, I don't know why they bothered releasing that, in my opinion they should have ended the DOS-lineage Windows with '98.

Windows 2000 and XP are much better with regards to driver installion.

If you have trouble identifying your hardware you could use a third party tool such as PCITree (http://www.pcitree.de/) or similar.

"examples include notepad insisting on looking for files in 'my documents', even when you want to use it for modifying c source code, which you would never want to have parked there."

I'm a little unclear about what you mean here. I assume you're saying that the Open dialog box defaults to the My Documents directory?

It does do this, but only if Notepad was not used to save a file elsewhere previously. This isn't even a feature of Notepad as such, it's part of the Common Dialog Controls. The last used directory is stored in the registry here:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ComDlg32\LastVisitedMRU

If you don't like the default location of your 'My Documents' directory you can change it here:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders

Alternatively you could alter the contents of the 'Places Bar' that appears on the left in the Open dialog box. These allow you to quickly change the current directory by clicking once on the icons, and can be changed here:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\comdlg32\PlacesBar\[Place0,Place1,...,Place5]

This is exactly the same behaviour that the Notepad and Common Dialog Controls in Windows 2000 exhibit, by the way.

It sounds like the problems you are having with Windows are mainly due to you not knowing how to use it well enough.

really?

so how do I set notepad to have the default directory of my website when I am working on that, the cfiles directory when I am developing the webtools used to aid in the website development, and a completely different directory when I just want to make a quick jotting?

in earlier versions, ie win3.11 and win95, if you opened a file in notepad, and selected "save as" to clone it, it came up in the working directory. now you are expected to store exerything including the kitchen sink in the default directory, and when they release longhorn, even your images will have been forced into the registry where you will no longer be able to get at them sensibly, even if they are part of your website you need to copy for someone.

how does this conform to your statement of "not knowing how to use windows", when it is microsoft trying to decide for me where to store my own files?

I happen to agree with you that windows ME was an abomination, and I am only using that on some of my hardware because you can not get drivers for anything older.

but windows 2000 and XP are even more unstable unless you install them on ntfs, in which case you have the problem that microsoft insists on trying to keep the ntfs specifications secret, so you are not allowed to access your own data from outside windows.

If you install either of them on fat32 it is just as bad, because it wastes drive space like crazy (one of my directories took 100MB on fat32, 30MB on fat16 and only 15 on linux, which is wasing 3 bytes out of four!!!).

Because of this, I am moving over to linux as quickly as I can, only having problems where microsoft have hijacked my data into proprietary formats unnecessarily.

by the way, "ComDlg32" and "\User Shell Folders" don't exist in my registry on windows ME, so I am being expected to change something that isn't there, which is unguessable, and is generally a nuisance, just because microsoft want me to work by their rules (which don't really work either).

not to mention the hundreds of other "default" options in the registry which are similarly problematic, and whose location will probably change between versions of windows (if past examples of microsoft behaviour are an indication of their future behaviour).

It's a good job they are well on their way to going bust really, isn't it.

Why don't you just change the directory after you've started Notepad? Just because it defaults to the last directory you saved something in doesn't mean you have to use that directory. I've already described a way you can adjust the 'Places Bar' in the dialog to get to the directories quicker. Microsoft's free 'Tweak UI' add-on can be used to change it more easily than modifying registry values.

"... but I won't install windows xp because of the large number of "features" which make your life massively more difficult than it needs to be.

examples include notepad insisting on looking for files in "my documents", even when you want to use it for modifying c source code, which you would never want to have parked there."

Anyway, to get back to your original point, this is a pretty trivial complaint against using Windows XP. If this tiny 'misfeature' of Notepad upsets you that much use a different text editor.

"but windows 2000 and XP are even more unstable unless you install them on ntfs, in which case you have the problem that microsoft insists on trying to keep the ntfs specifications secret, so you are not allowed to access your own data from outside windows."

You should install them on NTFS. It is a technically unsound decision to use FAT32. Most importantly, NTFS includes a transaction log whereas FAT32 doesn't .. allowing a greater chance of recovery should your computer crash whilst altering the filesystem.

There are a few NTFS implementations that aren't written by Microsoft. NTFSDOS on sysinternals.com is one that comes to mind. The NTFS filesystem driver in the Linux kernel is another.

Also there is the Captive NTFS project that interfaces Linux with Microsoft's ntfs.sys.

Your claim that you can't access data held on an NTFS partition from outside Windows is false.

"not to mention the hundreds of other "default" options in the registry which are similarly problematic, and whose location will probably change between versions of windows (if past examples of microsoft behaviour are an indication of their future behaviour)."

Look on MSDN. Most of the registry keys that Windows uses are well documented there. And those that aren't are usually documented elsewhere (use Google or similar.)

I've seen a number of non-microsoft ntfs implimentations, but all of those that I have seen claim that they are read only, and support for writing is unstable, verging on sucidal.

Microsoft have already changed the format a number of times, the worst being the nt4 to nt5 change when you had to guess the right order to apply the patches or lose your programs and data, and their insistance on changing the format, and keeping it hidden just goes to prove that you shouldn't trust ntfs to stay working between versions.

The fact that you admit that you shouldn't use xp on anything else because of its instability just points to it being a good idea not to use it anyway.

You are right about the windows registry keys being documented, but it is in the manner of "take the second turn before the pub" type documentation. If you already know the answer, you can verify you got it right or not, but you can't find it if you don't already know it.

it is remenicent of the documentation in microsoft visual c, where they deliberately mixed standard and non-standard features, recommended their versions in preference to the standard calls, and generally made it difficult to figure out which calls were portable and which calls were not.

I also note you have not commented on the wasting of 3/4 of your disk space by fat32.

oh, and notepad does not default to the last directory something was saved in, it always defaults to the default directory, unless you are saving a file you have just loaded into it.

it is not this particular feature of notepad which is the problem, but the dozens of similarly nuisance features in many different applications which are the problem, all of which are either unsolvable, or requre registry tweaks that your average user would never be able to find.

It shows a fundamental contempt for the user.

As i say, it's a good thing they are well on the way to going bust.

Progress is being made on the NTFS front. I definitely prefer NTFS over FAT32. The WINE project wrote a wrapper for NTFS.SYS that allows you to read and write NTFS volumes from Linux using the Windows native driver. The only catch is you need to own a copy of Windows to legally use the NTFS.SYS file.

If there are places where you're keen on using Linux features but still have to have Windows installed, you may want to check out http://www.colinux.org - you can run the Linux Kernel inside a running copy of Windows NT. It's not emulation like Cygwin or VMWare - it's an actual copy of the operating system running concurrently with NT, sharing the computer's resources. I thought it was pretty cool since it allows you to run Linux binaries without recompiling, rebooting, or having a massively powerful computer just so you can run an emulator.

"It is a technically unsound decision to use FAT32"

Depends what you're doing with it. There's a filesystem limitation in NTFS where, if you're building a file a byte at a time, it "tops out" at 2GB, while the same procedure in FAT32 "tops out" at 4GB. This means that for applications such as live video capture you can grab twice as much data to a FAT32 partition before the system falls over... Note that you can have much larger files in both filesystems, but they must be created by concatenating smaller files; these limitations are purely related to writing a single character to an open file, and are fairly well documented.


"I also note you have not commented on the wasting of 3/4 of your disk space by fat32"

You speak as if FAT32 was a single format; there are a large number of different cluster sizes available. All your posting told me was that the default cluster size for NTFS happened to store your particular data more efficiently than the default cluster size for FAT32. That doesn't mean that you couldn't have formatted the drive with a different cluster size and found a better "match" for your particular usage pattern, making FAT32 seem more efficient than NTFS. I personally prefer slightly larger than the default cluster sizes which are less efficient on space, but tend to be more efficient on performance.

"You speak as if FAT32 was a single format"... not really. there is a fundamental problem with the fat filesystem that your partition size determines your minimum block size. it is this minimum block size problem which causes the waste.

in the end, either you end up using a 2Gb dos partition moderately inefficiently, or a larger fat32 partition very inefficiently.

I didn't mention the efficiency of ntfs, because I won't use it, as it has too many other problems which mandate against it.

Currently I am using djgpp to move all my self built tools into c, and then the only requirement for windows will be drivers for unfriendly hardware (which is a reducing problem) and the historical emails.

In the long run, I don't see fat as viable except for block storage devies like usb pen drives, cameras and mps players. I don't see ntfs being any better due to the lockin and lockout policies of microsoft, so the only future for ntfs is as part of a microsoft os, but it is getting much more expensive to be a microsoft only company, so that isn't viable in the long term either.

Which year do you lot think microsoft will go bust. will it be just before or just after the release of longhorn (if they manage to get it out on time).

"The fact that you admit that you shouldn't use xp on anything else because of its instability just points to it being a good idea not to use it anyway."

No, you've missed my point. I don't think you should use FAT for *anything* when you have a better option. To analogise slightly, would you run Linux on a FAT filesystem when you have the option of ext2 or ext3?

"You are right about the windows registry keys being documented, but it is in the manner of 'take the second turn before the pub' type documentation. If you already know the answer, you can verify you got it right or not, but you can't find it if you don't already know it."

I don't know what you do to find out stuff registry values, so I can't really comment on whether that is a fair statement or not. Here's outline of what I do if I want to find registry values relating to some aspect of a Windows component's configuration:

1. Searching on google with "site:msdn.microsoft.com" in the search string, for the registry value or concepts involved.
2. Searching the microsoft.* newsgroups for the registry value or concepts involved.
3. Broader google search for the registry key or concepts involved.
4. Identify the files involved in the process on my system and:
4a. Extract all likely ASCII and Unicode strings from the files looking for clues.
4b. Run Sysinternals' Registry Monitor with appropriate filtering.
4c. Run Datarescue's IDA Pro on the files and examine calls to the Windows API registry functions.
5. Ask someone else who may know.

I almost always find an answer by then. Normally only steps 1-3 are required.

"I also note you have not commented on the wasting of 3/4 of your disk space by fat32."

I don't have anything to say about it, as I haven't used any variant of FAT for anything for years. Except the occasional floppy disk.

"oh, and notepad does not default to the last directory something was saved in, it always defaults to the default directory, unless you are saving a file you have just loaded into it."

It does in Windows 2000 and XP, which is what we were talking about.

"it is not this particular feature of notepad which is the problem, but the dozens of similarly nuisance features in many different applications which are the problem, all of which are either unsolvable, or requre registry tweaks that your average user would never be able to find."

The notepad feature you don't like is not unsolvable. If you wish to supply me with the version number of the notepad.exe you don't like (please also specify file size and md5sum as an extra check), I will happily provide you with instructions on how to adjust it to default to the current working directory. You will require a hex editor to apply this fix though.

Windows, like any other modern operating system, is a very complicated package. Expecting an average user to be able to change anything they want in this system seems an unrealistic expectation - and not just on Windows either.

"There's a filesystem limitation in NTFS where, if you're building a file a byte at a time, it 'tops out' at 2GB, while the same procedure in FAT32 'tops out' at 4GB."

This sounds interesting, could you please post more information about it? Which version of NTFS are you talking about?

I got that info from a Pinnacle Systems forum, discussing limitations in video capture, and confirmed it through experimentation. If capturing a stream to an NTFS drive, the capture app would crash at exactly 2GB; for a FAT32 drive it crashed at exactly 4GB. That was the explaination given.

Having been able to demonstrate the behaviour myself, I didn't pursue the problem any further, other than to reformat my "scratch" drive from NTFS to FAT32 to allow me to perform longer video captures.

p.s. when I say "fairly well documented", I mean there were a number of articles that were linked to from various forum posts, all essentially saying the same thing. As far as I recall, at least one of them was on MSDN.

Mmm that's a strange one! The structure of the NTFS filesystem is such that the filesize limit is 2^64 bytes where as FAT32 is 2^32 bytes. I wonder if it was the way the program was using the file APIs that caused it to crash. What was the name of the capture program you were using?

So, to find the keys, you have to get 2 dedicated proprietary programs, subscribe to various large microsoft specific newsgroups, and have a fairly good idea what they keys need to be in the first place.

proves my point really.

"It does in Windows 2000 and XP, which is what we were talking about."

not really, we were talking about the more general nuisense policies of microsoft with regards to the consimer versions of the operating system. 2000 and xp are based around the NT kernel with the aims of using the NT versions where possible. It might be that they were never allowed to be so silly in the NT server domain.

"Windows, like any other modern operating system, is a very complicated package"

absolutely, but microsoft try and pretend that it isn't. Unfortunately for them anyone with any knowledge of proper computing knows which orifice they are talking out of.

"Expecting an average user to be able to change anything they want in this system seems an unrealistic expectation"

no, I don't expect that. Equally I expect that there will not be deliberate attempts by the software writer to choose inappropriate defaults and then hide where they are set.

in the days of win3.11 and to some extent win95, if some option was set to point at a silly directory, you could just search the drives, looking in the ".ini" files for that path using any text search program, and you would find the option in a few minutes. nowadays, you yourself have pointed out that you have to jump through hoops to find the same information, and in some cases just give up and try and find an expert.

Under every other operating system I have used, it is easy to trace these things using a little bit of knowledge and a little bit of time, and you don't really need much of either.

"So, to find the keys, you have to get 2 dedicated proprietary programs, subscribe to various large microsoft specific newsgroups, and have a fairly good idea what they keys need to be in the first place.

proves my point really."

I only use those two programs when I can't find it searching the Internet, which as I pointed out is quite rare. There is no necessity to subscribe to any newsgroups as they are all fully searchable from Google.

It doesn't prove your point at all, which was "you can't find it if you don't already know it" .. I have just describeded to you a method of finding what these values are that has a high rate of success.

"not really, we were talking about the more general nuisense policies of microsoft with regards to the consimer versions of the operating system."

Yes we were talking about that earlier, but your example of notepad's behaviour in Windows XP was what I was replying to then.

"2000 and xp are based around the NT kernel with the aims of using the NT versions where possible."

?

"absolutely, but microsoft try and pretend that it isn't. Unfortunately for them anyone with any knowledge of proper computing knows which orifice they are talking out of."

I don't know where you get the idea that they pretend that it's not a complicated system. It has some simplistic abstractions, but that doesn't count as pretending anything.

"Equally I expect that there will not be deliberate attempts by the software writer to choose inappropriate defaults and then hide where they are set."

Do you have any appropriate examples of that? Putting configuration information in the registry isn't hiding it -- that's what it's there for.

"in the days of win3.11 and to some extent win95, if some option was set to point at a silly directory, you could just search the drives, looking in the '.ini' files for that path using any text search program, and you would find the option in a few minutes. nowadays, you yourself have pointed out that you have to jump through hoops to find the same information, and in some cases just give up and try and find an expert."

Are you seriously suggesting that having a bunch of .ini files scattered all over the drive is the way forward?

The Registry Editor has a search function as well, you know, which will do the exact same thing you just described only on the Registry. I should've put that in my method above, but it's so obvious I forgot.

"Under every other operating system I have used, it is easy to trace these things using a little bit of knowledge and a little bit of time, and you don't really need much of either."

What operating systems are you referring to here?