OS poll at Tip.it

Feel like posting Off Topic? Do it here.

Moderator: MaxCoderz Staff

User avatar
benryves
Maxcoderz Staff
Posts: 3087
Joined: Thu 16 Dec, 2004 10:06 pm
Location: Croydon, England
Contact:

Post by benryves »

hop wrote:And Windows does that at the cost of it being an easy mechanism for the user rather than the application. Last I checked, the application doesn't have bills to pay or wife and kids to feed, so that's pretty poor prioritising.
Out of interest, how often do you need to manually access these files? (Personnaly I have only ever once needed to access an application's data directory, so I could copy some skins to my own machine, sans internet connection). The application is the only thing that really needs to know what's going on in that directory.
This is why real OSes have had real file- and permissions systems for decades. Any file should have security management, not just your user dir. Also, lol @ saving website passwords.
As has Windows. However, it makes life easier to chuck files into a secure directory (which in turn automatically protects the files) rather than having to set rights on individual files (as you are mixing and matching different users). Again, easier for the developer.

I think the difference of opinion is that I can't see any reason to need to go and manually edit settings files on a day-to-day basis.

(I can't quite see what's so amusing about saving website passwords either). :)
User avatar
hop
Extreme Poster
Posts: 378
Joined: Sat 09 Dec, 2006 3:42 pm

Post by hop »

Out of interest, how often do you need to manually access these files? (Personnaly I have only ever once needed to access an application's data directory, so I could copy some skins to my own machine, sans internet connection). The application is the only thing that really needs to know what's going on in that directory.
Well because of the huge fail that modern webbrowsers are I get to look at my firefox files multiple times a day, simply because everything is in there, from bookmarks to cache to plugin configurations. There's always something in there I have to look in or copy elsewhere like the background wallpaper.
Then there's GIMP's settings, tools, scripts, plugins, etc.
My pron folder "~". In this case the fail that is the windows user directory acts well to hide it because nobody wants to go in there. : )
Explorer cookies and favorites. (why aren't these inside "/users/me/appdata/failplorer/" ?)
More browsers history cache and all that shit.
The huge mess that is /Temp/.
Fixing my dad's /nethood/ because Windows sucks at storing network share access settings in the user profile.
Fixing the templates because yet another bullshit closed source app is forcing it's proprietary bullshit formats to go in my context menu.
And S.T.A.L.K.E.R. stores it's settings.ini with all the rendering settings there, so tuning that (to have even better graphics and input settings than commercially supported, like global illumniation, shader settings, keybinds, etc) results in anger.
The webbrowser cache files and such need a lot attention when auditing website security.
As has Windows. However, it makes life easier to chuck files into a secure directory (which in turn automatically protects the files) rather than having to set rights on individual files (as you are mixing and matching different users).
Yes, now Windows finally has something somewhat approaching real security management. But alternatives natively and forcefully employ security on all files so both the developer and the user can locate it both with convenience and security. You don't have to set file rights at all, user x created it so user x is the owner and creator of the file and the file automatically gets the right permissions, excluding any other users except root from even seeing it and possibly even excluding native administrator accounts.
DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS
How do you even get customers?
(I can't quite see what's so amusing about saving website passwords either).
Don't need filesystem access to get those passwords from you.
Post Reply