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posted by Fnord666 on Friday March 24 2017, @06:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the didn't-need-those-folders-anyway dept.

in with a story on Robert Elder Software blog entitled Silently Corrupting an Eclipse Workspace: The Ultimate Prank:

Next time your co-worker asks:

"What's the best way to back up my Eclipse workspace on Windows?"

you can tell them "Just right-click on it and select 'Send to Compressed (zipped) folder' and save the zip file". Unbeknownst to them, you just pulled the ultimate prank by telling them to make a corrupted backup!

          What your friend probably doesn't realize is that the Windows 'Send to Compressed (zipped) folder' utility has a mandatory optional feature to automatically not include certain folders in the archive without telling you. This is a great feature because it demonstrates the excellent sense of humour that the authors of Microsoft Windows have. This feature was no doubt included to allow you to play a variety of hilarious pranks on others by causing them lose data, only to find out about it years later when they want to open the archive and recover it.

The blog post goes on to identify other idiosyncrasies with how Windows mishandles directories whose names start with a period and/or contain Unicode characters.

Reasons you haven't switched to Linux (cont.):

  • 3. Windows has superior development tools.

What other issues have you found with how Windows handles filenames?


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  • (Score: 2) by canopic jug on Friday March 24 2017, @07:48PM (2 children)

    by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 24 2017, @07:48PM (#483827) Journal
    Better if you control the mouse while watching them and their screen and can approximate their movements. If you're good enough you can keep them going for a little while.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @08:40PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @08:40PM (#483855)

    Meh, too much work.

    At one of the first jobs I worked when I was 16, my boss decided to prank the secretary one day. He installed VNC on her computer and would move the mouse (remotely, from his computer running VNC viewer) when she wasn't moving it.

    • (Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Friday March 24 2017, @10:31PM

      by el_oscuro (1711) on Friday March 24 2017, @10:31PM (#483897)

      Back in the PC Anywhere days, one of my co-workers used to do something like that. Whenever the victim would try to login, he would press an extra character to ensure the password was always wrong.

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