Re: Drag it to the trash...

"GreyCloud" <mist@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:VbCdnUzKk732FMzZnZ2dnUVZ_v-dnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Daniel Johnson wrote:
Yes, you can delete keys, but you can't delete *other people's*
keys.

Not even as admin?
Surely the admin can do that.

An administrator can take ownership of other
registry hives on the same machine and change them;
but this is likely to cause problems for the original
owner. There is no "root" equivalent on Windows,
for which security checks are turned off.

Even if an admin is willing to do that, finding roaming
profiles is not possible, so he can only get the ones that
do not roam.

[snip]
Me. I was pointing out that on Windows, you can't actually get
every registry key that your software installs. You can do it in
limited cases (ie, only 1 user), but most uninstallers don't
even bother to do that.

True, they don't bother. Very sloppy of them isn't it.

It is. But like I said: lazy ISVs who Just Don't Care.

[snip]
What is the OpenVMS way, then? If it involves manual intervention
by an admin, then it's no better than Mac OS X.

They have been doing it for the last two decades. Either remotely or
online. The SYS$STARTUP.COM file controls everything on one local node,
and logging into another node you get to make changes in that systems
SYS$STARTUP.COM file... or for most purposes each user has a SYS$LOGIN.COM
file that has all the program presets there. And all of these files are
plain text.

That's like DOS's AUTOEXEC.BAT!

These sorts of files are not "plain text"; they are *programs*
(written in DCL I should think) and expecting installers to modify them
is a bit much. Expecting ordinary users to do so is out of the question.

The fact that the VAX and Alpha architectures have 5 levels of security in
hardware actually makes the sys admins job a whole lot easier.

This is really sort of archaic. It's a lot of complexity for no real
benefit; you only need 2 levels in hardware and you can do everything
else in software, where you can at least fix the bugs.

Most of my sysadmin techniques relied on programming a dedicated terminals
function keys to do different tasks... by logging in and pushing the
correct (1) function key.

That is pretty poor UI by modern standards, of course.

[snip]
The registry API describes several disconnected 'hives',
like HKEY_CURRENT_USER, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,
and so on. You can see this in regedit.

Why do you keep calling it 'hive'?

That's what MS calls it.

Here's a link with a (possibly apocrypal) explanation:

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/08/08/54618.aspx

Never heard the term except in sci-fi books or beekeepers.

:D

It does not look like one file to programs, and it does not behave
like one file: each user gets his own preferences.

Sounds to me more like it would be easier for a problem to occur using
their methods. Database type structures tend to get corrupted from time
to time.

This is *not* true. Databases are very corruption-resistant
because of the journalling techniques they use.

Even non-database-like binary files are more robust than text
files as a rule. Text files are more complex so that they may be
made human-readable: they support comments and
non-significant whitespace. They must tolerate ASCII,
UTF-8, UTF-16, and gawd knows what other encodings.

Worse, human-readable files are almost always seen as
human-writable first. The text file can easily be *structurally*
corrupted by a careless user. And even careful users make
mistakes sometimes.

I wonder... is there a rebuild command for the registry?

No. This is the great weakness of the design. This is why
you sometimes really do need to rebuild a Windows system
from scratch.

[snip- text vs binary again]
But not *that* much really.

Except that prefs are individual and go with the app.
There isn't a central registry that gets involved.

Prefs files do not go with the app: they go in your
~/Library/Preferences directory. They aren't all
kept in one file, but this does not make any difference
since they *are* all in the same directory.

[snip]
This is the big difference: the registry contains object
registrations that can't be regenerated.

Is that where, when looking in the registry, you see something that looks
like a very long serial number?

Yes.

If so, I can understand why it couldn't regenerate itself.

I wonder. But maybe you do. In any case, it can't. It can
regenerate prefs like the Mac does, but the bulk of the
registry is not prefs.

[snip]
Funny things when windows media player in OS X started and then
mysteriously quit, I called Apple up about it. They just said to drag the
main Caches directory to the trash. I did and the problem went away.
This is probably still a big mystery to me as to what can make an app just
shut down or crash, but by throwing out the main cache it works. Never
seen anything like that happen in windows.

It can happen, but presumably MS works a little harder to make
Windows Media Player solid on Windows.

Caches do differ from prefs in one respect: caches are about
making a program *fast*, so there is a temptation to omit validation
if it would be expensive. After all, caches are private files of
the app, no-one should be editing them. So nothing can go wrong,
right? :D

Windows and the Mac handle caches in essentially the same
way: per user directories in the profile/home folder.

[snip]
Sun is doing Java.

Getting a bit long in the tooth tho. Plus I really don't like the style
of java that much.

Java was first released in 1996. It's still on the young
side, as languages go.

Microsoft has pretty well caught up,
but nevertheless Sun deserves credit for the innovation.

Sun started java back in the early 90s.

These things take time. It seems to be faster with
Apple partly because Apple sticks to unambitious
or proven technologies, but mostly because they
keep everything secret.

Remember when we had just MS-DOS and then out came the Amiga?
That was what made things exciting.

That was when things really were stagnating.

MS-DOS was just a CP/M knockoff.

There were still good ideas then: the Amiga's graphics
architecture, the Macs GUI. But they stayed bottled up
on niche platforms.

The lack of compatibility you had back then was crippling;
the result was that most of the effort expended back then
was expending on copying things from other platforms;
quite a lot simply on copying the Mac.

Microsoft is not any less innovative today than it usually
is, I would say. :D

Due to their dominance, they have actually stagnated the industry by not
putting out any new and trully innovative products out there. Right now,
about all M$ does is search the country or world looking for innovative
companies to buy out. But still, this stagnates the industry. They've
made it almost impossible for a new company to jump in and compete with a
new o/s and hardware.

I do not wish to exagerate MS's own innovation: but they have
been an enabler for innovation. Their software makes each hardware
and software component independent, thereby making it possible for
other vendors to produce innovative products without having
to build 'a new o/s and hardware'.

Without Windows, there would be no WinModems or WinPrinters;
there would have been no 3D revolution in gaming. No 3d-sound
cards.

Even simple things like high-resolution, high-color screens are extremely
difficult without this technology.

I doubt we'd even have scroll wheels.

[snip]


.

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