What do you lose when somebody makes a package that just happened that is of no utility for you? Or do mean they should all concentrate on the packages that you use just to serve you?
I don't care what people package. I just think that as far as lofty goals go, that particular one is shallow. The Debian organisation suffers from the same thing as, say, a lot of university departments; it's self-selecting, self-sustaining, self-directing, and is in some danger of eventually disappearing up its own viewpoint, as it were. The "universal distribution" idea provides no counterbalance; basically, the group exists to please itself.
Of course I don't feel they should concentrate on the packages I use, to please or serve me - I don't use Debian anyway. And I'm happy for the group to work on pleasing itself and nobody else, if that's what they want to do. Individuals of similar taste will use Debian; the self-selection will continue; nothing wrong with that - except that it's not a "universal" distribution then, is it?
Do you know what you are talking about? If their ideology is to spread Free Software and the concept of Freedom, and your so called "Practical Success" means more people using Debian, I don't see how the two ideas conflict.
Yeah, I do know what I am talking about, but thanks for asking.
Ideology is a fine and wonderful thing, but it is not easy to reconcile it with practical considerations. Practical success in my view involves a good atmosphere within the Debian project; an atmosphere, by preference, that promotes constructive action and dissuades political rubbish. In other words, my metric for practical success in this context is not the number of people using Debian directly.
In practice, I'm seeing a lot of political crap going on within the Debian project, compared to other groups, and I think that has a lot to do with those who wear their ideologies on their sleeves. Others may disagree. Many probably like it this way, since ideological struggle is attractive to some. Myself, I have respect for the ideals of Free Software and Freedom and many other things with gratuitous capital letters, but like many ideals, I just don't feel they need to be broadcast and cherished as self-consciously as they in fact are.
My impression (from talking to Debian users and occasional developers) is that Debian represents a bit of a political talking point in and of itself. The whole "Universal Distribution" thing is symptomatic of the idea that there's something inherently wonderful about packaging everything and its dog, provided it's Free(TM) no matter what it is, as long as someone's willing to maintain it, and then offering the resulting chaos for download.
Now, that's lovely, if you're after making a political point (what exactly the political point is remains to be seen, but certain developers seem very much in love with it). But for the rest of us, it's just a bit... baffling. And I am willing to bet that a subset of Debian developers see the political background the same way.
I see the whole thing as slightly unnecessary. Myself, I settled on Slackware simply because there was no visible politics. What Patrick does, he does, and the rest is up to linuxpackages.net. For me, there comes a time when one has to get pragmatic about belief; why should Pico or Pine (under uni-Washington licensing) be innately less worth having than 'man sex' or 'man condom', part of the funny-manpages which come free on Debian?
Before anyone considers answering along the lines of "Freedom is its own reward!!!" - I've heard it before. Debian is either an ideological success or a practical success, and I am by no means convinced that the two separate viewpoints on the project can be reconciled. This is only an opinion, based on nothing but a little observation, so I'm happy to be proven wrong...
In other words, MS and I do not share our definitions of the term 'filesystem'.
Last time I ran SQL server (with WinXP and.net) its major distinguishing feature was a requirement for more CPU and memory than my machine had... but I suppose it's 'eating one's own dog food' from MS's point of view.
Well yes it will, but I wouldn't park that in the filesystem as such, any more than I'd consider the locate db to be part of the filesystem.
I'm wondering whether part of the problem is that you and I just have slightly different definitions of 'filesystem'.
To me, a metadata indexing service is a service, a filesystem is an on-disk data structure that records info about the files written on the disk. I personally would not feel that the filesystem as such has to know about metadata, beyond what it already handles. As far as I know, there's nothing wrong with adding this sort of thing as a service. Just because one might wish to label it 'the central database' or 'central storage' does not mean it actually has to be an integral part of the filesystem in the sense of forming part of the description of the physical structure on disk. All that does is to increase the risk that disks are going to be unreadable by older or alternative operating systems, which, if you'll excuse my French, sucks.
That said, there is a distinct advantage in having the service catch writes/reads on the FS. Does that make the service part of the filesystem?
I'm satisfied that the MS version will/would work, though much less satisfied about its use on heterogeneous networks.
But the original poster was actually issuing a challenge along the lines of Write A WinFS-alike filesystem under Linux, and I was saying that I personally wouldn't attack the problem from that direction, but would prefer to write a metadata indexing/robust linking/history system that runs as a service. As for the paths, isn't that essentially just a URI handler connecting to the service?
Well the main point is that it becomes part of the OS platform, rather than just a database in a particular application.
That's what I dislike about it.
The minute you move away from your own home PC, you lose all that metadata. That's what I mean by 'leaving their APIs'. Unless you postulate a whole bunch of altered protocols, etc, in order to make this stuff transferable.
And that is why I would try to keep metadata within data files wherever possible, and make use of open standards in order to encode that metadata for storage or transmission where it is not possible. I don't see that the filesystem is a particularly good place to store it. There are existing solutions to this sort of problem, which are certainly less grandiose than an entirely new filesystem, but have the slight advantage of being standard.
As for your last point, yes, no matter where the metadata is stored, the filesystem will have to be hooked into it in some way. But that doesn't mean that the filesystem actually has to be the guilty party - it just has to call it.
Hey, I wouldn't bring it up either. It's irrelevant for Slashdot purposes and as one can clearly see from the conversations on this thread, it tends to bring out the trolls. Which is a very good reason not to talk about it - I see you've already picked up an AC troll.
I'm sure there are more women reading than Slashdotters realise. In fact, I find it slightly bizarre that someone modded my first comment 'funny' at all. It didn't strike me as being in the 'funny' category so much as 'ought to be obvious, but'...
Only problem is, I seem to recall there being a sort of health warning on slashdot polls:
This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
But yeah it might be a laugh... though I'm not sure people would answer it very honestly (and you might end up finding out more about the demographics of people who answer polls than the original topic), so it would be of limited value.
Yeah... I do agree that you could work out a lot simply using data from Bob's calendar. Assuming of course that Bob was one of those people who is fairly well organised about his schedule. I'd be surprised if face recognition was much of a success in this context, though you never know I suppose - but I imagine you could get moderate success looking at photo features.
I'm just not too in love with the total lack of external tech specs and whatnot. I have the feeling that this is designed as one of those things that Just Works (TM) provided you're using nothing but the newest MS stuff, but which will abruptly disappear in its entirety as soon as you leave their APIs. You don't need WinFS to store metadata about photos - you could do exactly what you just described in a simpler and more portable way without tying it into a filesystem as such. WinFS doesn't actually help you at all in gathering the metadata, that's a separate problem; it's just a storage medium for it plus a query service.
It could as well run as a relations query service and a resolver service, based on harvesting of data embedded into files. Certainly there are disadvantages involved, since unless you had an OS hook updating segments of the db when you added/modified files, it would not update in realtime, but there is the advantage (which is fairly massive, at least to me) that you're not looking at any fundamental changes, you're using existing technology to achieve an effect. The alterations required are relatively minor.
Re:Looking at the distribution ...
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Women Leaving I.T.
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· Score: 3, Insightful
A lot of posters have asked why there are so few women here, but I suspect that nobody really knows how many women do post on slashdot (least of all how many women actually read slashdot - good luck working that one out).
Most women surviving on the internet realise fairly quickly that it's courting severe and long-term irritation to admit to their gender in a room full of geeks. Therefore the majority of women registered on slashdot are not going to be using names with giveaway terms like, I dunno, "babe" in them.
You hint at methods outside of the OS, like encoding the data in the file itself. I am going to google "EXIF metadata" after this post, but presently I think of things like XML and relation DBs. What exactly do you have in mind?
Various specific file formats have their own methods of encoding metadata, usually in fairly arbitrary ways (which can be a problem). For example, MP3s have their ID3 tags either at the start or end of the file, EXIF has photo-specific details, DOCs have all that microsoft authorship stuff. A great improvement might be if we could all fix on a standard for the actual metadata to store (Dublin Core, say) so we don't end up with completely different standards in each file format and lots of mapping to do.
There are sort of 'wrapper' XML formats, like METS, which are extremely handy for providing files with some sort of context (here's the official site). As it says on the site, The METS schema is a standard for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library, expressed using XML.
Re: the second point, I think maybe people get carried away, as in the MS WinFS documentation, when they think about the information available in an image. There is some easy to collect information, depending on the source of a data file: if it's an image, maybe you know whose camera it comes from and when, maybe you can even guess what that person was doing or where they were when the image was taken; if it's from the Internet, you know everything about the process the user went through to find that file in order to download it (I'm looking at that one atm). I'd be tempted to look in great detail at the kinds of information that might be useful, and set up open standards for encoding and transmitting that information, not to mention gaining an idea of the privacy implications, before going for any filesystem embedding of it.
If you're interested in discussing this further I'm kaiidth at altern dot org.
Well this is true, but when you're a major fan of reading you can go a bit far on this; in our house there are five full-height bookshelves and five half-height, and no order whatsoever.
It's not impressive so much as it is insane... and that's why it sometimes would be nice just to fit a few thousand paperbacks onto a CD.
Hmm - I'm not sure if I'd actually choose to do it that way. For me, the WinFS stated metadata aims bring up more questions than they solve, at least, looking at this intro. They describe the following scenario:
One reason people have difficulty finding information on their computer is because of the limited ability for the user to organize data. The present file system support for folders and files worked well originally because it was a familiar paradigm to most people and the number of files was relatively small. However, it doesn't easily allow you to store an image of your coworker Bob playing softball at the 2007 company picnic at a local park and later find the image...
Obviously, they're right that filesystems do not provide a lot of support for this sort of thing. But it is not an entirely unsolved problem; you can for example use a photogallery program to store your images, which brings in metadata and a DB right there. If the system you are using is smart, it will make use of something like EXIF metadata anyway and store metadata within the actual image files to the greatest extent possible.
It's my opinion that metadata, short of a radical shift in computing standards, belongs in data files rather than in the OS. Otherwise, sending that file by email (short of a shift in the way email works - and yes I know the promotional literature says that the metadata will be intact in the file when exported to NTFS) will dump the metadata and leave you with an image with zero available metadata. There is maybe a good argument that there's a place for a unique ID for data rather than files, and for a 'link resolver' type functionality to avoid breaking links when reorganising the disk....
This WinFS thing seems to me to be a bit like the fabulous Windows registry; putting centralisation in where it does not have to be. It sounds like a great attempt from the documentation, but I really think there's a more UNIXy way of achieving the same results, without monkeying around with the filesystem. Metadata-enabled locate:)
Plus, that 'company picnic' example suggests that they haven't really thought about the most major problem in the metadata world - how to get the metadata in the first place. It's as though they think that merely adding the theoretical capability to store metadata will suddenly turn us all into competent archivists.
Frankly I think it is time to make a way bigger deal out of this. If this is the way Europe is to be run, then I'm voting 'No' to Europe.
This is a total joke, this whole thing. It's enough to make one want to go visit the Luxembourg representative of today with a token of one's gratitude, by which I do not mean flowers. Whereas this is of course unfair, because they only moved it on because it was taking up too much of their time (aww).
The EU Commission needs to be deleted from the landscape.
Heh, I visited that lab at one point... they showed us the CoolTown stuff, you know, that wifi iPAQ plus RFID or whatever it was; you'd walk around an exhibition with it, and when you got near enough to a given exhibit, it would start to play a corresponding soundtrack. The trouble was, it wouldn't mix/fade from the soundtrack you had before; it just cut from one to the other. This blindingly obvious flaw rather detracted from the whole 'immersiveness' of the experience. Rather than 'walking from room to room', it felt more like channel surfing.
We asked if they'd thought about, y'know, smoothing the transition between exhibits. They said, well, it was funny that we'd mention that because so many other people had made similar comments, but no, they hadn't pencilled that into the project as of the present time (or similar phrasing).
Much as I hate to speak ill of the probably jobless, the attitude was a bit surprising in a research lab:-/
If you use a TV or any other device to receive or record TV programmes (for example, a VCR, set-top box, DVD recorder or PC with a broadcast card) - you need a TV Licence. You are required by law to have one.
hint: if you are not taking part in the bolded activity, you do not require a licence.
It is not practical to expect children to educate themselves. It is not practical to expect the sick or injured to cure themselves, nor for the old or disabled to take care of themselves. The fact that you didn't go to state school rather explains your attitude, but we'll pass on that and merely reiterate that denying basic education is a no-no, as is denying unemployment benefit. These strategies are damaging on a very real, practical level.
The case for subsidised railway is a little less blindingly obvious, so it is fortunate for you that the UK government barely bothers subsidising them, isn't it? However, there are a few reasons for public transport, not merely that it is childishly facile to suggest walking from London to Newcastle, but possibly all that stuff you might remember having heard about the disadvantages of the car as a means of transport and the supposed advantages of public transport... remember?
This sort of thing is collective responsibility, either to each other or (horrors) to the environment.
TV, on the other hand, you can do without, and nobody dies in the process. Nobody has proven to me as yet that society has been materially improved by its existence, as opposed to the other media currently available. It's a fad; internet seems to be displacing TV; before TV it was radio, all the way back to the days when those with the spare cash would amuse themselves with books and/or manuscript music. Personally, I don't feel that TV deserves any more of my cash than all the other fads, as far as state funding is concerned (proportionally to base cost). Given that my tax money already goes into various councils (eg Arts, Museums, Libraries and Archives, etc.) and corresponding groups on the local level, I don't see where TV's special need for massive quantities of funding arises.
The Government cannot afford to pick a specific medium and treat it as 'the fad to end them all' (look at Minitel for an example of what happens when governments do this). Thus the BBC's opt-in funding model, which delegates the choice to individuals - which seems to have worked, all in all, pretty well.
Yes, I do. Therefore I have no television, because personally I think the situation stinks enough to refuse to be part of it. TVL are pushy bullying arseholes; I don't want their product enough to deal with their attitude. So I just buy DVDs. This is why I know about this law, because I've been into it in gory detail.
As to blocking the broadcast, yes, my solution is stupid. But it's no stupider than current policy eg. if your tv is detuned when they turn up, it's sufficient for them to agree that you don't watch it. In fact, your word of honour is intended to be sufficient, because you're innocent until proven guilty in law, if not in the eyes of TVL; so they need to catch you provably watching broadcast TV before you can actually get fined. A sensible alternative would be to get the ISP to put in the firewall rule and certify it to the BBC - I'd accept that, just as long as goddamn TV Licencing leave me alone.
In the UK, it's the act of using the device to receive TV that means you require a TV licence. That's the law. Read the TV licencing web site:
Do I need a licence?
If you use a TV or any other device to receive or record TV programmes (for example, a VCR, set-top box, DVD recorder or PC with a broadcast card) - you need a TV Licence. You are required by law to have one.
Again, TV licencing people will cheerfully lie about this and tell you that the law has changed, etc; the trick is to ask them to write it down or show it to you in writing. They won't, unless they're really stupid, in which case take the paper and tell them you're sending photocopies of their misrepresentation of the law out to various consumer watchdog groups.
You may be thinking of a different country. In France or Germany, you'd actually be right; just not in the UK.
Sorry, but if this has happened to you you're a victim of the Pay Up attitude of the TV licencing chaps; they will lie to you if they think they can get away with it.
However, the letter of the law says that unless you're using the device to receive TV, you are not required to have a TV licence. Simple as that.
Next time a TV licencing person tells you otherwise, demand it in writing. Then thank them and post it off to the complaints department and anybody else you can think of, because misrepresenting the law in an attempt to gain money is illegal even for TVL.
To be fair, I wouldn't mind paying a whatever, a 'culture tax' or something, that partly went to fund the BBC nationally and internationally - particularly if it also funded foreign-language TV in Britain, which is desperately necessary if we're going to shake the whole 'monolingual' stigma. I really do see the BBC as a good service on the world scale, though it's a little bizarre that much of its greatest usefulness is for those who are outside the reach of British TV licencing.
I'd even like to see the BBC funded directly by such a tax, but not under today's system and not on today's terms; that's why I suspect the system is better off the way it is, because all sorts of questions otherwise arise such as the acceptability of funding the BBC to produce soap TV, or gameshows, or derivative reality TV. As a governmental group, should they be held to all the standards that other governmental groups have to deal with, and what does this mean for controversial shows or themes? It could defang the BBC. It would certainly confuse it. I work with government-funded groups, and trust me when I say that if you needed a committee per policy, you'd need a football stadium just to site chairpersons' meetings.
But mostly, I just hate the idea that TV is seen as a necessity, as though people who claim to go without are either lying or insane. I find the current TV licencing threats plastered all over the Underground to be totally over the top, which is generally symptomatic of TV Licencing. The whole thing just lacks a sense of dignity or of respect.
Ah, your descendants will pay death duties when you pop off this mortal coil:)
Only they call it inheritance tax these days. And they'll only pay it if you're worth more than £263,000, which if you own a house, you almost certainly are. But the principle is there!
Well, it'll be fun when we move to digital radio and all the people who live in poverty will have to buy themselves a bundle of electronics to keep that public, unbiased access - eh?
Just show them that your TV is not plugged into an arial, tell them that you do not use it to receive broadcast TV, and they will then go away.
That's the thing with this system - with this it ought to be prove you don't use a TV or PC to watch their broadcasts, and they they go away. I'm perfectly happy to stick a firewall rule in to block their internet broadcasts; I consider that ought to suffice.
Slashdot Mirror
What do you lose when somebody makes a package that just happened that is of no utility for you? Or do mean they should all concentrate on the packages that you use just to serve you?
I don't care what people package. I just think that as far as lofty goals go, that particular one is shallow. The Debian organisation suffers from the same thing as, say, a lot of university departments; it's self-selecting, self-sustaining, self-directing, and is in some danger of eventually disappearing up its own viewpoint, as it were. The "universal distribution" idea provides no counterbalance; basically, the group exists to please itself.
Of course I don't feel they should concentrate on the packages I use, to please or serve me - I don't use Debian anyway. And I'm happy for the group to work on pleasing itself and nobody else, if that's what they want to do. Individuals of similar taste will use Debian; the self-selection will continue; nothing wrong with that - except that it's not a "universal" distribution then, is it?
Do you know what you are talking about? If their ideology is to spread Free Software and the concept of Freedom, and your so called "Practical Success" means more people using Debian, I don't see how the two ideas conflict.
Yeah, I do know what I am talking about, but thanks for asking.
Ideology is a fine and wonderful thing, but it is not easy to reconcile it with practical considerations. Practical success in my view involves a good atmosphere within the Debian project; an atmosphere, by preference, that promotes constructive action and dissuades political rubbish. In other words, my metric for practical success in this context is not the number of people using Debian directly.
In practice, I'm seeing a lot of political crap going on within the Debian project, compared to other groups, and I think that has a lot to do with those who wear their ideologies on their sleeves. Others may disagree. Many probably like it this way, since ideological struggle is attractive to some. Myself, I have respect for the ideals of Free Software and Freedom and many other things with gratuitous capital letters, but like many ideals, I just don't feel they need to be broadcast and cherished as self-consciously as they in fact are.
My impression (from talking to Debian users and occasional developers) is that Debian represents a bit of a political talking point in and of itself. The whole "Universal Distribution" thing is symptomatic of the idea that there's something inherently wonderful about packaging everything and its dog, provided it's Free(TM) no matter what it is, as long as someone's willing to maintain it, and then offering the resulting chaos for download.
Now, that's lovely, if you're after making a political point (what exactly the political point is remains to be seen, but certain developers seem very much in love with it). But for the rest of us, it's just a bit... baffling. And I am willing to bet that a subset of Debian developers see the political background the same way.
I see the whole thing as slightly unnecessary. Myself, I settled on Slackware simply because there was no visible politics. What Patrick does, he does, and the rest is up to linuxpackages.net. For me, there comes a time when one has to get pragmatic about belief; why should Pico or Pine (under uni-Washington licensing) be innately less worth having than 'man sex' or 'man condom', part of the funny-manpages which come free on Debian?
Before anyone considers answering along the lines of "Freedom is its own reward!!!" - I've heard it before. Debian is either an ideological success or a practical success, and I am by no means convinced that the two separate viewpoints on the project can be reconciled. This is only an opinion, based on nothing but a little observation, so I'm happy to be proven wrong...
In other words, MS and I do not share our definitions of the term 'filesystem'.
.net) its major distinguishing feature was a requirement for more CPU and memory than my machine had... but I suppose it's 'eating one's own dog food' from MS's point of view.
Last time I ran SQL server (with WinXP and
Well yes it will, but I wouldn't park that in the filesystem as such, any more than I'd consider the locate db to be part of the filesystem.
I'm wondering whether part of the problem is that you and I just have slightly different definitions of 'filesystem'.
To me, a metadata indexing service is a service, a filesystem is an on-disk data structure that records info about the files written on the disk. I personally would not feel that the filesystem as such has to know about metadata, beyond what it already handles. As far as I know, there's nothing wrong with adding this sort of thing as a service. Just because one might wish to label it 'the central database' or 'central storage' does not mean it actually has to be an integral part of the filesystem in the sense of forming part of the description of the physical structure on disk. All that does is to increase the risk that disks are going to be unreadable by older or alternative operating systems, which, if you'll excuse my French, sucks.
That said, there is a distinct advantage in having the service catch writes/reads on the FS. Does that make the service part of the filesystem?
I'm satisfied that the MS version will/would work, though much less satisfied about its use on heterogeneous networks.
But the original poster was actually issuing a challenge along the lines of Write A WinFS-alike filesystem under Linux, and I was saying that I personally wouldn't attack the problem from that direction, but would prefer to write a metadata indexing/robust linking/history system that runs as a service. As for the paths, isn't that essentially just a URI handler connecting to the service?
Well the main point is that it becomes part of the OS platform, rather than just a database in a particular application.
That's what I dislike about it.
The minute you move away from your own home PC, you lose all that metadata. That's what I mean by 'leaving their APIs'. Unless you postulate a whole bunch of altered protocols, etc, in order to make this stuff transferable.
And that is why I would try to keep metadata within data files wherever possible, and make use of open standards in order to encode that metadata for storage or transmission where it is not possible. I don't see that the filesystem is a particularly good place to store it. There are existing solutions to this sort of problem, which are certainly less grandiose than an entirely new filesystem, but have the slight advantage of being standard.
As for your last point, yes, no matter where the metadata is stored, the filesystem will have to be hooked into it in some way. But that doesn't mean that the filesystem actually has to be the guilty party - it just has to call it.
Hey, I wouldn't bring it up either. It's irrelevant for Slashdot purposes and as one can clearly see from the conversations on this thread, it tends to bring out the trolls. Which is a very good reason not to talk about it - I see you've already picked up an AC troll.
I'm sure there are more women reading than Slashdotters realise. In fact, I find it slightly bizarre that someone modded my first comment 'funny' at all. It didn't strike me as being in the 'funny' category so much as 'ought to be obvious, but'...
But yeah it might be a laugh... though I'm not sure people would answer it very honestly (and you might end up finding out more about the demographics of people who answer polls than the original topic), so it would be of limited value.
Yeah... I do agree that you could work out a lot simply using data from Bob's calendar. Assuming of course that Bob was one of those people who is fairly well organised about his schedule. I'd be surprised if face recognition was much of a success in this context, though you never know I suppose - but I imagine you could get moderate success looking at photo features.
I'm just not too in love with the total lack of external tech specs and whatnot. I have the feeling that this is designed as one of those things that Just Works (TM) provided you're using nothing but the newest MS stuff, but which will abruptly disappear in its entirety as soon as you leave their APIs. You don't need WinFS to store metadata about photos - you could do exactly what you just described in a simpler and more portable way without tying it into a filesystem as such. WinFS doesn't actually help you at all in gathering the metadata, that's a separate problem; it's just a storage medium for it plus a query service.
It could as well run as a relations query service and a resolver service, based on harvesting of data embedded into files. Certainly there are disadvantages involved, since unless you had an OS hook updating segments of the db when you added/modified files, it would not update in realtime, but there is the advantage (which is fairly massive, at least to me) that you're not looking at any fundamental changes, you're using existing technology to achieve an effect. The alterations required are relatively minor.
A lot of posters have asked why there are so few women here, but I suspect that nobody really knows how many women do post on slashdot (least of all how many women actually read slashdot - good luck working that one out).
Most women surviving on the internet realise fairly quickly that it's courting severe and long-term irritation to admit to their gender in a room full of geeks. Therefore the majority of women registered on slashdot are not going to be using names with giveaway terms like, I dunno, "babe" in them.
You hint at methods outside of the OS, like encoding the data in the file itself. I am going to google "EXIF metadata" after this post, but presently I think of things like XML and relation DBs. What exactly do you have in mind?
Various specific file formats have their own methods of encoding metadata, usually in fairly arbitrary ways (which can be a problem). For example, MP3s have their ID3 tags either at the start or end of the file, EXIF has photo-specific details, DOCs have all that microsoft authorship stuff. A great improvement might be if we could all fix on a standard for the actual metadata to store (Dublin Core, say) so we don't end up with completely different standards in each file format and lots of mapping to do.
There are sort of 'wrapper' XML formats, like METS, which are extremely handy for providing files with some sort of context (here's the official site). As it says on the site, The METS schema is a standard for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library, expressed using XML.
Re: the second point, I think maybe people get carried away, as in the MS WinFS documentation, when they think about the information available in an image. There is some easy to collect information, depending on the source of a data file: if it's an image, maybe you know whose camera it comes from and when, maybe you can even guess what that person was doing or where they were when the image was taken; if it's from the Internet, you know everything about the process the user went through to find that file in order to download it (I'm looking at that one atm). I'd be tempted to look in great detail at the kinds of information that might be useful, and set up open standards for encoding and transmitting that information, not to mention gaining an idea of the privacy implications, before going for any filesystem embedding of it.
If you're interested in discussing this further I'm kaiidth at altern dot org.
Well this is true, but when you're a major fan of reading you can go a bit far on this; in our house there are five full-height bookshelves and five half-height, and no order whatsoever.
It's not impressive so much as it is insane... and that's why it sometimes would be nice just to fit a few thousand paperbacks onto a CD.
Hmm - I'm not sure if I'd actually choose to do it that way. For me, the WinFS stated metadata aims bring up more questions than they solve, at least, looking at this intro. They describe the following scenario:
:)
One reason people have difficulty finding information on their computer is because of the limited ability for the user to organize data. The present file system support for folders and files worked well originally because it was a familiar paradigm to most people and the number of files was relatively small. However, it doesn't easily allow you to store an image of your coworker Bob playing softball at the 2007 company picnic at a local park and later find the image...
Obviously, they're right that filesystems do not provide a lot of support for this sort of thing. But it is not an entirely unsolved problem; you can for example use a photogallery program to store your images, which brings in metadata and a DB right there. If the system you are using is smart, it will make use of something like EXIF metadata anyway and store metadata within the actual image files to the greatest extent possible.
It's my opinion that metadata, short of a radical shift in computing standards, belongs in data files rather than in the OS. Otherwise, sending that file by email (short of a shift in the way email works - and yes I know the promotional literature says that the metadata will be intact in the file when exported to NTFS) will dump the metadata and leave you with an image with zero available metadata. There is maybe a good argument that there's a place for a unique ID for data rather than files, and for a 'link resolver' type functionality to avoid breaking links when reorganising the disk....
This WinFS thing seems to me to be a bit like the fabulous Windows registry; putting centralisation in where it does not have to be. It sounds like a great attempt from the documentation, but I really think there's a more UNIXy way of achieving the same results, without monkeying around with the filesystem. Metadata-enabled locate
Plus, that 'company picnic' example suggests that they haven't really thought about the most major problem in the metadata world - how to get the metadata in the first place. It's as though they think that merely adding the theoretical capability to store metadata will suddenly turn us all into competent archivists.
Yeah.
Frankly I think it is time to make a way bigger deal out of this. If this is the way Europe is to be run, then I'm voting 'No' to Europe.
This is a total joke, this whole thing. It's enough to make one want to go visit the Luxembourg representative of today with a token of one's gratitude, by which I do not mean flowers. Whereas this is of course unfair, because they only moved it on because it was taking up too much of their time (aww).
The EU Commission needs to be deleted from the landscape.
That's incredibly cheap.
Right! I'm moving to Denmark!
Heh, I visited that lab at one point... they showed us the CoolTown stuff, you know, that wifi iPAQ plus RFID or whatever it was; you'd walk around an exhibition with it, and when you got near enough to a given exhibit, it would start to play a corresponding soundtrack. The trouble was, it wouldn't mix/fade from the soundtrack you had before; it just cut from one to the other. This blindingly obvious flaw rather detracted from the whole 'immersiveness' of the experience. Rather than 'walking from room to room', it felt more like channel surfing.
:-/
We asked if they'd thought about, y'know, smoothing the transition between exhibits. They said, well, it was funny that we'd mention that because so many other people had made similar comments, but no, they hadn't pencilled that into the project as of the present time (or similar phrasing).
Much as I hate to speak ill of the probably jobless, the attitude was a bit surprising in a research lab
hint: if you are not taking part in the bolded activity, you do not require a licence.
It is not practical to expect children to educate themselves. It is not practical to expect the sick or injured to cure themselves, nor for the old or disabled to take care of themselves. The fact that you didn't go to state school rather explains your attitude, but we'll pass on that and merely reiterate that denying basic education is a no-no, as is denying unemployment benefit. These strategies are damaging on a very real, practical level.
The case for subsidised railway is a little less blindingly obvious, so it is fortunate for you that the UK government barely bothers subsidising them, isn't it? However, there are a few reasons for public transport, not merely that it is childishly facile to suggest walking from London to Newcastle, but possibly all that stuff you might remember having heard about the disadvantages of the car as a means of transport and the supposed advantages of public transport... remember?
This sort of thing is collective responsibility, either to each other or (horrors) to the environment.
TV, on the other hand, you can do without, and nobody dies in the process. Nobody has proven to me as yet that society has been materially improved by its existence, as opposed to the other media currently available. It's a fad; internet seems to be displacing TV; before TV it was radio, all the way back to the days when those with the spare cash would amuse themselves with books and/or manuscript music. Personally, I don't feel that TV deserves any more of my cash than all the other fads, as far as state funding is concerned (proportionally to base cost). Given that my tax money already goes into various councils (eg Arts, Museums, Libraries and Archives, etc.) and corresponding groups on the local level, I don't see where TV's special need for massive quantities of funding arises.
The Government cannot afford to pick a specific medium and treat it as 'the fad to end them all' (look at Minitel for an example of what happens when governments do this). Thus the BBC's opt-in funding model, which delegates the choice to individuals - which seems to have worked, all in all, pretty well.
Yes, I do. Therefore I have no television, because personally I think the situation stinks enough to refuse to be part of it. TVL are pushy bullying arseholes; I don't want their product enough to deal with their attitude. So I just buy DVDs. This is why I know about this law, because I've been into it in gory detail.
As to blocking the broadcast, yes, my solution is stupid. But it's no stupider than current policy eg. if your tv is detuned when they turn up, it's sufficient for them to agree that you don't watch it. In fact, your word of honour is intended to be sufficient, because you're innocent until proven guilty in law, if not in the eyes of TVL; so they need to catch you provably watching broadcast TV before you can actually get fined. A sensible alternative would be to get the ISP to put in the firewall rule and certify it to the BBC - I'd accept that, just as long as goddamn TV Licencing leave me alone.
In the UK, it's the act of using the device to receive TV that means you require a TV licence. That's the law. Read the TV licencing web site:
Again, TV licencing people will cheerfully lie about this and tell you that the law has changed, etc; the trick is to ask them to write it down or show it to you in writing. They won't, unless they're really stupid, in which case take the paper and tell them you're sending photocopies of their misrepresentation of the law out to various consumer watchdog groups.
You may be thinking of a different country. In France or Germany, you'd actually be right; just not in the UK.
Sorry, but if this has happened to you you're a victim of the Pay Up attitude of the TV licencing chaps; they will lie to you if they think they can get away with it.
However, the letter of the law says that unless you're using the device to receive TV, you are not required to have a TV licence. Simple as that.
Next time a TV licencing person tells you otherwise, demand it in writing. Then thank them and post it off to the complaints department and anybody else you can think of, because misrepresenting the law in an attempt to gain money is illegal even for TVL.
Hehe... well, yes :)
To be fair, I wouldn't mind paying a whatever, a 'culture tax' or something, that partly went to fund the BBC nationally and internationally - particularly if it also funded foreign-language TV in Britain, which is desperately necessary if we're going to shake the whole 'monolingual' stigma. I really do see the BBC as a good service on the world scale, though it's a little bizarre that much of its greatest usefulness is for those who are outside the reach of British TV licencing.
I'd even like to see the BBC funded directly by such a tax, but not under today's system and not on today's terms; that's why I suspect the system is better off the way it is, because all sorts of questions otherwise arise such as the acceptability of funding the BBC to produce soap TV, or gameshows, or derivative reality TV. As a governmental group, should they be held to all the standards that other governmental groups have to deal with, and what does this mean for controversial shows or themes? It could defang the BBC. It would certainly confuse it. I work with government-funded groups, and trust me when I say that if you needed a committee per policy, you'd need a football stadium just to site chairpersons' meetings.
But mostly, I just hate the idea that TV is seen as a necessity, as though people who claim to go without are either lying or insane. I find the current TV licencing threats plastered all over the Underground to be totally over the top, which is generally symptomatic of TV Licencing. The whole thing just lacks a sense of dignity or of respect.
Ah, your descendants will pay death duties when you pop off this mortal coil :)
Only they call it inheritance tax these days. And they'll only pay it if you're worth more than £263,000, which if you own a house, you almost certainly are. But the principle is there!
Well, it'll be fun when we move to digital radio and all the people who live in poverty will have to buy themselves a bundle of electronics to keep that public, unbiased access - eh?
*incoherent noise of irritation*
You don't have to 'prove you don't have a TV'.
Just show them that your TV is not plugged into an arial, tell them that you do not use it to receive broadcast TV, and they will then go away.
That's the thing with this system - with this it ought to be prove you don't use a TV or PC to watch their broadcasts, and they they go away. I'm perfectly happy to stick a firewall rule in to block their internet broadcasts; I consider that ought to suffice.
Nope :)
You don't have to pay a licence fee unless you use the equipment to receive TV.
Check out the tv licencing web site: www.tvlicencing.co.uk