Archive for June, 2008

Memetastic!

June 18, 2008

These are the commands I’m running. Great idea!

 

$ history | awk {'print $2'} | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
    184 ls
    118 cd
    117 vi
    116 less
     54 tail
     43 ps
     41 perl
     31 rm
     27 for
     23 grep

Vista is worse than XP

June 1, 2008

You know in Windows XP when you tried to move a folder, but you had one of the files in that folder held open by some other program? You couldn’t do it, right? You got a standard error message.

Well now in Windows Vista, you still can’t do it, but instead of the standard error message, it tells you:

You’ll need to provide administrator permission to move to this folder

Okay, great! Click “continue” — the screen dims dramatically, “Windows User Account Control” — “File Operation” it says — Windows needs your permission to continue. Brilliant, you have my permission, go on… So I click the Continue button.

Oh oh! “Destination Folder Access Denied” — “You need permission to perform this action”.

What the hell? I just gave it permission! Click “Try Again”, it just comes back with the same error. Grrrr!

I click cancel, it flashes up quickly “Moving item, time remaining 8 mins 5 seconds…” And then the window disappears, and of course the folder has not been moved!
WHAT A WASTE OF TIME! In XP I could have figured out what the problem was in half that time. Instead Vista leads me down the garden path, asking for my permission, totally failing to tell the difference between an open file and a file I don’t have permission for.

And even after that, it shows a dialog estimating the time it will take to move the file, even though it has no possibility of moving the file!

Isn’t software supposed to get better with each release, not worse?

I really cannot understand how Microsoft can mess up such a simple thing that worked perfectly well before.