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by lutusp 4466 days ago
> There's very little to learn from operating system design point of view in there ...

I understand your point, but in one important sense, this release has value. Someday, a scholar is going to write the history of drive letters and their perverse effect on all of computing -- up to the present day, where they're buried under a thin patina of respectability in the newest versions of Windows.

Under Windows, including the most recent versions, you can get repeatable results for procedures that involve peripherals only if you disconnect them all, then reconnect them in the same order each and every time. Why? Drive letters.

This might be excusable on historical grounds, except that, when MS-DOS was first written, there was already an OS without drive letters -- Unix.
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tanzam75 4466 days ago
> Under Windows, including the most recent versions, you can get repeatable results for procedures that involve peripherals only if you disconnect them all, then reconnect them in the same order each and every time. Why? Drive letters.

So don't use drive letters.

Mount each volume in its own separate NTFS folder. Now you'll get repeatable results no matter what order you plug them in.

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Jtsummers 4466 days ago
As someone very unfamiliar with Windows administration anymore, how would you do this without invoking 3rd party tools?

Found MS's description [1]. However, that's not useable by most office workers, and the steps are likely beyond the average home user. So it's really just a feature for power users and IT departments.

[1] http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753321.aspx

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jon-wood 4466 days ago
Who are probably the only people it matters to, so I'm not sure it's worth getting too worried about.
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Jtsummers 4466 days ago
Eh, I use Linux and OS X at home. I only use Windows at work so it doesn't bother me (but I do get annoyed a bit when drives don't get mounted to the same letter, even when it's the next available one). That said, it would have saved me a lot of heartache a few years back dealing with some testing tools that liked to hardcode paths and threw a fit when things didn't line up correctly.
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peteri 4466 days ago
Err MSDOS was a rough CP/M clone and CP/M did have drive letters. CP/M picked up some stuff from RSX-11 (pip for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_Interchange_Program) and that's why the Windows/MSDOS command option is usually / as it was on a pdp-11 (backwards compatibility to BEFORE unix)
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