Windows vs Linux, Pros and Cons

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2003-02-03 06:23pm

Depends on the keyboard. Some have it next to the backspace, so you have to move your pinky farther, or some have it under enter beside shift. Some have it above enter and below backspace. The slash key is always located next to the period for easy access.

Above enter

Below enter

next to BS

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2003-02-03 06:34pm

I use the type in the middle. Took awhile to find a picture of that. My keyboard is a nice clicky mechanical one, unlike the rubber cup ones you find today.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-02-03 07:15pm

Ahh, the IBM Model M keyboard, one of the best every made

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-02-03 07:18pm

Durandal wrote:Yeah it is. Who uses backslashes for paths? Sheesh ...

Well, at least it isn't the silliness of using a colon :p (HFS still uses it, though OS X has some code to seamlessly switch between the two)

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-02-03 07:21pm

Durandal wrote:In this case, Windows' use of backslashes fucks everything up. People think I mean backslash when I give them a URL with forward slashes in it.

WTF? That's just stupidity (not you). You call "/" a slash and "" a backslash.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-02-03 07:23pm

Durandal wrote:Don't get me started on the stupidity of drive letters. They basically make relative paths impossible. If OS X ran on that idiotic drive lettering scheme, I'd be screwed, as I've moved my home folder from drive to drive more than once, and I've even renamed it. Of course, I've done this all seemlessly because of the beauty of mount points.

Doesn't XP do mount points, though?

That has never screwed me up, though how I do things is a bit different than most. We have a main fileserver at home, each person with their own directory. My computer maps the public directory to Z: and my own directory to Y: - and I never have any problems. My laptop synchronizes the differences on boot and shutdown whenever I'm at home (mapped to the same drive letters).

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2003-02-03 07:23pm

Hey, Mac has moved beyond the colon. I'd rather not talk about those days ...

Though I'd like to murder the QuickTime and iTunes teams for still using colons in their paths.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-02-03 07:36pm

Apple really hasn't completely moved away from the colon for the same reason Microsoft hasn't moved away from the driver letter: backwards compatibility.

Too many things rely on them.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2003-02-03 08:11pm

There's only one thing that relies on the colon: badly-done Carbon applications. Well, Mac OS Dinosaur does, as well.

All it takes is for developers to get off their asses and conform to the new way of doing things. Things aren't that easy for Microsoft.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-02-03 08:13pm

Durandal wrote:There's only one thing that relies on the colon: badly-done Carbon applications. Well, Mac OS Dinosaur does, as well.

All it takes is for developers to get off their asses and conform to the new way of doing things. Things aren't that easy for Microsoft.

Microsoft has been sneakily adding odd behaviours into Windows as of late - it now recognizes both front and backslashes.

His Divine Shadow · Post by **His Divine Shadow** » 2003-02-04 02:36am

Pu-239 wrote:Depends on the keyboard. Some have it next to the backspace, so you have to move your pinky farther, or some have it under enter beside shift. Some have it above enter and below backspace. The slash key is always located next to the period for easy access.

Not so on non-american layouts, the slash key is SHIFT+7 or the division button on the numpad

Backslash is just as easily reachable

His Divine Shadow · Post by **His Divine Shadow** » 2003-02-04 02:36am

Durandal wrote:In this case, Windows' use of backslashes fucks everything up. People think I mean backslash when I give them a URL with forward slashes in it.

People shouldn't be so stupid.

MKSheppard · Post by **MKSheppard** » 2003-02-04 02:38am

Durandal wrote:There's only one thing that relies on the colon: badly-done Carbon applications. Well, Mac OS Dinosaur does, as well.

COMBAT MISSION does not play under OS X, therefore OS X is a piece
of shit.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-02-04 11:10am

MKSheppard wrote:
Durandal wrote:There's only one thing that relies on the colon: badly-done Carbon applications. Well, Mac OS Dinosaur does, as well.
COMBAT MISSION does not play under OS X, therefore OS X is a piece
of shit.

EV:N does not currently play under Win32 natively, therefore Windows is shit?

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-02-04 12:31pm

phongn wrote:
MKSheppard wrote:COMBAT MISSION does not play under OS X, therefore OS X is a piece
of shit.
EV:N does not currently play under Win32 natively, therefore Windows is shit?

Shep's one-dimensional approach to things is well known to us. Pay it no mind

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-02-04 01:31pm

Darth Wong wrote:
phongn wrote:
MKSheppard wrote:COMBAT MISSION does not play under OS X, therefore OS X is a piece
of shit.
EV:N does not currently play under Win32 natively, therefore Windows is shit?
Shep's one-dimensional approach to things is well known to us. Pay it no mind

I felt like biting the bait today

MKSheppard · Post by **MKSheppard** » 2003-02-04 01:48pm

Darth Wong wrote: Shep's one-dimensional approach to things is well known to us. Pay it no mind

You mock the goodness that is Combat Mission?

We're going to use the kinetic energy of the round, the precise strike angle, the Brinell hardness and thickness of the armor plate, the cross- section and quality of the round fired. Realism in combat results, realism in damage calculations, realism in every aspect of the game. Every single shot will be tracked, adjusted for wind, temperature, EVERYTHING we can think of. If it's a hit, we want brutal details on where it hit and what is the effect. If it misses, it will be tracked until it hits something or leaves the board.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2003-02-04 03:07pm

Shep's obviously never been addicted to Escape Velocity. It's often been the one piece of software that Mac users have that Windows user wish they had. Though it's being ported.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-02-04 03:12pm

Durandal wrote:Shep's obviously never been addicted to Escape Velocity. It's often been the one piece of software that Mac users have that Windows user wish they had. Though it's being ported.

I spent half a day getting Basilisk II running just so I could play EV:N.

Shinova · Post by **Shinova** » 2003-02-04 03:50pm

I would like to say that last night I tried out Mandrake 9.0 after backing everything up. Pretty nifty.

I had some problems with the mouse wheel in the beginning, but that got taken care of. Sound and printer still doesn't work.

All in all, pretty neat---though I found out just how noob I was when I found out that I didn't know how to copy stuff from home to zip disk

Anyway due to a number of undisclosable reasons, I'm gonna be switching back to XP once I get home.

His Divine Shadow · Post by **His Divine Shadow** » 2003-02-04 04:02pm

The only real reason I can see for running linux is for something you'd actually use it for, if you got XP or 2K(and to an extent OS X, but we're mainly on PC ground now), you're pretty firmly set with what you need.

Initial curiosity may drive you to install it but after a while you're likely to pretty much forget about it.

You need something lasting and possibly productive to do with it.

I have the exact same problem, but if I ever get myself a real perm connection to the net I'll set up that old 400mhz P2 I got and put linux on it and route my traffic through it and such.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2003-02-04 04:10pm

There's also plex86 so you can run windows under linux (open source clone of VMware). You need shitloads of ram though, and games won't work. Plex86 development seems to have died, and is only in alpha, so you might want to use Bochs, which is an emulator instead of virtualization software, so it is a lot slower. However, if you have a mac, Bochs allows you to run windows software, since it emulates x86 hardware. Yes I'm talking to you, Durandal.

URLS:
http://bochs.sf.net
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/plex86

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2003-02-04 06:33pm

phongn: I thought win98 recoginised both front and backslashes. But winXP & win2k definatly do.

However this isnt consistant between files stored locally & networked files.

ie:
\\somecomputername\ - works
//somecomputername/ - doesnt work

As for drive letters, you can mount drives into folders in XP.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2003-02-04 06:38pm

As for relative directories in Windows, that is actually supported for applications. There is a 'current directory' for each app, and they can move around the file structure relative to that. The Current directory can also be changed too.

However windows programs mostly use absolute paths instead of relative paths, because the programmers are often lazy.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-02-04 07:01pm

Symbolic links. One of the greatest filesystem ideas ever. Impossible in Windows.

Linux is great for the things it's designed for. It's not very good for games and ripping DVD's. In an ideal world, people would use whatever tool is appropriate. But the Windows monopoly is based on freezing protocols and file formats and other standards and taking them under a wing of "intellectual property" patents and legal threats, so that people can't really choose based on what's appropriate for a particular task.

Take an office full of secretaries writing memos. Does it really make sense for them to run WindowsXP with OfficeXP on cheap machines where the software costs more than the hardware? Of course not. A competent admin can easily set up a Linux/OpenOffice network for nothing. But since Office file formats are kept under lock and key, nobody trusts any office software but Microsoft's office software, so you end up with the ridiculous travesty of people paying $500 for OS and apps to write memos.