Re: Leopard rant - hard shutdowns all the time

T i m <news@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Mon, 23 Jun 2008 12:14:00 +0100, james.dore@xxxxxxxxxxxx (James
Dore) wrote:

Amen. I don't understand why there's a need for drive letters, surely
it's far easier to understand 'disks' assigned by a Name, rather than a
letter? Why are letters necessary in the 20th Century?

But it's not always necessary and is partly historic isn't it? If I go
to 'My Network Places' (stupid name but hey ...) I see all my shares?
No letters, just the share names <shrug>. If I open 'My Computer' I
see things like 'System (C:)' but I don't have to take any notice of
the C: do I?

The Shares in My Network Neighborhood (sic) are not yet mounted on the
local machine. When they mount, they get a Drive letter - but only under
windows.

Whilst the user can disregard the drive letter, Windows doesn't. What's
worse is that it could be so much better: What is risibly called the C:
drive is actually, to the OS

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\

- and it is told to reference this as C:

It would be not beyond the wit of the programmer to refer to this as
System: or some such other label, and do away with all the drive letter
nonsense. Linux would refer to the same partition as /dev/hda1 and mount
it as / - all other partitions would mount as whatever the user told
them to.


Wait until you get a USB stick that has by default /two/ partitions on
it - a small one with some advertsing crap on (as part of the 'free'
gift that was the memory stick) and another larger empty partition for
the luser to use. Then try and explain to the luser why his 1GB USB
stick only appears to be 80MB in size....

But that's not a fault of the OS but the luser for not understanding?
*I* wouldn't be confused by that, nor would my daughter. And you can't
just say it's not intuitive because there are many aspects of OSX and
Linux I don't find intuitive at all in spite of many years in IT
support.

(I think you're confusing the device name with the mountpoint there).

Under an OS that doesn't use drive letters, you'd see both partitions
mount immediately, and think 'Oh! My USB stick is in two bits. Oh well.'
And either use it like that, or change it straight away. The point is
that a user with no idea about drive letters or partitions or whatnot
can immediately see and use their USB stick no matter how it is
partitioned - rather than being hindered for no good reason because it
can't use the mount point it or Windows thinks it should.

This is the problem with Windows' Filesystems: There are finite, and
fixed, mount points for volumes. Under other filesystems, there are not
[1]. A user may be confused if they came across the device name (eg
/dev/hda2 or /dev/sda5) but they are /always/ mounted on a friendly name
automatically, so there is no real need for the user to care what the
device is called, only the Volume - the friendly name.

So my USB stick with two partitions when used on Linux shows up as
devices /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdb2 but show up in userland as icons
KINGSTON and JHD99 on the desktop, which in turn are just shortcuts to
the mount points /media/KINGSTON and /media/JHD99. This will vary from
Linux distro to distro - some still use /mnt as the directory to mount
other filesystems in - but they are immediately useable, and quite
clearly the users' USB stick.

On Mac OS, they show up as devices /dev/disk5s1 and /dev/disk5s2 which
is a bit more informative than the Linux device naming scheme (at least
you can see it's a disk of some sort :-) but these are always referenced
by the friendly names of the mount points - which are always
/Volumes/<name> - which is where the desktop icon points. The user
again doesn't need to know any of this, as his USB stick is right there
on the desktop, ready for use.

Under windows they don't show up at all without buggering about in My
Computer -> Manage -> Disk Management -> Change drive letter (maybe even
of other drives as well), because drive F: is mapped to some other
device, be it network drive or local device. That's not the user's fault
in any way - bad programming is working against the user for no good
reason.

Cheers,
James

[1] - well, limited only by the amount of devices the hardware will
support really.
--
james dore
IT Officer,
New College, Oxford
http://www.new.ox.ac.uk/ it-support@xxxxxxx
.

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