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Why is a registry file called a “hive”? (2003)
- dekhn 4y agobecause it's full of scum and villany.
- wnevets 4y agoI don't get it, is that something hives are known for?
- adrianpike 4y agoIt's one of the more famous quotes from Star Wars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xcb4_QwP6fE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xcb4_QwP6fE
- CurtHagenlocher 4y agoOnly the wretched ones. (Hint: use a search engine.)
- zabzonk 4y agoOposite I would have thought - full of nice little humming creatures, making delicious sweet stuff.
- nescioquid 4y agoYou must be young.
- zabzonk 4y agoHardly.
- Pxtl 4y agoBetter question: why aren't there comments? It's 2022 and there are still no comments in regedit?
- kazinator 4y agoWhat stops you from creating a string key called Comment? :)
- userbinator 4y agoYou can make a string value with an unused name and use that as a comment, if that's what you're referring to?
- Pxtl 4y agoThis idea is also the recommended workaround for JSON, and it is equally wrong there. For one thing, then you can only comment the key/folder/object, not the individual value.
- indrora 4y agoFor something that wasn't meant to be interacted with by humans on the regular, I can see why you wouldn't include comments.
- School-Cotton 4y agoClassic mistake. The creators of JSON thought the same thing, and that decision is here forever to annoy us.
- MrStonedOne 4y ago
- eternityforest 4y agoHuman interaction with JS kinda sucks regardless. It's a good lowest common denominator of data, that is somewhat decent for hand editing when needed. Comments would be nice, but they'd get lost in loading and dumping. Moving beyond pure hierarchy, and having first class ordering, where comments are real data objects that survive import would probably be the way to go. Something like slightly less verbose XML might be a great thing.
- ComputerGuru 4y agoThat’s funny. If I loved bees and was obsessed with them, I’d have done the same thing this bee-hating developer did.
- romanhn 4y agoWhat makes it funnier is that the registry developer is not the same person as the bee hater, if I'm reading this correctly.
- pkrumins 4y agoIf you think about it, the Windows registry is the first and most deployed NoSQL database.
- meepmorp 4y agoMainframe databases from the 60s.
- loudgas 4y agoNot really. Databases predate SQL.
- throwawayboise 4y agoAnd they predate Windows.
- Const-me 4y agoEach Windows installation only has 1 registry, but it normally has multiple ESENT databases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Storage_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Storage_Engine These databases are NoSQL as well. Albeit somewhat closer to traditional SQL than the registry: ESENT databases are made of B-trees, have column schema, primary/secondary indices, and support transactions. Unlike SQL servers, ESENT doesn’t have relations across tables, doesn’t have a query language (instead it has a low-level API to move cursors), and doesn’t support remote nor inter-process access, a DB is exclusive to a single process.
- zinekeller 4y ago> Each Windows installation only has 1 registry This is clearly false, how could you store user-specific data? (Hint: it's the NTUSER.DAT on each of the users' directory.) Additionally, you could create binary registry files and load them, funnily in much the same manner as how would mount drives on Unix and Unix-derived/inspired systems. Unless you consider that as a single root, the comparison that "Windows only has 1 registry" (which is wrong since that system-wide registry is backed up every boot and shutdown) is silly.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- zdw 4y agoHonestly, the registry as an idea is a great concept - structured, typed data to define the configuration of an entire system, which all applications use for config? Remind anyone of YAML loaded into K8s?
- somat 4y agoIt is a great concept, it makes sense from any reasonable viewpoint, yet for some reason I loath the registry with a passion, not exactly sure why, but I think it comes down to the question. Why do we need an additional tree to store configuration?
- FridgeSeal 4y agoI think because it’s used haphazardly and applications make messes that they never clean up. Also, having both env vars, local config and registry creates sort of a smorgasbord-stuff gets thrown everywhere. If all you were allowed for config was the registry,and application scopes were more tightly defined and enforced, it would probably be a lot nicer.
- dredmorbius 4y agoIf an architecture results in persistent and pervasive misuse, the problem isn't the misuse, the problem is the architecture.
- FridgeSeal 4y agoI agree 100%, I’m just hypothesising why it could have ended up like that, and if there’s a way to have something “registry-like” without the observed flaws.
- zmmmmm 4y agoI always just found it incredibly hostile to access and use. Hate to think the hours I've lost from my life using Regedit. But that goes for all sysadmin stuff in Windows. Give me plain text files I can grep and edit with vim, backup by making copies, diff, version etc. Make it JSON if you want but let me use real tools and not the horror show of Regedit and it's ilk.
- Stampo00 4y agoI wish I'd thought of that! I used to work with someone who was unbearable and he also hated butterflies. I should have snuck as many butterfly references in the code as I could. You know who you are!
- imron 4y agoHonestly speaking, if you're the type of developer who would do such a thing, there's a high chance that you are the unbearable one.
- Stampo00 4y agoIn reality, instead of trolling this guy... I just left the team so I didn't have to work with him anymore. Which is the correct, mature, professional thing to do. But my inner child still likes to dream. As far as revenge fantasies go, it's pretty tame, don't you think?
- JoyfulTurkey 4y agoI had a feeling this was going to be a Raymond Chen post. Loved reading the Old New Thing back in the day. Amazingly it looks like it is still going strong.
- ogurechny 4y ago> 0 comments This is a blatant lie, I know posts on Old New Thing with zero comments have been extremely rare. And of course: https://web.archive.org/web/20091231092140/http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/08/08/54618.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20091231092140/http://blogs.msdn... Note that pingbacks were also available, and some posts had quite a lot of them from various years, creating a web of somehow related pieces of information. After 2012 the comments were loaded with AJAX, its endpoint obviously stopped existing, and it wouldn't work on Web Archive anyway. However, these resurfaced in 2016 after another move. And someone on bytepointer.com has created a sane static copy which deserves an applause. Also, various old custom text style markup was broken in other posts, but it's a general problem with all MSDN content. People doing the conversion just didn't care. I guess informing them that some old knowledge base articles were actually distributed as self-extracting archives (IIRC, in custom format, so you have to run them in an emulator to unpack) with text and code files (in DOS code page, with occasional pseudographics) would make them panic and run away. So there's a corporation the size of Microsoft, and one of the most highly regarded places to set “correct” approach to Windows programming, and the most they can offer to Raymond Chen is “Hey, old man, our engine supports bold and italic, and comments from Microsoft® Account™ logins, you can import your posts and fix them manually. Next!” The announce post had an excuse (personal data protection laws) https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190313-01/?p=102234 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190313-01/?p=10... HOWEVER, it does not cover pingbacks (at least pingbacks from oldnewthing to oldnewthing itself). Also, even in 2003 we see the remains of “old” old comment system, so at least some comments had been impossible to delete all along even before the move. Tsk. /grumble
- veltas 4y agoAt some point MSDN replaced the names in comments with email addresses associated with accounts. My email address wasn't public but all of a sudden it was, at Microsoft's discretion! I complained about this, potentially this was the data concern they had, because it was actually pretty dumb on their part.
- iggldiggl 4y ago> And someone on bytepointer.com has created a sane static copy which deserves an applause. Oh wow, nice, thanks for mentioning that. I've been grumbling about the lost comments, too…
- gjvc 4y agothis is a good example of why whimsy is not to be tolerated when creating foundational building blocks
- kazinator 4y agoNo it isn't; the hive metaphor entirely fits the Windows Registry, which is a kind of hornet's nest where configuration goes to disappear. The person who came up with that was developing it seriously, and the naming almost certainly had to have "buy in" from other "stakeholders" in the project.
- gjvc 4y agoseems like you didn't read the actual article. it's short enough to include here. """ Because one of the original developers of Windows NT hated bees. So the developer who was responsible for the registry snuck in as many bee references as he could. A registry file is called a “hive”, and registry data are stored in “cells”, which is what honeycombs are made of. """
- kazinator 4y agoI read it several hours before writing that comment. Regardless of the motivation for the naming having come from tormenting bee-hating guy, the naming had to make sense. The developer in question would probably not have gotten away trying to call a registry root "fiddlestick". He had a boss, and peers, and they signed off on "hive". Perhaps that person had some creative name for the entire thing instead of "The Registry" (Apiary? Ha!), which perhaps had been overruled. The "Hive" jargon is not really end-user-facing, though.
- gjvc 4y agohow do you know they "signed off" on anything? were you there? a generation of people getting to grips with NT in the 90s will disagree with you on your last point, too.
- agumonkey 4y agohttps://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030814-00/?p=42903 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030814-00/?p=42... His blog is full of nice reads