Alex Coleman said:
What is the difference between a FOLDER and a DIRECTORY in XP?
In the registry I can see these two keys:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\FOLDER
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\DIRECTORY
What is the difference between them?
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name, would
smell as sweet" ("Romeo and Juliet", Shakespeare).
Microsoft thought "directory" was confusing to newbies (and it was)
because they were explaining it in terms of a filing cabinet as the
volume (drive) with folders inside that contained files. So they were
equivalencing file folders to directories, and eventually dropped
"directory" and just used "folder" to solidify the metaphor. Back in
the days of QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System), users were expected
to know more than just clicking around a pretty GUI with a mouse. I
suppose another push came was when they started using "Active Directory"
on their NT server. They thought it would be less confusing to replace
"directory" with "folder" so users didn't think "directory" (in the file
system) referred to Active Directory (to manage resource;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Directory). Microsoft even makes
statements like, "how to print a directory listing of the contents of a
folder".
Remember that this is the same company that calls the boot partition as
the system partition and the system partition as the boot partition
(
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/100525/en-us), who renames "Internet
Mail & News" to "Outlook Express" with the resultant flood of users
asking questions about it while thinking it is related "lite" product to
Outlook, who bought and proffers an anti-spyware product that *polls*
for changes already made rather than intercede and pend them until
authorized, tried to foist Bob on boobs (maybe they forgot the extra "o"
in "Bob"), and sold the Xbox at a loss in trying to capture a market.
