Hum. Whether or not the article was informative (thanks for pointing it out about a hundred billion times, guys), WinFS sounds kind of neat to me. However, the real opportunity i see here isn't WinFS itself, but the kind of file systems WinFS may be the progenitor of. Bear with me now, because i'm by no means a "hard drive scientist" or whatever you want to call... people that... know about hard drives... heh.
Anyway, when i first heard about WinFS (maybe a few months ago), people were saying that all data on the hard drive would pretty much just be stored in a big blob, and that the database would basically index where each "file" in this blob is. Now, from this article (and from the comments i've gathered here) that doesn't seem to be completely accurate, but... eh. Database is a database i guess.
So i thought, if the database is doing the job of indexing these files for the operating system, then theoretically you could have, like, a database of what basically amounts to a whole bunch of symlinks. So you'll have your blob of file(s), your "original" database, and then your "symlink" database (for lack of better terms). I was thinking, if you could have that symlink database, you could pretty much choose where in the file system (as it appeared to you, the user) each file would go, and how it would be represented.
For example, say that you want My Computer to just be / (like on UNIX, basically). You could have a utility that tells your symlink database to set My Computer's "location" as/. That is, it "holds" all your drives and stuff. So then maybe you could set C:\ (your primary hard drive) to something like/hda, and set D:\ (your DVD drive) to something like/hdb. Et cetera.
Say you never messed with the stuff in your Windows directory, and you don't want a bunch of extra junk on the root level of your hard drive. Tell the symlink database to hide/hda/Windows (if we're continuing with the file system i'm kind of creating right now, heh), and that's that. It's basically like a hidden file, i guess, but that's not really the point (hiding folders, that is). The real point is, say that you did mess with your Windows directory, but you didn't want it on the root level of your hard drive, for whatever reason. You could tell your symlink database to "mount" the Windows directory to any place your heart desires. So, if i wanted, i could have my Windows directory located in/hda/hax0r stuff goes here/i like bacon/kthxbye.
Stuff like that. Or i could tell the symlink database to hide certain types of files. Or i could construct a full UNIX file system in Windows, complete with/dev,/usr,/bin,/etc, and all that other jazz. Or i could create my own file system (as i kind of did above with the/hda stuff). Maybe the symlink database utility would come with pre-set file systems for the user to choose from. Or something.
I don't know, i just thought that would be a neat idea. I know that symlinks and aliases and all that can kind of (but not completely, in most cases) accomplish the same thing, but a databased file system like what i described would be far more robust and manageable. Just a thought i had.:/
Eh. konspire2b (... such a retarded name) is interesting and all, but i think BitTorrent accomplishes that task quite well. I did a little reading on k2b's Web site a while back, and i really don't understand what makes this any more effective than BT for that sort of application. As i understood it (and maybe i'm totally off-base here; let me know if i am), you're basically receiving an "inbox" full of stuff from a particular "channel" (an inbox full of classical music, an inbox full of anime, an inbox full of ebooks, &c.). Sounds great for "scene" distributors, but i don't really understand the attraction otherwise.:/
Do you mean disabling "Hide extensions for known file types"? If so, you must be doing something else, because i always disable that when i install Windows as well (and i just tested a folder with Oggs and MP3s, and what i said earlier was confirmed).
If you don't mean that, please explain to me what you're talking about.:p
Well, you're right in that not many home users have the "full blown" Office package (unless they pirated it:p). However, a really good portion of OEMs packages (or gives you the option of packaging) Office with your computer. Typically it's only the version with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (if i recall correctly), but it's Office nonetheless.
That said, i've never sent or received an Office document either.
I'll reply to you and the guy below in the same post:
No, you can't do that. At least, not with a "default" file association. Sorting by file type will only sort them by the description Windows gives of the file type. For example, almost every audio file on my system has a type of "Winamp media file". That's what Windows sorts files by "type" with. It does not use the extension of the file, though i really wish it would.
That may be true (regarding the emphasis on the GUI), but having a fully-featured command line is not going to hurt the average Windows user (or Microsoft's pocket, for that matter) in any way.
And, for the record, the command line is not arcane. I know of no other easy way, for example, to go into a directory full of MP3s, Oggs, and WAVs, and move only the Oggs to another folder. In DOS, it would be something like this:
cd \music\downloads
move *.ogg..\ogg
In Explorer, it would involve hunting through and finding all the Vorbis files, and then Ctrl+clicking each one, and then cutting them, and then going up a level, and then pasting them in the ogg folder. As another example of the command line's usefulness, can you imagine pinging a site with a GUI? That would be retarded.
Heh. I think he meant that he was blind to which of the three files he was listening to.
Re:Thank iTunes for the skips etc.
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AAC Put To The Test
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Er? I'm not an "audiophile" or anything, but as far as i knew VBR is the best quality-for-size ratio you can get with MP3. I don't understand "cracking and whooshing". Can you explain?:/
Just ask anybody at my school. They couldn't give a shit less, either way. They act like the school's discouragement towards talking about the blow-jobs they got/gave last weekend, the mishaps they had with their tampons, and the frequency of their masturbation is totally ridiculous.
Aside from that, just talk to somebody on IRC. Most people there don't seem to have any problem whatsoever discussing sex in full and gruesome detail.
I guess i kind of see where you're coming from, though, a little. In some peoples' minds, it's like that. For example, my English teacher thinks war movies are super-fantastic in their realistic depiction of people getting their legs torn to shreds, but she seems to think that sex in movies is unnecessary, and insists that we fast-forward through all scenes involving physical romance.
On the other other hand, NBC and ABC and Fox seem to discourage violence in their programming, while sex is the primary focus of pretty much every piece of trash they run.
Really? When were you 13? Last time i went to the theatre and wanted to see a rated-R movie (which was like last Summer), they told me it was "the law".
Yeah, really. I've never heard of anybody that didn't like LOTR, and it seems like every other guy on the Internet is obsessed with Gollum. The fact that MTV gave an award for him is just kind of like "... Yeah? So?".
Aside from that, there's no issue of "lacking credibility". You're talking about MTV here. Credibility == money.
Hmmm. Maybe that could explain why we have to sleep? Clearly the people of the future are running their Matrices with Microsoft software, so we have to "reboot" every 16 hours.
Got my obligatory relate-the-quality-of-Microsoft-products-to-any-st ory-involving-software post out of the way for the month. I'll be here all week. Bada bing.:/
I'm not one of the people on here that thinks all cases mods are retarded wastes of time (i only hate them when they look really stupid, or didn't provide any sort of challenge), but....
There's no question that that took a LOT of time, and that it achieved the effect that he was going for. But aren't case mods supposed to make the case look... better?
Re:The Most Interesting Quote...
on
Hacking the XBox
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· Score: 1
Heh, you haven't been here for the last 5 years, have you? Come on, i know you have. Have you really not been paying attention at all?:/
This is exactly the same notion behind Palladium and such initiatives that Microsoft intends on pushing. It certainly could really happen, in theory, but only time will tell if that's actually the case. If you want more information, Google for "Microsoft Palladium"; you're no doubt going to find thousands of articles/comments/whatever written by (mostly) Linux guys, which go through the possibilities quite extensively. Actually, you don't even have to leave Slashdot to find that. Just use Slashdot's search engine to search for "Palladium".
You're arguing something completely different. You start out talking about software, and then you move on to hardware. Software support for Vorbis has grown exponentially since its inception, and it's no longer a problem. Anything worth its salt supports Vorbis (even WMP, if you have the DirectShow filters, i think). Winamp, Foobar2000, XMMS, &c.. Not to mention all the CD-ripping programs support it. You can even download a plug-in that allows Windows XP to provide information on Vorbis files in Explorer, just as it does with MP3s and WMAs (artist, title, bitrate, &c.).
But you are right about the lack of hardware support. I have a couple friends that like Vorbis, and they would switch in a second, if only there was hardware support. And that seems to be the major problem. Without hardware support, Vorbis will probably remain a nerd's pipe dream forever. Hopefully, though, they're making progress on some hardware players. I think i read in an Ogg Traffic once that one of the iRiver models was tested to see if it could handle Tremor, and apparently it can, which is good news, i think. Whether or not iRiver is going to take the time to implement it is the problem. Aside from that, nobody seems to interested in Vorbis on the hardware side, except for the makers of those ugly iPod rip-offs.:p
Re:What are the odds that Ogg will replace mp3?
on
Ogg Now An RFC
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· Score: 1
I think "most" is stretching it by a fair bit. I'm not much of a PC gamer at all, but i do know that Neverwinter Nights and Ragnarok Online use MP3 (well, i think RO uses MP2, but either way). The only games i've heard of that use Vorbis are the Unreal-based games, as you said. Vorbis.com usually has news about that kind of stuff, and i'm sure it's used in other games as well.
But yeah, not "most games" by a long shot.
Re:Now if only it had a decent name
on
Ogg Now An RFC
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· Score: 1, Funny
To continue the recently-created Slashdot tradition of replying to posts at random:
Sorry, didn't realise that about the DRM thing. However, when Apple moves this service to PC (They've said that they were going to do that, right? Correct me if i'm totally off-base.), do you suppose it'll stay like that? I don't know... somehow i doubt it. Maybe, though.
Never heard of eMusic before you mentioned it. Time will tell how the DRM thing goes. But my audio format argument still stands, either way.:p
Firstly, to the RIAA, i'd just like to say "TOLD YOU SO!". If they had embraced this from the very beginning, they would have a lot more friends in the world, and they wouldn't have had to invest all that time and money into combatting piracy. To get to the point, though....
As everybody probably agrees, this is a great step in the right direction. This is exactly the kind of system that will bring "MP3s" (i know they're not MP3s, but that's what everybody actually means when they say "digital audio" or whatever) to the masses, legally. However, there are a few problems.
These songs are all AAC. Now, a good deal of the "new" or "lesser-known" formats that Apple has picked up on, they've turned into pretty much ubiquitous formats, for all systems. So, the fact that AAC is largely unsupported by most media players, hardware players, and other audio utilities is only going to be an issue for a little while. Once Apple has propogated AAC all throughout the PC world, it'll be just as popular as Vorbis or MPC. But there are several problems with this. Number one, as everybody knows, it's all DRM. That means that i'm paying just about the same price as a retail CD (or probably a little less, but not much), but i can only play those songs on approved hardware. (I haven't read up on Apple's AAC DRM scheme, but i assume it's much like WMA's.) So that's one problem. Another problem is, AAC is lossy, and not everybody likes it, for that reason and others. If i'm paying for a song, i want it in full, crystal-clear, lossless quality, so that i can encode it into my lossy format of choice, in order to make it compatible with my desired hardware/software. Or, at least, i'd like the option to (i understand that not everybody wants to download a full lossless CD). Of course, if they ever did go lossless, they'd have to get rid of the DRM (or it would be mostly pointless).
But i think, realistically, everybody knows that that's not going to happen. No matter how far the music industry goes with this, the music will ALWAYS be DRM. There is never going to be a service that offers just plain MP3s/Vorbises/FLACs/WAVs/<insert desired audio format>. It's always going to be restricted-access media, because the RIAA can't bear to let their content go freely to the user.
In other words, it's a step in the right direction, but i think it's the last one.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, when i first heard about WinFS (maybe a few months ago), people were saying that all data on the hard drive would pretty much just be stored in a big blob, and that the database would basically index where each "file" in this blob is. Now, from this article (and from the comments i've gathered here) that doesn't seem to be completely accurate, but... eh. Database is a database i guess.
So i thought, if the database is doing the job of indexing these files for the operating system, then theoretically you could have, like, a database of what basically amounts to a whole bunch of symlinks. So you'll have your blob of file(s), your "original" database, and then your "symlink" database (for lack of better terms). I was thinking, if you could have that symlink database, you could pretty much choose where in the file system (as it appeared to you, the user) each file would go, and how it would be represented.
For example, say that you want My Computer to just be / (like on UNIX, basically). You could have a utility that tells your symlink database to set My Computer's "location" as /. That is, it "holds" all your drives and stuff. So then maybe you could set C:\ (your primary hard drive) to something like /hda, and set D:\ (your DVD drive) to something like /hdb. Et cetera.
Say you never messed with the stuff in your Windows directory, and you don't want a bunch of extra junk on the root level of your hard drive. Tell the symlink database to hide /hda/Windows (if we're continuing with the file system i'm kind of creating right now, heh), and that's that. It's basically like a hidden file, i guess, but that's not really the point (hiding folders, that is). The real point is, say that you did mess with your Windows directory, but you didn't want it on the root level of your hard drive, for whatever reason. You could tell your symlink database to "mount" the Windows directory to any place your heart desires. So, if i wanted, i could have my Windows directory located in /hda/hax0r stuff goes here/i like bacon/kthxbye.
Stuff like that. Or i could tell the symlink database to hide certain types of files. Or i could construct a full UNIX file system in Windows, complete with /dev, /usr, /bin, /etc, and all that other jazz. Or i could create my own file system (as i kind of did above with the /hda stuff). Maybe the symlink database utility would come with pre-set file systems for the user to choose from. Or something.
I don't know, i just thought that would be a neat idea. I know that symlinks and aliases and all that can kind of (but not completely, in most cases) accomplish the same thing, but a databased file system like what i described would be far more robust and manageable. Just a thought i had. :/
I doubt this will happen because like Linux, Darwin is controlled by Apple and is centralized with Apple.
Heh. Darwin is controlled and centralised by Apple, just like Linux? Obviously not. Of course, i'm sure that isn't what he intended to say, but eh.
http://www.pcguide.com/intro/fun/bindec-c.html
Eh. konspire2b (... such a retarded name) is interesting and all, but i think BitTorrent accomplishes that task quite well. I did a little reading on k2b's Web site a while back, and i really don't understand what makes this any more effective than BT for that sort of application. As i understood it (and maybe i'm totally off-base here; let me know if i am), you're basically receiving an "inbox" full of stuff from a particular "channel" (an inbox full of classical music, an inbox full of anime, an inbox full of ebooks, &c.). Sounds great for "scene" distributors, but i don't really understand the attraction otherwise. :/
If you don't mean that, please explain to me what you're talking about. :p
That said, i've never sent or received an Office document either.
No, you can't do that. At least, not with a "default" file association. Sorting by file type will only sort them by the description Windows gives of the file type. For example, almost every audio file on my system has a type of "Winamp media file". That's what Windows sorts files by "type" with. It does not use the extension of the file, though i really wish it would.
And, for the record, the command line is not arcane. I know of no other easy way, for example, to go into a directory full of MP3s, Oggs, and WAVs, and move only the Oggs to another folder. In DOS, it would be something like this:
cd \music\downloads ..\ogg
move *.ogg
In Explorer, it would involve hunting through and finding all the Vorbis files, and then Ctrl+clicking each one, and then cutting them, and then going up a level, and then pasting them in the ogg folder. As another example of the command line's usefulness, can you imagine pinging a site with a GUI? That would be retarded.
Heh. I think he meant that he was blind to which of the three files he was listening to.
Er? I'm not an "audiophile" or anything, but as far as i knew VBR is the best quality-for-size ratio you can get with MP3. I don't understand "cracking and whooshing". Can you explain? :/
Just ask anybody at my school. They couldn't give a shit less, either way. They act like the school's discouragement towards talking about the blow-jobs they got/gave last weekend, the mishaps they had with their tampons, and the frequency of their masturbation is totally ridiculous.
Aside from that, just talk to somebody on IRC. Most people there don't seem to have any problem whatsoever discussing sex in full and gruesome detail.
I guess i kind of see where you're coming from, though, a little. In some peoples' minds, it's like that. For example, my English teacher thinks war movies are super-fantastic in their realistic depiction of people getting their legs torn to shreds, but she seems to think that sex in movies is unnecessary, and insists that we fast-forward through all scenes involving physical romance.
On the other other hand, NBC and ABC and Fox seem to discourage violence in their programming, while sex is the primary focus of pretty much every piece of trash they run.
So i guess, in a word, it depends.
Was the ticket lady just misinformed, or...?
Aside from that, there's no issue of "lacking credibility". You're talking about MTV here. Credibility == money.
Haha, wait. Linus has to sign a non-disclosure agreement to look at the code for the operating system he created? You are richer than rich, SCO.
Got my obligatory relate-the-quality-of-Microsoft-products-to-any-st ory-involving-software post out of the way for the month. I'll be here all week. Bada bing. :/
There's no question that that took a LOT of time, and that it achieved the effect that he was going for. But aren't case mods supposed to make the case look... better?
This is exactly the same notion behind Palladium and such initiatives that Microsoft intends on pushing. It certainly could really happen, in theory, but only time will tell if that's actually the case. If you want more information, Google for "Microsoft Palladium"; you're no doubt going to find thousands of articles/comments/whatever written by (mostly) Linux guys, which go through the possibilities quite extensively. Actually, you don't even have to leave Slashdot to find that. Just use Slashdot's search engine to search for "Palladium".
Yes, exactly that. Thanks for posting the link; i just reformatted and needed it anyway. :D
But you are right about the lack of hardware support. I have a couple friends that like Vorbis, and they would switch in a second, if only there was hardware support. And that seems to be the major problem. Without hardware support, Vorbis will probably remain a nerd's pipe dream forever. Hopefully, though, they're making progress on some hardware players. I think i read in an Ogg Traffic once that one of the iRiver models was tested to see if it could handle Tremor, and apparently it can, which is good news, i think. Whether or not iRiver is going to take the time to implement it is the problem. Aside from that, nobody seems to interested in Vorbis on the hardware side, except for the makers of those ugly iPod rip-offs. :p
But yeah, not "most games" by a long shot.
I agree! "Wilford" is a funny name!
Our problem is solved. All we have to do to get Linux to become mainstream is to have the Linux vendors get market share! Why didn't i think of that?
Just playing with you.
Sorry, didn't realise that about the DRM thing. However, when Apple moves this service to PC (They've said that they were going to do that, right? Correct me if i'm totally off-base.), do you suppose it'll stay like that? I don't know... somehow i doubt it. Maybe, though.
Never heard of eMusic before you mentioned it. Time will tell how the DRM thing goes. But my audio format argument still stands, either way. :p
As everybody probably agrees, this is a great step in the right direction. This is exactly the kind of system that will bring "MP3s" (i know they're not MP3s, but that's what everybody actually means when they say "digital audio" or whatever) to the masses, legally. However, there are a few problems.
These songs are all AAC. Now, a good deal of the "new" or "lesser-known" formats that Apple has picked up on, they've turned into pretty much ubiquitous formats, for all systems. So, the fact that AAC is largely unsupported by most media players, hardware players, and other audio utilities is only going to be an issue for a little while. Once Apple has propogated AAC all throughout the PC world, it'll be just as popular as Vorbis or MPC. But there are several problems with this. Number one, as everybody knows, it's all DRM. That means that i'm paying just about the same price as a retail CD (or probably a little less, but not much), but i can only play those songs on approved hardware. (I haven't read up on Apple's AAC DRM scheme, but i assume it's much like WMA's.) So that's one problem. Another problem is, AAC is lossy, and not everybody likes it, for that reason and others. If i'm paying for a song, i want it in full, crystal-clear, lossless quality, so that i can encode it into my lossy format of choice, in order to make it compatible with my desired hardware/software. Or, at least, i'd like the option to (i understand that not everybody wants to download a full lossless CD). Of course, if they ever did go lossless, they'd have to get rid of the DRM (or it would be mostly pointless).
But i think, realistically, everybody knows that that's not going to happen. No matter how far the music industry goes with this, the music will ALWAYS be DRM. There is never going to be a service that offers just plain MP3s/Vorbises/FLACs/WAVs/<insert desired audio format>. It's always going to be restricted-access media, because the RIAA can't bear to let their content go freely to the user.
In other words, it's a step in the right direction, but i think it's the last one.
I was referring to the fact that they used the illegally-obtained Xbox SDK to port it. That makes it illegal, doesn't it? :/