I HATE the clickwheel. Hate it hate it hate it. I actually specifically bought a 3G iPod to avoid them. Going back to moving parts on the interface was a dumb decision by Apple.
Meh. I own one, and while I think it's the best MP3 player on the market, I wouldn't call it "brilliant". The fact that I've had to restore on 2 different generations is reason enough to call it "great, but not perfect".
The two main ones: the "Indexing Service" on 2000, XP and 2003 and the indexing daemon on OS X. According to MS's description, the Indexing Service "Indexes contents and properties of files on local and remote computers; provides rapid access to files through flexible querying language." However, if you mess around with the querying tool (Start, right-click My Computer, Manage, Services and Applications, Indexing Service), you'll notice the query constructs are crude at best.
There are a host of sites that compare this system, Mac's and the daemons in FreeBSD and Linux. Google them.
By the way, just because someone uses generic language in a Slashdot post doesn't necessarily mean they "don't know" what they're talking about. Even though this is a "news for nerds" site, I generally don't liter my comments with talk about inner joins and such. Anyone with a modicum of an IQ would realize the flatfile structure of the current indexing systems is nowhere near as fast as a SQL database would be on the same machine.
"it would work similar to the way iTunes displays libraries and playlists like a database, yet stores the actual files in a heirarchical arrangement only visible to a user who manually browses the filesystem"
Uh, well, there is a database. Look at iTunes Music Library.xml in your root iTunes folder. There's all the data that iTunes uses. The heirarchical arrangement is simply for the user to have a better idea what they're looking through when they rooting through the file system
Spotlight will supposedly create a file like that for the entire drive. We'll see.
"And how is the computer supposed to know that the photos are from the trip to Italy? Someone is going to have to enter that stuff."
Not really. You already have the time and date stamps. When you plug in the camera, the system could ask "what are these pictures from?" Nana would type "Italy trip". The system, if it was smart, could compare faces to previous photos and determine "this is Bob, this is uncle Frank", etc. For people it didn't know, it could ask (Nana types "that's my sister I haven't seen in years") and the system would classify the remaining.
Again, ideal system. Photo recognition isn't even close to what I'm talking about here, but I can imagine we might reach it in a decade or two.
"How will bolting on SQL into the filesystem improve performance?"
Two ways. First, any time you're working with large amounts of text, SQL is vastly faster than any of the current indexing systems. Look at (what few) benchmarks have been made. I personally would like a system where I can search on material using established SQL query constructs, as I find the current indexing systems really limited. Simply a case of a bigger toolkit.
Second, SQL is much better at handling previous queries than current indexing systems. If I search for files of my grandmother, than do it again a few months down the road (after the indexing system has lost my previous query in the cache), it takes just as long. I could set up stored procedures in SQL that'd be much faster. Maybe the past 100 queries would be saved as stored procedures, or maybe the top 50. However this would work, SQL would have an answer for me before I hit the search button. The current indexing systems don't.
Well, not exactly. I can see how I'd explain this to my grandmother ("Nana, type 'vacation photos from our trip to Italy'" instead of "Nana, search for files with the name DSCITALY001...") That's the ideal implementation any way.
I could also see this being a boon for business. Often when I'm on the phone with someone, I like to pull up all of our email coorespondance. They could do a "spokewheel" implementation: each person would be an axle and various spokes would link to business contact info, personal information, photos of them, etc. Think calling a client, having it pop up and asking "Oh, how was your son's birthday last week?" Again, ideal implementation.
Supposedly it now stands for "Future storage". Just like NT and.NET once stood for something and then got real nebulous (NT was once "new technology", while.NET was going to be used on everything from servers to toilet paper).
I think MS is going about this a bit more complicated than necessary. Mac OS 10.4 is said to have similar features. It's not as complicated as you think: simply attach XML metadata to every file (similar to how.NET and a host of other systems do now) and organize based on that.
The problem with MS's implementation is that they want to tie SQL to it. Noble (it'd vastly improve performance) but unnecessary.
It still remains to be seen how well Apple pulls this off (my guess: ok, but not perfect). While the implementation is easy, getting it to work as expected will be hard.
I'd personally be satisfied with just a "spokewheel" system: have every person and event as the axle of a spokewheel and have the files branching off it (business contacts, vacation photos, etc). Not too complicated: just define a person schema in XML, make each person the top key and work off that. I think MS originally wanted to take that approach (based on the MS research projects) but overdeveloped its complexity.
I recently bought a Mac and I agree that most things "just work"... provided you stick with Apple-recommended hardware. iPod "just works". My Sony camera, despite having a basic firewire port that's properly handled in both Windows and Linux, doesn't. When you don't mind a monoculture of hardware, Macs are great.
That's one of the nice things about Windows, and one of its biggest drawbacks: you can pop just about any hardware in and it'll recognize it, configure it. I've been continually surprised digging up old ethernet cards, popping them into 2003 servers, and having them work as soon as the system starts up. Only problem is sometimes there's too much variance, and the system gets flaky trying to match 1980s hardware with 200x drivers.
I called it "scaling back" in comparison to what it once was: a SQL-like metadatabase for every file accessible on a computer. It was actually a very cool idea, and I'm not sure why MS abandoned the networking features (where I work, anything that should be catalogued is on remote servers, not on desktops).
Then there was some confusion, because "WinFS" sounded like a new file system. Then it was called a service on top of NTFS, which wasn't as dramatic. Now it's unclear what it'll end up being.
The 3 cornerstones of Longhorn, if I remember correctly from an early webcast, was:
* More robust file system * A better windowing system * Better security and connectivity
One is going to be "beta" and two are going to be released for current OSes. MS *has* scaled their plans back.
"It has less to do with "networking" than building distributed applications."
Uh, aren't we talking about essentially the same thing here? If anything it's a subset of networking tech (like.NET, it isn't very well defined) but I wouldn't consider the word "networking" necessarily incorrect.
Considering the web aspect, it actually has less to do with "distributed applications" and much more with plain old web services. When I think "distributed applications", I think a word processor through a browser. I think this is just going to be more remoting. "Networking" was a generic enough term to use.
Anti-iPod troll? I OWN 2 (an older 3rd-generation and a mini). They're great devices. My point is to cast down a product just because it *supports* DRM is foolish.
Yeah, you know, they'll never take off. I mean, that white one, the iPod, with the support for AAC files with DRM crust -- who's buying those?
Oh, you say, "But these will *only* play DRM files". Au contraire. From what I'm reading, they'll play standard MPEG2s. A few hacks and we'll see DivX on these things.
Ignoring it's Microsoft, and ignoring that there will probably be a million posts about iPod in a few seconds, I think this is going to be very interesting to watch for an entertainment and psychological standpoint (outside tech).
Will people actually carry one of these around for their commutes? How much of an increase will we see in TV viewing? Will it contribute to the growing social isolation I'm beginning to see (a world full of people wearing headphones)?
I'd give it a few revisions and then consider buying one.
"I also thing the mechanisms for malware to work with are limited in Mac OS X."
You must've not been around for the disk image exploit a few months back. You know, the one where a user could go to a site and Safari would automatically download a disk image, run it WITHOUT ANY USER INTERACTION, and ruin the computer? The one where Apple kind of ignored it for a few weeks?
"The point is that worms don't seem to need adminstrator access to cause a lot of harm... enough harm to be a serious problem."
I disagree. If one of my users gets infected, cleaning a user directory is cinch. Having to redo an entire computer isn't.
"On the other hand, a web browser should prevent web pages from doing things to users' files."
What on EARTH are you talking about? What do you call the cache where all internet files are stored? And cookies? A site could pretty much dump a 100-MB file of textual garbage on your computer by just going to it. Web browsers create, edit and delete user-level permissioned files all the time. Please, don't speak anymore. You're making yourself look worse and worse each time.
The issue here is that Windows is acting exactly like every other "preferred" OS. You can hose files with a similar technique in UNIX or Mac OS X. Because of this, it's not a *security issue*, but just *a bug that the programmer was extremely dumb in not fixing*.
I can very easily drag and drop files in and out of Safari and get roughly the same result. The big problem here is that it drops it in the user's startup folder, but again, that's not as big a security issue as people are making it out to be.
A lot of online games are having issues. That's because most game programmers tend to write around the default network stacks and create "optimized" versions that break over time. You hear me, Carmack?
N"orton Antivirus status is not detected by Security Center AVG Antivirus is not detected by Security Center"
No shit. There's a host of programs not detected. Most are on MS's website. You can always turn on that "I'll manually monitor this one" feature. By the way, why are you running to AV programs on one box?
"Windows crashes on startup if any non-MS OS is doing a SMB network scan while it is starting up"
News to me. I have a mix of OS X and WinXP boxes at home constantly talking to each other through Samba. Although, again, a weird question: why are you scanning SMB while the computer is starting up? What exactly are you going to find?
"Security Center considers having Automatic Updates set to "Ask Before Installing" a security risk"
Unfortunately, for most home users, it is. A lot have seen that "I'm ready to install" box and completely ignored it. Better to have Windows install automatically (us geeks can turn it off and actually read the EULAs).
RTFA. You need root access, the same as any other box, to tamper with the security display. This has nothing to do with security, and everything to do with a Slashdot editor who likes to manipulate story summaries to leave out keywords like "ActiveX with root privledges".
Slashdot Mirror
Ugh. Really? I think the original iMac had a better look. This is too angular.
I HATE the clickwheel. Hate it hate it hate it. I actually specifically bought a 3G iPod to avoid them. Going back to moving parts on the interface was a dumb decision by Apple.
"does one primary thing, and does it brilliantly"
Meh. I own one, and while I think it's the best MP3 player on the market, I wouldn't call it "brilliant". The fact that I've had to restore on 2 different generations is reason enough to call it "great, but not perfect".
"this is very old news that's been spreading around the web for a week"
It's scary that we now consider news more than a week dated "old".
What's that unearthly glow coming out of the cardboard box?
"What indexing systems?"
The two main ones: the "Indexing Service" on 2000, XP and 2003 and the indexing daemon on OS X. According to MS's description, the Indexing Service "Indexes contents and properties of files on local and remote computers; provides rapid access to files through flexible querying language." However, if you mess around with the querying tool (Start, right-click My Computer, Manage, Services and Applications, Indexing Service), you'll notice the query constructs are crude at best.
There are a host of sites that compare this system, Mac's and the daemons in FreeBSD and Linux. Google them.
By the way, just because someone uses generic language in a Slashdot post doesn't necessarily mean they "don't know" what they're talking about. Even though this is a "news for nerds" site, I generally don't liter my comments with talk about inner joins and such. Anyone with a modicum of an IQ would realize the flatfile structure of the current indexing systems is nowhere near as fast as a SQL database would be on the same machine.
"it would work similar to the way iTunes displays libraries and playlists like a database, yet stores the actual files in a heirarchical arrangement only visible to a user who manually browses the filesystem"
Uh, well, there is a database. Look at iTunes Music Library.xml in your root iTunes folder. There's all the data that iTunes uses. The heirarchical arrangement is simply for the user to have a better idea what they're looking through when they rooting through the file system
Spotlight will supposedly create a file like that for the entire drive. We'll see.
"And how is the computer supposed to know that the photos are from the trip to Italy? Someone is going to have to enter that stuff."
Not really. You already have the time and date stamps. When you plug in the camera, the system could ask "what are these pictures from?" Nana would type "Italy trip". The system, if it was smart, could compare faces to previous photos and determine "this is Bob, this is uncle Frank", etc. For people it didn't know, it could ask (Nana types "that's my sister I haven't seen in years") and the system would classify the remaining.
Again, ideal system. Photo recognition isn't even close to what I'm talking about here, but I can imagine we might reach it in a decade or two.
"How will bolting on SQL into the filesystem improve performance?"
Two ways. First, any time you're working with large amounts of text, SQL is vastly faster than any of the current indexing systems. Look at (what few) benchmarks have been made. I personally would like a system where I can search on material using established SQL query constructs, as I find the current indexing systems really limited. Simply a case of a bigger toolkit.
Second, SQL is much better at handling previous queries than current indexing systems. If I search for files of my grandmother, than do it again a few months down the road (after the indexing system has lost my previous query in the cache), it takes just as long. I could set up stored procedures in SQL that'd be much faster. Maybe the past 100 queries would be saved as stored procedures, or maybe the top 50. However this would work, SQL would have an answer for me before I hit the search button. The current indexing systems don't.
Well, not exactly. I can see how I'd explain this to my grandmother ("Nana, type 'vacation photos from our trip to Italy'" instead of "Nana, search for files with the name DSCITALY001...") That's the ideal implementation any way.
I could also see this being a boon for business. Often when I'm on the phone with someone, I like to pull up all of our email coorespondance. They could do a "spokewheel" implementation: each person would be an axle and various spokes would link to business contact info, personal information, photos of them, etc. Think calling a client, having it pop up and asking "Oh, how was your son's birthday last week?" Again, ideal implementation.
Supposedly it now stands for "Future storage". Just like NT and .NET once stood for something and then got real nebulous (NT was once "new technology", while .NET was going to be used on everything from servers to toilet paper).
I think MS is going about this a bit more complicated than necessary. Mac OS 10.4 is said to have similar features. It's not as complicated as you think: simply attach XML metadata to every file (similar to how .NET and a host of other systems do now) and organize based on that.
The problem with MS's implementation is that they want to tie SQL to it. Noble (it'd vastly improve performance) but unnecessary.
It still remains to be seen how well Apple pulls this off (my guess: ok, but not perfect). While the implementation is easy, getting it to work as expected will be hard.
I'd personally be satisfied with just a "spokewheel" system: have every person and event as the axle of a spokewheel and have the files branching off it (business contacts, vacation photos, etc). Not too complicated: just define a person schema in XML, make each person the top key and work off that. I think MS originally wanted to take that approach (based on the MS research projects) but overdeveloped its complexity.
"It really does... just work."
I recently bought a Mac and I agree that most things "just work"... provided you stick with Apple-recommended hardware. iPod "just works". My Sony camera, despite having a basic firewire port that's properly handled in both Windows and Linux, doesn't. When you don't mind a monoculture of hardware, Macs are great.
That's one of the nice things about Windows, and one of its biggest drawbacks: you can pop just about any hardware in and it'll recognize it, configure it. I've been continually surprised digging up old ethernet cards, popping them into 2003 servers, and having them work as soon as the system starts up. Only problem is sometimes there's too much variance, and the system gets flaky trying to match 1980s hardware with 200x drivers.
I called it "scaling back" in comparison to what it once was: a SQL-like metadatabase for every file accessible on a computer. It was actually a very cool idea, and I'm not sure why MS abandoned the networking features (where I work, anything that should be catalogued is on remote servers, not on desktops).
Then there was some confusion, because "WinFS" sounded like a new file system. Then it was called a service on top of NTFS, which wasn't as dramatic. Now it's unclear what it'll end up being.
The 3 cornerstones of Longhorn, if I remember correctly from an early webcast, was:
* More robust file system
* A better windowing system
* Better security and connectivity
One is going to be "beta" and two are going to be released for current OSes. MS *has* scaled their plans back.
"It has less to do with "networking" than building distributed applications."
.NET, it isn't very well defined) but I wouldn't consider the word "networking" necessarily incorrect.
Uh, aren't we talking about essentially the same thing here? If anything it's a subset of networking tech (like
Considering the web aspect, it actually has less to do with "distributed applications" and much more with plain old web services. When I think "distributed applications", I think a word processor through a browser. I think this is just going to be more remoting. "Networking" was a generic enough term to use.
Anti-iPod troll? I OWN 2 (an older 3rd-generation and a mini). They're great devices. My point is to cast down a product just because it *supports* DRM is foolish.
Yeah, you know, they'll never take off. I mean, that white one, the iPod, with the support for AAC files with DRM crust -- who's buying those?
Oh, you say, "But these will *only* play DRM files". Au contraire. From what I'm reading, they'll play standard MPEG2s. A few hacks and we'll see DivX on these things.
Ignoring it's Microsoft, and ignoring that there will probably be a million posts about iPod in a few seconds, I think this is going to be very interesting to watch for an entertainment and psychological standpoint (outside tech).
Will people actually carry one of these around for their commutes? How much of an increase will we see in TV viewing? Will it contribute to the growing social isolation I'm beginning to see (a world full of people wearing headphones)?
I'd give it a few revisions and then consider buying one.
The code also isn't run at root level. That means everything.
"I also thing the mechanisms for malware to work with are limited in Mac OS X."
You must've not been around for the disk image exploit a few months back. You know, the one where a user could go to a site and Safari would automatically download a disk image, run it WITHOUT ANY USER INTERACTION, and ruin the computer? The one where Apple kind of ignored it for a few weeks?
"The point is that worms don't seem to need adminstrator access to cause a lot of harm... enough harm to be a serious problem."
I disagree. If one of my users gets infected, cleaning a user directory is cinch. Having to redo an entire computer isn't.
"On the other hand, a web browser should prevent web pages from doing things to users' files."
What on EARTH are you talking about? What do you call the cache where all internet files are stored? And cookies? A site could pretty much dump a 100-MB file of textual garbage on your computer by just going to it. Web browsers create, edit and delete user-level permissioned files all the time. Please, don't speak anymore. You're making yourself look worse and worse each time.
Exactly my point. How does this differ from the above bug? Both would be equally impossible to distinguish what happened until it was too late.
The issue here is that Windows is acting exactly like every other "preferred" OS. You can hose files with a similar technique in UNIX or Mac OS X. Because of this, it's not a *security issue*, but just *a bug that the programmer was extremely dumb in not fixing*.
I can very easily drag and drop files in and out of Safari and get roughly the same result. The big problem here is that it drops it in the user's startup folder, but again, that's not as big a security issue as people are making it out to be.
"FarCry Demo fails to install
Unreal2 won't run"
A lot of online games are having issues. That's because most game programmers tend to write around the default network stacks and create "optimized" versions that break over time. You hear me, Carmack?
N"orton Antivirus status is not detected by Security Center
AVG Antivirus is not detected by Security Center"
No shit. There's a host of programs not detected. Most are on MS's website. You can always turn on that "I'll manually monitor this one" feature. By the way, why are you running to AV programs on one box?
"Windows crashes on startup if any non-MS OS is doing a SMB network scan while it is starting up"
News to me. I have a mix of OS X and WinXP boxes at home constantly talking to each other through Samba. Although, again, a weird question: why are you scanning SMB while the computer is starting up? What exactly are you going to find?
"Security Center considers having Automatic Updates set to "Ask Before Installing" a security risk"
Unfortunately, for most home users, it is. A lot have seen that "I'm ready to install" box and completely ignored it. Better to have Windows install automatically (us geeks can turn it off and actually read the EULAs).
RTFA. You need root access, the same as any other box, to tamper with the security display. This has nothing to do with security, and everything to do with a Slashdot editor who likes to manipulate story summaries to leave out keywords like "ActiveX with root privledges".