On 5/28/2004 10:17 AM, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
The type of solution being proposed would not be acceptable [...]
Thus it came to pass that Microsoft's multi-billion dollar
"commitment" to
mail technologies was brought to a halt by the overwhelming and
incomprehensible demands of a UI widget that could display an
RR to the system administrator.
You still don't get it. In Windows the GUI is the O/S. Hacking
about in configuration files is no more acceptable to a windows
administrator than applying ad-hoc code patches to a binary
executable would be to a UNIX admin.
You might administer a Windows system as if it were UNIX, the
data you are interested in might appear as a flat file, but
that does not mean it is acceptable to most admins.
I have RealNetworks locked out at the firewall on my home machines
to stop anyone downloading their client onto one of my machines
because of their habbit of mucking with configuration files that
they have no business touching.
Windows is an object oriented O/S. You do not touch the data
managed by an O/S component except through the APIs and user
interfaces provided. If you break this rule you take the machine
outside the scope of the regression testing regime which in turn
means that you may end up with instability.
Hacking arround with direct I/O calls that bypass the BIOS is the
reason that the transition from MSDOS to Windows was so painful
in the first place.
Phill