Estimated Transfer Time Is No More In Windows 8 456
MrSeb writes "Ahh, the Windows Explorer progress dialog. For years it has been struggling to figure out how to calculate how long our copy and delete operations would take, sliding the progress bar back and forth in a seemingly random, haphazard way, the laws of time all but ceasing to exist — five seconds remaining one moment and 13 minutes the next. That's (almost) all going to change, with the arrival of a greatly improved file management experience in Windows 8. Copy, move, delete, rename, and conflict resolution are all being overhauled and it's about time!"
Obligatory XKCD (Score:4, Insightful)
You all knew it was coming [xkcd.com] ;)
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You all knew it was coming [xkcd.com] ;)
XKCD612 was actually referenced in TFA. So, yes, I knew it was coming.
Re:Obligatory XKCD (Score:5, Insightful)
This is Slashdot. Why would TFA have given anyone any idea about anything? That would have required reading it, and that never happens. Ever.
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^ This. I saw this article and, before I even thought about it, I shared the comic. I only checked TFA afterwards and realized I was beaten to the punch.
Re:Obligatory XKCD (Score:4, Funny)
Not only that, it kicked my dog and stole my grandmother's false teeth!
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It turned me into a newt!
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A newt?
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Re:Obligatory XKCD (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah Microsoft can't fix a feature that works fine in most other OSes so they remove it entirely. Great work guys. Great work.
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I suspect that Notepad not being able to wrap properly is the least of their worries
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I wonder...
- was Microsoft really not able to fix that (probably) easy bug?
- or did they think it's not important enough?
There was another (less) famous bug: notepad not able to deal with word-wrap correctly - not sure if they fixed this one in Vista+ (that was happening in the latest XPs).
So how do you calculate how long it will take to copy files? On the same device? Between physical devices? Between different interfaces (SATA -> USB)? Across a network? What if the system is thrashing and busy? What if there's network traffic? What if a cluster of bad sectors is discovered and it's trying to relocate them on the fly? Is it verifying the copy? Are all selected files from the same location? Are there links? Sparse files? Will the server have to bring a tape unit online? Copying on differen
Re:Obligatory XKCD (Score:4, Informative)
So how do you calculate how long it will take to copy files?
Off the top of my head:
Maintain a table of expected speeds for each storage device on the filesystem. Record how long it takes to read the filesystem information. When a device is mounted, if it's reasonable for the device type, seek to the middle and end, measuring speeds there, too. Get approximate curves for the read and write speeds across locations, and use those for future estimates. For future read and write operations, take note of where they are and how fast they go, and adjust the curves accordingly.
When an operation starts, look at the curves for input and output for the respective devices. Find the expected speed for the target location. Whichever speed is lower should be used for the estimate.
With so many conditions and edge cases and minutia, simply projecting estimates from sampled speed data seems like a pretty good compromise if you want an estimate of the time.
Edge cases are edge cases, and shouldn't be causing incorrect estimates most of the time. Estimating based on the first few seconds of an operation makes sense if that's all the information you have, but a modern operating system should be able to know so much more than that now. It should be able to know the effects of virus scanners and verification. It should know how fast a device has performed in the past.
Problem is, people don't understand it's an estimate.
Saying that your transfer will take somewhere between 5 minutes and 9 hours is not an estimate. It's a mockery. What I want to know is whether I should get a cup of coffee, watch some TV, or read a novel. What I'm told is that my OS has no idea what it's working with.
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I wonder... - was Microsoft really not able to fix that (probably) easy bug? - or did they think it's not important enough?
Yes.
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It will be... (Score:3)
Will the file copy/move crash.... (Score:2)
... when it hits a locked / corrupted / moved file, as every version of windows has since year dot??/
That alone would be a vast improvement and make all the file sync tools surplus...
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You can copy files in Vista? I've never had the system stable long enough to try that.
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You can copy files in Vista? I've never had the system stable long enough to try that.
You can, but it takes so long that no-one has ever managed to copy a complete file.
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So.. (Score:3)
This may take from a few minutes to a few hours.. (Score:2)
Hey, it worked for disk defragmenter in Vista. I'm sure Pririform [piriform.com] agrees.
Teracopy (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps they should just buy teracopy
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Perhaps they should just buy teracopy
Try Altap Salamander too - www.altap.cz. Cracking software, especially if you prefer to press keys rather than click buttons :-)
So Futuristic (Score:2)
Terrible summary & headline (Score:5, Insightful)
First, I've never seen the progress bar in a Windows file transfer progress bar slide 'back and forth in a seemingly random, haphazard way'. I've seen progress bars that do that, and but I've never seen a Windows file transfer dialog do that. The estimation can jump around like crazy at times, but the progress bar was always fine (since, I assume, it's simply based on # of files completed). Maybe Windows 98 did that? I don't remember it doing that, but its been a while. Certain XP, Vista & Windows 7 don't.
Second, if you RTFA the estimated transfer time is currently still there; its just downplayed.
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"Second, if you RTFA the estimated transfer time is currently still there; its just downplayed."
You read RTFA? Hand over you slashdot reader card!
Re:Terrible summary & headline (Score:4, Funny)
You read RTFA?
You read RRTFA?
Error Stack Overf%$3z/.$%#@
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The bigger problem is that the first thing the GUI does when you want to copy the files is to go and see how many files there are and how large they are so it can estimate the amount of time it's going to take, and by the time it's done that it could just have copied the damn files in the first place unless they're enormous.
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If the count isn't known, it shouldn't use a progress bar. What's the Windows version of the "barber pole" unknown-limits-but-not-crashed progress indicator?
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I know there is one, I just can't remember what it looks like. I have a vague sense that its a solid green bar (lighter in colour) with something bouncing back & forth, but I might be mixing it up with something else. I know it has one though, I've definitely seen it.
And what's 0123456 was talking about is that I believe when its a large number of files it gives you the 'indeterminate' progress bar while it has some status like 'Calculating files to copy' or 'Preparing to copy'. But there are times when
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It doesn't slide back and forth. What it does is jump from 0% to 99.9% complete in the first millisecond of copying, and then take 10 minutes to finish the last 0.1%.
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Oh look, I can't rename that file in Explorer until I close the file in Word (repeat for any other program and file).
My favorite was the way that I couldn't delete a file in Explorer because Explorer was trying to generate a thumbnail for the file. And usually that would cause some thread in Explorer to vanish up its own backside so the file remained locked until I killed Explorer or rebooted.
Ah, I so miss the excitement of running Windows and never knowing what is going to spectacularly fail next.
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I know the time estimation is loopy, I've seen that plenty of times. I meant that the actually progress bar doesn't jump around. The summary suggests it does, but I've never seen that.
Windows really does that? (Score:5, Funny)
Wow, I guess I am out of touch with windows flaws. I quit running windows back at windows 3.1.
Ill stick with Linux until windows is ready for the desktop. ;P
queue (Score:2)
I wish the transfer window created had a pause function, and was actually a queue so that I could queue up more files for the same action (copy/move).
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I think that Gnome 2 did that. I use KDE and filed a feature request for it.
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Which is wonderful for magnetic hard drives - and a featured added just in time for the sunset of those magnetic hard drives.
Because probably by the time Win8 ships, even more people will be using SSDs for their primary drives and those don't care about trying to do multiple writes/reads from the same drive at the same time.
The 64GB SSDs are now down around $100. Use t
W7 is pretty good about it (Score:2)
The real problem with incorrect reporting times is when you have a very large number of 10-100kB files to transfer. Windows spends a very long time starting up the transfer of a new file, and that is where I have seen the greatest slowdown and most inaccurate time estimates.
Windows 7 performs better with smaller files, and provides a transfer rate indicator, but everyone already knows this.
What a weird thing to take out...
Re:W7 is pretty good about it (Score:5, Interesting)
I think you meant to say "... performs better with larger files".
You nailed it though. My big gripe with Windows it how it seems to spend more time fiddling with metadata / directory entries than the actual contents. On an SSD with 700mb/sec writes and 0.1 msec access times, I'd expect it to churn through a few thousand files per second at the very least. That's not even factoring the disk cache. All those MFT updates seem to drag it right back down to spinning-disk speeds when dealing with numerous small files. You know, like a source tree or a directory full of images.
As sequential storage performance continues to improve, filesystem overhead is becoming the primary bottleneck.
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Don't forget that Windows (at least XP) will also be busy swapping out the applications you're using so that it can cache the files you're copying in memory.
Ah, the joy of moving 2GB files from one drive to another on an XP machine with 1GB of RAM and watching your web browser thrashing the disk as it desperately tries to swap itself back in while Windows is desperately trying to swap it out. I miss that so much.
Estimating time to delete (Score:2)
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How about "No to all?" (Score:2)
Or at least *telling* the user that holding down shift key while clicking No accomplishes the same thing as a "No to All" button!
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Have you ever tried telling a user to use a button to accomplish something? A small percentage of them will genuinely appreciate learning a useful new trick but majority's eyes will glaze over the moment they realize the keyboard is involved.
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> Have you ever tried telling a user to use a button to accomplish something?
The grand-parent is right. The way to do it is called a ToolTip or HoverBar over the Yes, or No button. (Of course, there needs to be an option in the Control Panel / System Preferences, to disable "UI Help".)
It's not rocket science, just computer science. This is why computers -- namely the UI -- still suck ass. Because almost no one gives a shit about making the interface _friendly_ to people. The way we use computers is co
Having actually read the article ... (Score:2)
... it looks like the new dialogs are going to include some useful diagnostic information in detailed view. Wondering why it went from 15 minutes to 2 hours? Oh, that's because the transfer rates dropped 90% around the time that I launched such-and-such a program. Maybe I shouldn't do that next time.
Granted, my biggest criticism is that the copy process grinds to a halt every time Windows Explorer doesn't know what to do. They should either figure out the problem before the copy happens (which they can
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They should either figure out the problem before the copy happens (which they can do in most of the cases where you want to merge folders or have identical file names) so that you don't have a half-botched job; or keep copying the files that can be copied in the background while you're waiting for input from the user on the troublesome cases. If Windows 8 fixes that problem, I'll be gleefully happy because I don't like babysitting copy operations.
Other than cases where I'm cherry-picking files to copy, robocopy gets all my copying business.
Microsoft could pretty much solve every file copying issue with Explorer by adding a shell extension that allowed you to right-mouse drag the files and choose "copy with robocopy".
Experience? (Score:2)
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Why don't they concentrate on helping me get actual work done?
Because then why would you buy a new version of Windows when XP was perfectly fine for doing actual useful work?
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there will be a special "professional" edition for people like you, and others who want to work with their computer.
Ofc.. since it will be "professional" it will cost 2-3x the normal editions
Interesting idea (Score:2)
It worked great until somone had the bright idea of rewriting it for the sake of it in Vista. It might say Windows 7 when it starts up, but it's still got big chunks of Vista underneath.
MidnightCommander (Score:2)
The MC folks should donate their progress bar code to MS. It's by far the most informative and accurate I've ever seen.
What about search? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm still mad about the (basically) neutered search capability for desktop/LAN files in Windows 7.
What used to be a consistent
"right-click, choose 'Search', enter 'filename' OR 'phrase in file', tick off search parameters, optionally expand and enter detailed parameters, hit 'Search' button->Results"
workflow has been 'simplified' to
"enter your search string in this little text window and we'll search inside every goddamn file in this directory/subdirectory (oh, and across teh internets and rifling through your emails too, if you want!) for that search term, no matter how long it takes -> wait for freaking ever -> more results than you ever needed, or no results if it's a system file, not in an indexed location or Windows simply doesn't like it for some reason. Oh, you want additional search parameters? Good luck finding any besides filesize and date modified!"
You used to be able to re-enable old-style search on Vista (somewhat), but I guess they thought it was too much of a dinosaur (or too useful, perhaps) to include in Win 7. Bah. Get off my lawn!
And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage (Score:2, Interesting)
* Drive letters - WTF???
* \ instead of the standard / - leave it to Microsoft when faced with picking a sane choice and and a mind boggling idiotic one...
* Can't boot to a standard desktop from any Windows OS media
* No application bundles
* The Registry - LOL. Why lose just the settings for a single application when you can lose everything! Thanks Microsoft!
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What about not having cancelling a print job take forever and a day?
Re:And The Rest Of What Makes Windows Garbage (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, kids these days just don't troll like they used to. How about we get some facts in here, instead?
There is no standard directory separator:
/ is UNIX and derivative OSes since the beginning of subdirectories
: was the separator on MacOS from the 1980s until MacOS/X
\ is DOS and Windows, from the 1980s
VMS was this massive mess: http://www.itec.suny.edu/scsys/vms/ovmsdoc073/V73/6489/6489pro_010.html [suny.edu]
(Were there others?)
Also, if you lose your Registry... wow. Never seen that happen in 16 years of working in IT. I think the last time I heard of that was when someone's hard drive started going bad, and they were running Windows 95, and had never backed up anything in their lives. Why wouldn't anyone back up their hard drive regularly, anyway? Some people must like the pain of reinstalling everything and starting from scratch... Mac / UN*X users are not exempt from this requirement either.
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Actually the \ character was chosen because the "/" character was used in DOS 1.0 for command line switches. And / was used in DOS 1.0 for command line switches because that's what they used in the DEC operating systems (VMS, DECSystem 10, DECSystem 20) from the 1970s. Remember that DOS 1.0 didn't support directories (all files were located at the root of the drive). They added directory support in DOS 2.0. Once / was used as a command line switch delimiter, it couldn't be used as a path separator, so
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Why are mount points better than drive letters, and why is / better than \? Unix's own particular way of naming files is far from universal. [wikipedia.org]
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Stratus VOS uses >, as a Multics-family system.
Bull GCOS 8 uses \
HP NonStop uses .
VMS uses .
Mac OS used :
As far as the registry, and how Windows is the only OS horrible enough to use one, look up AIX and ODM sometime.
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* Can I rename a file so it starts with a period or space?
Oh that's right -- Explorer is brain dead.
Good to see Microsoft is leading innovation! /sarcasm
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"* Drive letters - WTF???"
So what? What is so wrong with drive letters?
"* \ instead of the standard / - leave it to Microsoft when faced with picking a sane choice and and a mind boggling idiotic one..."
Blame nerds for having no business savvy to make THEIR FAVORITE OS the defacto standard not others who saw the business opportunity the nerds didn't.
"* Can't boot to a standard desktop from any Windows OS media"
Yes you can Norton Ghost does this, it is possible you just haven't looked into how to do it.
"* N
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* Drive letters - WTF???
Mount points are just fucking indecipherable to regular users. "/dev/sda1" lolwut?
* \ instead of the standard / - leave it to Microsoft when faced with picking a sane choice and and a mind boggling idiotic one...
Oh, you mean Digital Research, who wrote DOS. Microsoft didn't.
* Can't boot to a standard desktop from any Windows OS media
A feature no-one cares about. Joy.
* No application bundles
Here you show your true colours, Mac fanboy. Since OS X is the only OS that has this concept. And app bundles are just folders anyway. /Applications/Safari.app is no different than C:\Program Files\Safari except one of the two OSes hides the implementation from the user. I don't like my computer hiding things from me, mmkay.
* The Registry - LOL. Why lose just the settings for a single application when you can lose everything! Thanks Microsoft!
D
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and it is just as brain dead.
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> You have a bunch of commands that use / as the symbol indicating a flag. You want to add directories to your file system. Are you going to change all the commands and thus make any scripts no longer work, use the / for both a directory separator and a flag, thus giving ambiguous commands or use a different separator?
Why does config.sys have the SWITCHAR= command then??
DOS 2+ - SWITCHAR - SET SWITCH CHARACTER
AX = 3701h
DL = new switch character
Return:
AL = status 00h successful FFh unsupported subfunctio
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How about being able to move or rename an open file while we are at it. These three shortcomings, the fact Windows wouldn't tell you there wasn't enough disk space until it was 30 minutes into the transfer, and the issue in this story are the reason I'm a Mac user.
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Even if there is a "good" reason to prevent me from replacing/overwriting a file, there's still no "good" reason to prevent me from moving/renaming it.
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If I've got a log file which is opened by one program in Append mode, and I rename/move it, what should happen? Should the program keep appending logs to the file in its new name/location until it closes and reopens the file, or should it start a new file with the original's name/path? Choose carefully - either answer will create unpredictable or incorrect behaviour in some programs depending on the details of the file and how it's being used.
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You didn't test anything, because Notepad doesn't lock files when it opens them. Try renaming/moving a file while it's still being downloaded, or a movie while it's being played.
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Slight correction, it doesn't even leave the file open. It just opens it, reads the contents, and then closes it. Of course you can rename/move the file. But drop a 1/2 GB file into Notepad and then try renaming it while Notepad is still trying to read it. You can't.
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I never said it was exclusive to Windows.
Re:How about replacing an open file? (Score:5, Informative)
And exactly which OS(es) allows you to rename or move files that have write exclusive locks on them? Because, from what I can see this has, again, nothing to do with Windows.
BSD, Linux and MacOS allow you to do that, and even delete or overwrite the file while it's still locked without causing problems. Moving, deleting or renaming a file affects only a hardlink to the file and not the file itself; and overwriting a file is actually just deleting a hardlink and writing to a completely new file.
Thank you (Score:3)
You seem to be about the only responder in this thread who actually understands how files work.
It's pretty sad that people don't understand the pseudo-atomicity of the POSIXish way of handling file names (as opposed to files).
(You could also have mentioned the distinction between file handles and inodes (and lazy unlinking) to explain the "program can write to a deleted file without causing harm" bit, but whatever.)
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Because you say so? There are plenty of good reasons that a piece of software would want a write lock on a file so that someone else can't replace the file.
There are plenty of retarded reasons but I can't think of any good ones; if it's something like a database, then you should only be allowing one process to access it, not allowing multiple programs to randomly write stuff in there.
All I've ever seen file locking achieve is annoying users and fscking up the system when it fails so you have to reboot to clear the stuck locks.
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Not with a proper text editor. .filename.swp that vim uses?
Never seen the
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And that means something why? Because you're the sole arbiter of what is good and what is not? Oh wait, your opinion means jack and shit.
So, give us a good reason why a program should be locking a file so no other program can access it. And by good reason, it has to be something that isn't better solved by having one process arbitrating access to that file (e.g. dumb database vs some kind of SQL server).
You do realize that any time you open a file for writing you are almost always given an exclusive write lock on it, correct? Behavior that pretty much all OSes have had for 30+ years?
No wonder you think file locking is a good thing if you know so little about how file accesses work. I don't remember even Windows being that retarded, and the numerous Unix variants certainly weren't.
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This behavior doesn't exist on OS X, nor did it in Mac OS (as far back as I can remember).
As a user, your logic makes no sense to me. There are plenty of good reasons (behind the scenes technical reasons?) why the OS should make it harder for me to accomplish work?
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Start a Terminal window.
Type in:
$ cat > ~/SomeTextFile.txt
then type a few lines of junk into the terminal afterwards. leave the Terminal window open.
Now go into your home directory and open the file you've created in your favourite text editor. Try making some changes to the file and then saving it.
Didn't work, did it? See, OSX has always had write locking semantics, and earlier MacOSes did too. What was actually going on, is you were just using apps which were sanely designed, which means they only open
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Linux has only rudimentary mandatory lock support. Approximately no one uses it, and you need to add a mount option to the file system to enable it.
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Using such a program has a very good chance of causing random file corruption:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.04.windowsconfidential.aspx [microsoft.com]
"Forcing a handle closed is equivalent to reaching into a program and freeing some memory. The program thinks the handle (or memory) is still valid and will continue to use it. But since the handle is really free, it will be reused for something else."
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Yes, because he says so.
Whose goddamned machine is it exactly?
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Linux also has lock switch for files - do you also blame Linux distros for that, or do you blame the badly designed programs?
The difference is that almost every Windows program locks files even though there's no reason to do so, whereas almost no Unix programs lock files because there's no reason to do so. If you have two programs writing to the same file simultaneously, you're probably doing something wrong.
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Then so sad that damn near every program uses them I guess. Too bad windows lacks lsof, is there a decent replacement for that?
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http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653 [microsoft.com]
Process Explorer can list file handles.
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Thank you.
Does this have a CLI?
I would hate to have to watch filenames blink in and out of the list in a gui.
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Because it means you are closing apps to replace files. A silly thing to do. I can rm rm, lets see windows do that.
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Why do you want to kill off Windows anyways? Let people use whatever they want. Isn't this what freedom is about? Choice is always good.
So put aside the arrogance that you are the one that knows the best, please?
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I have four words: "Games and Legacy Apps"
That explains pretty much every windows install I'm personally aware of (including my own)
Either people want to play their games or they have to use/support legacy apps for a business that it doesn't want to take the time, expense and risk of replacing.
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You can't play games and record the video on linux.
Well yeah, you can, maybe. Compared to fraps it is a pita.
I play games on my windows box and occationally I want to record something for youtube. It's just not viable to do that in linux, even if you could run the game in Wine. I switch to linux for editing. Kdenlive is very nice for that.
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Simple there is too much software that runs only on windows that people need and or want. For the enterprise VB was a brillant lock in. It because fast and easy to write applications that ran on Windows and no where else.
People talk about Office but the real lock in was VB and now it looks like C# is trying to take it's place. You can make an effort to make it portable or just go the easy way and make it only run on Windows.
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It's so hard for me to believe that so many people still use Windows. As a Ubuntu Desktop user and administrator of a small business network, I've been patiently waiting since 1999 for enough people to just ditch windows all together so that we could all move on to better times. Everyone I know who has tried Linux in the past few years hasn't gone back to Windows, and were all amazed that the computer 'Just Worked'. People are so used to struggling with Windows issues that they don't expect using a computer to be easy and it really doesn't have to be that way.
So perhaps this is a bit off topic, but every time an article comes out touting some new enhancement of the Microsoft Windows Operating system, I just feel compelled to say "Who fucking cares?" and "Why does anyone even bother with this Operating System designed with the main purpose being to lock up your computer spending dollar into Microsoft?" Don't we all know better already?
Please people, get over MS Windows already, let it die.
Everyone you know?
Ok, well I don't know you but, hey, we're all friends on here so I kinda feel thatI know you ;-)
I /did/ use Linux on my primary laptop for a while (Ubuntu and Fedora, if you're interested) and while I like parts of it, other parts of it stank. Badly. Multi-monitor support was, frankly, embarrassing and suspend/resume was patchy at best. It certainly wasn't more reliable as I found it more likely to "lock up" in a given situation than Windows 7, which TBH, is very usable and a good workhors
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I thought it was just me.
I use a Mac, and it isn't much better. The most hated words on my Mac. "Preparing to Copy." Gets me thinking of:
Dark Helmet: "Your Preparing, your always preparing, just Go!"
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Everyone I know who has tried Linux in the past few years hasn't gone back to Windows, and were all amazed that the computer 'Just Worked'.
Hi, I'm R. Bemrose. Pleased to meet you.
I've tried several times to switch my desktop PC to Linux, and every time (across, what, 4 distros now? Redhat 9, Debian Sarge, Ubuntu 8.10, and Ubuntu 10.04) there's been some issue that caused me to move back to the platform that really does "just work" even if it does require me to use the CD/DVDs given to me by the hardware manufacturers for my computer's parts.
It hasn't been the same reason every time either. As I recall, one wouldn't start XWindows at all if