August 01, 2005
Vindication for Ivory-Billed Woodpecker
It was hard for me to feel the same frisson about the rediscovery of a thought-to-be-extinct woodpecker in Arkansas (bottom bird in the photo) when I learned there was already a weird-looking woodpecker thriving there (top bird in the photo).
It has white feathers only at the back of its wings!!
It has red feathers on top!!
And to think we thought it was gone!
So?
Usually I'm the only person in the room excited about stuff like this, but somehow this one leaves me lukewarm.
I guess I'm not a birdman.
Why aren't people more interested in stuff like this?
Windows Vista
From a Goldman Sachs research report, "A first look at Windows Vista:"
The file management capabilities of Windows Vista have also been enhanced. Currently, the file structure in Windows is fairly rigid and linear in its path in terms of the hierarchical structure. Basically the path to a file follows a straight linear path from top level directory to subdirectories and then to the file itself. This is a very "physical" way of looking for files. Windows Vista is taking a more "logical or practical" approach, where files can be searched by the associated metadata attached to the file instead of just the file name. This is the concept of "virtual views," where the user can organize and search by keyword, author, file category, etc. Most files today already come with metadata attached. In Windows Vista, the user can more easily make modifications to the metadata, and this can even be done graphically. In the file search window, the files can be grouped into different categories. When the user drags a file into another category, the attributes of that category are automatically added to the file. The WinFS capabilities that were excluded from the initial release of Vista will likely follow in several years, although there are still a number of file management improvement included in this upcoming release of Vista.
Even though I like the idea of tagging data with keywords and using that metaphor to find stuff, I'm reasonably confident that the facts will reveal that they've screwed it up in Vista, somehow.
[Rereading that paragraph from the report, I can see the seeds of destruction are already present:
When the user drags a file into another category, the attributes of that category are automatically added to the file...
ugh.]
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