FreeNet isn't really a P2P network as you are probably thinking - for instance, it doesn't have built in searching (or didn't last time I checked). It's not like Kazaa where you type in the files you want and get it, it's more like the web, where you have to find those files and locate them.
Plus, it's not a sharing model, it's a publish model. You have to upload files to the network, a process that used to be a total PITA anyway, if you wanted it to propogate enough to be useful.
So FreeNet isn't useful for pirates. Which is cool. What it is useful for is things like load balancing - if you've ever been slashdotted, or ever found it hard to pay the bandwidth bills, freenet offers a way out. They were even playing with streaming radio over it a while ago, though I think really IPv6 multicast is a better solution there.
So freenet is about freedom of speech, load balancing, cool P2P experiments, lots of things - but not MP3 swapping.
Well, I tend to prefer flat themes over the rather huge Keramik. I think I've seen such a theme for KDE, which is cool, but overall I'm currently in love with Mist and the tigert-crack window manager themes. It ends up looking very slick.
Oh, I like the new gnome2 borderless frames as well, it gives an open, breezy feel to the UIs.
Some things were a bit unfair, such as the slowness of OSX. Yeah, the desktop hardware sucks right now.
For what it's worth, when people say things like "Well OS X is cool, it's just the hardware" or "But you can buy 3 button mice if you want", her normal reply is something along the lines of: Apple sell an integrated whole, so you can't judge the OS apart from the hardware, if the defaults are wrong then it sucks.
In this case obviously the comparison was between DEs, but you can't buy MacOS without buying a Mac, so her position still holds I think.
Like most "X sucks" posts, this one boils down to lack of true transparency.
Ignoring the fact that for real world usefulness and platform stability (by which i'm talking about standards, not MTBF) an open network transparent protocol is far superior, X will soon be getting these features anyway.
The reason it takes so long? Doing it well is hard. Double-buffering everything consumes vast amounts of resources. The reason X11/GDI have such complex geometric calculation APIs is to cut down the amount of drawing to the minimum. Now you could say, "but computers are so much more powerful today than they were back then". And you'd have a point. But of course with that increase in power, we've also increased colour depth, screen resolutions, and number of apps running at once, so you still end up blowing all your resources on double-buffering.
There are various techniques to improve this situation, ie bring flicker-free semi-transparent graphical goodies to X but without blowing a hole in memory usage, and they are being worked on. Until then rather contrived examples of things you can do, but in reality never actually do, do not make a good argument against X.
I personally don't like GTK for programming, bowever, saying that GTKmm is a hack is wrong. It works, albeit not as nicely as Qt, which is God's gift to C++ progammers.
Hmm, why do you say that? Most C++ coders I've met who have experience of both say they prefer GTKmm because it uses the STL more (or something, i'm not a c++ coder). So I'm interested to know why you think that? Or is it just that you like Qt?
Well GNOME has supported SVG icons for a while in Nautilus (and therefore on the desktop), but now GTK supports it as well, so you can have SVG widget themes and SVG toolbar icons etc. Way cool stuff, but it'll take some time to mature, the icons tigert and jimmac drew are suprisingly high quality - so far the vector renderings I've seen seem far fuzzier and less detailed.
1) A very usable, nice-looking GUI
2) All the functionality of Unix/Linux
Well, if people seem to take the fact that MacOS is "usable" for granted, when actually it's full of glaring problems Apple don't even seem to recognise... yeah, they mostly did OK, but then GNOME mostly do OK as well.
So to me, usable would be clean and professional, something that looks good but in a non-invasive sort of way. I already use such a desktop, it's far from perfect, but I can see the major remaining usability issues being ironed out as the days go by.... personally I find Aqua massive overkill, it effectively brands your desktop, good for marketing, not so good for getting your work done.
Assertion: "The best UI's have been designed as commercial efforts."
Supporting evidence: "Despite the *many* complaints I have about Windows XP - the UI is pretty darn stable,"
I don't know how an UI can be "stable", an UI is just the way the user interacts with something. You're thinking of the underlying OS, which was not what was being reviewed here. So this seems invalid.
Everything that fades in or out does so in just the right amount of time to look "classy" instead of "cheezy".
Well this is pretty subjective. The fading in and out just looks cheesy to me, I'd certainly never consider XP classy. But perhaps you like it. Nonetheless, not an argument that supports the claim.
Accelerated graphics cards are fully utilized in almost all cases
Again, nothing to do with the DE.
Default font sizes and styles are well chosen
Examples of where this isn't the case? Yeah yeah, I know up until recently Linux fonts sucked, but that's basically fixed now in any modern distro.
When it comes to KDE or Gnome... [snip
More subjective opinions, followed by what would seem to be a bug (rare one, i've never heard of it until now). You don't even say whether you were talking about GNOME1 or 2 (big difference).
Even if KDE or Gnome was 100% bug-free, there's still the issue of how the color palettes get handled when a video card only does 256 colors.
Which again, has nothing to do with how well "designed" the DE is, that's an X issue, or more likely a driver issue.
You're confusing many, many different things together, and haven't supported your original claim at all. Sure, there are bugs. There are bugs in every OS. I don't see what relation these points have to usability.
What do you think most people download over a month from P2P networks? Probably hundreds of songs, amounting to (these days) 10 - 20 CDs. Do you really think that if P2P wasn't there, they were going to buy 10 - 20 CDs a month? No, of coruse not. So the music industry has not lost 10 - 20 CD's worth of revenue.
Sure, I understand these arguments. Problem is, they aren't very good. Under the current system, if you download a CD, you've "stolen" it, in that you're listening to it but not paying for it. That does hurt the creators, maybe if they got a bum record contract it hurts the record company more, but you can't just write it off as having no impact, because if everybody did that, they'd never get paid at all.
So to say, well this is OK because the RIAA would never have got my money anyway, is silly, because it doesn't generalise - if everybody thought this way, it's essentially become a way of justifying increased consumption but stagnant or decreased flow of money from you to the artists (and of course the middle men).
My point is, as always in these threads, not that the current system is cool and we should all dutifully pony up our dues and never download music. It's that there are too many people who simply use the "The RIAA is evil and they wouldn't have had these sales anyway" line to justify being cheap, or even illegally profiting from other peoples work. So I dislike two things, I dislike the current system and I dislike people who abuse it and then try and justify it to themselves.
Bottom line is that people who take advantage of the system while attempting to paint their actions in a good light piss me off. If the system is really so bad, why are they not trying to change it? Why are they not signing up artists to their indy label which promises ethical treatment and makes all the bands music available as oggs on their website? Maybe they don't have time, or the skills. Fine. So wait until somebody else changes the system. Until then, live with it, and if you would normally download 20 CDs a month, buy them instead, until you can get that music for free with the consent of the artist or author.
I do nowadays:) The comparison was with integrated IDEs however, hence my point.... although there are integrated IDEs on Linux nowadays, I don't know many people who use them, and that's not because they really suck, cos they don't.
They could -- but the potential customers would know that the threshold had been set ridiculously high, and would be far less likely to buy in.
Really? How many people know that the threshold for TransGaming releasing their Direct3D work is (or was) 20,000 subscribers? How many people know roughly how many subscribers they actually have?
Seems the escrow idea was already tried, and at least in the Wine project it led to a high-tension fork of the code, not really the intended effect.
Re:Bullshit. Write software - get paid for softwar
on
O-STEP In The Limelight
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The two aren't mutually exclusive - I know some people who find people for whom an open source product is 95% of what they want, then get hired to make it 100%. That falls under the customisation aspect I'd guess, though "customisation" makes it sound like you'd spend all your time sticking company logos on the software, in reality that's not true.
And if you think about it, getting paid for what people actually *need* as opposed to what you think they'll need is more efficient anyway.
Well, it works both ways. I miss autocompletion as well when coding on Linux, but on the other hand when I'm on Windows (in Delphi say) I miss having a proper text editor. The Borland built-in one is good, but after using emacs for a while, I realise how much I miss stuff like typeahead find, registers (for text, not just positions), instant splits and so on.
I haven't really found documentation to be a big problem to be honest, and although more spartan SGML or gtk-html genereated docs are far easier to read than stuff on MSDN, which invariably only looks good on huge screens (with IE of course).
The Palm OS and VT-OS DB systems are quite a bit more restricted than the Newton OS's OODB or the theoretical system-wide relational DB we're discussion.
If you read Hans Reisers whitepaper on the future of ReiserFS, you'll find he puts forward some convincing arguments (at least to a layperson like me) as to why using a relational database at the filing system layer would be a bad idea. The central theme is that of eliminating information by imposing too rigid a structure on it (or something like that). I think he intends for the final result to be based on set theoretic semantics mostly (although with a variety of different layers, so you can join together a heirarchical namespace to a set theoretic namespace).
So, people are indeed working on doing what you wanted, and have been for several years, but it's tremendously complicated and performance concerns have required a lot of groundwork to be laid first.
Most people realize (intuitively) that downloading music/movies/software is (at the very least) a victimless crime in that 99.99% of the stuff that is downloaded and not later bought would never have been bought anyway. I think the remainder is more than made up for by the increased sales due to increased exposure.
Yeah, you tell yourself that, if it makes you feel better. I'm sure there are some here on Slashdot that download a few gigs of music every month, then go out and buy CDs for music they already have. Ya know, 'cos they're moral sort of people.
The vast majority of p2p pirates do not do this. I'm talking from personal experience. They don't download music to "sample" it, they download whole albums, sometimes even with artwork. Even worse, some of them have the gall to then burn them onto CDs and sell it on to people without broadband connections, sometimes for as much as 500% profit.
They never buy CDs. Why bother, when downloading it is so much easier? The fact is, if there was no music piracy, CD sales would be higher, because all those people who never buy CDs (or who buy them for nearly nothing from "friends") would have lower music consumption but would actually pay for it, so the gross profit is still higher than zero.
This "victimless crime" garbage has got to end. Music piracy is a victimless crime in the same way a war on Iraq would be a victimless crime - there are victims all right, you just can't see them, except in occasional glances the media gives as events rush past the window.
Of course, if Stallman hadn't rejected Linux when Linus offered it to the FSF as being too "inferior" to the Hurd, maybe I'd have a bit more sympathy.
A better analogy would be that Stallman was building this amazing house, but that he spent years attempting to perfect the roof. When a finnish kid offered him a roof that was good enough (that he and his friends had made) so the party could start, Stallman told him to shove it and wait for the Hurd. In reality, nobody wanted to do that, so he dropped the ball and it passed to Linus.
Don't get me wrong, Stallman has done some great work. But I think that analogy you gave paints Linus in an unfair light.
I do not see how creating a 'world economy' helps anyone but the rich.
The world economy was not created deliberately - it's a natural consequence of the free market.
One of the natural consequences of the free market, in turn, is the flow of wealth from the rich to the poor. We get poorer, the rest of the world gets richer. That's probably going to happen a bit more in the future.
Clearly though, there is at the moment huge disparities in wealth, and yet the world markets are relatively free. There are of course trade barriers, but they are frowned upon, and are the exception rather than the rule. The current administration uses them more than they should, but...
So, why is the west still rich, and large parts of the rest of the world, still poor? Partly just through the natural turn of events. Africa has been ravaged by civil war, natural disasters and political chaos for many, many years. The parts of Africa that managed to avoid that aren't doing so badly really. They're pulling themselves up, slowly but surely.
Partly economic. Communism set much of the Eastern Bloc and former Soviet states back years.
And partly, because we're simply ahead. Education feeds back into itself. There's some truth in the idea that the west is rich because the rest of the world is oppressed, because we deliberately keep all the wealth to ourselves... but not as much as I think many people believe.
Of course, there are some who say that many of the economic woes we take for granted as just being a natural part of the system are in fact simply a by product of the monetary system in dominant usage. Google for Bernard Leitaer, mutual credit systems and demurrage for some fascinating insights into economics, and the idea that there is always enough work and enough money to go around, if only we used a different currency system.
1. Getting rid of the Windows desktop all together. I REALLY look forward to the day when VPC can go rootless like an X windows server can and the Windows apps appear directly on the Mac desktop.
That'd be really hard, I can't think of a good way of doing that, short of running some kind of server on the copy of Windows inside VPC that hooked deep into the kernel, then used something like VNC to export individual windows over the loopback. It'd almost certainly be a huge huge hack, if it happened.
That's the problem with this style of emulation. You get very little integration with the host environment. And of course, you need to buy Windows.
And so I cannot in good conscience upgrade my existing VPC5. I cannot condone their business practices so they get none of my money. Disney's in the same boat with me.
And yet Apples business is based on the same logic as Microsofts. Do you really believe that if it was Jobs instead of Gates at the top, he'd run the computing industry more justly? They've certainly pulled enough stunts in their lifetime to banish any doubts whatsoever in my mind, in particular they wield the law like a weapon - something Gates has never done.
They are two sides of the same coin. You can't dislike one but not the other, that's merely hypocrisy.
Keyword based bookmarks - Epiphany. Very few people have tried this yet, because Ephy isn't stable, but they look like a pretty interesting departure from the normal heirarchy based bookmarks
Autocomplete? Perhaps not that innovative, but still.
I believe you're thinking of the binfmt_misc hack.
I know of no such daemon, and one wouldn't really be very useful. Making Linux able to execute Windows EXEs "natively" in this way is little more than a semantic change - all it does is run "wine foo.exe" for you when you write "./foo.exe" - neat, but... what's the point?
Especially when you consider that mostly wine apps will install to the fake C drive
Who told you that? I install 3rd party RPMs all the time. In fact, there are far more available for Red Hat than SuSE, but as we're about to go in and shake up Linux packaging anyway, that hopefully won't be a reason to choose redhat for very long.
A) How can you patch a game that isn't installed? Seriously, this doesn't seem possible.
Assign files GUIDs (perfectly possible with both NTFS and WinFS), then have a filecache on disk. When it gets requests for a file by GUID, the OS checks the update cache first, then the provided location.
I would guess this WinFS might change a few things fairly radically, for instance rather than "installing stuff", it simply merges in to the normal FS database, then seamlessly unmerges when the CD is removed. Just a guess.
Slashdot Mirror
Plus, it's not a sharing model, it's a publish model. You have to upload files to the network, a process that used to be a total PITA anyway, if you wanted it to propogate enough to be useful.
So FreeNet isn't useful for pirates. Which is cool. What it is useful for is things like load balancing - if you've ever been slashdotted, or ever found it hard to pay the bandwidth bills, freenet offers a way out. They were even playing with streaming radio over it a while ago, though I think really IPv6 multicast is a better solution there.
So freenet is about freedom of speech, load balancing, cool P2P experiments, lots of things - but not MP3 swapping.
Does anybody else find it amusing that most posters to Slashdot appear to think Eugenia is a man? :)
Oh, I like the new gnome2 borderless frames as well, it gives an open, breezy feel to the UIs.
For what it's worth, when people say things like "Well OS X is cool, it's just the hardware" or "But you can buy 3 button mice if you want", her normal reply is something along the lines of: Apple sell an integrated whole, so you can't judge the OS apart from the hardware, if the defaults are wrong then it sucks.
In this case obviously the comparison was between DEs, but you can't buy MacOS without buying a Mac, so her position still holds I think.
Ignoring the fact that for real world usefulness and platform stability (by which i'm talking about standards, not MTBF) an open network transparent protocol is far superior, X will soon be getting these features anyway.
The reason it takes so long? Doing it well is hard. Double-buffering everything consumes vast amounts of resources. The reason X11/GDI have such complex geometric calculation APIs is to cut down the amount of drawing to the minimum. Now you could say, "but computers are so much more powerful today than they were back then". And you'd have a point. But of course with that increase in power, we've also increased colour depth, screen resolutions, and number of apps running at once, so you still end up blowing all your resources on double-buffering.
There are various techniques to improve this situation, ie bring flicker-free semi-transparent graphical goodies to X but without blowing a hole in memory usage, and they are being worked on. Until then rather contrived examples of things you can do, but in reality never actually do, do not make a good argument against X.
Cos you know in Red Hat, subpixel AA is in the fonts control panel. Change it. Close the window. Away you go.
Hmm, why do you say that? Most C++ coders I've met who have experience of both say they prefer GTKmm because it uses the STL more (or something, i'm not a c++ coder). So I'm interested to know why you think that? Or is it just that you like Qt?
Well GNOME has supported SVG icons for a while in Nautilus (and therefore on the desktop), but now GTK supports it as well, so you can have SVG widget themes and SVG toolbar icons etc. Way cool stuff, but it'll take some time to mature, the icons tigert and jimmac drew are suprisingly high quality - so far the vector renderings I've seen seem far fuzzier and less detailed.
Well, if people seem to take the fact that MacOS is "usable" for granted, when actually it's full of glaring problems Apple don't even seem to recognise... yeah, they mostly did OK, but then GNOME mostly do OK as well.
So to me, usable would be clean and professional, something that looks good but in a non-invasive sort of way. I already use such a desktop, it's far from perfect, but I can see the major remaining usability issues being ironed out as the days go by.... personally I find Aqua massive overkill, it effectively brands your desktop, good for marketing, not so good for getting your work done.
Supporting evidence:
"Despite the *many* complaints I have about Windows XP - the UI is pretty darn stable,"
I don't know how an UI can be "stable", an UI is just the way the user interacts with something. You're thinking of the underlying OS, which was not what was being reviewed here. So this seems invalid.
Everything that fades in or out does so in just the right amount of time to look "classy" instead of "cheezy".
Well this is pretty subjective. The fading in and out just looks cheesy to me, I'd certainly never consider XP classy. But perhaps you like it. Nonetheless, not an argument that supports the claim.
Accelerated graphics cards are fully utilized in almost all cases
Again, nothing to do with the DE.
Default font sizes and styles are well chosen
Examples of where this isn't the case? Yeah yeah, I know up until recently Linux fonts sucked, but that's basically fixed now in any modern distro.
When it comes to KDE or Gnome... [snip
More subjective opinions, followed by what would seem to be a bug (rare one, i've never heard of it until now). You don't even say whether you were talking about GNOME1 or 2 (big difference).
Even if KDE or Gnome was 100% bug-free, there's still the issue of how the color palettes get handled when a video card only does 256 colors.
Which again, has nothing to do with how well "designed" the DE is, that's an X issue, or more likely a driver issue.
You're confusing many, many different things together, and haven't supported your original claim at all. Sure, there are bugs. There are bugs in every OS. I don't see what relation these points have to usability.
Sure, I understand these arguments. Problem is, they aren't very good. Under the current system, if you download a CD, you've "stolen" it, in that you're listening to it but not paying for it. That does hurt the creators, maybe if they got a bum record contract it hurts the record company more, but you can't just write it off as having no impact, because if everybody did that, they'd never get paid at all.
So to say, well this is OK because the RIAA would never have got my money anyway, is silly, because it doesn't generalise - if everybody thought this way, it's essentially become a way of justifying increased consumption but stagnant or decreased flow of money from you to the artists (and of course the middle men).
My point is, as always in these threads, not that the current system is cool and we should all dutifully pony up our dues and never download music. It's that there are too many people who simply use the "The RIAA is evil and they wouldn't have had these sales anyway" line to justify being cheap, or even illegally profiting from other peoples work. So I dislike two things, I dislike the current system and I dislike people who abuse it and then try and justify it to themselves.
Bottom line is that people who take advantage of the system while attempting to paint their actions in a good light piss me off. If the system is really so bad, why are they not trying to change it? Why are they not signing up artists to their indy label which promises ethical treatment and makes all the bands music available as oggs on their website? Maybe they don't have time, or the skills. Fine. So wait until somebody else changes the system. Until then, live with it, and if you would normally download 20 CDs a month, buy them instead, until you can get that music for free with the consent of the artist or author.
I do nowadays :) The comparison was with integrated IDEs however, hence my point.... although there are integrated IDEs on Linux nowadays, I don't know many people who use them, and that's not because they really suck, cos they don't.
Really? How many people know that the threshold for TransGaming releasing their Direct3D work is (or was) 20,000 subscribers? How many people know roughly how many subscribers they actually have?
Seems the escrow idea was already tried, and at least in the Wine project it led to a high-tension fork of the code, not really the intended effect.
And if you think about it, getting paid for what people actually *need* as opposed to what you think they'll need is more efficient anyway.
I haven't really found documentation to be a big problem to be honest, and although more spartan SGML or gtk-html genereated docs are far easier to read than stuff on MSDN, which invariably only looks good on huge screens (with IE of course).
Oh, a decent command line is useful too.
If you read Hans Reisers whitepaper on the future of ReiserFS, you'll find he puts forward some convincing arguments (at least to a layperson like me) as to why using a relational database at the filing system layer would be a bad idea. The central theme is that of eliminating information by imposing too rigid a structure on it (or something like that). I think he intends for the final result to be based on set theoretic semantics mostly (although with a variety of different layers, so you can join together a heirarchical namespace to a set theoretic namespace).
So, people are indeed working on doing what you wanted, and have been for several years, but it's tremendously complicated and performance concerns have required a lot of groundwork to be laid first.
Yeah, you tell yourself that, if it makes you feel better. I'm sure there are some here on Slashdot that download a few gigs of music every month, then go out and buy CDs for music they already have. Ya know, 'cos they're moral sort of people.
The vast majority of p2p pirates do not do this. I'm talking from personal experience. They don't download music to "sample" it, they download whole albums, sometimes even with artwork. Even worse, some of them have the gall to then burn them onto CDs and sell it on to people without broadband connections, sometimes for as much as 500% profit.
They never buy CDs. Why bother, when downloading it is so much easier? The fact is, if there was no music piracy, CD sales would be higher, because all those people who never buy CDs (or who buy them for nearly nothing from "friends") would have lower music consumption but would actually pay for it, so the gross profit is still higher than zero.
This "victimless crime" garbage has got to end. Music piracy is a victimless crime in the same way a war on Iraq would be a victimless crime - there are victims all right, you just can't see them, except in occasional glances the media gives as events rush past the window.
A better analogy would be that Stallman was building this amazing house, but that he spent years attempting to perfect the roof. When a finnish kid offered him a roof that was good enough (that he and his friends had made) so the party could start, Stallman told him to shove it and wait for the Hurd. In reality, nobody wanted to do that, so he dropped the ball and it passed to Linus.
Don't get me wrong, Stallman has done some great work. But I think that analogy you gave paints Linus in an unfair light.
The world economy was not created deliberately - it's a natural consequence of the free market.
One of the natural consequences of the free market, in turn, is the flow of wealth from the rich to the poor. We get poorer, the rest of the world gets richer. That's probably going to happen a bit more in the future.
Clearly though, there is at the moment huge disparities in wealth, and yet the world markets are relatively free. There are of course trade barriers, but they are frowned upon, and are the exception rather than the rule. The current administration uses them more than they should, but...
So, why is the west still rich, and large parts of the rest of the world, still poor? Partly just through the natural turn of events. Africa has been ravaged by civil war, natural disasters and political chaos for many, many years. The parts of Africa that managed to avoid that aren't doing so badly really. They're pulling themselves up, slowly but surely.
Partly economic. Communism set much of the Eastern Bloc and former Soviet states back years.
And partly, because we're simply ahead. Education feeds back into itself. There's some truth in the idea that the west is rich because the rest of the world is oppressed, because we deliberately keep all the wealth to ourselves... but not as much as I think many people believe.
Of course, there are some who say that many of the economic woes we take for granted as just being a natural part of the system are in fact simply a by product of the monetary system in dominant usage. Google for Bernard Leitaer, mutual credit systems and demurrage for some fascinating insights into economics, and the idea that there is always enough work and enough money to go around, if only we used a different currency system.
That'd be really hard, I can't think of a good way of doing that, short of running some kind of server on the copy of Windows inside VPC that hooked deep into the kernel, then used something like VNC to export individual windows over the loopback. It'd almost certainly be a huge huge hack, if it happened.
That's the problem with this style of emulation. You get very little integration with the host environment. And of course, you need to buy Windows.
And yet Apples business is based on the same logic as Microsofts. Do you really believe that if it was Jobs instead of Gates at the top, he'd run the computing industry more justly? They've certainly pulled enough stunts in their lifetime to banish any doubts whatsoever in my mind, in particular they wield the law like a weapon - something Gates has never done.
They are two sides of the same coin. You can't dislike one but not the other, that's merely hypocrisy.
Keyword based bookmarks - Epiphany. Very few people have tried this yet, because Ephy isn't stable, but they look like a pretty interesting departure from the normal heirarchy based bookmarks
Autocomplete? Perhaps not that innovative, but still.
I know of no such daemon, and one wouldn't really be very useful. Making Linux able to execute Windows EXEs "natively" in this way is little more than a semantic change - all it does is run "wine foo.exe" for you when you write "./foo.exe" - neat, but... what's the point?
Especially when you consider that mostly wine apps will install to the fake C drive
Who told you that? I install 3rd party RPMs all the time. In fact, there are far more available for Red Hat than SuSE, but as we're about to go in and shake up Linux packaging anyway, that hopefully won't be a reason to choose redhat for very long.
Assign files GUIDs (perfectly possible with both NTFS and WinFS), then have a filecache on disk. When it gets requests for a file by GUID, the OS checks the update cache first, then the provided location.
I would guess this WinFS might change a few things fairly radically, for instance rather than "installing stuff", it simply merges in to the normal FS database, then seamlessly unmerges when the CD is removed. Just a guess.