Gripe

I don’t get file extensions. Okay, maybe they were needed thirty years ago when the first rudimentary file-systems were created, but we have meta-data and the ability to read file headers and all sorts of neat things like that. Why do I still have to name something .whatever?

(Yes, I know this doesn’t apply to *nix, shut up.)

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Posted November 7th, 2007 in main. Tagged: , .

2 comments:

  1. Peter Vander Klippe:

    This reminds me of a time when my parents had a Ubuntu box upstairs and we used the gimp to edit some photos on my siblings mp3 player. I accidentally saved the images without a file extension. As this was Linux, this didn’t matter. The computer knew they were jpeg files because they contained jpeg information. The mp3 player of course is stupid and said that the files didn’t exist. Then I renamed all the files to *.jpeg and the device still didn’t recognize the files. What we found out is that the device looks for files named *.jpg (not *.jpeg) and wouldn’t recognize anything else but that.

    And of course my Dad blames “stupid linux” for this problem because it is actually intelligent in how it handles files and isn’t dumb like Windows and cheap iPod nano clones.

    Morale of this story: Intelligent Programming = Good.

    November 7th, 2007 at 12:43 pm
  2. daniel:

    I hate it when people blame systems for doing things right when they’re used to doing things wrong. Like when someone is using some undocumented hack in PHP to make a site, making that particular hack critical throughout the system, then upgrades to the next point release of PHP and blames the language for breaking every single page. Nope, don’t blame the hack. Blame the language.

    Though GIMP’s handling of filenames has been less than graceful up until the last release.

    That said, my iPod has more processing power than supercomputers had 40 years ago, you’re telling me you can’t tell what the file is by simply looking at the file? Gah.

    November 7th, 2007 at 3:07 pm

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