Re: Windows Vista - Innovation or *another* /expensive/ Knock-Off?

Ingvar Nilsen wrote:
Ingvar Nilsen wrote:
Go long enough back, and every company
had their own proprietary binary format where data was stored.
Then some standards came.

Considering that the first such standard was EBCDIC in 1963,
followed by ASCII in 1967, one has to go back a very long way
indeed to find a computer system which does not have a text file
format.

See how difficult there is to just take an
application and move it on you machine, it won't find anything because
data is scattered all over in the registry etc.

This is because Microsoft decided to abandon text-based configuration
files while everybody else continued to use them. Lest we forget, DOS
had config.sys and autoexec.bat, while older versions of Windows used
system.ini and win.ini, and applications stored their configuration
information either in win.ini or frequently local files, just like DOS apps
did, and those for CP/M, Unix, VMS, OS/360, OASYS, and various other
venerable operating systems. Then Microsoft decided that the Registry
was the bee's knees for everything, and told programmers they had to use
it to obtain Windows-95 logo compliance, hence the dog's breakfast of a
system that we have today.

Take a web project in Visual Studio 2003, it had to be hooked up with
IIS, web applications defined, in the project file there were hard
coded paths and urls and so on.


Which says a whole lot about bad decisions by Microsoft, because
free tools such as NetBeans and Eclipse did not impose such restrictions.

Take a web project in Visual Studio 2005, it only relates to the folder
it is in and its sub folders, you can move it around as much as you
wish.

The only remarkable thing about this is that they didn't allow it
before now, not that they finally relented and gave users of their
tools the same options that everybody else had.

Why store anything at all in the registry, that is proprietary to
one application and that never is needed by other applications?

Ask Microsoft. The Registry in Windows 3.11 was solely a repository
of global information, usually GUIDs etc. for use with OLE, but that
changed with Windows-95, when MS started telling us that we had
to use it for application-specific settings if we wanted "Designed for
Windows-95" status. This ended up causing no end of problems due
to the fact that the Win9X registry was 16-bit, and therefore filled
up very quickly (especially if you installed Visual Studio!), yet MS
continued to insist that it be used for everything, eventually resulting
in a situation where the only applications that avoided it were those
written for multiple platforms, none of which have "modern innovations"
like the registry besides Windows.

So rather than being a trend, this hopefully marks the end of a rather
stupid one that saw MS abandon a time-proven system of
distributed human-readable files that have no single point of failure
with huge binary messes which at best can cause massive unrecoverable
data loss (.PST Email files etc.), and at worst render an entire system
inoperable (registry corruption).

Prediction based on prior MS behaviour: the text files for Email messages
will not use any existing standard formats such as the Unix one, but a new
MS version which has binary data in it encoded as text. Furthermore,
"to protect our privacy", these files will be encrypted in a way that prevents
system administrators from recovering corrupted ones without logging into
the specific user's account, thus making automated data recovery either
painful or impossible.
.

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