Fumble-fingered Microsoft

Coincidence?

I just posted this morning about big companies behaving like Microsoft, fumbling the technologies and blaming on the competition.

I have a USB flash drive which I use to transfer files at work. Over the last few days, I have used it to transfer files between a MSWindows7 notebook machine on my desk and an MSWindows7  narrow tower machine up in the computer lab. I always get nervous about moving data on USB drives like this. Microsoft's software has bitten me in the past. So I back it up periodically.

But it had been a while since the last time. Have I backed it up this week?

So it was a little bit of an unpleasant surprise to plug it in to the notebook on my desk and see the warning dialog:

"Some problems have been detected in several files on this media."
"Do you want to fix them?"

There is no right answer to that dialog box.

Hit "Yes" and it messes up your file system.

Hit "No" and it messes up your file system a different way.

Close the accursed dialog without answering and it messes with your file system for spite.

Rip the USB out without mounting, or try to leave the dialog unanswered while you try to properly unmount the USB, and it leaves the file system and/or partition structures in a half-altered state.

It shouldn't be writing anything to those structures at that point in the first place. You don't have to write to those structures if you are only reading files on the disk.

Yes, Microsoft screwed up their various definitions of FAT file systems and the associated partitioning standards.

And they patented their screw-ups and charge people who produce non-MSWindows OSses patent-use fees for not using their patented standards screw-ups.

And if you refuse to pay because you don't want to use their intellect-impaired "Intellectual Property" anyway, they take you to court and force you to provide all sorts of proof that you and you grandparents and your in-laws have never used those patents, are not using them, and never-ever-ever will, as long as everyone lives.

Until you just give up, sign on the dotted line, and commit yourself to refrain from doing anything that would ever harm Microsoft's position in the market-place, etc.

(No, I'm not exaggerating, and I'm only speaking metaphorically about the in-laws and grandparents. Think technology relationships. That is what Microsoft's "right to innovate" is all about.)

But that doesn't mean they have any reason to write to your partition map just to mount and read the media.

So, I have to capture the data on this drive when I go home tonight, and reconcile it with my backups. Then re-format and figure out what I need to carry with me. The fewer files I carry, the safer it is.

And, incidentally, a pox on Intel, too, for helping bad players in the industry impose these poorly designed, fragile USB media on us. A pox on Microsoft and Intel both.

/usr merge and the tail wagging the dog

Fedora 16 17 is will probably be the end of the line for me.

Really wanted to keep my hand in, there, since I still need to take the LPIC level 2. But there are a few guys in there who are all gung ho over ripping out the flooring and restructuring the entire Linux file system layout to match their vision of layout of some other so-called operating system.

Microsoft envy. And hubris. Hubris without utility.

Here's what I'm fighting:

• /sda1: some boot-up partition for MSWindows. 7.
• /sda2: the usual "C:" partition with "System" and "Program Files", etc. 
• /sda3: the usual "D:" partition, except it contained a bunch of stuff for the bundled utilities, install packages and the like. If it weren't for the program to update my wireless router, I'd junk the whole of the MSWindows system.
• /sda4: the "restore" partition. Doesn't work, for what it's worth. Just breaks anything you installed since the last time you tagged it.

I suppose the C: partition had to be a MiSeryDOS basic partition. Would have been nice if they could have put it in a "logical" (i. e., nested in the extended) partition. But, noooo, Microsoft doesn't have any motivation for making it easy to install any other OS on the box for dual-booting, especially not a "competitor's" OS.

D: and the restore partition --No, there is no valid technical reason not to put those in a logical partition. Not that they (Lenovo) have any motivation to make it easy to install an alternate OS on the box, either, especially with the kickback from Microsoft. ("Volume" discounts only available to "A" rated integrators and OEMs, where "A" includes deliberately getting in the way of Microsoft's competition with games like these.)

Not that it would have helped. The restore function is hard-wired, against all technical reason, to the vendor installed partition layout. So the end result would be the same.

I described the above and how I originally installed Fedora 16 on the box elsewhere.

The way I did that, /sda4 ended up at 14.5 gigabytes. I little on the large side for a bot partition, but it has to be the boot partition because the boot partition has to be a basic partition, and there are only four of those, and /sda3 has to be a basic partition so it can be the enclosing extended partition for the other partitions I cut for the install: /usr, /home, /var, /tmp .

Now it's Fedora 16's end-of-life. Time to update to Fedora 17.

But.

Some hot-heads (apparently spearheaded by a group at freedesktop.org) got a bee in their bonnets about how "Everything ought to be in /usr. There is no technical reason to separate them now."

Makes me want to swear. Yes there are plenty of technical reasons, security, stability, and simply having a bit of division of purpose.

And Microsoft envy is not a good reason for changing that.

Sure, we no longer have the sort of situation they had in the early days when drives were small and you wanted to have all the stuff you needed to boot up in one set of directories and all the rest in another. Right?

lvm in /usr instead of /bin is a pain, yeah.

Plymouth in /usr is liveable, but it would be nice not to have to tell newbs why their cool start-up screens don't get loaded at startup. Yeah. I understand. But it's not a technical reason.

And ACLs (including the curious perversion of the concept that someone calls securelinux or something like that) mitigate the need to separate classes of binaries and libraries. Sure. I understand that you think such things.

You're wrong, but I understand that you think such things.

No, vendors never do stupid things like I described above, right?

RIGHT?

ARE YOU GUYS LISTENING?

No. You're not. I'm just a nameless slob, roadkill on your way to inventing reason for code churn and the accompanying job security.

I've lost about a month, total, to your need to prove how smart you are. A month of my time that I could have been writing bug reports on outstanding bugs. But it means nothing to you guys, because I'm a nameless slob out here in never-never-land.

When I hit the 15G limit on the root partition because /usr is packed and I can't put it on another partition because of your hubris, I'm gone.

Debian's engineers are smarter for the time being, but, if they roll over, shoot, configuring openbsd from scratch is going to take less time than figuring out work-arounds to your vanities.