[geeks] Google announces Google Chrome OS

[Phil Stracchino]

gsm at mendelson.com wrote:
> Windows is based upon the concept that drive letters are assigned at boot
> time, the boot drive is C, the first partition of each hard drives is then
> added, then the optical drives, then each extra partition.

Yes.  And then when you install a piece of software, the relevant drive
letters *at that time* are all too frequently hard-coded into the
registry.  Add a drive, or plug or a USB thumb drive and an optical
drive in a different order, and the drive letters are wrong ... so the
software doesn't work, and usually won't tell you what's wrong.  That
is, it'll tell you what it's looking for, but not where it expects it to
be.  So you have to either remember, or guess, or go digging through the
registry (and if you're lucky, you might actually find it in a form you
can read).

Drive letters should have died at least ten years ago.  When a piece of
software tries to determine whether a particular volume is mounted, the
OS should be able to transparently enumerate all removable drives,
physical or virtual, and if one of them contains that volume, hand back
a pointer to it.

> As for network drives, you can assign then via the net use command via
> the CLI and either have drive letters stick or not.

Which fails to address the question of why we still have to screw around
with drive letters - and worse, the idea of statically mapped drive
letters - at all.  It's sort of like only being able to start your car
if you parked it in the same parking space you did yesterday.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.