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Microsoft's Search Engine Plans
prostoalex writes "Andy Beal from SearchEngineGuide.com interviews Robert Scoble from Microsoft. Scoble tells the audience what current search technologies Microsoft is working on as part of its Longhorn/WinFS development as well as in the field of Internet. Scoble also discusses current problems with local drive and Internet searching, such as absence of metadata for a lot of files out there: "When I take pictures off of my Nikon, they have some metadata (for instance, inside the file is the date it was taken, along with the exposure information) but that metadata isn't useful for most human searches. For instance, how about if I wanted to search for "my wedding photos?" Neither X1, nor Windows XP's built in search would find your wedding photos. Why? Because they have useless names like DSC0001.jpg and there's no metadata that says they are wedding photos.""
Make it "Micosoft Search powered by GOOGLE". Then "maybe" it might function well. Also metadata needs to be created by the user, I aint gonna be entereing data on a keypad on my camera for every photo.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
I can get around searching for "wedding photos" because I remember the date. 3 special days, and hundreds of wedding photos appear.
It's part of being human that we don't necessarily remember the phrase "wedding photos" but we may remember many other tiny pieces of data about a shoot that are unique to us, and the time and date are one of those. I can be certain the post 9pm photos done on those days are pretty embarassing.
Just concentrating on "Wedding Photos" is useful if someone else is searching my picture archive, but that's not useful to me
nude geekgrrls
For instance, how about if I wanted to search for "my wedding photos?" Neither X1, nor Windows XP's built in search would find your wedding photos. Why? Because they have useless names like DSC0001.jpg and there's no metadata that says they are wedding photos."
That's why you can change filenames and organize things into directories.
X1, nor Windows XP's built in search would find your wedding photos. Why? Because they have useless names like DSC0001.jpg and there's no metadata that says they are wedding photos.
Right, dude! The camera should automagically recognize that it's taking pictures of your wedding and include that info in the metadata!
I think thats what "organization" is for. You place files like "DSC0001.jpg" in things called "folders", and then name the folder "Wedding" or something.
I dunno.
Bowie J. Poag
Darth Ballmer: Commander tear this site apart until you've found those plans and bring me the users I want them alive!!
What happened to thumbnails?
This whole longhorn winfs thing seems like a big technological advance to me ...
...
Manualy adding metadata to each of your 200+ wedding pictures looks so smarter than just creating an old fashioned directory "wedding pics" and moving them into it
I can't wait to start using this wonderful FS
search for "best OS" find Microsoft
search for "viral software" find Linux
search for "secure" find Windows XP
search for "handsome smart guy" find Bill Gates
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Sounds like Image Subject Recognition technology related to facial recognition.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
I found when I started using X1 that I became much less interesting in where I stored things. The search is so good and so fast that it became easier to just save anywhere and retreive using X1.
So instead of offering their official toolbar for IE only (the one for Mozilla is unofficial), start to slowly phase out the Google Toolbar and replace it with the Google Browser which would basically be a Google branded Mozilla Firebird. With all the features that make Firebird great like Tabbed Browsing, with the addition of the Google Toolbar features such as PageRank, etc. All on a cross platform basis.
If people get used to downloading better browsers now, then they won't even notice when the next release of IE starts to reject the Google Toolbar.
Let them know what you think
Darth Ballmer: Where are those plans you've been hiding?
Rebel leader: Ummm. I stored them on my XP machine. Due to an OS security flaw, the DiaNoga Worm (tm) got into my system and wiped the drive.
Darth Ballmer:. Ummmm. never mind. Assistant! Where are my dancing shoes?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
If users didn't suck so much, then descriptive dir names would easily solve the problem of trying to locate a wedding photograph on a hard drive.
So what, the image file is named "DSC0001.JPG" -- who cares. Put it in a folder named "my images" and there's no wonder you can't find it!! Put it in a folder named "wedding photos", and then you've got something there!
The best way to describe it to the average joe (non)user is that directories/folders are analogous to folders in a filing cabinet. Would you file telephone bills, for example, under "mortgage" or "telephone"?
Thanks Microsoft for "my photos", and "my documents", and the like. We appreciate it!
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Phil Greenspun has a similar idea and is looking for help on how to accomplish this on a personal level with existing the Windows XP filesystem. Check out his blog post for details. There's already an intersting discussion taking place in the comments for that post.
Free Mac Mini. Yes, I'm
....and found ever picture *but* from my wedding.
bash$ cd /stuff/wedd [tab] [tab]
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
That is quite nice of you. However, you are about a 5 days off.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I hope the industry sees the opportunities that Longhorn's WinFS opens up. We can either work together and share data with each other, or we can be afraid and keep data to ourselves.
Share data? with whom? how can you share data that is in either proprietary format or "patented XML" ???
It is following the OpenStandard that will help in "working together and sharing data".
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
I mean, what is the likelihood of geeks getting married anyway?
They should have a search engine which recognizes pictures of old exotic hardware like my HPPA box that runs Linux..
Just my 0.02 euros..
The only wedding photos you're going to find are all those Pamela Lee downloads, and the "Chewie and Leia's Honeymoon" pix you made yourself using Photoshop.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Look for pictures with blue backgrounds with white lettering on top. XP will eventually reward your search.
As long as they shoot that fucking yellow dog.
Why? Because they have useless names like DSC0001.jpg and there's no metadata that says they are wedding photos.""
d aylight...horizon?), you've got more issues than just locating a particular photo.
You mean to say you don't know the date you got married? You're in trouble.... iPhoto on OS X at least breaks them out into folders according to either last imported and/or month/year etc.. You're responsible to breaking them down further, in which case you don't search the entire drive later, you simply open iPhoto and take a short trip to your wedding folder, just like having a folder in a drawer in a cabinet in your home.
It's not really that hard, now is it? if you're dropping any files onto your drive randomly, the issue is with your basic housekeeping, not that a top level search tool seems blind to your target.
You're talking about EXIF, and the list of data there is long. Why you took the picture isn't part of it, and if you want the camera to interpret which part of the subject matter is root (noses..faces...age...sex...background..,trees...
Would you want to trust your private data, gathered from govenment departments, purchases and financial transactions etc, being accessed by such a system run by any old govenmental or business agency?
How about your private correspondence on friends and acquaintances home computers.
Microsoft culled the URL name:password@ functionality from Internet Explorer because it claimed it could not create a secure enough fix, yet in the same month, it yet again proposes a privacy nightmare such as this? Madness.
WinFS sounds promising, but unless Microsoft makes the WinFS specs open and free, it'll be yet another lock-in technology, which would be very dissapointing.
Adding metadata to all your files would require a lot of time and effort, and if it's a closed technology, it'd be yet another reason people wouldn't want to even attempt switching to another OS. I can almost hear it now...
"This other OS looks cool, but I've spent so much time adding metadata to all my files, and I can't export that metadata to this other OS because the format is proprietary and patented... I'd better stick with Windows, switching OS's would be too hard..."
Sorry, someone had to state the blatantly obvious. As usual, all promising technologies coming out of Microsoft are poisoned. And most people don't even realize it. Not even intelligent people. Most .NET developers don't even realize that .NET's so-called "standardization" via ECMA doesn't really make it an open standard (lots of the "standardized" .NET technology is encumbered by patents).
-Teckla
I'm watching Invader Zim, and he says "And NOW For my Evil plan" and /. finishes loading with this story is at the top of the page. Second when it loads, it's got a google ad in it.
(Score:0, Interesting)
Judiging from the interview, the "innovative" Longhorn seems to allow you to add metadata in a slightly user-friendly way. But virtually nobody will use it, except maybe to mark a few important files which you have stored in a special place anyway.
So what would be a better solution then? My idea is that metadata should be added automatically. For instance, a human will recognize most wedding photos for what they are. Getting a computer to recognize this is not trivial, but lots of research is currently invested in this. Already computers can easily recognize general categories ("groups of people", "nature", "animal", "portrait"). My guess is that it is already possible to implement a system that you can train to let the computer recognize your particular brand of photos.
I don't expect Microsoft to try to go into this way of innovation. They will probably wait until an entrepeneur develops it and then copy it or buy them out.
Need a new smile. I'd hate to see the metadata for that picture file. --
There is already a way of storing all that metdata in JPEG files, called JFIF. That's the informatin you can store, for example, under the File Info dialog in Photoshop, or using the Image::IPTCInfo Perl module. There's a shell extension for Windows that allows you to deisplay those fields as columns in Windows Explorer ... once again, Microsoft takes things that already exist, shines them up, and calls them innovation.
Given what it thinks of the best OS. Although I don't know about the handsome smart guy.
yes thats right im scared. firdtly, they revolutionize the web, then they control and take over p2p chatting, next is email and nntp.. they also had a small dabble in irc clients :).
and now they going to take on google, I mean, come on.. theyve fucked up enough technologies in their time that this is bound to end up going sour..
i miss bfs and all its database/searchable glory :)
DSC = Digital Still Camera.
Got to exif.org for more.
I store them by date photographed, using ThumbsPlus to view thumbnails and metadata stored in a database. So far, it's worked out for the 45Gb of photos I've taken in the past 5 years.
--Mike--
PS: Yes, I'll chat with and give ideas to anyone who wants to make this better... even Microsoft.
For instance, how about if I wanted to search for "my wedding photos?" Neither X1, nor Windows XP's built in search would find your wedding photos. Why? Because they have useless names like DSC0001.jpg and there's no metadata that says they are wedding photos.
:)
You know the date of your wedding right? If not, don't let your wife find out. You can search for jpegs taken on a certain date.
As you previously said...
When I take pictures off of my Nikon, they have some metadata (for instance, inside the file is the date it was taken, along with the exposure information)
It isn't exactly rocket surgery.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I once made the mistake of working with these files under Windoze. After I was done, all the EXIF information had been removed. You can imagine how mad I was.
So what is Microsoft going to do? Fix this bug and call it a feature?
-Rick
"Why? Because they have useless names like DSC0001.jpg and there's no metadata that says they are wedding photos."
Metadata is a stupid concept. It puts the cart before the horse. Files should not have to 'know' about themselves, they are not objects.
You have to treat files as just files, their names are nothing more than identifiers, their contents are nothing more than contents.
By all means its possible to build a great search capability into a filesystem, but you need to build the 'meta' data _outside_ the file.
A system built on file metadata is doomed to be incompatible with anything but the latest datatypes designed for it.
Used to be if you wanted to find a file real fast under windows, you'd hit WINDOWS+F to pullup the find window, enter in your search query, and Go.
Now if you're in front of an XP machine and want to find say...all the pictures on the system you can't just enter in "*.JPG" anymore. You have to read what some animated dog is asking you, click on one of the options before you get to the search query window, then enter in the query. doesn't sound like much of a hassle, but it IS an extra step.
$cat
I use Windows (duck) and it preserves my metadata fine.
My "feet" are for getting places, but I tend to use a "car" instead because it wastes less fucking time. Get the point?
C:\photos\1997\1997_01_05
which later morphed into
c:\photos\source\2003\20031205
Where you know what kind of image file (source vs altered, cropped, etc) then the year (to keep the directory listings reasonably short) then the YYYYMMDD to file by date.
Trivia: Most digital cameras roll over after 9999 photos, it gets annoying.
--Mike--
"If you've been online for any length of time and work in any industry connected with the Internet, you would heard of, Robert Scoble." I've been online since the days of BBSs and I've never heard of that guy. Are we all supposed to follow everything Microsoft?
Hmm... stories up for a few minutes, and of course the Slashdot luddites has pipes up with comments says that "i just need to put them in a folder. stupid microsoft."
The point is folders only allow a single hierarchy of data. Sure you can make a Wedding Photos folder. But what if you also want a folder with all the pictures of Uncle Bob from multiple events, a folder with 5-star photos from multiple events, a folder with night photos, a folder with wild partying photos, and a folder with photos of centerpieces.
The Longhorn WinFS will allow you to make queries saying "show me all the photos with Uncle Bob (from my mom's side) and Aunt Jane (from my dad's) that were taken in daylight at formal special events in the last two years that I've rated with 4 stars or more." This cannot be done with modern file systems (unless you want to use some stupid non-standard awkward file naming system that you think covers every possibility), although it can be done with other software (ie. Photoshop Album). Assuming you maintain the meta data... with which Photoshop Album, for example, is a simple drag-and-drop operation.
The trick is incorporating it into the file system mean you don't have to reinvent the wheel. The meta-data technology used for the photos can be used when you're writing, say, a music cataloging application (artist, genre, rating, keywords, composer, publication date, length) or a document repository (client, project, document type, importance, length) or a cataloging application for the terabytes of video files we're all going to have one day.
It is, needless a good idea and where file systems are heading in the future. People who want to defeat Microsoft would be well advised to see the benefits instead of sticking their heads in the sand.
"Neither X1, nor Windows XP's built in search would find your wedding photos. Why? Because they have useless names like DSC0001.jpg and there's no metadata that says they are wedding photos."
Metadata will NEVER improve searching in this way unless the things that generate the content FORCE you to put it in before they can snap pictures, etc...
Even if people were forced to put metadata into all their files there is a big chance that typos and other errors in entering the info would occur. This will make the metadata totally useless in a search!
It's saved my bacon more than once. As we move away from text, we become completely dependent on metadata to find things. Standards for metadata need to be settled soon, or Moore's law means our computers will become less and less useful.
--Mike--
find exactly this string is what i miss from google and other web search engines. i search for "dc=d" but it finnds crap like "dc d". Why??? Or am I just stupid?
SHE does throw dice.
It seems like we're working very hard around the user. Why doesn't the user put all their wedding photos in a directory called 'Wedding Photos'? That's what I do. It's very effective...
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Why is this simple and irrelivant problem being handled with this much attention? Are people getting that lazy, or has Microsoft ran out of things to do? This is not worth any research or development dollars. Maybe instead they should invent a pixel anaylizer, which analyzes a picture and puts is meta info according to what it thinks it is.
How many people have trouble finding files on their hard drive using the most basic search criteria. People who are so unorganized as to lose files on their hard drive are probably not sophisticated enough to use advanced search methods successfully.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
"As we move away from text, we become completely dependent on metadata..."
Exactly what do you think metadata is? This system would require more text than current. At present, you can rename the files and put them in folders, which works quite well if you have any organizational ability. Metadata would require dozens of unrelated pieces of info be input, and the a more complex retrieval (search) process would be required. While metadata standards are important, it's only advanced users who will be using them. How many "typical" users do you know that are going to search for a photo by the F-value?
And for the record, I've never used the "containing text" search, because I name files in unambiguous ways.
G
Your search for "linux" returned 2 results:
t ed/searchengine/results.asp
t er
1. How to migrate from Linux to Windows [99%]
http://www.microsoft.com/linuxsucks/blahblah/tain
2. Why Windows is better than Linux
http://support.microsoft.com/why/windows/is/bet
So if i can't trust MSN to give me untainted and unaltered search results, why should i trust microsoft to do the same?
Just more of a reason NOT to buy their product.
I think what MS is going for here is a little different that what we're thinking. Obviously adding metadata to every stinking file is a dumb idea. For compatability reasons among thousands of others. Nothing wrong with just having an intelligent directory structure and naming files appropriately in the first place.
But what I think MS is going to do is not have metadata on each file, but have an entire meta file system. You wont even worry about directories and filenames anymore. I think the os is going to maintain a database of metadata and associated pointers to files. The concept of the directory structure will be destroyed, but probably still be accesible buried down below. I imagine that everytime more files come in the os will gather as much info about them as it can and ask you for the rest. Then whenever a user wants some files they'll use a google style search to find them. No more "where did my files go?"
This completely blows for us power users. It adds another level of abstraction on the sytem that is mostly unecessary. It is only helpful to disorganized people who make a mess of their machines. The problem is that most windows users are just that. Disorganized mess makers. You all know the ones with 100 icons on the desktop. For these people, this sytem is awesome. It's awesome assuming it works perfectly, which it wont. Also it is a technological solution to the real problem. Lack of education. You will never be able to force users to use the machine in a certain way by changing the technology. They will always attempt to use it the way they are comfortable with for the things they want to do. This is evident by the thousands of "duct-tape programs" for windows that sit in the sytem tray and take up ram only to alter a small piece of the os' functionality.
Changing the program like this will only confuse and annoy people who have gotten used to the existing windowses. Windows geeks will embrace it and use it to its fullest potential. Linux geeks will still only use windows to play a few games that wineX doesn't work on, and convert more and more people to free software.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
--Mike--
Oh, I absolutely agree that most people wouldn't go to the trouble to put meta-data on every single file. However, they also won't go to the trouble of renaming every file either.
So, since putting meta-data on is easier (even if only slightly), they are at least more LIKELY to tag relevant information to a photo than they might have been otherwise. It certainly doesn't worsen the situation.
You know the one where http://google.com accidently points to http://search.microsoft.com I hate to be the one to break it to the /. crowd, and I don't mean this as a troll. But based on history once MS decides to crush a competitor or "threat" GAME OVER in a big way. They'll lie, cheat, steal violate every known moral and ethical principle to get their way. They'll probably end up losing a lawsuit six years from now and paying the current owner of google.com four million dollars. That's the way this has worked in the past.
I seriously think that the Google legal team better be looking at the ways in which MS products will fail to interoperate with google correctly. (I know you're thinking this will be hard to do, but never underestimate MS) Windows isn't done, until Lotus doesn't run.
Wow... Microsoft is making a search engine and a music downloader part to Windows Media Player. Can't they just... you know.. stop?
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
I've just rotated an image there in XP, and it has preserved the metadata. I'm quite fond of the way you can display metadata right there in Explorer with XP. Perhaps an earlier version of Windows did nuke it?
In KDE you can allready select an image file and say select "Find similar images". provided you have indexed your images using GIFT (Gnu Image Finding Tool)
You can search images both in your own GIFT database and databases on the internet.
So to solve the wedding photo problem you could make a drawing similar to your photos and search for similar images.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
Metadata only works when the used doesn't have to do anything. A GPS receiver in the camera attaching latitude/longitude to every photo should do the trick. You could even distinguish between photos taken in the church or at the reception..
This is more useful than it would seem. I've read a bunch of posts that talk about keeping the wedding pictures in a folder called "Wedding", and that's the extent of the organization.
Except it doesn't work that way. If I dig around a little, I see that I have the same images in several places: in the folder called "Vacation", another folder called "work" where I did some touchups, another folder called "staging" where I laid things out before putting them on the server, and again on the server, where my family can view them on the web.
If I follow the suggestion of putting them all into a single folder, then I've created a logistical headache. The _only_ thing I've gained is the ability to find all the files at once. Using metadata, I would no longer have that restriction - I could put files where they made the most sense, and still find all the files at once.
Real markup includes:
It should be possible to build a markup langauge that does all of this, and is human readable. You'll know you've got it right when you can mark up the page in a layer than can turn on and off, then mark over that. (All without stupid rules about "overlapping tags")
If we had a standard way do markup, we'd be able to solve this issue (the need for metadata) on our own, without the need to revisit the idea of a hierarchical filesystem.
We'll eventually get there... the only question is if we'll be locked into a Microsoft based implementation when we do.
--Mike--
Ever look at the properties page of an MS Office file? There's enough metadata tags in there to keep you busy for hours.
Does anyone really fill those in? Rarely.
Is there a method to search on them? Never looked.
Sometimes it's interesting to browse the properties page to see who really created a spreadsheet or document. For example, people who shamelessly "borrow" templates from former employers and either aren't smart enough or too lazy to do just a little clean up. But that's about it.
Ever tried to search for Xfree86 on search.msn.com?
Stefan
Isn't image metadata already implemented by the JPEG comment field. See man 1 wrjpgcom.
In 2000, the Find in Folders looked in every file for a given text string.
:)
In XP, it was "improved" to have a pretty dog, and to only look in certain types of files.
In Longhorn, there is supposed to be access to a SQL query language for better searches, but I'll be damned if I can find it [if someone knows, please tell me].
Better and better, all the time, or at least more and more money, thats Microsoft for you
"All your search are belong to us."
Just like any Microsoft plan: For XXX, the plan will boil down to "All your XXX belong to us".
Just because it's lame, just because all the astroturfing MCSE monkey slaves mod this down, doesn't mean it isn't true.
For mpegs (including .mp3's) you can change the ID3 tag to what album, track, artist, comment, year and genre the song is. Only thing needed now is a decent way to view that information and filter through it.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
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"Neither X1, nor Windows XP's built in search would find your wedding photos.
Why? Because they have useless names like DSC0001.jpg and there's no metadata
that says they are wedding photos."
... I enter data into my gallery so that I find my photos later on. But I am
not entering all thousands I ever made, only the best. The similiar ones could
easily be found by an image search, however, looking at the good ones, and
ignoring the bad/boring versions works.
http://bloodgate.com/photos?c=black&m=random
Ch eers,
Tels
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Not quite true. See here (scroll to the "Junction" header)
Where the hell did the parent post say anything about the names not being useful? Are you really able to see six file names in isolation, with absolutely no context, and determine the filenames aren't "useful"?
Surely if the image's 'date taken' = 'your wedding day' thats a good clue that those are wedding pictures.
I would LOVE such a program, if it supported full boolean searches and NEAR ... sometimes I dont care if it is slow. What fucking use are fast results if I still have to apply my human based search engine to them?
This kind of query interface is justifieable for Google, where you are using someone else's computing resources, but the dumbed down interface is plain dumb when you are using your own computer.
They seem to key off of the "86" on the end of "Xfree". Other numbers don't get you the X-rated warning.
:-). But what is an "86"????
OK, I know what "69" is. I know what "68" is (my favorite
-Rick
I was recently at a longhor demonstration at my university and Longhorn had facial recognition software built right in. You could specify the name of the person by face and then all the photos with that person were searchable on your computer.
Also by default at the presentation there was a search bar built right in to the default desktop.
if I have pictures I make a directory with a name like wedding photos and put them there -
it is that simple.
we don't need metadata and a sql server on every pc. this is just bills attempt to try show how current technology is deficient and he has next greatest innovation.
I didn't read the article but I think we all have been down this path before. I don't care because I have been burned and wasted too much time on his so called innovative os and won't even buy his Longhorn thingy. Last os I bought of his was windows/95/nt4.0. won't give him any more of my money. And has anybody notice that on all his NFL type commercials all the geeks resemble him.
What a ego!! But I guess you can do that in America when you are a billionaire mutliple times over.
Linux rocks -
Signed
Former MCSE and current CNE 6.x
ACDsee, a well-known and, at one time, free, image viewing and organising app, supports metadata. It puts it in a "descript.ion" text file in each directory. This is an ancient DOS standard. It's still supported by a few Windows apps, notably the Far manager (a shareware clone of Norton Commander for Win) and ReGet, a downloader; both Russian.
In fact I find the "descript.ion" metadata so useful I stick with apps that use it. At my last job, a web news site, I organised out image library using ACDsee and this metadata to add notes. ACDsee also has a nice batch rename.
No need to invent a whole bloody new file system to find your wedding photos.
funny
It's "file attributes" or "extended attributes", introduced ages ago by (IIRC) Apple and IBM.
Obviously DSC0001.jpg is the first picture taken at your stag party. Contrary to what the wife says, these will always remain the most important wedding pics of the lot....
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
We have now entered a mobius strip of problems when it comes to pushing a new browser. Joe Sixpack wants the page to look exactly like it does with IE.
/.ers) answer might be "switch banks to one that supports Mozilla" or "don't use [insert_favorite_website] and change to [another_website]".
/. suggest the same thing, but they fail to realize that integration needs to be seemless and unintrusive for the USER. That's why Microsoft's IE works. It's seemlessly and unintrusively integrated with their OS.
Your (not you in general, but other
This in here lies a major problem for the average computer user. They don't want to make -2- (or more) changes to get something to work. They don't even want to make 1! Their software works with the companies websites, and that's the way they like it.
All these arm-chair business-persons on
We need to keep up the good work, and continue our push. We are not ready yet for a take-over.
When modding "Informative", please make sure it both has a source and IS actually informative.
They are bitching about indexing, that it takes too much cpu. But instead of indexing sometime during the night, why not index once like that, then index each file when it is created?
Cripes. You'd had thought that a company as big as Microsoft would have considered a better way, but no.
.. you got it .. drop it on the Uncle Jim topic icon.
-
from the article, Microsoft's Robert Scoble:
But, WinFS goes further than X1 and other file search tools do today. It lets you (and developers of apps you'll use) add metadata to your files. So, even if you don't change the name of your files, you might click on one of the faces in a picture application and get prompted to type a name and occasion. So, you would click on your cousin Joe's face, type in "Joe Smith" and "Wedding."
So Microsoft, who have sold many more graphical interfaces that anyone else on the planet, require you to "type in" Joe Smith for each and every photo of Joe you have !
Oh, sure, there'll be a dropdown list, but it'll surely list every last irrelevant person and topic you ever defined in WinFS.
Instead consider the following scenario: -
You've uploaded your latest batch of photos from your camera to your PC and have them in thumnails view in a file manager of your choice. -
Now you want to add your metadata, so you open up your "Meta topics" folder and select a number of graphical icons representing the subject matter of your photos, e.g. "Wedding", "Uncle Jim", "Mary-Jane" and some others. You then drag'n'drop these into a "Scratch" folder and close the "Meta topics" folder. So you now have the freshly-uploaded photos, and the relevant meta topics. -
Now select all the photos in the folder - they're all wedding photos, so drag'n'drop 'em onto the Wedding topic icon. -
Now select the photo of Uncle Jim staggering across the reception with a pint of special, and
Now the picture of Mary-Jane in her wedding hat - yeah, that's it baby - drop it on the pretty icon.. -
Now you can access all the Wedding photos by clicking on the wedding icon all the pictues of Uncle Jim by clicking the uncle jim icon and so on. -
There's even an interface to combine filters, e.g. Wedding AND (Uncle Jim OR Mary-Jane), simply by dragging and dropping the icons onto AND and OR icons in a cumulative fashion.
Now you can do all of this (bar the interface combine filters interface) TODAY, albeit in a fairly crude way, with a file system that supports symlinks (such as ext3), and a graphical file manager (say, Rox-FILER..). And here is my claim to prior art in respect of this "graphical metadata manipulation" concept. Of course, I had to hold down Shift+Ctrl to make it do the symlinks when I dropped the photos on the relevent icon, which a proper interface wouldn't require. Also, a posix filesystem is not as elegant as say, a relational database for the purposes of storing the metadata. But hey, not bad for 5 minutes work. How long have Microsoft been working on this exactly ?
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
See? Even Microsoft has embraced the power of Ninnle Linux! Billy Gates uses it on his own personal workstation, (he borrowed Linus' copy of it, you know,) and it's rumoured to form the basis for the next generation of Windows!
So now we have:
Ninnle Linux
NinnleBSD
Winnle!
Download your ISO today at www.ninnle.org!
if they can find a way to make this search function as good or better than the query tool in BeOS. The filesystem in Be made it very simple to make custom queries and oddly enough you could search through email and contacts. I'm not bashing microsoft at all for attempting to implement similar features, I just hope they can live up to the expectations that Be gave all of us.
How about a google where for a little money a month you can do full boolean searches including exact phrases. Throw in NEAR and regexp searching while you are at it.
I don't see how adding 'metadata' is going to help. If people are unwilling to give their files meaningful filenames or organize them in directories, then how can they be expected to provide properly describe their data?
An interesting article that addresses this and several other points is here.
So I guess you want /Weddings/ and in that... /Mine/ /Bob's/ /Susan's/ /Cousin Vinnie/ /Bob G/
;-)
Or maybe do those by year? What if you're trying to find that person so-and-so was dancing with at that wedding ummm... whose was it? Dang...
Letse here... search umm... Tony dancing wedding
Heeey! There she is!
Or play Guess Who! with your computer. (The MS Photo Wizard)
"No"
?
"Yes"
"Yes"
(Don't laugh, this is the future)
Ehhh... the more metadata you get the better, but nobody is gonna type all that junk in. iPhoto does a pretty good job so far, but I still only have 6 mostly empty catagories... the tools are aleady here, people are just lazy. The computer is STILL better than shoeboxes and albums! I can look through a few thousand photos in iPhoto and find the right one in a few seconds, compare that with digging through a shelf full of albums and flipping through pages. For practical purposes the computer has already superseeded real life photographs (organizing that is), I can put the same photo in multiple albumns without making copies of it.
But hey I'm sure a branch of AI is devoted to image recognition, a quick way to get some money back out of that is to put it in photo software to help sort out pictures, have it cranking away in the background like some sort of SETI... the program would notice similiarities and ask for names now and then, then fill in the blanks for ya. Of course with family pictures I'm sure it would more than likely mix people up, we do it ourselves don't we?
Best answer... Camera with an RFID receiver on it that automatically scans the ID of everyone in the shot and imports that metadata into the photo program.
Oh wait, that's what everybody DOESN'T want isn't it?
-Don.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Microsoft Search Engine Clippy - "I found 0 matches for 'Linux', maybe you meant to search for 'Microsoft Windows XP'?"
I can't afford a sig!
Folders are annoying, though, because (on windows) files can only be in one folder at a time. Unix has links, but even then -crucially- you can't introspect on a file to find out what folders it is in. What is needed is a relational filesystem, where the "directory" structure is _equivalent_ to metadata. I can look for a file in directory mp3, or I can look AT a file and see that it is in directories mp3, kittymonkey.
I used PhotoMesa before they wanted money for it, but you can still download a free trial. It's written in Java "but" it is well-written and feels very fast.
There's an article on Sun's Java website about PhotoMesa.
Dr Superlove 300ml. I use my powers for awesome
I also name files in sensible ways, but that doesn't mean that I always immediately know which of my program (code) files contains a particular function (no, this isn't Java of course). The containing text search would be handy... if it worked. I've had instances before now when it doesnt match the exact phrase I input even though it was in the files, due to punctuation, spaces or whatever. Had to use grep in the end...
Ok, I just downloaded a shitload of pr0n...
Doze is gonna make me categorize it first before I get the tissues out???
snap out of it you fools.
Doesn't storing your photos in hierarchical folders labeled appropriately count as metadata? I know it's not very flexible or powerful, but it's metadata of a sort. Store your wedding photos in a wedding folder in a photos folder.
Now, if you're talking about a database of metadata about files, then that's something else.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
for the first few paragraphs, Robert Scoble is referred to as [RB].
maybe if his word processor had access to the right metadata, he wouldn't have had that problem.
Your (not you in general, but other
Well although there's still some sites that don't work with Mozilla (although personally it's rarely I use them) the point is with someone like Google behind Mozilla people will make the effort to get their sites to work because Mozilla's market share would rise.
At one time when Netscape was big lazy people never bothered checking their sites would work in IE, now just about every site will work because it has a good market share.
Maybe the photo software could check with your calendar, see that a certain date/time was "my wedding," and assign that metadata to photos as they are downloaded. Most photos already have time/date metadata.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
That's impossible and PRECISELY the reason why they're doing this new stuff.
Directory and filename information should be irrelevant! Because when you run out of info on one disk, then you have to search two or more disks. Or you have to have 255-byte file names.
I tried everything with my porn collection such as
- first two letters - race
- 2nd two - ff for lesbian, gb for group sex, etc.
- etc..
Still you can never put enough info in those, plus you're manually creating all metadata which is very time consuming...
it's an MS research tool. They collect and store all search requests.
Their results are crap but they don't care.
on windows) files can only be in one folder at a time
Copy
Paste.
Duh.
...In the Internet search engine arena. I already have a choice between Google, AV, Lycos and Yahoo. But I do like the idea about improving local searching. Before you pooh pooh entering the metadata for each file, consider this:
At my place of employment (a government organization), we generate thousands of new documents every year. Some of these need to be kept until the end of the fiscal year, others for as long as 10 years. Up until this point, the only metadata consisted of a descriptive file name. Administrators have assistants that file hard copies, and I've given these assistants access to Administrators' home directories to organize things there. It's not working. Because there is no metadata, when a file is lost, it's a nightmare to find again. Remembering approximate dates doesn't work. Attempting to recall some of the content doesn't work either, because the user can almost never recall an exact phrase in the document. Then, on top of this, we have documents stored in different places on and off the network, because of security requirements. Take this recipe, sprinkle with drive letters or mount points, mix in some documents transferred (and lost) through e-mail, and I have a hopeless mess on my hands. Most folks just give up and recreate the document from scratch.
I decided about two years ago to get a document management system in place, but the current crop are either out of our budget if proprietary, or barely functional if open source. I put off the project because other folks wanted to rearrange my priorities. I'm going to have to take up this project soon. I want to do away with all the network nonsense with drive letters, mount points and subsubsubsubdirectories filled with unhelpful file names. It'll have one interface on all platforms, and no knowledge of network design will be needed. The system will allow transfer of documents between all the employees or between groups of employees. It will incorporate virus scanning (not mapping r/w network shares is also an effective way to stop the spread of viruses/worms).
*And*... Users will not be allowed to put a document into the system without entering a description of the document.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
I once worked at a law firm that had a really great software package called DocsOPEN. It replaced the Word/WordPerfect Save As dialog box with a basic database frontend. You didn't have to provide a filename, you just provided your name, your client, the subject, some keywords, and the name of the document, etc. Sure it took a few extra seconds to save a file, but it made it SIMPLE to find documents, etc. Why hasn't anyone implemnted anything like this in linux yet? I've searched for DocsOPEN and I can't seem to find the application anymore. It's would be really nice if we could make linux apps provide this functionality and tie it to a MySQL db or something. As I accumulate more and more data (textfiles, email, code, etc. - I'm quickly finding myself lost in the filesystem-directory-filename convention of file storage. Using locate and grep helps me find the files, but then I have use that list and load each file up, make sure it's the right version, etc. I need something more productivity friendly.
Does anyone know of any packages for linux that can help me organize my data?
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
My friend and former roommate, Ken Ferry, wrote an application that greatly aids in adding metadata in the form of keywords to iPhoto. Keywording has been part of iPhoto for many revisions now but the interface has always sucked: a panel in a disparate GUI style with a list of keywords in the order they were created. What his app, Keyword Assistant, does is to provide an autocomplete for finding and assigning already created keywords, an easy mechanism for creating new keywords, and a way of alphabetizing existing keywords. And it's free (gratis) to boot.
Keyword Assistant for iPhoto page or the MacUpdate page for KA
My connection with the project is in that of tester, and, lately, Japanese localizer.
Of course I mean lazy people on Windows, people who designed sites under Linux couldn't test on IE back then as wine wasn't as mature and Mac users had their own IE which had a different rendering engine to the Windows one!
These days people who use Windows and write sites have no excuse but ignorance for not testing in Mozilla based browsers, and Google would make the browser a lot better known.
No, no: he means a _single_ file (one copy) linked to more than one directory.
Slashdot entertains. Windows pays the mortgage.
I've just recently started building large media collections - lots of JPG images (digital photos), lots of pdf files (saved articles - is there a better text + graphics format than pdf?), mp3s, xvid movies.
Of course we know how useful mp3 metadata is. Are there useful solutions for organizing pdf, jpg, and other metadata? I've started to try and enter info about my photos in the JPG data fields that Irfanview provides. Am I wasting my time doing this? Are there other apps that can read this JPG metadata? Does anyone have experience with video file metadata?
Sweet Mother of Christ, how do I get a piece of this action?
I completely agree with what the parent said, but I'm wondering why it seems no one is working on such a tool. WinFS appears to automatically generate metadata, and then hope they covered all the bases. (They won't have.) Other OSes appear to not even be considering such a tool.
/bin/gimp and /gimp/bin are synonymous!
One of the biggest advantages I see to such a tool is the implict solution to the PATH problem. If all binaries had the "BIN" attribute set, then PATH could just be set to use the BIN attribute. Now
They'll have to tightly integrate search functionality with the core OS or else the performance will be poor and the user experience will suffer!
Yeah, I can't wait to download stuff from the internet full of their own meta data. Isn't it true that search engines are not using meta data as much cause of false data? The OS having its own contacts list might seem like a good idea, but i can see many people trying to hack into it and mass mail all your friends.
Mark
>Given the history of Microsoft's security flawed implementation and design...
>Would you want to trust your private data...
I, for one, do not.
Their flawed workmanship continues right on through today - even with their search "service". For instance, even though they say so on their website, every single day I've seen msnbot grab the robots.txt off my site then crawl the entire site - even though the robots.txt and metadata in the html tells it not to do so. They've now been added to my firewall, since they can't be bothered to even follow the rules they say they follow.
Microsoft not following time honored standards? That's unpossible!
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
What if ALL applications, not just Outlook, could use that new file type? What if we could associate that file type to social software services like Friendster, Tribe, Yahoo's personals, or Google's Orkut? Would that radically change how you would keep track of your contacts? Would that make contacts radically more useful? I think it would.
I get the feeling MS is also merging concepts from directory servers into winFS. It was bound to happen. In this particular case, LDAP/directory servers would make it easier to build applications that need to keep an addressbook or something similar to an addressbook. I just hope the winFS team doesn't try to make it a general database. Using LDAP like serves for applications that need relational databases suck big time.
I don't look at photos for text. I look for images. If I sort them, it's by date and then later I might sort them by subject.
What needs to be done is to make the sorting easier at importing. Thumbnails and a easy to use browser/mover/orginizer, not metadata, are what we really need.
I have a simple script that takes all the JPGs in the directory the script is run from and makes thumbnails out of them. It also generates the "code" which is just the array containing all the file names and thumbnail names. I plug that into an inc file, link it up, change a few variables to match the collection and I have an easy to browse photo album. Page numbers are automatically generated and X pictures can be viewed on one page.
Meta data in files is incomplete and pointless. It's trivial to whip up an HTML page and create a page to describe all the pictures linked up by it. There's more to pictures than just a date and names.
You don't need a web-server to make a photo album web-site. Straight HTML does everything you need and you can just load it locally.
Google's image search works by looking at file names, directories and the text surrounding the picture. There's no way around it. If you want to have a digital photo album you have to spend time putting it together in an intelligent fashion so you can find things later.
There's also already software out there for creating albums.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
how many times have you had to search using the "containing text" features of Windows (or some other OS)?
E.g, find and grep on UNIX. There is no sin in using this search method. Also, real applications, such as OpenOffice.org and Mozilla, use human readable file formats when possible. It's crap like Microsoft produces that forces people into relying on unreliable metadata for finding things in a pile of Word and Excel documents. This only application domains that absolutely must have binary file formats might be graphics and databases, but only for performance reasons (who would want to wait for Oracle to parse 100 gigs of XML?).
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
[RB] Because hard drives keep getting bigger (a 60GB drive at Fry's Electronics is $60 now -- in three years we predict it'll be $20 and you'll see 500GB drives for less than $100). It's easier to create files now than it is to find them.
*NOTE that [RB] should be [RS] for Robert Scoble
Who actually goes through all the files they ripped from their CDs and enters all the meta-data? I certainly don't, I just name a directory for the composer/artist and some subdirectories for individual works, and stuff the files in there. I can't see how anyone would want to spend a whole day or more organizing a database that probably will get deleted anyway (it's pretty hard to back up all ripped files in a large collection).
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
Wow, being able to search for wedding photos! ;-)
OK, that's it - I'm switching to Longhorn!
Sig Nature
us geeks don't marry, so why would we want to search for wedding photo's? :-)
I have given up even trying to use MS search on my hard drive. First of all it frequently desides that I have nothing on my machine. In other words whenever I search for something it instantly decides that it's not there. The only cure is to turn off indexing and delete the database files. Then it takes an half an hour to search for one filename.
I have taken to saving things on a samba share just so I can use locate and grep.
War is necrophilia.
maybe if we switch our standards to the government we can finally have microsoft do things the right way with search engines. instead of relying on those pigeons.
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
If you search on Bill Gates dick on MSN it returns no item found ???
What the f*ck is that !!!! what gender is Bill gates then ????
We simply dump our photos in \PHOTO1, \PHOTO2, ... and start a new folder when there's about a CD full. The photos are stored [1] at home as well as [2] at the office, [3] backed up on CD for convenience, and [4] backed up on 4mm DDS tape for long-term.
Metadata is too tricky. I just sit my wife in front of the computer, fire up ThumsPlus, and by simply pressing F2 she can change the name of each photo to include the names of the subjects. By typing DIR *GRANDMERE*.JPG we can find all the pictures of my mother.
BTW if you're concerned about longevity, your best and only backup could be a 3"x5" print. You can use ThumbsPlus' batch-stamping feature to have the name & date of each photo blended into a corner of a copy of the JPG, and it will appear in the printed copy.
(You don't realy think you'll be able to view those CDs thirty years from now, do you?)
Slashdot entertains. Windows pays the mortgage.
concentrate on getting MIME data identified first. The entire operating system relies on ".JPG" to find pictures to begin with. Internet Explorer has no clue what to do with a file unless it has a "proper" extension.
Apple has a solution to this, which has trade-offs, but seems pretty functional.
Essentially, each of their iLife apps is a replacement for the Finder. Do we really need music search integrated with file search? Or is it sufficient to build independent metadata (ID3) and filestructure (playlists) just for music. That's really the brilliance of iTunes in that it never takes you back to your HD filestructure. You can even ask it to maintain the HD filestructure to reflect the metadata structure, so it'll keep everything in an artist/album/song structure, naming things as needed.
iPhoto is set up the same way, but it's pretty apparent that the iPhoto guys are the 'B' team, since they haven't gotten it nearly as slick as iTunes yet, but it also has the equivalent of content metadata, playlists, and smart playlists. So, yes, I can easily find my wedding photos. The trade-off is that you can't search for 'Wedding' in the Finder and get wedding photos, wedding songs, etc. Maybe that's upcoming, but I'm not totally convinced of the value.
The iTunes organizational structure does carry into iPhoto, so if you want to select a song for a slideshow in iPhoto, you can see your iTunes playlists, and filter against metadata. It also carries into iMovie, etc.
Other posters have clearly identified the problems with metadata. File organization is generallly only useful if you are willing to symlink across all of your metadata, otherwise your photos of you mom and your wedding photos are disjoint, since some should be in both places. The single biggest problem with metadata is putting it in to begin with. iPhoto now allows you to do that during photo import - using a slide-show type UI.
I think MSs tendency to do everything in one place is interesting, but tends to not come off so well. Having everything in SQL could eliminate one of the shortcomings in Apple's implementation which is that they need to maintain an XML intermediate structure for music files, photos, etc. While somewhat handy, it's main function is to join file metadata and the FS, which means that it is somewhat fragile.
If it validates, there is absolutely no reason it shouldn't work in browser A, B and C, as long as the browsers are properly standards-compliant as well.
For instance, how about if I wanted to search for "my wedding photos?" Neither X1, nor Windows XP's built in search would find your wedding photos. Why? Because they have useless names like DSC0001.jpg and there's no metadata that says they are wedding photos.""
The true discerning Slashdot geek doesn't have to look for His wedding photos because he NEVER got married in the first place. He spends most of his time at night in poorly lit room, with his choice of poison, either instant [ack] coffee or Mountain Dew, and sleeps during the day, when most attractive women are interacting with the rest of the 'normal' population. When he isn't geeking out compiling and installing the latest Linux kernel, he's working very hard keeping that '76 AMC Gremlin, complete with bondo, fresh primer, and duct tape, in 'just barely get me there' condition. The much more rare, stylish geek, a newcomer to the *NIX world, is a Mac OS X user, like myself, who sips on gourmet coffees or cappuchinos in the morning, clicking on his favorite sites in tabs in Mozilla (The Wall Street Journal, BigCharts.com, Slashdot, CNN, etc...), drives a Saab, BMW, Audi, or Mercedes Benz, who would rather not fuss around wasting time downloading drivers, hacks, and cracks to get peripherals to work properly with his computer. Hell, who has time for tedious mundane tasks? Just open up a terminal session and type:
locate wedding [enter]
assuming you were bright enough to create a directory called 'wedding'.
Or if your ARE a true discerning geek who has serendipitously stumbled upon a LIFE, a WIFE, and a high salaried career, AND upgraded to the prestigious Apple Power Macintosh G5 platform, you may even know the time, date, exposure, and shutter speed data of those wedding photos that you so desperately seek. In that case, you could probably use the grep command and actually look inside the EXIF data of those very photos.
Yeah, it's a bummer that the Windows filesystem doesn't support meta data. I recall a long time ago Apple did something like that, and everyone laughed at them, ridiculed them, wouldn't let it join in the market share games. And now look, the Borg are inventing a new filesystem that uses meta data. Actually, a new filesystem isn't necessary, all that is needed is a program [for Windows] that can look inside files for metadata. Afterall, the Borg want to maintain compatibility with all the virii and worms that exploit gaping security holes.
Any dullard or oaf lacking insight and intelligence, which leads them down the path of confusion, frustration, and self-imprisonment, deserves the anguish he so willingly chose and accepted with the purchase of a Windows machine. Liberate yourself NOW! Buy a Power Macintosh G5 at http://www.apple.com/
ALL YOUR META DATA ARE BELONG TO GREP!
There's a technological issue that people here do not understand entirely. Google and search engine's are easily first generation web content organisation and navigation tools. Where they fail is that they are not inherently embedded into everything we do: it's a deskbar, toolbar or external web page.
Microsoft is pulling the same strategy as it did with IE, i.e. trying to embed it into the operating system. This is actually a legitimate technical direction, so long as they really _do_ embed it, and it's not just a half-assed attempt to dominate the market.
In the same way, if Google doesn't succesfully embed itself into applications and so on, then someone else will take this market direction and google will lose.
Pros would love this; often you want to search some big image archive for pictures of a specific location. Tourists would find their photos self-organizing.
Lookup can then be by address, or using a map or globe. Think MapQuest.
This offers the possibility of a new (and totally legitimate) peer-to-peer application - location based picture-sharing. See the pictures others took of tourist locations.
PHB: I need you to make this so simple my mother could use it.
Alice: It's already so simple a squirel could use it. How much dumber is your mother?
-ted
WinFS metadata is going to be like The Registry: Poorly implemented and ultimately unnecessary.
/etc works in unix -- but they were trying to innovate.
What is the registry? A hierarchical way of storing keys. Rather, a filesystem within a file. Microsoft could have implemented The Registry as a branch in the filesystem -- just like
What is WinFS metadata? Basically the same thing. Microsoft is adulterating a fundamental part of the operating system because a top-level architect needs to justify their employment.
Compare WinFS versus NTFS streams that never had an application, and HFS forks in MacOS that were difficult to move between systems.
I think it's cool that Microsoft is taking cues from the iApps - interesting that they want to integrate it so much into the operating system. Whereas so far Apple is stressing an application-centered solution on top of a more general-purpose filesystem, Microsoft is getting deeper into the integration game, getting into file metadata a la BeOS, and tracking files according to thematic relevance a la relational databases.
If the "smart desktop" idea catches on it will be interesting to see the response from developers on Mac OS X and Linux, as far as offering intelligent activity tracking. Somehow I see a twisty maze of documents and activities, all alike.
Should operating systems do all the work of organizing users files for them, concealing the filesystem behind a database veneer, or behind a purely task-oriented veneer? Should this kind of thing be left to application developers, like the maker of Path Finder?
Wouldn't Windows be more useful if it was a truly modular system that could be configured simply by stripping away unwanted components? Isn't that what makes Darwin so healthy in the enterprise market today?
-- thinkyhead software and media
problems: 1) the meaning of 'my' changes with context 2) what is a 'wedding'? 3) does the software know the difference between a single photo, or many photos?
What I'd like to see come out of Google, is an add in that will categorize and search my local drives using the Google search algorithm. They have Google appliances that businesses can buy and use internally. I'd like to see a home based, and home priced, version of that application. Maybe have it search the internet as well, present the results separately. So if I'm looking for a file containing the words "efficient search keywords" (or something like that) it shows me files in my local system (including network shares maybe) as well as results on the internet.
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
Forget metadata. What I want is access to all the cool facial recognition software that the the tin-foil hat people are always claiming the government has. Then I could just search by name in your pictures! Err, I meant my pictures, honest....
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
Cory Doctorow has a great analysis of why most metadata schemes become less and less useful. This is also where he described the ebay "Plam Pilot" phenomenon that the NYT picked up on a little while back.
what will this meta data do with older windows versions or other operating systems?
will it lock them out from viewing longhorn only data?
you better bet the farm.
microsoft isnt only locking in the bios, they're locking everything in.
it's like if you read the libjpeg readme, jpeg isnt a concrete format it can be icompatible with itself.
and microsoft will possibly create data on each file that their software will produce and any other programs on the system, or older windows versions or any other system will be locked out from viewing those file besides let's say....Microsoft photoready. (wouldnt be surprised if they came up with that cliched name)
personally, this winfs search crap is another front for lockIN, and really, I hope people react the way microsoft expects them not to do, flock to an alternate OS
not to mention once programs like photoshop need to use this technology to run on windows, and it would hurt their macos support, not to mention they'd have to pay royalties for it, I think Adobe would start shifting away, and many gaming companies would prolly start flocking as well, because they dont want to put up with this shit, I think atm, the way XP crashes (where if you need to poweroff the system, you cant because XP controls the power on and off of the system) is about how far people are gonna take it.
Teacher next to my third period class has had it with his current XP set up because it just keeps getting viruses that cripple the system, and he spendsmore money and time repairing it than actually being able to use it.
and microsoft wants to lock us into this sort of bullshit? riight, once I told him about linux, he started sound a bit interested in it.
You show people something they havent seen before, plus it being stable, and showing general advantages, they will use it. most people are trained to think you have to pay for quality.
hell, this woman was selling a bunch of computer parts for 5 bucks yesterday (got me a nice monitor, hehe) and she said that these old games she had for her children no longer worked on XP, so she just got new ones.
reason people havent flocked over to linux is because it's completely new to them and their neighbor doesnt use it, but your typical grandmother or parent or average joe will get it as long as it works garaunteed. to your more geekcentric user, it takes more convincing.
but to get back onto my original point, microsoft is gambling with this metadata crap.
it's either going to make or break them.
not to mention if another manufacturer offers support for older windows systems and linux and alternatives, epople would gladly flock to that instead of this new system which doesnt work well with their older stuff. though then again, they might just flock to it because it's the latest thing and they're willing to change. this is something I think all desktop linux companies need to keep in mind.
Why anyone would be that worried about wedding photos is beyond me. And video, christ anyone who thinks they have an interesting wedding video is very sad.
And I sure as shit am not digitising and indexing the honeymoon photos for anyone to find. They are for our eyes only thank you very much.
Why not use an existing and available metadata standard, such as the jpeg2000 metadata standard, or the EXIF standard that embeds the metadata into the image file?
These standards are already available, are already being used in cameras and imaging software,
and are documented well enough that support can be implemented into your open-source imagebrowser or other app. There is no reason to add (now redundant) metadata layer to the filesystem or image database when the required metadata is already included in the image file itself in a easy to extract manner.
There are some interesting and informative articles pertaining to image metadata located at the TASI website and an article about accessing jpeg metadata using java (not really java specific) over at Sun's Java site.
Perhaps Microsoft is working within the existing standards while selling it as their own creation. If they are, it would not be the first time, and that would still be much more desirable than if they were rolling their own non-compatible, propietary standard.
Read, L
What we need is a startrek computer .exe or OS platform.
Something thats a PIM on steroids. Something thats not OS dependant or that can hook it self to the OS infos, ie something that has it all in one spot/mirroed on a web service, which then lets outlook/isync and any app instantly hook into it.
Why does every new app need its own data storage for this info, we need a common PIM storage/api. iSync with iBrain
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
sounds suspiciously like BFS.
"Why? Because they have useless names like DSC0001.jpg and there's no metadata that says they are wedding photos."
Holy shit Scooby...i mean Scoble is a FUCKING genius, who knew that Digital cameras couldn't automatically asign meta data of a picture based on the context on their own? Good thing M$ is to the rescue extending their illegal monopoly to search engines so Billy G can use his magical fairy powers to instantly add metadata to every file that has and will ever exist.
Seriously do these supposed uber-geniuses at M$ have any clue? How is the relevant metadata supposed to get on these files? The fucking user will have to add it of course. Do you really think Joe Shithead who managed to put his precious wedding photos in the 'C:\casino\online casino\spyware\' folder is going to take the time to add metadata to all his photos?
And what about when Windows starts to implode on itself how are these people supposed to backup all their files? M$ is assuming they can't put their pictures in the "My Pictures" folder in the first place. People will have no idea where their files actually are, and what kind of uber-search to you think these people are capable of doing that will amass all their personal files? Probably something along the lines of "find my shit".
Thanks but no thanks M$.
Let me tell you that I am not impressed with this crap. Does anyone remember Mac HFS file format used to do "resource forks" to contain extensible metadata on files. The Finder would know, for instance, that the last time you opened a particular file, a particular progam was used to save it. The default action for that file if you double-clicked the icon was to open it with the last-saver application. The problem isn't getting the metadata out there. Been there; done that, for years. The problem is indexing all of it. What? Are you going to put a Google style cross-correlation engine on your PC to grind through the FS metadata indexes every time you change a file? How do you tell which metadata is worth all of the effort? The worst case workload increases geometrically with the number of files and the kind of metadata.
What about BeFS? It took this problem on and made demonstrable progress. If you searched your filesystem with find(1), you would match MP3s by artist name.
The problem is, Microsoft's department of predation^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hinnovation is looking at these two ideas and asking the question, "How can we use this to squeeze a few more dimes out of our captive market?" They want blood, and it is the very personal connections between the rich collection of data on your hard drive, and how you personally relate it to your life. While they try to convince you what it would be worth to you, ask yourself what it's worth to them!
The first thing I see is the suggestion that there should be a "contacts" file type built into the OS to handle all of your contact data. Maybe this should be validated against a master database in Redmond? Maybe they are just aching for the warm feeling they get from that good-old lock-in of captive data and the phantom control it gives them over ISVs.
Can anyone else think of any nasty easter eggs we all might find in WinFS (besides the poo-poo'ing that they gave metadata sharing/privacy choice)?
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
Any programmer would tell you to use the NTFS supporting IPropertyStorage (go look it up!) to store whatever you wanted.. The iproperty storage is a "file system within a file", which could be searchable..
To specifcally find something like wedding photos from a local search engine, the answer is simple - integrate "MS Outlook" to your local search engine, then when you say wedding, it will grep MS Outlook to see when the various weddings you attended were, apply a meaningful "window" (say 24 hours), and return all photos within those windows.
Of course, you will need to keep outlook up to date, and complete with your comings and goings, as well as keeping the clock in your camera reasonably accurate...
Ken
also, use the $(cmd args) notation instead of backticks. It's more readable (and it works in ksh and bash, so there's no excuse)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
We've been down that mobius strip for a long time -- IE itself renders simple pages just like Netscape 3.
At least also with a Nikon, most of the metadata is stored separately in a simple tagged text file, but it is technical information about the shot: f-stop, ISO speed, etc.
Just like it is possible to put in rich data into Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, etc., that make them much easier to search for, people just are not trained to do this. Descriptive file names and paths are helpful, but not absolutely. There seem to be about as many naming conventions for stuff as there are users.
Even something as simple as saving temporary work, one-offs or rough drafts is more difficult than it is to save final versions of documents. Then add in CMS (real CMS, like with Documentum) systems.
While nice, it will require people to work differently than they have up to now, even though the ability to do so has been there for about 10 years (at least with MS Office).
... hopefully you still remember the date you got married - thus a basic search by date will do.
Sauron
Strange, none of my wedding photos have metadat associated with them either but I have no problem finding them on the in the big "Wedding Album" on the shelf where I keep my photo albums.
Now if this system "works" for rectangles of photo paper why do we need metadata when the picture is in the form of a computer file ?
No but, yeah but, no but...