Poll: Should/will Microsoft ever drop the C:\ and just go with directories?

[Chaotic42]

Just curious. I like the directories better.

 

[Sunner]

Yes they should.

No they won't.

 

[sak]

No they should'nt and they won't. Some ppl can use the command prompt faster than double clicking. so why should they??

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: sak
No they should'nt and they won't. Some ppl can use the command prompt faster than double clicking. so why should they??

I fail to see what that has to do with drive letters vs a hierarchical tree?

 

[Spyro]

Originally posted by: Sunner
Yes they should.

No they won't.

 

[Flatline]

It would be nice, but I very much doubt that they will, since it would a) confuse their users and b) make windows look more like a 'nix

 

[Lord Evermore]

How much difference is there really? If you look at it from a hierarchical viewpoint, the drive letter is just a branch of the "My Computer" tree, as partitions are a branch of the root folder. The only major difference I can see is that from a command prompt (or a script) you can't get a single file listing for every drive letter as you can with a root listing (and any other related things where you'd need to have a "root" location to work from to see everything on the system), and since Microsoft doesn't really care too much about people who use a command prompt, that's not going to be an incentive for them to change. For that they could modify the NT command prompt to have a "root" that you can change to named My Computer, though I don't know how easy that would be.

Unix users have to remember things like sda1 and hdb4, and have to pay attention to mount points. Windows users can see at a glance what partition their files are located on, and in many cases what physical drive if there are few partitions. Unix sort of has an edge in that you can mount a partition and then change that mount point easily, but that's only an advantage over Win9x. Win2k/XP you can change drive letters at will (and both Unix and Windows would break if you just changed letters/mounts to a different partition which doesn't have the data a link points to).

As a matter of fact, NTFS actually allows mounting a partition as a subdirectory of another partition. So, although it isn't the default or preferred way, it is possible to just use a hierarchy from the root drive.

 

[skriefal]

Yes, they should. When adding a new hard drive, I'd prefer to drop it in and mount it under -- for example -- \APPS or \BACKUP or \AUDIO or some other sensibly named mountpoint. These old, stupid drive letters should die a painful death.

Of course, this is already possible with Win2k and XP using junction points -- some more info: here, here, and here. This support should be better integrated into the UI and should replace drive letters as the default way of accessing additional drives.

 

[DeeK]

Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
As a matter of fact, NTFS actually allows mounting a partition as a subdirectory of another partition.

Actually, there's nothing technical about NTFS that allows it. It's a decision on Microsoft's part to only allow that with NTFS. In Linux I can mount any partition type as a subdirectory of any partition type, regardless if it's FAT32, NTFS, ext2/3. XFS, or any other filesystem you can think of.

 

[Nothinman]

How much difference is there really?

Huge. Especially when you take into consideration things like Citrix that let you move drive letters around for clients, now c:\ is the mapped client drive and q:\ is the system root drive, and when that happens a lot of software gets confused because they assume c:\. If there was no c:\ to assume (i.e. only / or \ if you want) it would eliminate a lot of problems.

Win2k/XP you can change drive letters at will (and both Unix and Windows would break if you just changed letters/mounts to a different partition which doesn't have the data a link points to).

Yes but in unix I have the ability to make a duplicate of that partition very simply by reading the raw device file in /dev or by just copying the files, in Windows you can't copy files that are opened and locked so you miss ~1/3 of the drive if you try to do the system drive.

Then there's the limit of 26 drive letters to get around that you can mount things in NTFS directories but then you end up half way between unix and Windows and have the same "what partiton is that file on" problem you say unix has.

Using letters to identify partitions should be deprecated and MS should move on, but it would break so much I doubt they will

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
How much difference is there really? If you look at it from a hierarchical viewpoint, the drive letter is just a branch of the "My Computer" tree, as partitions are a branch of the root folder. The only major difference I can see is that from a command prompt (or a script) you can't get a single file listing for every drive letter as you can with a root listing (and any other related things where you'd need to have a "root" location to work from to see everything on the system),

Why should I have to tell windows where the windows CD is? If it was at /cdrom or whatever, it could be more intelligent. Letters are entirely arbitrary and have zero correlation to what is on the actual drive.

Unix users have to remember things like sda1 and hdb4

Unix users have to remember alot of things, and good for them. A car mechanic should not be forgetting where a tire goes. And how could you get rid of names for drives anyways? The drives are individual physical entities, you HAVE to be able to refer to them individually for things like partitioning. Also, the only time that stuff really matters is when you're setting up the system or re-doing partitions or something. /usr is /usr, no matter what drive it's on.

and have to pay attention to mount points.

When? Again, you only do this (maybe) while setting up the system or rearranging things. In normal day-to-day use, /cdrom is /cdrom. "mount /cdrom".

Windows users can see at a glance what partition their files are located on

You're suggesting that you can only do this in windows?

 

[Sunner]

You're suggesting that you can only do this in windows?

I think he means UNIX users must first have to memorize things like sda1, hda2, etc, then remember where those are mounted, and since this is almost entirely impossible to remember, they won't be able to see where their files are at a glance...

Not sure though...

 

[Chaotic42]

Originally posted by: Lord Evermore


Unix users have to remember things like sda1 and hdb4, and have to pay attention to mount points.

Hence the df command. One of the nice things is that it's transparent. Anyone can tell that c:\ and d:\ are different partitions. Without checking, no one could tell that my /home is on a different partition. You could hook up thousands of drives with 20 partitions and it wouldn't look any different than one huge drive to the user.

 

[ultimatebob]

You know, it could happen!

Remember, Windows Longhorn will have brand new file system, loosely based off of SQL Server. I'd imagine that they'll use it to push the whole "folder" concept a bit more, and only use classic Windows directory structure for legacy applications.

 

[ultimatebob]

I'm not sure how that got double-posted. Odd.

 

[Spyro]

Originally posted by: Sunner

You're suggesting that you can only do this in windows?

I think he means UNIX users must first have to memorize things like sda1, hda2, etc, then remember where those are mounted, and since this is almost entirely impossible to remember, they won't be able to see where their files are at a glance...

Not sure though...

The only time that I actually have to pay attention to that, is when I install a new drive and during the initial linux install.

 

[Nothinman]

Seeing the poll results, I'm really surprised how many people are stuck on a such a stupid (IMO obviously) way to label partitions. My only guess is that they've never used a unix or Mac system where the partition management doesn't suck, even OS 9 and earlier used logical names for the volumes in the system.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Well, it works, and we have used it for years, and it's not stopping us from getting work done.

Yes I know about the df command. I guess the "transparency" thing being good or bad depends on your point of view. I like seeing all my partitions at a glance rather than having to check them with an extra command (of course, obviously on my OWN system I know where they all are).

Nobody's suggested any major reason drive letters need to be done away with, other than "that's now how Unix does it and Unix is GOD". The only reasonable thing was about locating the CDROM, but in that case, if you have more than one drive you have to figure out which one has your disc, so it's not always the case that you have just one reference. I can easily remember that my Yamaha drive is E and my LiteOn is F, just as easily as someone can remember that theirs are cdrom1 and cdrom2 (or "fastdisc" and "slowdisc" since I seem to recall you could name it anything). And as I pointed out before, in a GUI, it's obvious which drive letter is a CDROM, and Microsoft only cares about the GUI.

I acknowledge the ability for drive letters to change arbitrarily being a bit of a stupid thing, but that's about the only downside. And if you just use mount points in NTFS, you'll only ever have a C drive anyway, and you can always assign a latter character to the CDROM so it's unlikely to change, resulting in very nearly the same thing as a Unix system.

 

[Nothinman]

Nobody's suggested any major reason drive letters need to be done away with, other than "that's now how Unix does it and Unix is GOD".

I did so, there are a lot of apps that make stupid assumptions about drive letters. And think about boot disks, every DOS boot disk that uses a ramdrive and cdrom have special executables to find those drives and there's no easy way to do it without 'stealing' those executables. If we only had one / directory it would be simple to mount the ramdrive and cdrom somewhere and be sure they're always where you think they'll be, which would make custom boot disks a lot simpler and easier to create.

 

[spyordie007]

Seeing the poll results, I'm really surprised how many people are stuck on a such a stupid (IMO obviously) way to label partitions. My only guess is that they've never used a unix or Mac system where the partition management doesn't suck, even OS 9 and earlier used logical names for the volumes in the system.

I did so, there are a lot of apps that make stupid assumptions about drive letters.

I would agree that it's quite annoying to have applications which make assumptions about the drive letters, however I dont think that's a good reason that drive letters need to be done away with (only a good reason for software vendors to get their act together and quit writing sloppy apps).

In my opinion I cant see a percieved *need* for it for either the general publics' use or for Microsoft's. Microsoft is in a position now where they cannot just do away with it, many legacy applications would ceese to run alltogether and it would only confuse many of their end users. After all the only reason that many users can find the floppy drive at all is because they've always known it as "A:" why should we force them to learn it as "/mnt/floppy"?

I'm not saying that I would mind a change as such, it's just that when a company as large as Microsoft has been doing something like this for as long as they have and all the users are used to it the way that it is there are too many negative reasons to try and change their OS as such and not much benefit for the vast majority of users.

Also like it's been mentioned they have (in a sort) changed the system so that a drive designation is no longer the topmost level, now the topmost level is "my computer" with drive letters as simple "sub-directories" of it (within Windows, not DOS) so your actual "C" drive location is really:
"/My Computer/C:/"
Not that I'm suggesting one way is better than the other, just something I wanted to point out.

My real question is why have we gotten all these crappy polls the past few weeks?

-Spy

 

[Nothinman]

however I dont think that's a good reason that drive letters need to be done away with (only a good reason for software vendors to get their act together and quit writing sloppy apps).

We know that won't happen. One of my company's applications that we sell to big name clients used to assume c:\temp for the temp directory and the developers fought us when we told them that wouldn't work on Citrix, eventually they gave in but I'm sure that's not the only hard coded path they use.

After all the only reason that many users can find the floppy drive at all is because they've always known it as "A:" why should we force them to learn it as "/mnt/floppy"?

I would say most users can find it because it's the icon on the far left in My Computer, not because of the letter associated with it.

 

[SocrPlyr]

I not really hear to argue that it should be one way or another, however there would be some serious problems for MS if they changed it. first off people don't want to learn something new. it shouldn't be hard to make the switch but i have seen people have enough problems using windows as it is yet alone to change something like this on them. (although for future generations it would probably make it easier)

The second and much more important point is... it would probably break 50% of software written for windows to do something like this... In other words it becomes a big huge pain in the butt to fix or to come up w/ something to allow another backward compatibility mode.

You guys are also looking at it from the prospective that you have used *nix and you are somewhat used to it.

Now at least for a more useful feature that would have no problems, they could allow you to type in the drive label into the address bar and that will automatically refrence itself to that particular drive... they already do a similar thing with My Computer, My Documents, and My Network Places.

 

[chsh1ca]

Originally posted by: SocrPlyr
I not really hear to argue that it should be one way or another, however there would be some serious problems for MS if they changed it. first off people don't want to learn something new. it shouldn't be hard to make the switch but i have seen people have enough problems using windows as it is yet alone to change something like this on them. (although for future generations it would probably make it easier)

I disagree. Microsoft has already shown they don't give a damn if users have problems with change, they've already made huge changes. Compare Windows XP to Win95 and tell me that the two are similar. Your UI is still the same, and to 90% of users, C:\ means nothing, just as A:\ means nothing.

The second and much more important point is... it would probably break 50% of software written for windows to do something like this... In other words it becomes a big huge pain in the butt to fix or to come up w/ something to allow another backward compatibility mode.

It isn't a huge pain to alias c:\ to / at all.

You guys are also looking at it from the prospective that you have used *nix and you are somewhat used to it.

So what? People have used MacOS, and it doesn't have C Drives or anything, (I'm talking MacOS <10). Just because someone has used and likes Product B doesn't mean they can't reliably make points regarding Product A. IMO, it wouldn't be anywhere near the problem you're making it out to be, not for anyone.

That being said, I don't believe Microsoft will consider it.

 

[spyordie007]

So what? People have used MacOS, and it doesn't have C Drives or anything, (I'm talking MacOS <10).

One thing I would argue is that it is a PITA to reference a file location on any Mac OS, I think easier to do a "c:\dir\filename" than a "Mac OS/dir/filename", but of course that's just my personal preference and it has been almost a year now since I've had a Mac Box for myself to play around with.

-Spy

-Spy

 

[Nothinman]

it would probably break 50% of software written for windows to do something like this... In other words it becomes a big huge pain in the butt to fix or to come up w/ something to allow another backward compatibility mode.

Apple was able to make the transition with little problems and the compatibility mode of running in OS 9 was only for binary compatiblity, not paths or anything else easily manipulated by the OS like that. I would hope to think that MS could come up with something similar if they had to.

You guys are also looking at it from the prospective that you have used *nix and you are somewhat used to it.

Yes, and now that I've used it and have seen how much simpler it makes things from a user's and developer's standpoint I like it more.

Now at least for a more useful feature that would have no problems, they could allow you to type in the drive label into the address bar and that will automatically refrence itself to that particular drive... they already do a similar thing with My Computer, My Documents, and My Network Places.

Then they would have to force you to label the partitions, something a lot of people don't do.

A better start would be a pseudo-root that can be used from the command line. In unix I can do 'find / -name '*blah*'' and I'll get all files containing the term blah, ignoring the fact that Windows doesn't come with a decent command line find utility, it's impossible to do something like that because you have to do it on all drives. Yes you can use the GUI find thing, but you can't easily parse it's output or control it as well.