Windows 8 Features With Linux Antecedents 642
itwbennett writes "As details about new features in Windows 8 started to be discussed in the Building 8 blog and bandied about in Linux/Windows forums, Linux users were quick to chime in with a hearty 'Linux had that first' — even for things that were just a natural evolution, like native support for USB 3.0. So ask not 'did Linux have this first', but 'does Windows 8 do it better?'"
Meh. (Score:5, Informative)
I don't really see anything here worth the attention -- this really just looks like an attempt to generate traffic.
Move along, nothing to see here.
...No, really. It's quite dull and profoundly uncontroversial.
Re:"Linux Command Line Tirckery" HA! (Score:5, Informative)
I don't even do that. I just double click it.
It sounds like someone needs to update their FUD playbook. They're at least 5 years behind the times.
Re:"Linux Command Line Tirckery" HA! (Score:5, Informative)
Or you could click on it in Gnome/Nautilus (and probably whatever file manager KDE uses), but don't let that get in your way of your rant.
Re:"Linux Command Line Tirckery" HA! (Score:5, Informative)
Linux requires root for too many things. You shouldn't need root to mount a file/device.
So you're saying I should be able to plug in a USB stick with a setuid root shell on it, mount that without root permissions, and own your system with almost zero effort?
"ISO is taken from the ISO 9660 file system" (Score:5, Informative)
The name ISO is taken from the ISO 9660 file system [wikipedia.org] used with CD-ROM media, but what is known as an ISO image might also contain a UDF (ISO/IEC 13346) file system or a DVD or Blu-ray Disc (BD) image.
Re:"Linux Command Line Tirckery" HA! (Score:0, Informative)
That is exactly the problem with the CD mounting issue. From floppy drives to CD drives there's this problem of "autodetect" and "autorun". People do not know, or do not enjoy admitting it, but there are many possible exploits. Relevant exploits rely on hardware/bus/kernel combinations associated with "autodetect" and "autorun" of media in addition to the manufacturer of the media and the software used to format, create filesystems, and manage data on the media. Copy protection in the 5 1/4" days often relied on the manufacturer knowing more (often unpublished idiosyncratic circuitry details) about the sector/track/fs format in conjunction with chipset of the media drive and the data path across the bus, to the running kernel, and into allotted memory storage.
Linux command line tools somewhat encourage the user to be aware of the vectors for autodetect and autorun exploits. Linux GUI desktop managers dumb down the issue. Windows, in the effort to appeal to a population which didn't know the difference, progressively buried the concepts of autodetect and autorun into deeper and deeper layers of OS and driver configuration.
In all seriousness you are safe to fully expect that every single removable media, in some way, plays a part in a Big Brother (industry _and_ government) tracking and phone-home system.
Re:"Linux Command Line Tirckery" HA! (Score:5, Informative)
You can do the same thing in many Linux distros by just right-clicking an .iso file, or even just double-clicking it. So both you and the article are plain wrong.
Re:"Linux Command Line Tirckery" HA! (Score:5, Informative)
Optional for power users who want them, not required for simple tasks like mounting an image where a mouse click will do.
And that's the way it's been on almost any Linux distribution, for quite a while. On Ubuntu 10.04, I just right click on an ISO file and select the mount option. Then it appears as a new drive on the desktop. It works about the same, whether you're using a Gnome desktop, or KDE, or LXDE, or xfce. Probably also on other desktop environments or window managers, but those are the ones I'm familiar with.
Of course, with Linux, you can ALSO do it via the command line. This is very useful on a headless (no GUI) machine, which Windows curiously lacks support for.
Re:"Linux Command Line Tirckery" HA! (Score:4, Informative)
Suppose you want to delete everything from a directory that was created in the past 24 hours. How would you do that with Explorer?
View by detail, sort by date, ctrl-down until the date changes. Or use the search-folder tool using date criteria.
Or if you want to find all the TIFF files under a tree, and move them to a single directory?
Organize-group by file type.
Or even just batch renaming? How do you do that with Explorer?
Yeah, you need a third party utility for that - or use the command line.
The CLI is superior in some situations, but I find myself mostly using the UI for file management, mostly because I regularly have to move around arbitrary files in large file collections during development/debug work. For batch operations the CLI (or scripts) are usually superior.
That, or I have to find one of my folders in that hideous tree dialog on the left.
If your directories are laid out properly this isn't a big deal anymore.
Re:"Linux Command Line Tirckery" HA! (Score:4, Informative)
Even in Windows land, it is the GUI that is optional. The shell is always there - you can poke at it through a GUI like some terminally obese person with a dialling wand, or you can just use it directly.
Server 2008 doesn't even install a GUI by default.