A.S. Tanenbaum "Modern Operating Systems" 2nd edition
<quote>
In an experiment to see if Windows NT file usage was appreciably
different from UNIX file usage, Vogels made measurements on files at
Cornell University (Vogels, 1999). He observed that NT file usage is
more complicated than on UNIX. He wrote:
/When we type a few characters in the notepad text editor, saving this
to a file will trigger 26 system calls, including 3 failed open
attempts, 1 file overwrite and 4 additional open and close sequences./
</quote>
No comment.

Does notepad at least make backup copies of the previously saved
version?  I don't recall.  If it did, one could accept the above as
almost sensible.  If not, well...

On 2008-11-24, Kelsey Bjarnason <kels...@lgisp.net> wrote:

No way. But it does have undo and redo.

--
3A:29

AFAIK, no...
--
Firefox 3.0.4 .::. Thunderbird: 2.0.0.17.::. Ubuntu 8.10

No.

Maybe it does have undo/redo, but that's not a file operation.  Why would
it need three failed open, an overwrite and four more open/close
sequences to do a simple open/write/close operation?

news:1227544646.64988@athprx04...

Comment - Notepad triggers more file system calls. A better test would be
to monitor the low level filesystem calls and see how many calls are needed
to open/close/write/append a file.

Some would say this is a good thing.

Personally I hate editors "doing their own thing". Want backups? Use a
reliable version control system.

notepad is a quick and cheerful system editor. No more. No less.

And lets face it, so many people us notepad that the above paragraph is
really revealing .....

news:ggf0if$n1b$1@reader.motzarella.org...

To me this is a very good thing. If I'm doing serious coding then notepad
is useless. But if I need to make a quick change to file then notepad is
great because it loads so fast on even the slowest of machines. I just
checked the footprint of notepad and it's 2.7 megs of memory usage and a VM
size of 876K bytes. That is *exactly* the fast, light editor I want for
doing quick edits.

After takin' a swig o' grog, Kelsey Bjarnason belched out
  this bit o' wisdom:

Does Notepad also open a number of configuration files & plugins when it
starts, like vim does?

--
What a strange game.  The only winning move is not to play.
                -- WOP, "War Games"

Verily I say unto thee, that Kelsey Bjarnason spake thusly:

I could understand the failed "open" attempts if it were trying to
execute a file by trying various paths, but this is a data file, and
surely Notepad has already been told where it's being saved, so why
would it be searching paths for that?

As for four open/write/close ops; would one of those be something to do
with a fork for the metadata in the ADS (Alternate Data Stream)?

Anyway, who cares? The only thing about Windows that isn't a mystery, is
the fact that it's a bloated; inefficient; horribly broken mess. Do we
really need to know any more than that?

--
K.
http://slated.org

.----
| "At the time, I thought C was the most elegant language and Java
|  the most practical one. That point of view lasted for maybe two
|  weeks after initial exposure to Lisp."   ~ Constantine Vetoshev
`----

Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.25.11-60.fc8
 22:49:55 up 19 days,  6:32,  5 users,  load average: 0.16, 0.18, 0.18

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____/ Tony Manco on Monday 24 November 2008 19:21 : \____

notepad hasn't caught up even with vim.

- --
                ~~ Best of wishes

Microsoft loves competition.
"Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I’m going to fucking bury that guy, I
have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to fucking kill
Google."
                --Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO
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On 2008-11-24, geonik <geonik...@ath.forthnet.gr> claimed:

Ah. Not that bad. I'm sure they have it up to 260 system calls for
Vista, including 10 failed open attempts, 24 overwrites, 72 addtional
open and close sequences, and 121 "Oh shit!"s.

--
Outdoors for me is walking from the car to the ticket desk at the airport.
-- Frank Zappa

Verily I say unto thee, that Roy Schestowitz spake thusly:

Comparing notepad to vim is like comparing a candle to a nuclear
reactor. Notepad is little more than a Sticky Notes application,
without the stickiness. Wordpad is a hairs-breadth better than
notepad, but frankly there simply isn't anything in Microsoft's
portfolio that's anything close to a real text editor.

There's the WYSIWYG stuff like the all-singing Word, of course,
that's bloated up to the hilt with crap designed to make Web pages
with miles of embedded; MSO-specific garbage, if someone should be
stupid enough to want to fire up that behemoth just to edit a source file.

--
K.
http://slated.org

.----
| "At the time, I thought C was the most elegant language and Java
|  the most practical one. That point of view lasted for maybe two
|  weeks after initial exposure to Lisp."   ~ Constantine Vetoshev
`----

Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.25.11-60.fc8
 01:21:26 up 19 days,  9:04,  5 users,  load average: 0.24, 0.22, 0.18

On Nov 24, 8:37 am, geonik <geonik...@ath.forthnet.gr> wrote:

If one does a 'strace notepad' on Linux (with a
WinE install), things get a little strange.  I'm not
sure which of these are because of WinE and which are
because of notepad; presumably the latter is a freeware
reimplementation, but then notepad on Windows is AFAIK
little more than a dual-widget encapsulator anyway (the
second widget being a file requester dialog) -- and not
a very bright one.

First, unlike gedit, notepad simply titles it "Untitled",
even if one specifies a (non-existent) filename in the
invocation line.  gedit at least remembers the filename
while presenting the user with an empty window.  kedit also
remembers the filename specified on its command line.
vi[m] doesn't have a display window (although one can use
gvim), but will create a buffer with "newfile.txt [New
File]" if one presses control-G.  I don't have emacs but
strongly suspect it's hyperintelligent as well in that area
(if nothing else, to keep us vi guys quiet :-) ).

It turns out gvim titles the window correctly as well,
like everyone else -- *except* notepad.

Second, notepad, since it's forgotten what the filename is,
will present one with a file requester upon save; this
file requester does a fair number of strange things --
including counting the number of entries in subdirectories.
That's going to generate a bit of I/O.

Third, I have no idea how notepad actually *opens* the
file for write, for write(6,...) is preceded by a close(6),
which itself is preceded by open("..",O_DIRECTORY) = 6!

If the file *does* exist, the fid becomes 11 instead.  (God
only knows where the other 5 fids are coming from.)

Clearly something a little weird is going on here between
the close() and the write().  There is the possibility that
WinE is doing something that strace can't quite catch, such
as wineserver (somehow) passing a file descriptor down.

Wonderful engineering, yes?

Oh, and just to be even more bizarre, someone's going
to have to explain to me why

open(".", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE)

is even remotely useful -- especially when replicated 8 times.
Granted, I can understand the open() -- apparently opendir()
translates into an open() call with the O_DIRECTORY flag -- but
said flag is conspicuous here by its absence.

Go fig.

As for backup copies...Linux file editors vary in that
respect.  gedit in particular annoys me with its propensity
to create files appended with the '~' (tilde) character,
but one man's annoyance may be another's salvation if he
unexpectedly deletes his source code.  I'd have to look to
see if vim has a backup file option; presumably it's
settable.

All in all, for file editing, Linux just Makes More
Sense(tm). ;-) The one thing Microsoft actually does
correctly in its pedantic way -- namely, handling of CR/LF
sequences -- annoys just about everyone else, but that's
a missive for another day.

After takin' a swig o' grog, The Ghost In The Machine belched out
  this bit o' wisdom:

Today, I'm in a virtual machine running Win 2K, and go to open a file
in Visual Studio.  I click on the bar to open up the "current directory",
which is on the hard drive.  I wait for it to pop up.  In the interim, the
CD-ROM starts to spin up.

Why?

Nice stuff from the company whom someone here claimed was "incapable of
sustained error".

--
  I marvel at the strength of human weakness.

Of course.  You need to know why the OSS "community" of freeloaders and
theft-cloneware developers can't write better software than
Microsoft/commercial developers.

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____/ Homer on Tuesday 25 November 2008 01:21 : \____

It's limitation /by design/. There's no digital scarcity.

- --
                ~~ Best of wishes

"The collaborative, massively distributed development process behind the
Internet and Open Source projects is not your enemy. It is your friend, the
source of basic research that you can turn into your next generation of
products."
                --Tim O’Reilly
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This is comp.os.linux.advocacy.

Where's High Plains Hypocrite quoting the FAQ and calling you a troll and
whining that your post is off-topic?

Trying to outdo yourself for the most idiotic coment made this week?

On Nov 24, 6:33 pm, Chris Ahlstrom <lino...@bollsouth.nut> wrote:

I have noticed the floppy gronking at odd times in Windows,
during similar operations.  It would not surprise me
that the CD-ROM needs to be read for drive enumeration,
though one also wonders why Visual Studio really needs
to enumerate the drives anyway; can't Windows tell if
someone's inserted a new CD?

Well, there might be some hardware issues there.  The Amiga
in particular modified the floppy connection -- it's
not standard WD1771 [*] -- to include the ability to
indicate whether a floppy was removed or not; I'd have
to look precisely how, but the AmigaOS also checked on a
periodic basis, resulting in a characteristic "clicking"
sound if the floppy drive is empty (the click was actually
a head step, which reported a status back to the OS if a
floppy was in the drive).  I don't think the PC reports a
disk is changed until *after* the controller issues a read
attempt, but would have to look; it is also possible that
a head step on the PC reports a disk change, but DOS was
just too dumb (or lazy) to check before the user issued a
"DIR/W A:".

Of course DOS had the rather odd innovation of prompting
the user for "floppy B" if the user only had one drive
unit; the OS however emulated two more or less virtual
floppies, switching between the two as needed (or requiring
the user to switch).  Heaven help the user if he inserted
the wrong floppy at the wrong time if he was doing
something like COPY A:*.* B:*.* !

At least now the floppies are finally going the way of the
dino, though I still do have a bunch of 5 1/4"s and
3 1/2" running around...

I don't know what issues DOS and/or Windows has with
CD changing, though thankfully MSCDEX.EXE is long buried,
and hopefully dead.  [+]

Microsoft does have the problem of being hobbled by its
own success, perhaps.  IBM didn't fare much better, though
it tried with its ill-fated Microchannel to reclaim the
market it lost to the clones; unfortunately for IBM, by the
time IBM had gotten its patents on the MCA ready to go,
PCI swamped ISA (as well as swamping the VL-Bus as well)
in the marketplace.

Whoops.

And then there was OS/2, but I digress...

So Windows still has the "innovative" single-letter
drive prefixes long after they should have been shot,
buried, and (not) mourned.  Even in the Amiga's heyday
(or the Mac's, if one prefers), multi-letter prefixes
were common, allowing more intelligent pathnames such as
"MyDataDisk:My Third Grade Report.document" [!]  instead of
"A:MY3DGRPT.DOC".  OK, maybe spaces aren't that bright
but they were at least tolerated.

(To be fair, Win95 did implement a rather crufty long name
extension, which also tolerates spaces, on top of FAT.
Dunno what NTFS does in that area, though suspect it's
also slightly mucky.  Also, Win95 introduced the
rather old [$] concept of \\node\sharepath, but
not horribly consistently.)

* * *

[*] the Amiga's interface actually might have been called
a "Winfloppy", had such a concept existed at the time.
As it was, the Amiga had its blitter chip which easily
handled Manchester encoding, and presumably decoding
as well; the CPU therefore didn't need to get quite as
involved as it otherwise might have.  Its formatting also
led to more storage space on the floppy; AmigaOS wrote a
track at a time, and got 880k where most contemporary PCs
only got 720k.

Sadly, this innovative concept never made it outside of the
Amiga world (Apple had its own ideas, among them variable
speed floppy drives; AFAIK Atari went straight WD1771),
and when Commodore died, it took such innovations along
for the ride into its grave.

[+] with my luck it's just been renamed in XP, though, and
*still* sitting in conventional memory.

[!] The Amiga also allowed physical drivenames, so one
could use "DF0:My Third Grade Report.document" if one
knew the relevant disc was in the first drive unit.
"DH0:" was used for the first partition of the first
hard drive; I don't remember the exact ordering scheme though
Commodore had a far more sophisticated partitioning mechanism
than the PC's simple table.

I forget precisely what old MacOS did here.  Of course
MacOSX has its own ideas, being a Unix variant (AFAIK).

[$] Another dead machine: the Apollo DOMAIN series had
the more primitive //nodename/dir specification; the
system did not allow for a mapping from sharepoint to
directories arbitrarily placed on the volume, though
symbolic links could be used if need be.  Ultimately,
they were swallowed by HP.

Sad, to contemplate what might have been.

Sure.

Interesting that you post your, probably false, findings from a "virtual
machine".

And of course there are never any issues with CD Roms in Linux eh? My
sounds card wont work on XP any more ..... in the latest version of
VMWare that is. And no I havent tried hard to find the problem. But I
dont blame XP in this case.

But hold on! Visual Studio?!?!??!

Weren't you showing off recently about how Vim meets your "hardcore"
needs?

Why are you using this closed source "crapware" that you keep
complaining about?!?!?!

Whats wrong with CodeBlocks or something cross platform?

Oh! I know. You're a COLA hypocrite who makes his money by day using
Windows systems, writing Windows SW and you come here at night to big up
your Linux skills.

On Nov 24, 7:40 pm, AZ Nomad <aznoma...@PremoveOBthisOX.COM> wrote:

A very strange comment from DFS, that...I for one would
like for him to explain it.

Unless he's referring to the Linux freeze-ups that he posts
here on an occasional basis (his latest one turned out to
be thermal, aka a hardware problem :-P ).

There *are* problems with Linux, mostly in the
configuration of certain items -- WiFi is the one that
comes to mind right now -- but I'm not sure such problems
are nearly as mysterious as to the contents of that Windows
registry... ;-)

The Ghost In The Machine <ewi...@earthlink.net> writes:

Unless the drivers simply did not work.

Wireless for sure. Video is MUCH better. But as little as a year ago
getting ATI cards to work properly with OpenGL was a nightmare with some
distros.

Google will confirm.

NVidia can still screw over a Debian machine if you follow Liarnut's
advice and use the Nvidia installer.

On 2008-11-24, Hadron <hadronqu...@gmail.com> wrote:

...something else for the end user to have to worry about, install,
maintain and understand.

   Given the target user, this is a BAD idea.

   The VMS way would be very handy for the common end user. Given
current drive sizes, it wouldn't even be too much of a burden in
terms of extra "wasted" space.

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