Here’s an article on the new intelligent filesystem, WinFS, slated to appear in the next version of Windows. My favorite quote:
“From the user’s standpoint, items degrade the files’ physical storage location to the point of insignificance. Instead, Windows organizes the data according to content in virtual folders. In searching for these data, user-based criteria such as “All vacation pics of the last two years” replace details such as file format, author and storage location.”
So instead of depending on the user to intelligently catalog the pictures using folders (i.e. “My Documents\My Pictures\{2002, 2003, etc}”), it requires the user to catagorize the pictures using some other undefined means. I’m all for progress but it ain’t hard to catagorize pictures using folders now. Instead I think this is a facility that belongs at the application layer where an application will know a lot more about the format and datatypes of the files. Take email - Outlook does a great job at indexing and allowing one to search through years of emails to find that email from some distant relative. Leaving it to the OS will just slow down the whole process and require more powerful hardware.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Spelling Police // Feb 4, 2004 at 2:43 am
Not one, but two words are misspelled. Shame on you.
2 gthistle // Feb 5, 2004 at 11:04 pm
(That wasn’t me. Who was that?)
Are there stated advantages to the fuzzier classification? Trained librarians and archivists can’t agree on how to catalogue information for easily retrievable storage; how can the Microsoft Bob-type user manage? Or does MS expect that the average user loses everything due to a total system crash every two years? Oh, wait, MS is assuming that all data on their filesystem will be created by MS or a partner, lockable via DRM, and totally legible to their search functionality. Piffle.
3 mike // Feb 6, 2004 at 1:50 pm
I’m hoping they provide the infrastructure and allow applications to take advantage of metadata storage and queries as an OS-provided service. If you’ll pardon the somewhat personal nature of the analogy, no one wants Oracle to define the database tables an application must use but they’d love it if Oracle provided an empty database that the app could use to create its own tables.