[OT] Cool tiny tiny PC

[Tim Watts]

Yeah, but we're not SWITCHING them.

We're ROUTING them, with netfilter rules etc...

[Huge]

Works that way by default on my work machine (Win7 with Office 2013).

[Tim Streater]

You mean even mine where I complain that if I want to move a file around or rename it and as it might be Word has it open then I can't and am told off for wanting to?

Instead, that is, of being able to move/rename the file and having applications being told to get their ideas updated?

I see that file browser windows in Win7 (and in fact in Linus Mint) have a little "refresh" icon for the user to click because they are unable to be told that their view of a folder is now out of date.

[Huge]

Standard Dennis shit.

The "you can't delete that because Thumbs.db is in use" was, ooh, let me think, last Wednesday. On a fully patched Windows 7 machine.

Windows seizing the input focus and refusing to let it go was, ooh, let me see, last Wednesday. On a fully patched Windows 7 machine.

So, Dennis old chum, you can f*ck off and die.

In the Linux case, not strictly true. You *can* manually refresh the view, if you want to, but the Linux kernel has the ability to inform programs that the filesystem has changed out from under them, and Debian, Ubuntu & Mint file browsers make use of that. I rarely, if ever, click the button.

[Martin Bonner]

That was true in Win3.1. I'm not sure about 95. Not true for XP.

The one thing that *is* right about this, is that you can't move the

*parent* of a modal dialog. You can switch to the window under it, and move that.

It's well into the 21st century now.

[Theo Markettos]

Indeed, XHCI is different from EHCI which is different from OHCI.

T'other day I had a problem - I had a Win7 machine with USB 3 (actually a VMWare VM on a laptop with USB 3) which didn't have USB 3 drivers. So it couldn't talk to USB 3 things plugged in, but I could talk to USB 2 things plugged in. This was a bit of a problem with a USB 3 flash stick I wanted to use, because I couldn't talk to it at all even at USB 2 speeds.

The solution was a simple one: plug it in via a two inch extension cable. Since it wasn't a USB 3 extension cable it disconnected the extra SuperSpeed pins between the USB 3 port and USB 3 stick, which caused it to fallback to USB 2. That worked nicely. An alternative would have been to use a USB 2 hub if I'd had one to hand.

Theo

[Huge]

Yep.

[Andy Burns]

Jetway certainly do 4-port ethernet daughter cards for some of their other small form motherboards, used them in firewalls.

Alternatively

cheaper at Amazon et al.

[Dave Liquorice]

Agreed. "An error has occured. A log file has been created" OWTHE. I don't think I have ever seen a useful error message in windows.

[Dave Liquorice]

That's exactly the problem. Windows doesn't let you move the Word parent window, give me a good reason why you can't. Other desktop enviroments can manage it so there is nor programming or technical reason why it can't be done. Ergo windows is broke.

[Dave Liquorice]

That just shows how strong the windows conditioning is.

[Mike Barnes]

You are right but you miss my point which is that that's *much* less serious than the alleged problem that we were told about earlier. It's easy to find fault with Windows, so I don't know why people resort to transparent exaggeration in order to make their case.

Speaking for myself I've never found the slightest problem with cases like that described above, because it's trivially easy to move or resize the dialog to see what's underneath it, not that I'd ever want to do that with an Open dialog. What is annoying (and this the only such problem I've had in over a quarter-century of Windows use) is in Quicken where I open dialog A from the main window, then dialog B from dialog A, and find that I can't move dialog A to see what's underneath it in the main window.

[dennis]

Its the opposite, some of us don't believe all the cr@p that some make up. Nearly all of it is based on some ones inability to learn and as this thread has already shown by the fact the alleged problems don't actually exist. Now if you would like to detail some real problems feel free.

[Chris French]

I'm not sure it was the problem Huge was describing.

Not really, Dis-regarding whether or not I should be able too. I'm not sure that I would ever want to really. If I got the dialogue open, it's cos I'm doing something with it, rather than the main Word window. If I want to view a different programs window I can.

In fact thinking about it, I don't move windows about much anyway

[Huge]

Me neither, now! :o)

[Tim Streater]

In XP it certainly does. In Win7 it seems to be worse. I have a file on the desktop, I open it in Notepad and Notepad++

I then rename it. Notepad seems entirely unaware of this. Meanwhile, at least Notepad++ thinks that the original file "no longer exists". Well in fact it does, it just has another name. If I save it I now have two files, despite having taken no action that a reasonable person would describe as duplicating a file.

OK - lets try Publisher - which is the only reason I have this Win7 install in a VirtualBox VM in the first place. Start Publisher and create and save a new publication to the Desktop.

Try to rename the file and what do I get? Ah yes, classic Windows behaviour: "This action can't be completed because the file is open in Microsoft Publisher".

Three different apps, three different behaviours.

[Mike Barnes]

This is more interesting. One could equally argue that the original file does not exist, but another file with the same content but a different name does exist. Both statements could be considered true, depending on how you think of things. You clearly think differently from Notepad++, but that doesn't make Notepad++ wrong.

[Tim Streater]

Why would I do the sequence above other than because I decided that the file's name was no linger appropriate. Changing it "underneath" Notepad++ should lead to that app changing its record of the file's name. Of course, I could just have done a "Save as" in Notepad++ with the new name, but now I've got two files and have then to remember to go back and delete the "old" one. Notepad etc are editing, not file-management, programs.

Steps you take on a computer (or any device, really), should be appropriate for what you are trying to do. Relying on side-effects or workarounds is a recipe for stuff going wrong.

MS manages to do it right under OS X for Word/Excel, but not, it seems, on the own flagship OS (unless they've made more changes in more recent versions, Win7 is the most recent I've used).

[Mike Barnes]

I think you missed my point, which was about one's perception of the filesystem rather than about the computer trying to assess your motives.

But if you really want a "why", I might want to make a backup copy of the original before saving my changes. Renaming is quicker than copying and although the difference is probably insignificant for a text file on a fast storage medium, it might not be for a huge video file on a camera's internal memory card. There's often more than one way of looking at things and it's unwise to assume that your way is the One True Way.

[tony sayer]

Just tried that and it does work. Using WIN 7 pro..

Mind you I don't use Microsoft office we used Kingston office which is every bit as good and free in some versions..