Depends on which mode of undelete you used. There were three: the typical undelete functionality, which you described; delete tracker, which actively avoided writing to the deleted FAT entry until there were no other options; and delete sentry, which moved the files to a hidden directory, much like the Recycle Bin does today....which are all still not even close to the functionality that I'm talking about being in Vista.
Yeah - viruses, spyware, rootkits and an assorted array of trojans. If I'm running a program that feels it needs to hide data from me, I'm probably better off without it.
There was another poster who mentioned malware, but I don't think this is an innate problem. After all, in that statement is the assumption that the alternate streams are hidden. And currently they are almost completely invisible. But there's no reason this should be the case! Explorer could show alternate streams in a couple different ways. You could show files with alternate streams with an overlay icon (like "shortcut to"), you could show them as if they were separate files, or you could hide them entirely. IMO, the best option would be to have a choice of these three, in the same way you can show or hide files that are marked hidden now.
I mean, there's no more reason why these streams must remain hidden than reason why 'dot-files' in Unix systems must be hidden.
It's just a matter of tool support. And I don't know why MS isn't doing more with it...
Alternate file streams may have their uses, but theyre pretty much outmoded by the true random file access granted by any modern filesystem. You use a standardized file format (ELF, BFT, EXE, DLL, etc) that contains a table which contains locations and sizes for each data segment within a file. Even Apple have seen the light and moved away from forked and multistream files to a solution that works on flat (non-forked/streamed) filesystems.
But here's the thing... you can do all sorts of stuff that you essentially can't nicely without the ADS, because you can store file+metadata together *without changing the file format*. The file you're looking at doesn't support the sort of metadata that you want to add? No problem; just put it in an ADS. You could have generic information like author of the file, date it was created, notes, etc. that Windows or your OS could know about. Doing this for all file formats without streams is impossible because it would require modification of all the programs that use those files. Putting the metadata in other files would be somewhat of a solution, but that has its own problems, because it's easy to get the files separated or out of sync, and they sit there cluttering the directory. (The former reason is why a project I was working on that does some program instrumentation before compilation puts some information about the instrumentation it did in a separate section of the ELF object file -- to keep them together.)
As another question, anyone know why MS Visual C++ builds debug files (.pdb) instead of embedding the information into the EXE itself, like GCC does with -g on Linux? (This is just one application that has occurred to me as a good place for ADS: put the EXE in the main stream, and the debugging information into an alternate stream.)
If you can't afford extra storage for frequent backups you certainly can't afford the space for a versioned filesystem keeping copies of everything
Really? A versioned filesystem can be MUCH more efficient than a backup because you can store diffs. If you make a minor change to a file, you don't store two copies of the file; you store one copy plus the change. If you back up that file, you need to store two copies. (Primary + backup.)
I did a quick test. I worked on a C++ project last semester with another person. We have about 150 revisions, changing an average of, I dunno, 3 or 4 files each revision. (This is Subversion so I'm talking global revision numbers.) The repository size is 10 MB. The initial checkin size was 6.2 MB, and almost nothing was deleted. (By contrast, there were a few fairly large binary files added.) That means that storing these 150 versions took at worst about a 50% space overhead, and probably far smaller.
I didn't say that I wanted to lose the ability to delete something for sure; I wouldn't give up that degree of control. (You'd need to be able to tell the OS what to really and truely delete to reclaim space anyway even ignoring the issue of sensitive information.)
If we were to forgo useful features just because they could hold incriminating evidence, we wouldn't have hard drives at all, let alone monitors, network cards, printers, scanners, etc.
This is barely like undelete at all. Undelete worked by hoping that the drive space that a deleted file used hasn't been overwritten since it was deleted, and if so just setting up the appropriate FAT table entry again. (After asking the user "what was the first letter of that name again?")
This is the filesystem explicitly keeping around old versions. And not just deleted files either -- the heading for this reason is not very informative. It apparently actually keeps around old versions. So if you change it, you can revert that change, look at old versions, etc.
Again, it's pretty much NTFS+CVS, and only slightly like NTFS+undelete.
Secondly, and the real point, MS rule basically every desktop in the world already. Do you believe that computes to leverage FOR or AGAINST Microsoft when negotiation with the MPAAs? Truly, the MPAAs would be at the mercy of MS.
But the question is, how much of the MPAA's market are PCs responsible for? I don't know, but I get the sense that it's not a terribly large percentage. I at least hear a lot of "I'm sick of the movie theatres; it's so much better to watch movies on a home theatre", and I doubt the people saying that are watching them on their computers.
Then, think about what if they didn't support it. They'd have to have something somewhere saying "Vista doesn't support watching HD-DVD or Blue-Ray disks because the MPAA won't let us." But who do you think consumers would blame? Is the average person rational enough to go out, study the issue, and see that MS was the one being reasonable? Doubt it. I bet they'd go "Stupid Windows! Why can't I watch my Blue-ray?" This would leave, say, Apple a nice window in which to say, "hey, we'll capitulate to the MPAA's demands", and now MS is hurting even more. (They're vulnerable enough already. And I don't think it's terribly unreasonable to expect that Apple would take advantage of that situation, though I doubt they'd implement all the restrictions MS has. Apple has already shown willingness to capitulate to some extent with iTunes, and I think Jobs is shrewd enough to notice an opportunity to steal market share like that would provide.)
I'm more a follower of the "Microsoft is doing this for their own, lock-in based, reasons". The history of Microsoft is the history of vendor lock-in and market control through technology.
Maybe MS really want the RIAAs and MPAAs on their side in the fight against the iPod? Maybe if MS give the RIAAs and the MPAAs what they want. One back scratched for another... If I didn't despise the MPAAs of the world, I'd raise a warning about MS long documented betrayalish ways, but I do.
I do think this is a good point though. I don't really buy that MS is in the clear either. They certainly seem over-eager to please to me. Surely they could have put up SOME resistance to DRM. (I just don't think they could have removed it entirely.)
I guess what my feelings are on this is, yeah, MS is at fault here, but at the same time, even if they were run by totally principled, upstanding people who shared the/. anti-DRM mindset, I don't think it would make much difference in the end.
I'll support the GP on 4. If no one implemented DRM major studios would adopt open formats. Given the choice between not making money, and releasing DRM-free media, I think they would pick DRM-free media.
But it's a prisoner's dilemma, except instead of not being able to talk to the other person, you can't trust them. Tons of different companies make devices you can play back media on. MS makes Windows, Sony and Philips (to name two of a few gazillion) make standalone players. Do you think you could get EVERYONE to agree to not implement DRM? I think you'd need to get most of the big players -- I would guess 3/4 of the market; any less and the MPAA would hold out for a while hoping to bend the others -- before you could make a difference. And if you had such a consortium who agreed on it (which might be illegal to start with), everyone would have motivation to backstab, because then they'd be one of the few devices that could play the DRM'd media, so everyone would buy their product.
You can argue it if you want too, but I think my mind is pretty made up where the fault actually lies.
The MPAA?
Seriously, even if they weren't actively working on this, MS wouldn't have much choice in the matter. They can either abide by the demands of the MPAA and include DRM, or refuse to include it and have the MPAA refuse them licenses for the AACS decoding and whatnot. I don't think MS has the clout to move the MPAA's opinion in the latter choce, so you get reduced quality, Vista-like DRM, or you get nothing.
(Now, choosing nothing on principle is fine, and you can blame MS for that. You can also blame MS for not even trying to take the second approach. But I don't think the situation would be any different if MS were an angel either.)
He must be thinking of XP with its retarded Back/Forward only navigation.
What?
Are you in XP now? Open a file dialog. Look at the pull-down menu at the top center that says where you are. Look just to the right. The first button is back. The second is up a folder. In explorer, the third button (just to the right of forward) is up a folder. Did you miss those?
(This is XP without any service packs. (It's a very old laptop without a NIC let alone connection, and I'm in Linux now so can't check.) It's possible the buttons moved in SP2, but I doubt it. I know they didn't disappear, because I use them regularily.)
Yeah, I am surprised how little driver support there is. No drivers for my Audigy. As of a couple months ago, no drivers for my SATA controller card. (I was going to install Vista RC1 on a spare partition, but it was on a SATA drive so no luck. No Vista for me.)
??? Doesn't every OS have a find command or keep a database of current files? How is this different from XP?
Dunno what's different with the desktop search, but the search folders are a neat idea; basically they are saved searches I guess displayed like a folder. You go into one, you see what the results would be if you did the search again right then.
It's somewhat similar to the Opera email client's views or whatever they call them (it's been a while since I used it). I would set up a view that would show all emails with a particular subject, but rather than have a filter that moved them there, they would just show up.
I doubt it's unique to Vista, but it's still a neat idea.
All undelete means is that instead of doing remove you do move. Nothing exciting about that.
The rest of the paragraph on this one is less misleading than the title... it's not so much undelete as versioning. Think NTFS+CVS. And, IMO, this is exciting; I've been wanting a file system that did that for a long time. No clue if Vista does quite what I want, but we'll see sometime.
Apparently the "Folders" tool on the left is too hard to use. Take a look at his picture, if he just clicked on the "Folders" link on the left he would have a nice, easy to navigate tree right there. Yes, the address bar's drop-down is a sort of history. As for the web sites, mine seem to spawn a web browser (Firefox even) just fine.
At the same time, there is still a valid criticism here. First, why change a perfectly working UI by not only moving the previous functionality to somewhere completely different and unconnected to the old location, but then using the old location for something else instead of removing it?
Secondly, why is there a web history in the open/save dialog at all? Can anyone think of a remotely plausable use case where this would be helpful?
Viruses hide in files too. If there was better support for them, they could be as visible there as they are in files. Part of the question I'm asking is why isn't that support there.
Backup software forgets alternate streams. Web servers and browsers forget alternate streams. FTP servers and clients forget alternate streams.
Again, lack of tool support, not a problem with the concept. (In the case of FTP servers, you almost HAVE to forget about the alternate streams (or serialize them) because most other filesystems don't support them.
I think you're trolling, so I wouldn't have replied except you already have at least one +1 moderation.
JUST WHAT the hell does that mean ?!?!?!
"I like buzzwords"? I dunno.
god, WHAT is this ? im gonna make a critique, but i am speechless. WHAT is image based install ? and why is it good for us ? Were the installations of xp domino-based ? god, i cant establish relevancy - WHAT is that ?
Did you RTFP (paragraph) or just the heading? I can't see exactly what it says, but I *do* remember that it says that it should be faster, and I just skimmed.
what is a search folder ?
I bet the paragraph under it went into more details. But in liu of that, a Google for "Vista search folder" leads to this description:
A Search Folder is simply a search that you save. Opening a Search Folder instantly runs that saved search, displaying up-to-date results immediately.
s/he who was afraid of deleting something by mistake was already using the recycling bin. SO ?
Again, RTFP. It's not just undelete, it sounds like a versioning filesystem. Thing CVS+NTFS. As I posted above, I have longed for a filesystem for this feature for some time, if it does what it sounds like.
I think VMS had this a very long time ago and it worked well - however the underlying problem with anything like this is that your disks fill up with stuff you don't need.
But we could do stuff now like intelligent garbage collection where it goes through and starts thinning out old versions of files when the drive starts to fill.
Even if it sometimes needs the user's input to decide what it can throw out, I'd still love to have this feature.
The answers are - good backups and applications like CVS for situations where you want it.
Backups aren't fine-grained enough, especially for home users. Like me, everyone says "you have to back up your stuff", but I don't know how to do it... burning backups even to DVD would take forever. I can't afford fancier solutions. Even a hundred bucks for a hard drive just for backup would be pushing it. I *certainly* can't afford to keep multiple backups. I'm just a poor grad student. My backup regimin is that I burn important stuff to disc roughly corresponding to the end of each semester. Backups don't take the place of CVS-like capabilities at all; the space problem is even more aggrivated than with just CVS unless you only do incremental backups.
Using CVS isn't a particularily good solution either. Talk about space problems? Now I've got both the copy in the repository AND the working copy. Putting everything into a repository's a pain too... I would like to have pretty much all of my documents in the repository. And I would even still like finer-grained time slices that CVS provides without way to much running 'cvs ci'. I don't know; maybe having a version every save would be too much, but I would at least want to give it a shot. It's really hard to predict what you might want to have access to in the future. Actually, what I think would be *REALLY* sweet is to have it down to the granularity of your actions that changed the document -- so you can, for instance, go back and see the individual letters in a document being added. But that really needs more than file-system support.
Right, but why hasn't like ext or Reiser picked up something like this? (Or have they and I'm just out of the loop.) Apple's data and resource forks are the only thing that I know of that are similar. (And to be honest I thought that OS X brought an end to them, and I definitely wasn't aware that they support arbitrary streams. Guess I was mis- AND un-informed)
And why does almost no one use them? (Apart from the data/resource forks.) Is it because moving to other file systems is problematic?
Of course, one of the main things that keeps people on Windows is the inertia, that they already have all of this hardware and software that works with Windows. If you're going to buy a new computer with all new specific hardware and software, why not look to Apple or Linux?
Maybe the compy's due for an upgrade anyway? Maybe there's Windows-only software. Maybe you prefer Windows. Maybe you're a student at a school in a department with an MSDNAA subscription that gets you Windows for free.
8. Inbuilt undelete Or, depending on how you look at it, inbuilt rolling backup. Every time you make a change to a file or delete it, Windows keeps the previous version. As a result, the "oh !@#$ I just overwrote my entire PhD with Document1" feeling can be quickly assuaged. Read more...
But the read more link is broken. Maybe they need to restore it with undelete.
This sounds exciting... I've always wanted a filesystem that would act like CVS with each save. I don't know if this is doing quite that, but it's intriguing at least. (I think there's a Linux filesystem called Elephant that does something like this, but I haven't looked into it much.
(The other thing that I wonder why other file systems haven't adopted is NTFS's alternate streams. They seem like they could be really useful for some stuff...)
I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. To me, KDE is pretty much the same interface as XP, only easier to use in some details.
And harder in others, arguably slower (at least on my box), and arguably uglier (at least any KDE theme I've managed to get installed compared to the admittedly hacked theme for XP I have).
Then when you add in GTK apps the situation gets worse... especially the stupid file dialogs.
For one thing, the main menu (the "K" menu, that would be the "start" menu on XP) shows items detailed by type, such as "internet", "graphics", "multimedia", etc, while on XP it shows by vendor, "electronic arts", "firaxis", etc.
That's not really a Windows thing though. I'm sure that if people regularily purchased the number of programs for Linux that they do for Windows the Gnome/KDE menus would look the same.
At worst, Windows does nothing to discourage this practice; it's 3rd party vendors that decide to put them in "Electronic Arts" instead of "Games".
There is another alternative: The operating system on my computer can play content at full quality. Why do you insist this is not an option?
Because if the content is encrypted with AACS (likely even if it has been broken), you can't just write something that plays it back thanks to the DMCA. You may not like the DMCA, you may think it's a stupid law, and you'd probably be right; but that doesn't change the fact that for a commercial company as large as MS to deliberately violate it is idiotic. Thus they must license the decryption technologies through legal means. If the MPAA member companies are unwilling to give MS the ability to play back in full quality, they are left with three options:
1. Don't allow playback, possibly as a ploy to try to force the MPAA's hand 2. Play back at reduced quality 3. Violate the DMCA
It's even possible that selling copies that can play back in full quality in countries that don't have DMCA-like laws, but reduced quality in countries that do, would get them charged in countries that do.
You would rather have the people not only have to write the software but also write everything to interface with all the hardware as opposed to let them use APIs in an existing OS where the fundamental bugs were ironed out a decade or few ago?
Recently have been some recent stories on Slashdot claiming that Vista would downgrade the quality of audio and video for every application in a machine where protected content was running. One of the stories painted a scary scenario where a 'medical IT worker who's using a medical imaging PC while listening to audio/video played back by the computer' would have his medical images 'deliberately degraded'.
Slashdot posting anti-MS stories with only speculation to their correctness? Say it isn't so!
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on which mode of undelete you used. There were three: the typical undelete functionality, which you described; delete tracker, which actively avoided writing to the deleted FAT entry until there were no other options; and delete sentry, which moved the files to a hidden directory, much like the Recycle Bin does today. ...which are all still not even close to the functionality that I'm talking about being in Vista.
Yeah - viruses, spyware, rootkits and an assorted array of trojans. If I'm running a program that feels it needs to hide data from me, I'm probably better off without it.
There was another poster who mentioned malware, but I don't think this is an innate problem. After all, in that statement is the assumption that the alternate streams are hidden. And currently they are almost completely invisible. But there's no reason this should be the case! Explorer could show alternate streams in a couple different ways. You could show files with alternate streams with an overlay icon (like "shortcut to"), you could show them as if they were separate files, or you could hide them entirely. IMO, the best option would be to have a choice of these three, in the same way you can show or hide files that are marked hidden now.
I mean, there's no more reason why these streams must remain hidden than reason why 'dot-files' in Unix systems must be hidden.
It's just a matter of tool support. And I don't know why MS isn't doing more with it...
Alternate file streams may have their uses, but theyre pretty much outmoded by the true random file access granted by any modern filesystem. You use a standardized file format (ELF, BFT, EXE, DLL, etc) that contains a table which contains locations and sizes for each data segment within a file. Even Apple have seen the light and moved away from forked and multistream files to a solution that works on flat (non-forked/streamed) filesystems.
But here's the thing... you can do all sorts of stuff that you essentially can't nicely without the ADS, because you can store file+metadata together *without changing the file format*. The file you're looking at doesn't support the sort of metadata that you want to add? No problem; just put it in an ADS. You could have generic information like author of the file, date it was created, notes, etc. that Windows or your OS could know about. Doing this for all file formats without streams is impossible because it would require modification of all the programs that use those files. Putting the metadata in other files would be somewhat of a solution, but that has its own problems, because it's easy to get the files separated or out of sync, and they sit there cluttering the directory. (The former reason is why a project I was working on that does some program instrumentation before compilation puts some information about the instrumentation it did in a separate section of the ELF object file -- to keep them together.)
As another question, anyone know why MS Visual C++ builds debug files (.pdb) instead of embedding the information into the EXE itself, like GCC does with -g on Linux? (This is just one application that has occurred to me as a good place for ADS: put the EXE in the main stream, and the debugging information into an alternate stream.)
If you can't afford extra storage for frequent backups you certainly can't afford the space for a versioned filesystem keeping copies of everything
Really? A versioned filesystem can be MUCH more efficient than a backup because you can store diffs. If you make a minor change to a file, you don't store two copies of the file; you store one copy plus the change. If you back up that file, you need to store two copies. (Primary + backup.)
I did a quick test. I worked on a C++ project last semester with another person. We have about 150 revisions, changing an average of, I dunno, 3 or 4 files each revision. (This is Subversion so I'm talking global revision numbers.) The repository size is 10 MB. The initial checkin size was 6.2 MB, and almost nothing was deleted. (By contrast, there were a few fairly large binary files added.) That means that storing these 150 versions took at worst about a 50% space overhead, and probably far smaller.
I didn't say that I wanted to lose the ability to delete something for sure; I wouldn't give up that degree of control. (You'd need to be able to tell the OS what to really and truely delete to reclaim space anyway even ignoring the issue of sensitive information.)
If we were to forgo useful features just because they could hold incriminating evidence, we wouldn't have hard drives at all, let alone monitors, network cards, printers, scanners, etc.
This is barely like undelete at all. Undelete worked by hoping that the drive space that a deleted file used hasn't been overwritten since it was deleted, and if so just setting up the appropriate FAT table entry again. (After asking the user "what was the first letter of that name again?")
This is the filesystem explicitly keeping around old versions. And not just deleted files either -- the heading for this reason is not very informative. It apparently actually keeps around old versions. So if you change it, you can revert that change, look at old versions, etc.
Again, it's pretty much NTFS+CVS, and only slightly like NTFS+undelete.
Secondly, and the real point, MS rule basically every desktop in the world already. Do you believe that computes to leverage FOR or AGAINST Microsoft when negotiation with the MPAAs? Truly, the MPAAs would be at the mercy of MS.
/. anti-DRM mindset, I don't think it would make much difference in the end.
But the question is, how much of the MPAA's market are PCs responsible for? I don't know, but I get the sense that it's not a terribly large percentage. I at least hear a lot of "I'm sick of the movie theatres; it's so much better to watch movies on a home theatre", and I doubt the people saying that are watching them on their computers.
Then, think about what if they didn't support it. They'd have to have something somewhere saying "Vista doesn't support watching HD-DVD or Blue-Ray disks because the MPAA won't let us." But who do you think consumers would blame? Is the average person rational enough to go out, study the issue, and see that MS was the one being reasonable? Doubt it. I bet they'd go "Stupid Windows! Why can't I watch my Blue-ray?" This would leave, say, Apple a nice window in which to say, "hey, we'll capitulate to the MPAA's demands", and now MS is hurting even more. (They're vulnerable enough already. And I don't think it's terribly unreasonable to expect that Apple would take advantage of that situation, though I doubt they'd implement all the restrictions MS has. Apple has already shown willingness to capitulate to some extent with iTunes, and I think Jobs is shrewd enough to notice an opportunity to steal market share like that would provide.)
I'm more a follower of the "Microsoft is doing this for their own, lock-in based, reasons". The history of Microsoft is the history of vendor lock-in and market control through technology.
Maybe MS really want the RIAAs and MPAAs on their side in the fight against the iPod? Maybe if MS give the RIAAs and the MPAAs what they want. One back scratched for another... If I didn't despise the MPAAs of the world, I'd raise a warning about MS long documented betrayalish ways, but I do.
I do think this is a good point though. I don't really buy that MS is in the clear either. They certainly seem over-eager to please to me. Surely they could have put up SOME resistance to DRM. (I just don't think they could have removed it entirely.)
I guess what my feelings are on this is, yeah, MS is at fault here, but at the same time, even if they were run by totally principled, upstanding people who shared the
I'll support the GP on 4. If no one implemented DRM major studios would adopt open formats. Given the choice between not making money, and releasing DRM-free media, I think they would pick DRM-free media.
But it's a prisoner's dilemma, except instead of not being able to talk to the other person, you can't trust them. Tons of different companies make devices you can play back media on. MS makes Windows, Sony and Philips (to name two of a few gazillion) make standalone players. Do you think you could get EVERYONE to agree to not implement DRM? I think you'd need to get most of the big players -- I would guess 3/4 of the market; any less and the MPAA would hold out for a while hoping to bend the others -- before you could make a difference. And if you had such a consortium who agreed on it (which might be illegal to start with), everyone would have motivation to backstab, because then they'd be one of the few devices that could play the DRM'd media, so everyone would buy their product.
You can argue it if you want too, but I think my mind is pretty made up where the fault actually lies.
The MPAA?
Seriously, even if they weren't actively working on this, MS wouldn't have much choice in the matter. They can either abide by the demands of the MPAA and include DRM, or refuse to include it and have the MPAA refuse them licenses for the AACS decoding and whatnot. I don't think MS has the clout to move the MPAA's opinion in the latter choce, so you get reduced quality, Vista-like DRM, or you get nothing.
(Now, choosing nothing on principle is fine, and you can blame MS for that. You can also blame MS for not even trying to take the second approach. But I don't think the situation would be any different if MS were an angel either.)
He must be thinking of XP with its retarded Back/Forward only navigation.
What?
Are you in XP now? Open a file dialog. Look at the pull-down menu at the top center that says where you are. Look just to the right. The first button is back. The second is up a folder. In explorer, the third button (just to the right of forward) is up a folder. Did you miss those?
(This is XP without any service packs. (It's a very old laptop without a NIC let alone connection, and I'm in Linux now so can't check.) It's possible the buttons moved in SP2, but I doubt it. I know they didn't disappear, because I use them regularily.)
Yeah, I am surprised how little driver support there is. No drivers for my Audigy. As of a couple months ago, no drivers for my SATA controller card. (I was going to install Vista RC1 on a spare partition, but it was on a SATA drive so no luck. No Vista for me.)
??? Doesn't every OS have a find command or keep a database of current files? How is this different from XP?
Dunno what's different with the desktop search, but the search folders are a neat idea; basically they are saved searches I guess displayed like a folder. You go into one, you see what the results would be if you did the search again right then.
It's somewhat similar to the Opera email client's views or whatever they call them (it's been a while since I used it). I would set up a view that would show all emails with a particular subject, but rather than have a filter that moved them there, they would just show up.
I doubt it's unique to Vista, but it's still a neat idea.
All undelete means is that instead of doing remove you do move. Nothing exciting about that.
The rest of the paragraph on this one is less misleading than the title... it's not so much undelete as versioning. Think NTFS+CVS. And, IMO, this is exciting; I've been wanting a file system that did that for a long time. No clue if Vista does quite what I want, but we'll see sometime.
Apparently the "Folders" tool on the left is too hard to use. Take a look at his picture, if he just clicked on the "Folders" link on the left he would have a nice, easy to navigate tree right there. Yes, the address bar's drop-down is a sort of history. As for the web sites, mine seem to spawn a web browser (Firefox even) just fine.
At the same time, there is still a valid criticism here. First, why change a perfectly working UI by not only moving the previous functionality to somewhere completely different and unconnected to the old location, but then using the old location for something else instead of removing it?
Secondly, why is there a web history in the open/save dialog at all? Can anyone think of a remotely plausable use case where this would be helpful?
Viruses hide in alternate streams.
Viruses hide in files too. If there was better support for them, they could be as visible there as they are in files. Part of the question I'm asking is why isn't that support there.
Backup software forgets alternate streams. Web servers and browsers forget alternate streams. FTP servers and clients forget alternate streams.
Again, lack of tool support, not a problem with the concept. (In the case of FTP servers, you almost HAVE to forget about the alternate streams (or serialize them) because most other filesystems don't support them.
JUST WHAT the hell does that mean ?!?!?!
"I like buzzwords"? I dunno.
god, WHAT is this ? im gonna make a critique, but i am speechless. WHAT is image based install ? and why is it good for us ? Were the installations of xp domino-based ? god, i cant establish relevancy - WHAT is that ?
Did you RTFP (paragraph) or just the heading? I can't see exactly what it says, but I *do* remember that it says that it should be faster, and I just skimmed.
what is a search folder ?
I bet the paragraph under it went into more details. But in liu of that, a Google for "Vista search folder" leads to this description:
s/he who was afraid of deleting something by mistake was already using the recycling bin. SO ?
Again, RTFP. It's not just undelete, it sounds like a versioning filesystem. Thing CVS+NTFS. As I posted above, I have longed for a filesystem for this feature for some time, if it does what it sounds like.
I think VMS had this a very long time ago and it worked well - however the underlying problem with anything like this is that your disks fill up with stuff you don't need.
But we could do stuff now like intelligent garbage collection where it goes through and starts thinning out old versions of files when the drive starts to fill.
Even if it sometimes needs the user's input to decide what it can throw out, I'd still love to have this feature.
The answers are - good backups and applications like CVS for situations where you want it.
Backups aren't fine-grained enough, especially for home users. Like me, everyone says "you have to back up your stuff", but I don't know how to do it... burning backups even to DVD would take forever. I can't afford fancier solutions. Even a hundred bucks for a hard drive just for backup would be pushing it. I *certainly* can't afford to keep multiple backups. I'm just a poor grad student. My backup regimin is that I burn important stuff to disc roughly corresponding to the end of each semester. Backups don't take the place of CVS-like capabilities at all; the space problem is even more aggrivated than with just CVS unless you only do incremental backups.
Using CVS isn't a particularily good solution either. Talk about space problems? Now I've got both the copy in the repository AND the working copy. Putting everything into a repository's a pain too... I would like to have pretty much all of my documents in the repository. And I would even still like finer-grained time slices that CVS provides without way to much running 'cvs ci'. I don't know; maybe having a version every save would be too much, but I would at least want to give it a shot. It's really hard to predict what you might want to have access to in the future. Actually, what I think would be *REALLY* sweet is to have it down to the granularity of your actions that changed the document -- so you can, for instance, go back and see the individual letters in a document being added. But that really needs more than file-system support.
Right, but why hasn't like ext or Reiser picked up something like this? (Or have they and I'm just out of the loop.) Apple's data and resource forks are the only thing that I know of that are similar. (And to be honest I thought that OS X brought an end to them, and I definitely wasn't aware that they support arbitrary streams. Guess I was mis- AND un-informed)
And why does almost no one use them? (Apart from the data/resource forks.) Is it because moving to other file systems is problematic?
Of course, one of the main things that keeps people on Windows is the inertia, that they already have all of this hardware and software that works with Windows. If you're going to buy a new computer with all new specific hardware and software, why not look to Apple or Linux?
Maybe the compy's due for an upgrade anyway? Maybe there's Windows-only software. Maybe you prefer Windows. Maybe you're a student at a school in a department with an MSDNAA subscription that gets you Windows for free.
8. Inbuilt undelete
Or, depending on how you look at it, inbuilt rolling backup. Every time you make a change to a file or delete it, Windows keeps the previous version. As a result, the "oh !@#$ I just overwrote my entire PhD with Document1" feeling can be quickly assuaged. Read more...
But the read more link is broken. Maybe they need to restore it with undelete.
This sounds exciting... I've always wanted a filesystem that would act like CVS with each save. I don't know if this is doing quite that, but it's intriguing at least. (I think there's a Linux filesystem called Elephant that does something like this, but I haven't looked into it much.
(The other thing that I wonder why other file systems haven't adopted is NTFS's alternate streams. They seem like they could be really useful for some stuff...)
You think your brain is evil? "That's a nice Wikipedia entry you've got there. It'd be a shame if someone were to vandalize it."
I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. To me, KDE is pretty much the same interface as XP, only easier to use in some details.
And harder in others, arguably slower (at least on my box), and arguably uglier (at least any KDE theme I've managed to get installed compared to the admittedly hacked theme for XP I have).
Then when you add in GTK apps the situation gets worse... especially the stupid file dialogs.
For one thing, the main menu (the "K" menu, that would be the "start" menu on XP) shows items detailed by type, such as "internet", "graphics", "multimedia", etc, while on XP it shows by vendor, "electronic arts", "firaxis", etc.
That's not really a Windows thing though. I'm sure that if people regularily purchased the number of programs for Linux that they do for Windows the Gnome/KDE menus would look the same.
At worst, Windows does nothing to discourage this practice; it's 3rd party vendors that decide to put them in "Electronic Arts" instead of "Games".
There is another alternative: The operating system on my computer can play content at full quality. Why do you insist this is not an option?
Because if the content is encrypted with AACS (likely even if it has been broken), you can't just write something that plays it back thanks to the DMCA. You may not like the DMCA, you may think it's a stupid law, and you'd probably be right; but that doesn't change the fact that for a commercial company as large as MS to deliberately violate it is idiotic. Thus they must license the decryption technologies through legal means. If the MPAA member companies are unwilling to give MS the ability to play back in full quality, they are left with three options:
1. Don't allow playback, possibly as a ploy to try to force the MPAA's hand
2. Play back at reduced quality
3. Violate the DMCA
It's even possible that selling copies that can play back in full quality in countries that don't have DMCA-like laws, but reduced quality in countries that do, would get them charged in countries that do.
...no commercial os...
You would rather have the people not only have to write the software but also write everything to interface with all the hardware as opposed to let them use APIs in an existing OS where the fundamental bugs were ironed out a decade or few ago?
Wait this is M$ right?
The company that abandons the users on older machines, to help their customers sell new machines.
Neh? Doesn't MS have one of the longer lengths of support around?
Recently have been some recent stories on Slashdot claiming that Vista would downgrade the quality of audio and video for every application in a machine where protected content was running. One of the stories painted a scary scenario where a 'medical IT worker who's using a medical imaging PC while listening to audio/video played back by the computer' would have his medical images 'deliberately degraded'.
Slashdot posting anti-MS stories with only speculation to their correctness? Say it isn't so!