Flutterby™! : Vista 2006-10-10 18:00:55.46891+00

Vista

2006-10-10 18:00:55.46891+00 by ebradway 3 comments

So, I get excited over little things, from Mike Ward's Slug Page:

Something I just noticed with Vista (it's not new, I just noticed it) is that user directories are under c:\Users instead of c:\Documents and Settings as with XP.

For years, I've been remapping the "My Documents" directory to C:\documents. In the DOS days, it was just c:\docs. But Windows has handled directory names greater than 8 characters reasonably well for a while now. But this switch at the OS level from "Documents and Settings" to "Users" reinforces the belief that spaces should never be used in directory or file names!

More grist for the "who's ripping of whom" mill, Mac uses /Users, but I still don't understand why they don't just standardize on /home.

I'm trying to keep my mind out of the gutter of "Unix vs. the other OSes" because I only get reminded that I'm in this gutter because I'm hooked on the booze of GIS software that is ESRI.

Even though most of my research now involves writing code in Java, I'm still running Windows because I have to interoperate with other folks using Windows. And despite all the claims, large Word documents (like PhD theses with lots of tables and figures and a few hundred EndNote references) aren't handled well at all by OpenOffice.

So I just live in denial that there exists an operating system that runs cleanly, gets out of my way when I know what I'm doing, and keep plugging along trying to get my work done in spite of the OS...

Spaces in file/dir names are just one of those gawd-aweful things that really do not belong in -ANY- OS.

I agree with Eric, it's not that I'm a Linux zealot, it's the tool I use most. I've also got a WinXP machine rigged with OpenOffice, Gimp, Firefox, Putty, Thunderbird, NotePad++ w/WordStar-Joe Key Bindings/and it also runs Excel/Word/Powerpoint.. and sometimes I get confused as to which I am using.