@mike: Dude, me too! I don’t want to be the old grumpy guy who doesn’t understand computers. That’s like one of my greatest fears. I don’t want to be left behind!

These closed minded users will be phased out in a couple generations and I’m deathly afraid I will be in their place, refusing to keep up with more advanced technology or worse yet, not able to comprehend…

Windows 78=Skynet

I use zip’s as folders regularly, but using software that actually implements read and write, like Fuse filesystems. I think there are zip mounters with write ability for Windows, too.

But yes, before indulging themselves with auto-mounters and such people should understand the concept of compressed archive as opposed to folders, and why you can’t select a whole folder as an email attachment.

As for the floppy drive icon, that’s more valid than most people believe for XP and Server 2003. Last week I had a user with XP on a Dell Dimension 8400 who reported that she got a blue screen with a message about drivers. In the system log, there was an entry for Stop 0x00008086. I borrowed a USB floppy drive, extracted R82876.exe (which had a diskette icon) to it and updated the driver from that. There’s no option to pick an alternative location for the icons, probably because this is intended for an XP install.
Both XP and Server 2003 use diskettes in setting up ASR.

It’s always bugged me when I’m on an install of Windows where there isn’t a proper program set to handle zip files (mid way through a reformat or someone else’s machine).

Leads to mental discord along the lines of “Wait… this is a zip file, why is it acting like a folder? It can’t be like a folder, it’s zipped. Did I zip this thing properly, it’s looking all folder-like. Arrgh, confusion!”

I guess it’s not the fault of the lusers that their inbuilt expectations run the other way, but I still reserve the right to mock them for it.

@jambarama: No ball. I tried that and they either don’t notice since WinZip for example looks sufficiently like explorer. If you use something other than WinZip they go and install winzip or cry. :(

And yeah – I need to update the detection plugin. It doesn’t know about Chrome yet. :P

@jambarama: Chrome uses Webkit, so it registers as Safari.

Haha, Chrome on XP is identified as safari on OSX?

I think the fix for this is straight forward. Install a different program to open zip files by default. A program like 7z, izarc, or even the shareware stuff – winzip/winrar. None of those programs look like a folder and maybe people will start realizing zip files are different than folder because it takes a different program to open them.

@Luke Maciak: LOL @ “herded”. Nice.. :D