New Network Driver? New Telnet!

I think it's really sick that MSOffice, which has become the standard Office Suite (whether we like it or not), is so fucked up that it comes with a special utility to "Repair Office". I mean, I've been at this job for 3.5 weeks, and I've already had to "repair office" twice.

This morning, I swore to the desktop guy that I didn't install anything, but then as soon as I got off the phone, I realized that I had just accidentally lied. I had installed WS_FTP LE because Windoze ftp client sucks rocks. Now I'm perfectly capable of using a command line ftp client since I grew up in a world of shell accounts. Windows2000 ftp client is BROKEN. (Heh. I just had to go back and see if I complained about this before. I haven't. Some of you may have already heard this rant, but since I haven't written it down, all the rest of you get to share it now too.)

First, the ftp client. I'm using Windows2000, but I don't know if that matters. What I do know is that if your file names have spaces in them, you are not going to be able to transfer them with that ftp client. Now, you Unix people are out there saying "what kind of a moron puts spaces in file names"? Yeah, I know. I've gone over to the dark side, but I'd like to point out that Unix ftp clients deal with this gracefully. Hell, the whole operating system deals with it by expecting quotes around those file names. I've got no problem with that, but Windows2000 ftp doesn't recognize file names if they are surrounded by '' or "". Furthermore, the DOS 8 character names that we all know are under there (OK, this is seriously broken too, but perhaps that is a rant for another occassion.) are not visible in the command shell like they are under Win98.

Next: The whole installation process under Windows. Windows would not break so damn often if every installation didn't replace half the files in \\windows\system. How dumb is that? If you install a new network driver you get a new telnet. WHAT THE FUCK? This is like getting a new cp or grep everytime you install a perl module or a new version of Netscape. Clearly, this is a completely unsustainable architecture.

I'm just astounded that they've decided to distribute the band-aids automatically instead of fixing the core problem.