Re: New Microsoft Anti-Spyware Tool

From: Joel Kolstad (JKolstad71HatesSpam_at_Yahoo.Com)
Date: 01/13/05 

Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2005 20:21:49 -0800

"Ken Smith" <kensmith@green.rahul.net> wrote in message
news:cs4jop$jmh$1@blue.rahul.net...
> Windows wants to keep all sorts of unrelated stuff together. The whole
> registry concept is an example of this.

I used to think this as well, but over time the registry's grown on me. Why
is it any different to keep various program settings, user settings, etc. in
a central databse (that's fully hierarchical, secure, expandable, etc.) than
it is to keep all those settings spread all over your hard drive in many
different directories? By having everything in the registry, you eliminate
a lot of work for programmers who often wouldn't have the time to implement
something similar with anywhere near as much flexibility or security.

I would grant you that it makes moving program settings a little harder
than, e.g., the old 'INI' approach. (Too bad it's an uncommon program that
has a 'export user settings to file' option...).

But it's still a LOT better than ten million '.fooRC' files running around a
user's home directory!

> Another is the tendancy to put
> the data files in the directory structure as the software. This makes it a
> lot harder to fix a broken system than it would be if they didn't mix
> stuff together.

OK, adimssino #2 is that, yeah, there's still plenty of poor software out
there that does that, but Microsoft has been pushing developers for OVER A
DECADE now to keep data files in 'My Documents,' and there's been a great
improvement in that period.

In *NIX, of course, usually an application didn't have a choice... it was
~user or /tmp or you didn't have any write permissions! :-)

---Joel

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