Unix had the benefit of being developed, at any given moment, under one or a couple roofs, not amongst thousands of volunteers around the country with wildy different perspectives.
Check out Raymond'sThe Cathedral and the Bazaar He actually makes this point; the bazaar model only becomes viable after there is a code base to work on. Design has to come first.
To me Microsoft empowers average people to express themselves. To elitest and academics this can be a scary thing.
They don't an interest in letting others have any say or power.
That's fine and dandy, but do you want average people expressing themselves in your mission-critical software?
Microsoft supports programming languages like VB. No academic is going to go nuts over VB but you can do about 99% of anything you would need to do with it.
You would be amazed at the number of people I know who are about to graduate with skills in Drinking and VB.
Sun makes machines that take years to learn to do anything. If you can afford them.
Expensive? Yes. Steep learning curve? Unless you are already a UNIX guru, yes. Better than Microsoft? Yes.
Java is just huge to learn well. And there aren't any powerful and affordable development tools available.
I learned Java by reading a few of books and modifying C++ code until it would compile. I develope Java at home with javac, jEdit, and the JavaDocs I downloaded from sun, and store it all in CVS under CygWin (until I get the cash for my Mac). Heck, I don't know of any serious programmers who use much more than a command line compiler, emacs or something simmilar, and a version control system, all of which are available for free. If that's not enough, go grab Forte for Java or JBuilder. It's been a while since I've looked, but I believe that both of those are available for free, at least for personal use.
No one who knows what they are talking about would say that the Java API is small, but it is relativly easy to pick up on if you know what to look for, and the JavaDocs are the best documentation I have seen in ages. Not a tutorial, but if you need to find something fast, they are hard to beat.
Sure, you can spend hundreds (or thousands) of dollars to express yourself with Microsoft products, or you can spend a few hours downloading and express yourself with Java for free. You may need to invest some time in learning it, but is there really anything of value for which that isn't true?
Micrsoft has market dominance and power that smaller fish knowing no better, with no stamina tends to suck up to and befriend for.
Mono is not a Microsoft-freindly move. Microsoft's people have been quoted as saying that.NET is designed to make great programs easy to write for Windows machines. Mono does nothing to help this. Microsoft wants all the benifits of being a standard and cross-platform, so they submit the CLR to standards review, and get it running on other platforms. Yippee. The libraries that make it useful (roughly analagous to the java.* pakcages) are not a standard, and are not implemented on any other platforms, helping them maintain their monopoly. If Mono works,.NET programs will run on any computer, and this is not what Microsoft wants.
would imagine if you counted the number of Java developers and the number or.Net developers, java would be ahead by leaps and bounds.
I haven't looked at the numbers, but I think you might be mistaken...simply because everyone who uses Visual Studio is, or is about to become, a.NET user. Not because the.NET architecture is inherantly better, but because "oh, it's time to upgrade VisualStudio." (Pops in CD.) All of these people are going to be counted by Microsoft as.NET users, which may be accurate, but it also doesn't meant that they are eating away at Java.
The trick is predicting when. There's no reason why Microsoft won't continue to defy the fundamentals for years.
Second, you seem to be equating the value of the stock with the stability of the company. Microsoft is a profitable company with a solid customer base. It in no way resembles Enron.
I know you weren't writing to me, but...Microsoft resembles IBM, not Enron. They are going to be around for a long time. They are going to be profitable for a long time. But I do not believe that they are going to be number one for more than a few more years.
90% of the people in the city morgue had the right of way. So what? What matters is who is left standing.
Linux will be left standing because it doesn't need to make money to be succesful. Microsoft, Intel and IBM will be left standing be left standing because they will own the respective markets for software, CPUs and services. Moral legitimacy means zilch.
So read the rest of my post. Microsoft needs to make money to survive, as you pointed out, and they are running out of ways to do so. FreeNix will grow because it is free. UNIX vendors will migrate towards it because 1) it is UNIX, and 2), they will want whatever OS you use on their hardware. Microsoft will be left standing, but they do not have a once-and-for-all claim to king of the hill.
Once Microsoft gets Win2k up to par in every respect with Solaris (it will happen), they will start peeling high-price clients off of Sun with little contest (meanwhile linux will chew up Sun's low end more and more).
Microsoft may get their technlogy up to par with Sun, though I doubt it, but they will never, emphasise never, beat Sun in the high end market as long as they pursue their "software as a service" strategy.
Microsoft can talk about their "freedom to innovate" all they want, but they have come to a place where they have innovated or stolen just about everything worthwhile already. Their browser is one of, if not the, best on the market; so good, in fact, that I do most of my browsing on a Sun PCI card running on a solaris box. I refuse to touch Outlook, but many, many of the people I work with don't know any other way. Microsoft's office suite is the top of the line; it does basically everything you could want it to, and their.doc format is as close to a standard in the business world as you are likely to find; again, I have Word on the PCI card so I can read all of the.doc files people send me. XP is stable enough for personal/desktop uses, and now comes with the "ooh, shiney!" factor. Microsoft has accomplished what it set out to do; it has met the needs of 95% of the computing world.
And that is killing them. Many users are getting to the point that they no longer need to upgrade.
"Buy Office 200!" "Why?" "To get rid of the damn paperclip!" "Well, ok..."
"Buy Office XP!" "Why?" "Well, uh, it has better, uh, marco support, and it's, um, more tightly integrated. Yeah, better integration!" "Well, I guess..."
So Microsoft is trying to rope people into a (relativly unnecssary) perpetual upgrade cycle. They have realized that their ability to add value does not meet with their desire for more revenue. IT guys know this. Suits are going to start realizing this. No one has been fired for going with Microsoft, but that doesn't mean that no one ever will be...
So, let's say Microsoft pulls off some sort of miricle (or invokes some sort of dark god) and makes XP as good as UNIX. Businesses have a choice; a free *NIX flavor, reliable, but kind of "roll your own," a proprietary *NIX, realiable, better support, and a proven track record as the platofrm for mission critical servers, or Windows, with a proven track record for (poor) security, astronomical tech support costs, and a license that will bleed money out of you just sitting there.
I belive that A) is going to grow, and that most of the companies that provide B) are going to have to move towards distributing and supporting an open *NIX built for and running on their hardware. As for c); Apple was one the computer company. Now it is a computer company. They sat on their haunches, made some bad business decisions, and got replaced. IBM was once the computer company. Now, it is a computer company. Big? Yes. Powerful? Yes. Rich? Yes. But the computer company? No. Now, that title belongs to Microsoft. But for how long? They have almost no hope of breaching the server market, and on the desktop, Apple is looking a lot more attractive to a lot of people, myself included.
Microsoft has reached saturation, and is trying to use its monopoly to support itself by forcing users into questionable licenses. This is not going to work. They are also trying to diversify into higher-end markets, but since their products offer no compelling reason to make the switch, and a number of reasons not to, this will not work.
I am not going to tell you that this is the end of Microsoft. I will, though, tell you that this is the beginning of the end of Microsoft as we know it.
And as for Java...Java needs to look at C# et al. and continue to make sure that they stay ahead of the game, but if www.wehavethewayout.com is being served by apache from a BSD box, and they are using JSP for their web community...it would be a mistake to declare Microsoft defeated, but this gave me a very warm feeling. I almost smiled...;-)
Good point...it amazes me what people will say when it can't be traced back to them. "No one knows me, time to mouth off for all the times mommy said she loved Johnny more!"
We had this discussion on rec.martial-arts every month or so. Then it would be "Tae Kwon Do" sucks month. I wonder what's up on those boards these days...
/* Why is it that people who seem to know the least about the topic always spread FUD and ignorance to the community?
I blame it on the Automated Slashdot Disscussion Module: for the sake of brevity, I've left out the "topic == microsoft", insertRandomBitchSessionAboutAds(), insertRandomBitchSessionAboutCowboyNeal(), and insertExtravegantClaimsAboutMyCodingAbility() portions of the code.*/
if (topic == "java") { //vector<string> FUD; vector<string> arguments;
arguments.push_back("Java is slow."); arguments.push_back("C++ is sooo much faster than Java."); arguments.push_back("Java is nice for some things, but for any real task..."); //...
for (int i = 0; i < arguments.size(); i++) { cout << arguments[i] << "\n"; } }
Now, if suddenly people can play system A games on, say, systems D, G, L and P, then exclusive contracts are pretty much useless, and as such, there's no real push to buy any single system. Most people will go with the cheapest system.
You mean kind of like computers?
The X-Box might as well be a PC. There is absolutly nothing stopping Sun from writing a java VM for X-Box, including it on a game disk, and dropping it on the hard drive. The playstation will get there. The console market has a very good chance of going the way of the desktop market...those who make compatible consoles will at least have a chance at profitability (think all the Wintel clones), those who do not will either find their nich (think Apple) or die.
People like standards. Industry like proprietary. We outnumber them, and there is always someone waithing in the wings to give consumers what they want.
A smaller set of limitations may be imposed (for instance, it may be required that the class implement some sort of comparison operator, for sorted lists)
So have them implement a common interface instead of inherit from a common base class? What does that gain you?
I've never understood why people don't like having Object as a common ancestor to all objects. Being gaurenteed that things like toString() are always there is nice...
I agree that the single inheritance model forces you into some tough design decisions, but as things stand, Object is your friend.
(what happens if/when Object changes? everything that inherits from Object will need a recompile, at the very least.)
What happens if/when the STL changes? What happens when one line out of 500 changes in a header file that all of your other files reference? Not to mention that most developers will be doing a nightly build anyway...make clean all is also your friend...I don't trust compiler chaches.
There is a depressing tend of someone saying something innaccurate, getting called on it, then having some AC pipe up and say "it was just a joke. Duh." Jokes should be funny.
CVS lets developers update to see other people's changes at their own convenience.
So does clear case, though it might not be intuitive...look in the docs for adding time rules to your config spec. This lets you look at "all files baselined on or before March 3rd, 2002," or someting simmilar.
Merging in CVS is a PAIN IN THE ASS
(compared to the nifty merge tools in ClearCase).
Nifty when it works...but don't get careless. We just saw a branch with three versions on it, and when it was merged to the baseline, it was the exact same file. I'm still not sure how that happened, but I'm leaning towards "cleacase lost its mind for a minute."
If it is crunchtime it is time to use all of your processes, because the processes should be designed to produce the best bug free code the quickest... otherwise it shouldn't be in the process...
Not qutie...it is designed to produce the best bug free code in a reasonable ammount of time. As I have posted before, there is a stark difference between the "we have all the time in the world, follow the coding standard to the letter, desk check everything twice before you submit it, and code review is on Wednesday, so be early" code and the "Beta is due Monday, say goodbye to your family, and oh, could you get some soda on the way in, 'cuase this is going to be a long weekend" code. Ideally, you never get to the later, but reality seldom complies with one's ideals.
I'm not a big fan of clear case, but it is the best VCS I've seen.
CC probably has all of the tools this gentleman needs, and since he mentioned it in his post, I would guess they are already using it.
Clear Case has a featur called "rebaselining," where a developer that has a source file checked out can see what has changed on the baseline and merge those changes in with his/her own. Each developer should be responsible for doing this until they submit their changes to the build master/integration guy/prject lead. Once a file has been submitted, it's usually the program lead's job to sort out the inconsistencies when creating a build.
I saw a titanium knife that was advertised as being able to get through a metal detector...that was a few years ago. I wonder what they do about something like that.
Do you honestly believe that the benifit of a faster search is enough incentive to rewrite such a major part of the OS?
I don't think that 'faster searches' are all that this kind of a file system would entail...
Slashdot has run a few articles in the past about the "UI of the Future," and what it will look like. Most of them indicated derision for the "folders nested within folders on the desktop" metaphore we are all so used to. A Filesystem as described above would allow for a fairly substantial shift away from that metaphore.
Right now, most of us try and organize our files into logical groupings, resulting in directories or folders like "development", "school", and "work", with sub-folders like "java", "cpp", and "termpaper". This OFS (or something simmilar) would, at least in theory, allow you to look at "all of my development documents", "all of my java source files", "all of my Word97 files", or "all of my Word97 files that are written for school." The more meta-data associated with a file, the more exact the drilling down possible.
This will require a fairly large change in the way most users interact with their computer, and I imagine that there will be an option to use it basically the same way explorer runs now. Still, this is a cool idea...maybe not original, but still something I would like to play with.
Re:Dirty Pool! But also confusing.
on
Abusing the GPL?
·
· Score: 1
What if they claim that the obstafacation (sp?) is part of a copy-protection plan and that anybody whom writes a program to un-do it is violating the DMCA.
I don't think so...they do not own the copyright to the original source, so they cannot apply the DMCA to it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, except when it isn't doing exactly what you told it to. Cacheing compilers can be funny about that.
Unix had the benefit of being developed, at any given moment, under one or a couple roofs, not amongst thousands of volunteers around the country with wildy different perspectives.
Check out Raymond'sThe Cathedral and the Bazaar He actually makes this point; the bazaar model only becomes viable after there is a code base to work on. Design has to come first.
To me Microsoft empowers average people to express themselves. To elitest and academics this can be a scary thing. They don't an interest in letting others have any say or power.
That's fine and dandy, but do you want average people expressing themselves in your mission-critical software?
Microsoft supports programming languages like VB. No academic is going to go nuts over VB but you can do about 99% of anything you would need to do with it.
You would be amazed at the number of people I know who are about to graduate with skills in Drinking and VB.
Sun makes machines that take years to learn to do anything. If you can afford them.
Expensive? Yes. Steep learning curve? Unless you are already a UNIX guru, yes. Better than Microsoft? Yes.
Java is just huge to learn well. And there aren't any powerful and affordable development tools available.
I learned Java by reading a few of books and modifying C++ code until it would compile. I develope Java at home with javac, jEdit, and the JavaDocs I downloaded from sun, and store it all in CVS under CygWin (until I get the cash for my Mac). Heck, I don't know of any serious programmers who use much more than a command line compiler, emacs or something simmilar, and a version control system, all of which are available for free. If that's not enough, go grab Forte for Java or JBuilder. It's been a while since I've looked, but I believe that both of those are available for free, at least for personal use.
No one who knows what they are talking about would say that the Java API is small, but it is relativly easy to pick up on if you know what to look for, and the JavaDocs are the best documentation I have seen in ages. Not a tutorial, but if you need to find something fast, they are hard to beat.
Sure, you can spend hundreds (or thousands) of dollars to express yourself with Microsoft products, or you can spend a few hours downloading and express yourself with Java for free. You may need to invest some time in learning it, but is there really anything of value for which that isn't true?
Micrsoft has market dominance and power that smaller fish knowing no better, with no stamina tends to suck up to and befriend for.
.NET is designed to make great programs easy to write for Windows machines. Mono does nothing to help this. Microsoft wants all the benifits of being a standard and cross-platform, so they submit the CLR to standards review, and get it running on other platforms. Yippee. The libraries that make it useful (roughly analagous to the java.* pakcages) are not a standard, and are not implemented on any other platforms, helping them maintain their monopoly. If Mono works, .NET programs will run on any computer, and this is not what Microsoft wants.
Mono is not a Microsoft-freindly move. Microsoft's people have been quoted as saying that
would imagine if you counted the number of Java developers and the number or .Net developers, java would be ahead by leaps and bounds.
.NET user. Not because the .NET architecture is inherantly better, but because "oh, it's time to upgrade VisualStudio." (Pops in CD.) All of these people are going to be counted by Microsoft as .NET users, which may be accurate, but it also doesn't meant that they are eating away at Java.
I haven't looked at the numbers, but I think you might be mistaken...simply because everyone who uses Visual Studio is, or is about to become, a
Glad you liked it. :-)
The trick is predicting when. There's no reason why Microsoft won't continue to defy the fundamentals for years. Second, you seem to be equating the value of the stock with the stability of the company. Microsoft is a profitable company with a solid customer base. It in no way resembles Enron.
I know you weren't writing to me, but...Microsoft resembles IBM, not Enron. They are going to be around for a long time. They are going to be profitable for a long time. But I do not believe that they are going to be number one for more than a few more years.
90% of the people in the city morgue had the right of way. So what? What matters is who is left standing.
Linux will be left standing because it doesn't need to make money to be succesful. Microsoft, Intel and IBM will be left standing be left standing because they will own the respective markets for software, CPUs and services. Moral legitimacy means zilch.
So read the rest of my post. Microsoft needs to make money to survive, as you pointed out, and they are running out of ways to do so. FreeNix will grow because it is free. UNIX vendors will migrate towards it because 1) it is UNIX, and 2), they will want whatever OS you use on their hardware. Microsoft will be left standing, but they do not have a once-and-for-all claim to king of the hill.
Once Microsoft gets Win2k up to par in every respect with Solaris (it will happen), they will start peeling high-price clients off of Sun with little contest (meanwhile linux will chew up Sun's low end more and more).
.doc format is as close to a standard in the business world as you are likely to find; again, I have Word on the PCI card so I can read all of the .doc files people send me. XP is stable enough for personal/desktop uses, and now comes with the "ooh, shiney!" factor. Microsoft has accomplished what it set out to do; it has met the needs of 95% of the computing world.
;-)
Microsoft may get their technlogy up to par with Sun, though I doubt it, but they will never, emphasise never, beat Sun in the high end market as long as they pursue their "software as a service" strategy.
Microsoft can talk about their "freedom to innovate" all they want, but they have come to a place where they have innovated or stolen just about everything worthwhile already. Their browser is one of, if not the, best on the market; so good, in fact, that I do most of my browsing on a Sun PCI card running on a solaris box. I refuse to touch Outlook, but many, many of the people I work with don't know any other way. Microsoft's office suite is the top of the line; it does basically everything you could want it to, and their
And that is killing them. Many users are getting to the point that they no longer need to upgrade.
"Buy Office 200!" "Why?" "To get rid of the damn paperclip!" "Well, ok..."
"Buy Office XP!" "Why?" "Well, uh, it has better, uh, marco support, and it's, um, more tightly integrated. Yeah, better integration!" "Well, I guess..."
"Buy Office XP^2!" "Why?" "Well, uh...just buy it, dammit." "Um, no."
So Microsoft is trying to rope people into a (relativly unnecssary) perpetual upgrade cycle. They have realized that their ability to add value does not meet with their desire for more revenue. IT guys know this. Suits are going to start realizing this. No one has been fired for going with Microsoft, but that doesn't mean that no one ever will be...
So, let's say Microsoft pulls off some sort of miricle (or invokes some sort of dark god) and makes XP as good as UNIX. Businesses have a choice; a free *NIX flavor, reliable, but kind of "roll your own," a proprietary *NIX, realiable, better support, and a proven track record as the platofrm for mission critical servers, or Windows, with a proven track record for (poor) security, astronomical tech support costs, and a license that will bleed money out of you just sitting there.
I belive that A) is going to grow, and that most of the companies that provide B) are going to have to move towards distributing and supporting an open *NIX built for and running on their hardware. As for c); Apple was one the computer company. Now it is a computer company. They sat on their haunches, made some bad business decisions, and got replaced. IBM was once the computer company. Now, it is a computer company. Big? Yes. Powerful? Yes. Rich? Yes. But the computer company? No. Now, that title belongs to Microsoft. But for how long? They have almost no hope of breaching the server market, and on the desktop, Apple is looking a lot more attractive to a lot of people, myself included.
Microsoft has reached saturation, and is trying to use its monopoly to support itself by forcing users into questionable licenses. This is not going to work. They are also trying to diversify into higher-end markets, but since their products offer no compelling reason to make the switch, and a number of reasons not to, this will not work.
I am not going to tell you that this is the end of Microsoft. I will, though, tell you that this is the beginning of the end of Microsoft as we know it.
And as for Java...Java needs to look at C# et al. and continue to make sure that they stay ahead of the game, but if www.wehavethewayout.com is being served by apache from a BSD box, and they are using JSP for their web community...it would be a mistake to declare Microsoft defeated, but this gave me a very warm feeling. I almost smiled...
No no no, I don't use it....I've just opened up the code to the public. :)
To quoth Archie Bunker: "Would you rather they was pushed outta windows?"
Good point...it amazes me what people will say when it can't be traced back to them. "No one knows me, time to mouth off for all the times mommy said she loved Johnny more!"
We had this discussion on rec.martial-arts every month or so. Then it would be "Tae Kwon Do" sucks month. I wonder what's up on those boards these days...
whistful sigh
/*
//vector<string> FUD;
//...
Why is it that people who seem to know the least about the topic always spread FUD and ignorance to the community?
I blame it on the Automated Slashdot Disscussion Module: for the sake of brevity, I've left out the "topic == microsoft", insertRandomBitchSessionAboutAds(), insertRandomBitchSessionAboutCowboyNeal(), and insertExtravegantClaimsAboutMyCodingAbility() portions of the code.*/
#include <string>
#include <vector>
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
string topic;
cin >> topic;
if (topic == "java")
{
vector<string> arguments;
arguments.push_back("Java is slow.");
arguments.push_back("C++ is sooo much faster than Java.");
arguments.push_back("Java is nice for some things, but for any real task...");
for (int i = 0; i < arguments.size(); i++)
{
cout << arguments[i] << "\n";
}
}
Now, if suddenly people can play system A games on, say, systems D, G, L and P, then exclusive contracts are pretty much useless, and as such, there's no real push to buy any single system. Most people will go with the cheapest system.
You mean kind of like computers?
The X-Box might as well be a PC. There is absolutly nothing stopping Sun from writing a java VM for X-Box, including it on a game disk, and dropping it on the hard drive. The playstation will get there. The console market has a very good chance of going the way of the desktop market...those who make compatible consoles will at least have a chance at profitability (think all the Wintel clones), those who do not will either find their nich (think Apple) or die.
People like standards. Industry like proprietary. We outnumber them, and there is always someone waithing in the wings to give consumers what they want.
A smaller set of limitations may be imposed (for instance, it may be required that the class implement some sort of comparison operator, for sorted lists)
So have them implement a common interface instead of inherit from a common base class? What does that gain you?
I've never understood why people don't like having Object as a common ancestor to all objects. Being gaurenteed that things like toString() are always there is nice...
I agree that the single inheritance model forces you into some tough design decisions, but as things stand, Object is your friend.
(what happens if/when Object changes? everything that inherits from Object will need a recompile, at the very least.)
What happens if/when the STL changes? What happens when one line out of 500 changes in a header file that all of your other files reference? Not to mention that most developers will be doing a nightly build anyway...make clean all is also your friend...I don't trust compiler chaches.
There is a depressing tend of someone saying something innaccurate, getting called on it, then having some AC pipe up and say "it was just a joke. Duh." Jokes should be funny.
ClearCase is not a VCS... it's a CMS...
We use DDTS for bugs/feature tracking...all we use clear case for is version control and integration.
CVS lets developers update to see other people's changes at their own convenience.
So does clear case, though it might not be intuitive...look in the docs for adding time rules to your config spec. This lets you look at "all files baselined on or before March 3rd, 2002," or someting simmilar.
Merging in CVS is a PAIN IN THE ASS (compared to the nifty merge tools in ClearCase).
Nifty when it works...but don't get careless. We just saw a branch with three versions on it, and when it was merged to the baseline, it was the exact same file. I'm still not sure how that happened, but I'm leaning towards "cleacase lost its mind for a minute."
If it is crunchtime it is time to use all of your processes, because the processes should be designed to produce the best bug free code the quickest... otherwise it shouldn't be in the process...
Not qutie...it is designed to produce the best bug free code in a reasonable ammount of time. As I have posted before, there is a stark difference between the "we have all the time in the world, follow the coding standard to the letter, desk check everything twice before you submit it, and code review is on Wednesday, so be early" code and the "Beta is due Monday, say goodbye to your family, and oh, could you get some soda on the way in, 'cuase this is going to be a long weekend" code. Ideally, you never get to the later, but reality seldom complies with one's ideals.
I'm not a big fan of clear case, but it is the best VCS I've seen.
CC probably has all of the tools this gentleman needs, and since he mentioned it in his post, I would guess they are already using it.
Clear Case has a featur called "rebaselining," where a developer that has a source file checked out can see what has changed on the baseline and merge those changes in with his/her own. Each developer should be responsible for doing this until they submit their changes to the build master/integration guy/prject lead. Once a file has been submitted, it's usually the program lead's job to sort out the inconsistencies when creating a build.
Let me ask you this question. Who in their RIGHT MIND would travel to St. John's, Nfld. to perform a terrorist act there?
Someone who figured out that no one in St. John's thought a terrorist would ever show up there.
I saw a titanium knife that was advertised as being able to get through a metal detector...that was a few years ago. I wonder what they do about something like that.
Do you honestly believe that the benifit of a faster search is enough incentive to rewrite such a major part of the OS?
I don't think that 'faster searches' are all that this kind of a file system would entail...
Slashdot has run a few articles in the past about the "UI of the Future," and what it will look like. Most of them indicated derision for the "folders nested within folders on the desktop" metaphore we are all so used to. A Filesystem as described above would allow for a fairly substantial shift away from that metaphore.
Right now, most of us try and organize our files into logical groupings, resulting in directories or folders like "development", "school", and "work", with sub-folders like "java", "cpp", and "termpaper". This OFS (or something simmilar) would, at least in theory, allow you to look at "all of my development documents", "all of my java source files", "all of my Word97 files", or "all of my Word97 files that are written for school." The more meta-data associated with a file, the more exact the drilling down possible.
This will require a fairly large change in the way most users interact with their computer, and I imagine that there will be an option to use it basically the same way explorer runs now. Still, this is a cool idea...maybe not original, but still something I would like to play with.
What if they claim that the obstafacation (sp?) is part of a copy-protection plan and that anybody whom writes a program to un-do it is violating the DMCA.
I don't think so...they do not own the copyright to the original source, so they cannot apply the DMCA to it.