[geeks] Google announces Google Chrome OS

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Wed, Jul 08, 2009 at 04:41:03PM -0400, Phil Stracchino wrote:

>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).

No, some games and some programs do it and others do not. A lot of the
programs I run use drive letters, but most of the games that my son
runs don't. If they require the Cd/DVD at all, it can be in any of
the optical drives. 

To be honest, he's not very good at keeping his disks in readable condition,
so I often have to apply the nocd crack just to keep them going. However,
that's usually after months of playing the game.

I like Valve's operation, STEAM, where you buy a license to a game and if
it gets lost or corrupted, STEAM will automaticly reload or update it
for you. You can also install the game onto several computers, but only
run it on one at a time. 

The downside is that it requires an Internet connection. I do not know
what happens when it is down. I'll have to ask my son.

Note that circa 1990, the Mac did the same thing, hardcoding directory
numbers in file paths. It was one way of copy protection, because if you
moved or copied the files, the number of the directory would change, even
if the name did not. Luckily that has long since died.


>
>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.

Well,actualy you can specify volume name in a path instead of drive letters,
and I have seen network shares specified that way. The problem with that is
most (99.99%) of the people in the world never name their volumes.


>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.

OH sh*t, the new GM will be using that one now.

Geoff.
-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM