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PDF viewer. Chrome is the only non-awful PDF viewer I've found for Windows. Requires third-party install. Copying and pasting text causes weird characters to b

by cturner 11y ago

PDF viewer. Chrome is the only non-awful PDF viewer I've found for Windows. Requires third-party install. Copying and pasting text causes weird characters to be carried around (e.g. emdash), and I haven't found a reliable way to sanitise it. Does notepad handle \n separated lines correctly yet? Something about excel breaks the behaviour of the alt+tab stack. (if you have multiple documents open) Also, it's annoying the way that - by default - excel wants to open everything in the same parent window. Why why why why why would you want it to behave like this?! Apps that minimise to the small-icon part of the start bar (next to time) don't go to the back of the alt+tab stack. A bunch of NTFS features are not exposed to the user interface. Not quite in the spirit of what you're asking, but I think Windows file locking is a bad design. You can't copy that excel file (in pscp), because you have it open in excel. It'd be useful to be able to mute an application from the OS interface, and to see an indicator for audio activity ion something like the task manager. No strong answer to sshd. No TCP-check tool in the standard install. Why on earth did they get rid of telnet in the standard build? If anything we needed a better TCP-check mechanism - they got rid of the only trustworthy one that was in. Similarly with shell scripting - they actually neutered a bunch of features that were in NT in subsequent versions. Previously you could (just) ship a single bat file that would act as a self-installer for binary content. I imagine they disabled this to discourage malware. But - how is a bat particularly different than an exe? I think it's a shame Windows doesn't ship with devtools out of the box, also. If it came with devtools, would be one less hurdle to getting newbies into programming. Offer good tools at every level - an assembler, a C compiler, c#-level tools, javascript debugger, visual basic. Microsoft's grew from a successful devtool company. They should bundle a python API to windows and a recent version of python also. Make it easy to create and ship python on Windows. A community would just grow around this, with no further effort from them. Would be good if you could choose a filesystem that had strong performance with git. Either make git+NTFS fast, or else offer a well-support FS that git does want to work on. Weak scheduler, init mechanisms. (from user perspective) There's no nice IPC mechanism available for casual development. Cmd kind of has pipes but they're horrible. This is kind of evil, but if I was Microsoft I'd be tempted to make Access more accessible (i.e. ship with base office). As soon as users hit a certain level of scale they'll find themselves needing SQL Server. Access has huge lock-in to the Microsoft world. Much like the way a manager will create a microsoft word or excel document, and then suddenly you find yourself stuck with sharepoint everywhere - ugh.

pjmlp 11y ago
UNIX file locking is broken. Requiring all processes to play along. It suffices one process to ignore fcntl calls to corrupt files. All non-POSIX OSes with proper file locking use the same approach as Windows does. You can install telnet via the add features option from the control panel. Who wants to have such insecure program available anyway? Commercial UNIX systems were know to charge at least $2000 for their SDKs, something that made many join the effort to improve GCC back in the day. Windows NT family has had multi-threading since the day one, even at the kernel level. Which took ages for UNIX systems to catch up. The only UNIX that matches Windows IO completion ports is Solaris. The init is so bad that part of its design has been copied by UNIX systems, instead of using spaghetti init scripts.
- nandhp 11y ago
  > You can install telnet via the add features option from the control panel. Who wants to have such insecure program available anyway? There's no security problem with the telnet client, unless you're using it to log into remote hosts without encryption. But OP, and presumably many other people (like me), use telnet as a simple TCP client for troubleshooting. On Linux, one can use netcat (though I never remember to type nc, and always try telnet first), but of course Windows doesn't come with netcat.
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    There are better GUI tools for such purposes.
    - cturner 11y ago
      It's important to have something to be installed by default, and not require admin privileges. This is what you need need if you're supporting people over the phone. That is - something dependable that you can use to check that they don't have TCP obstacles for whatever they're trying to do. Telnet-for-Windows was a terrible interface for this purpose (if it succeeds, you get left at a meaningless command prompt) but it was possible to talk people through that, and that was enough. (You can't trust the proxy configuration of their web browsers.)

by cturner 11y ago

pjmlp 11y ago

UNIX file locking is broken. Requiring all processes to play along. It suffices one process to ignore fcntl calls to corrupt files. All non-POSIX OSes with proper file locking use the same approach as Windows does. You can install telnet via the add features option from the control panel. Who wants to have such insecure program available anyway? Commercial UNIX systems were know to charge at least $2000 for their SDKs, something that made many join the effort to improve GCC back in the day. Windows NT family has had multi-threading since the day one, even at the kernel level. Which took ages for UNIX systems to catch up. The only UNIX that matches Windows IO completion ports is Solaris. The init is so bad that part of its design has been copied by UNIX systems, instead of using spaghetti init scripts.

nandhp 11y ago
> You can install telnet via the add features option from the control panel. Who wants to have such insecure program available anyway? There's no security problem with the telnet client, unless you're using it to log into remote hosts without encryption. But OP, and presumably many other people (like me), use telnet as a simple TCP client for troubleshooting. On Linux, one can use netcat (though I never remember to type nc, and always try telnet first), but of course Windows doesn't come with netcat.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  There are better GUI tools for such purposes.
  - cturner 11y ago
    It's important to have something to be installed by default, and not require admin privileges. This is what you need need if you're supporting people over the phone. That is - something dependable that you can use to check that they don't have TCP obstacles for whatever they're trying to do. Telnet-for-Windows was a terrible interface for this purpose (if it succeeds, you get left at a meaningless command prompt) but it was possible to talk people through that, and that was enough. (You can't trust the proxy configuration of their web browsers.)