WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else
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Filed under: we need a tag cloud to attack
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@levicki Technically, it isn't too hard to do, and some local system search tools get close, such as Spotlight on macOS. Better yet, you can do deep indexing of the files so users can look for documents that contain phrases and so on. That's better because most users don't really tag things all that often even when provided with easy tools to do so and uncontrolled tagging vocabularies are a morass of uselessness for search. (If every tag is only ever really used once, they're not helping!)
Controlled vocabularies are better for search, and terrible for getting stuff annotated because the terms often don't match well. The needs of the content creators and the content consumers are poorly aligned here. (The best solution I've seen has been the tagging system on Stack Overflow, which is semi-controlled and relies on a lot of human intervention and autistic obsessiveness. Horrid, but much better than the alternatives. Also, it won't work for desktop files.)
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@levicki said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
tags would allow you to group stuff which can't be organized in a tree hieararchy.
Such as binary dependencies, naturally.
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@levicki said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
why do you think they would not?
experience with document management systems, users don't take a second to tag/mark their documents. They hardly take a second to fill the required things.
and it's not only documents ... same things apply to ticket/bug trackers.
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I wish my car's MP3 player supported tags beyond just displaying the current song's information. Like if it built up the media database from ID3 tags rather than just the folder structure.
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@dkf said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
autistic obsessiveness
I think it's kind of shocking how many things in the modern world rely on this, for discovery if not for continued use.
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@Luhmann said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@levicki said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
why do you think they would not?
experience with document management systems, users don't take a second to tag/mark their documents. They hardly take a second to fill the required things.
and it's not only documents ... same things apply to ticket/bug trackers.I concur. I used to work at Evernote and their doc organization kind of forced you to use tags because they only had one level of folders (tho you could group folders together - but that group could only contain folders). Most users (it seemed) did not use tags and constantly requested deeper folder hierarchies. (Even I didn't (and still don't) use tags to their full extent. And I don't use them at all in my email program that does support them also) The more experienced people (in the forums) would try to help people with good ways to use tags...
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@dcon my wife used to use Evernote a lot. I could never find anything in there.
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@levicki said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@anonymous234 said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
I mean I agree that filesystems kinda suck, but do you think people would use tags in any helpful way that names don't already provide?
Maybe better question is -- why do you think they would not?
25+ years of experience.
When naming files, 99% of people simply use whatever seems to make sense at that moment, with little or no thought of consistency or future use. And you eventually end up with thousands of haphazardly named files scattered across hundreds of haphazardly named folders.
There is nothing that will magically make tags any different.
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@levicki said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@boomzilla said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@dcon my wife used to use Evernote a lot. I could never find anything in there.
Probably because she wasn't tagging things?
Case in point.
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@levicki said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
the only possible organization is a tree
False. But you knew that already.
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@levicki said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@anonymous234 said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
I mean I agree that filesystems kinda suck, but do you think people would use tags in any helpful way that names don't already provide?
Maybe better question is -- why do you think they would not?
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@El_Heffe my students regularly turn on files with the default name (think "new file", "new file (2)", etc). So I'm right there with you. Note that these are also parts of their class notes, so when they're looking for them they have to dig through a mound of similar files, opening them at random until they get the right one.
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@levicki said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
due to directory size limit
You mean the limit that only applied to the root directory of FAT filesystems? And on Windows 95 (due to LFN support) was expanded to practical irrelevancy? That directory size limit?
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@levicki said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
What other organizations are possible besides tree?
https://www.sharecourse.net/sharecourse/upload/course/55/b6f7fa36fa937c65ee989e616dbe0092.pdf
Here you go. That's just one example I searched. I'm sure such an advanced and experienced assembly-language guru such as yourself can imagine others.
@levicki said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
And please give examples on actual filesystems people use (hint: not Linux).
You already gave an example:
@levicki said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
tags
But I'll do you one better: Clouds.
@levicki said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
And don't say "you can keep flat hierarchy" because you can't due to directory size limit.
Alright I won't tell the lie about ancient history, but even back when such a silly statement might apply said limit was merely an implementation detail easily solvable by widening the table entry size. But you knew that already.
@levicki said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
And forget symlinks because they have no GUI.
Nope, no GUI whatsoever.
It just doesn't exist and in fact can't exist. Nosirree.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@levicki said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Probably because she wasn't tagging things?
Case in point.
Filed under: what are you talking about?
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@Zecc said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@levicki said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Probably because she wasn't tagging things?
Case in point.
Filed under: what are you talking about?
Systems are useless if the user doesn't use them.
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@Tsaukpaetra Just to be perfectly clear, I was taking a swype at how we barely ever used the forums tags in a meaningful way.
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@Zecc said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
forums tags
probably because there is no tag cloud to attack
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Nope, no GUI whatsoever.
Which shell extension did you install or enable to get that context menu item? It's not there by default.
ObTopicSpur: There's a very limited set of file types where I would personally like to use tags in addition to folders when organizing things in the file system. Images, for example, have multiple aspects where tagging would both work well and be useful at the file system level. Compare this to music files, which have all sorts of tags I could use in my music player but I usually dig down through Artist/Album/Song, which is exactly how they're organized outside of the music player.
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@Parody said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Nope, no GUI whatsoever.
Which shell extension did you install or enable to get that context menu item? It's not there by default.
Which kernel module or add-on did you install to get a filesystem that uses no folders? It's not there by default either.
Edit: and to be clear I was satirizing the idea that it's impossible to make a GUI for links, symbolic or otherwise.
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This post is deleted!
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@Parody in that case, it's this:
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@Parody said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Nope, no GUI whatsoever.
Which shell extension did you install or enable to get that context menu item? It's not there by default.
Which kernel module or add-on did you install to get a filesystem that uses no folders? It's not there by default either.
Edit: and to be clear I was satirizing the idea that it's impossible to make a GUI for links, symbolic or otherwise.
I don't think even @levicki was saying it's impossible (it's obviously possible since you can do it on the command line), just that it's not there by default in the GUI and isn't an expected way for folks to go around organizing things.
Also, I'd actually like to know which extension it is. :)
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@Parody said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
it's not there by default in the GUI and isn't an expected way for folks to go around organizing things.
Actually, it's arguably implementable using hard links, a tags-based system.
You'd have the original file be a guid, then, each tag would be a folder, and to tag a file a hard link would be created in each tag-folder, optionally with a different name. For maximum confusion, related tags can be hard linked into other tag folders!
Tara! I've produced a viable design spec for a filesystem that isn't based around folders but instead tags!
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@Tsaukpaetra now if only the kernel didn't require administrator access to fuck around with links I might even sketch a working implementation...
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Oh fuck are we having the "solve filesystem problems that aren't actual problems" conversation again?!
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@loopback0 said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Oh fuck are we having the "solve filesystem problems that aren't actual problems" conversation again?!
Filed under: It was inevitable
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@TwelveBaud To be fair, there might be a very high hard limit now on NTFS (if any), but you will see performance degradation when folders contain more than 10 000 filesystem objects. I can't say whether that's due to Explorer / the Windows API fetching too much information for each object, or just a lack of optimization in NTFS. However, it's sure there so expect each operation in that folder (list folder contents, get file from folder by path) to take way longer than usual.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@Parody said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Nope, no GUI whatsoever.
Which shell extension did you install or enable to get that context menu item? It's not there by default.
Which kernel module or add-on did you install to get a filesystem that uses no folders? It's not there by default either.
And yet you just said that there’s other options than organizing things in trees/folders, so you’re just disputing yourself?
Or was that a statement in the sense of “of course you could install your own system”?
Because users that don’t change the name from “default document.doc” aren’t exactly likely to do that.
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@loopback0 said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Oh fuck are we having the "solve filesystem problems that aren't actual problems" conversation again?!
Quick, someone call Blakey!
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@JBert same is true on Linux filesystems. (Well, at least the ones installed on our systems, maybe there’s better ones)
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@topspin said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
And yet you just said that there’s other options than organizing things in trees/folders, so you’re just disputing yourself?
No, that was my Alt, pay attention.
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@levicki said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
I was expecting you to show me an implemented and widely available organization method which is different from the tree in an OS used by majority of population for everyday work.
Why? It's clear there has never been sufficient need for such a system to ever become such. Why should I prove a negative?
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@levicki said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
there is no effort to create one
And why do you think that is?
Also, I do believe there's a program named Everything (original, I know) that essentially fulfills your criteria. You should try it.
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@levicki said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@boomzilla said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@dcon my wife used to use Evernote a lot. I could never find anything in there.
Probably because she wasn't tagging things?
Possibly. Probably didn't know how to do that in their interface. I remember being furiously frustrated at not being able to do stuff in there. Like, whatever mental model they were using to organize stuff either was completely retarded or just was unobvious enough to me that I couldn't figure it out.
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@loopback0 said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Oh fuck are we having the "solve filesystem problems that aren't actual problems" conversation again?!
I once read about how someone read about someone else talking about putting nulls and newlines into files.
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@topspin said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@loopback0 said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Oh fuck are we having the "solve filesystem problems that aren't actual problems" conversation again?!
Quick, someone call Blakey!
THAT WAS THE GUY!
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@levicki said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
As far as I am know there are no systems which offer this functionality
Sounds like a system where nobody could share knowledge better than that
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@Tsaukpaetra now if only the kernel didn't require administrator access to fuck around with links I might even sketch a working implementation...
In Win10 (Creator's Update + ), you don't. But you do need to enable Developer Mode. (Which, for me, is auto-done since I install Visual Studio)
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@dcon said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@Tsaukpaetra now if only the kernel didn't require administrator access to fuck around with links I might even sketch a working implementation...
In Win10 (Creator's Update + ), you don't. But you do need to enable Developer Mode. (Which, for me, is auto-done since I install Visual Studio)
What the fuck is “Developer Mode”?
There are two type of symbolic links: Hard and soft. Soft symbolic links work similarly to a standard shortcut.
Huh? A symbolic link is a soft link in my book.
Note that Windows doesn’t actually use the terms “hard link” and “soft link”. Instead, it uses the terms “hard link” and “symbolic link”. In the Windows documentation, a “symbolic link” is the same thing as a “soft link”.
And so does the man page of
ln(1)
.**This looks like it should evaluate to
0
to me.
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@topspin said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
What the fuck is “Developer Mode”?
I'm on linux right now, so I can't screen shot it - in Settings, under "Update & Security", there's the "For Developers" section.
[] Microsoft Store apps
[] Sideload apps
[] Developer modeHuh. On my win system here with VS2019, looks like it only set Sideload mode. I know my home system is set at Dev mode...
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@dcon said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
I'm on linux right now, so I can't screen shot it - in Settings, under "Update & Security", there's the "For Developers" section.
Come on, it took me less than two seconds to search and find an image on the internet. It took me less time than to type this first sentence.
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@Zecc said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Come on, it took me less than two seconds to search and find an image on the internet.
Plus, I type pretty quick.
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@dcon I can type Ctrl+K "!img windows developer mode" Alt+Enter pretty quick too.
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@dcon said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Can't argument against this though.
Or I could, but :kne—
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@Zecc what does app signing have to do with symlinks?!
Wait, maybe it’s better if I don’t know.
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@topspin There's actually a reasonable explanation for that one: they're both things which might be useful for developers, who unlike most users, ought to know better what's happening inside the magical electric box.
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@topspin said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@Zecc what does app signing have to do with symlinks?!
Wait, maybe it’s better if I don’t know.
"and use advanced development features"
Yeah, a bit weird to combine those 2 things... Seems it would have been better to make adv-dev a sub-checkbox of the dev-mode radio button.
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@levicki said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
TIL symlinks are "advanced developer features".
Users can't name things. It follows they can't link things symbolically either.