| Friday, January 15, 2010 |
11:40 - The way of the future... the way of the future... the way of the future...
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God, I love Solaris.
Well, more particularly I love the Solaris attitude.
"Oh yeah, Solaris doesn't allow >8 character usernames. You filthy heathen, why would you want more than 8 characters anyway? POSIX says that's the limit!"
"Oh, but okay, we'll let you create usernames of any length, we'll just give you a bizarre error message that looks like the whole operation failed but is actually just a warning!"
# useradd abcdefghi
UX: useradd: abcdefghi name too long.
"And then when the user logs in and tries to change his password, he finds that the passwd command doesn't support >8 character usernames at all and tells him he's passwd'ing the wrong username!"
$ passwd
passwd: Changing password for abcdefgh
passwd: User unknown: abcdefgh
Permission denied
"Hah! Serves you right, you MORON. Now go back to your Sun console with Sun keyboard and Sun mouse and entirely Sun hardware chain from fingertips to motherboard that nevertheless makes those "^[[~" sequences whenever you press Backspace like it's never heard of your alien space technology before."
Meanwhile, even Linux (freaking Linux) has supported 32-character usernames since 1997.
Maybe the reason why Microsoft has failed so spectacularly to come up with a technology that people respect is that this was what they identified as their target.
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Brian Tiemann
