Tuesday, April 5, 2011

How outdated is XP?

Just happened to use an XP machine and was moving a folder from one location to another, when it came across a file that was already open by another program. It promptly gave me an error dialog and then quit copying. Midway.

I like Win7/Vista much better where it gives you an option of continuing to copy, rename or discard. I do prefer Linux's cp --no-clobber (or overwrite by default) mechanism a little better as well, since that makes the process non-interactive (I asked you to do something, I know what I'm doing and do it accordingly philosophy). I can understand that Windows typically works with "you asked me to do this, but are you really sure you're not shooting yourself in the foot" mentality, and I can understand that. It's not what I'd like, but I can see how non-techies of the world might.

I don't like XP's "oh crap something unexpected happend. Bail!" philosophy. Not any more.

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