[geeks] Google announces Google Chrome OS

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Jul 8, 2009, at 14:36 , gsm at mendelson.com wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 08, 2009 at 02:18:19PM -0400, Phil Stracchino wrote:
>> ranting at how stupidly Windows does ... something.
>
> The Wifi support in XP/SP3 is very good, far better than even MacOS,  
> and miles
> ahead of anything Linux.

Wifi is great on my Mac, frequently terrible on my Wintendo, and sucks  
on Linux and BSD.

The only time I've seen Wifi suck on the Mac is when the idiots create  
some proprietary Windows-ish driver and preference pane instead of  
doing it properly.

>> Yesterday's example is that Windows' handling of optical drives - in
>> fact, of multiple drives and network volumes, PERIOD - is utterly
>> broken.
>
> Works fine for me. One of the problems is that XP (and Vista) HOME  
> version
> has really bad networking. It's not a bug, it's a feature. XP and  
> Vista
> corporate works fine. I have shares on Windows computers, Linux  
> computers,
> and a Mac all mounted at once on the same Windows XP/SP3/Corp  
> workstation
> with no problems. I can add or remove shares as I want and they work  
> fine.

You are about the only person I know who feels that way.

I have a very hard time getting Windows to reliably remember its  
remote connections, and they frequently take a long time to connect.

Worse, the whole GUI usually becomes unresponsive while it makes a  
connection, like the whole thing was stuck in 1980s single-threaded  
mode.

I don't think remote shares works great on the Mac either, but at  
least my UI doesn't lock up.  For Mac users, there is a third party  
remote manager that is much better than the one Apple has.  It's  
pretty much flawless, but I can't remember what it was called now so I  
can't find it.

Of course, one issue is that most of the remote shares suck.  Windows  
sharing is just plain stupid, and NFS while better, still sucks.

We really don't have a good remote filesystem in common use, just like  
we really don't have a good common filesystem for sharing drives.

> Windows is based upon the concept that drive letters are assigned at  
> boot
> time, the boot drive is C, the first partition of each hard drives  
> is then
> added, then the optical drives, then each extra partition.

In a perfect world, yes.

The problem is that you can plug drives in after boot, split drives  
with some software, or create virtual drives.

Then you install some software on one.

Next time you boot, the drive letters have changed, and Windows can't  
find all or part of the application.

Ditto for CD-ROM drives.  If Windows has a problem with a drive, even  
temporary, it will frequently remove its letter.  Do any install or  
anything that uses a drive letter, and it breaks when you reboot next.

It's a crappy system that breaks things all the time.

> This can be easily modified by either GUI or command line to assign  
> drive
> letters to devices.

You can use a fairly horrid system program to force drive letters to  
certain devices, and that can help.

But just as often, Windows or some other app will ignore your setting,  
or it will cause the system to get confused later.

Even Bill Gates ranted about the Windows drive letter mess once.


-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com