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I seem to recall reading somewhere that one of the reasons Vista was a "bad" os, was that it originally had much higher more optimistic ambitions to build a sql
by swalsh 11y ago
I seem to recall reading somewhere that one of the reasons Vista was a "bad" os, was that it originally had much higher more optimistic ambitions to build a sql like file system (i suppose similar to this). It however had issues, and a decision to scrap it delayed the vista project, and reduced the scope of "cool" things it was supposed to deliver.
- teraflop 11y agoYep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS
- jandrese 11y agoAn interesting chart appears on the Wiki explaining how Microsoft keeps tilting at this windmill and has two decades of cancelled or scaled back products to show for it. I suspect there is an inherent scaling problem with the approach. While it demos well and can be useful in a lab setting, the full scale version ends up being so complex that mere mortals aren't able to comprehend it and end up just losing their files constantly in the morass of schemas and structured accesses. The talk on the wiki about being able to write an editor that can handle any file type smells of pure insanity to me. An application that can present a usable editing interface for any filetype would be so bloated that it's almost inconceivable to think about a single company writing it. Can you imagine the kind of application that has an interface for manipulating photos, writing reports, tabulating data, programming (all languages), doing CAD, editing textures, composing music, etc...?
- dTal 11y agoI can imagine such a thing; it's called a programming language. A GUI application, you say? Well then you're just asking for a graphical programming language, and as they say, now you have two problems... I think the more general-purpose a tool is, the more intelligence and/or general knowledge is needed to wield it: "Here's a widget thromper. You push the big green button and it thromps the widgets." vs "Here's a car. It will get you from virtually anywhere to anywhere else. Don't kill anyone." vs "Here's a general purpose computer. Knock yourself out."
- jandrese 11y agoOk, we need you to work on the music for this TV show. Your first job will of course be to build your composition suite from scratch so you can access our incredibly complicated database oriented file storage system.
- dTal 11y agoIf you're competent with your language, you don't always need to build a special purpose tool with it to do work - you can use it directly. You picked an example where a) libraries are lacking (high level audio manipulation) and b) good special purpose tools exist, but it's entirely possible to find tasks for which these things aren't true. The whole idea of shell scripts as a basic tool, or IPython/Jupyter as a reasonable interface to a variety of tasks, is based on this concept. In my last "proper" job, I wrote a lot of code, and the vast majority was one-off; virtually none of it ended up in what you might call an "application".
- rincebrain 11y agoThe thing you're thinking of was indeed supposed to be in Vista, then post-Vista, and then scrapped all together - WinFS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS
- marcosdumay 11y agoIt was promised for Cairo (that become win95), under the name of Object File System. Different name, exact same promises.