Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gaelan | Hacker News Reader

You know, this is a pretty apt analogy. Vista (apparently) was considered terrible primarily because it ripped off the band-aid and made a bunch of inconvenient but important-for-security-in-the-long-term changes. [0]

[0]: https://twitter.com/swiftonsecurity/status/85185740489147187...

View on HN

Well, that, plus the fact that it was resource-heavy. This was compounded by the fact that a lot of hardware was sold as being 'Vista-ready' while in reality being incapable of running the overly-fancy graphics-heavy 'glass' shell. It also had a number of performance problems (e.g. slow file copy) which only got sorted out in Windows 7. Oh, let's not forget the fact that Vista was supposed to be Longhorn, the OS of the future with a database file system and all sorts of fancy stuff which was either dropped due to performance problems or never left the lab in the first place.

> Oh, let's not forget the fact that Vista was supposed to be Longhorn, the OS of the future with a database file system

This sounded interesting when I first heard about it, long before Vista came out. Now when I see it I wonder what they were trying to do. A file system is a database, with a well understood user API. So what were they going to add? Tagging? Application level views of the system? None of t hat seems like something that would require anything more than an extension that handled additional metadata.

A file system is a database, with a well understood user API.

Yes, a terrible API which works poorly for most home use cases.

You probably have music on your computer. In your hierarchical filesystem, do you organize it by Genre/Artist/Album or Artist/Album? Do music videos live in the same Artist directory or in a separate "video" folder?

Chances are you don't know/care because you're using an app like iTunes that builds a custom database on top of the filesystem. And something like Photos that reinvents a totally different custom database. And more database reinventions for email, ebooks, games, karaoke files, voice memos, calendar appointments, etc... all proprietary file formats without published APIs.

Data doesn't want to be organized in a single static hierarchy.

I take it you missed the part where I said " None of t hat seems like something that would require anything more than an extension that handled additional metadata"? I'm not saying don't add additional data that can be fast indexed and trackable, I'm just not sure why it requires a rewrite from the ground up and isn't additional data that is tracked tacked onto the file metadata. I mean, what is that not going to be able to support that just the new metadata would? The difference is whether you also have a hierarchical location stored or not.

The only thing that comes to mind is ACL tracking and it getting a bit complex from different access types, but I can think of a few options to work with that already.

So you want to take existing filesystem technology, and build additional indexing and query capabilities so that it can handle nonhierarchical data? Sounds like a great idea. Let's call it "Longhorn".

I think you mean WinFS. Longhorn is a whole release codename, which encompassed many new features.

Given that a beta WinFS eventually was made available as a separate download years after even it's beta was slated to be released[1], I suspect they did what I outlined above - eventually. Otherwise, I'm not sure why a bolt on component to the system would require so long and miss deadlines like it did.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS#Development

"Data doesn't want to be organized in a single static hierarchy."

Data has no feelings.

In the case of file system, it makes perfect sense to be stored in a single static hierarchy because that perfectly reflects the concept of a paper file in a filing cabinet, in a little binder.

Even a relational database system that lets you query tables for data based on set ordering has a single method of storing the data on disk - that's a clustered index. You can't get away from having that, despite being able to support additional nonclustered indexes. In that case, the table and its rows really is organised in a static hierarchy too.

As it stands, NTFS has plenty of features that lets you attach a secondary data stream to a file anyway, and all manner of metadata. The Windows Internals book on NTFS is very informative on this.

These features don't exist on APFS though, as it's not as good despite being brand new, it seems!

Lots of file systems at the time were hierarchical databases, but the file-system Microsoft was working on was to be more a hybrid with the ability to find files based on specific criteria right away, rather than having a search process walk the tree looking for something.

The point of a database is probably to index via arbitrary columns, allowing for fast lookups and filters of files. The current model is to find something you more or less have to walk the directory tree.

I remember friends bitching about Vista's UAC prompts but I never really had an issue with it. I suspect that was because their main experience was with Windows XP, which pretty much did everything with admin rights.

I think I was the only person I know who actually liked Vista, mainly because of these. I was on the fence about installing Catalina but this blog post paradoxically convinced me to do so.

>You know, this is a pretty apt analogy.

Disagree wholeheartedly. It definitely has "hints" of Vista band-aid rips in the same way that shit like La Croix has "hints" of flavor but Vista was one of the worst OS releases I ever had the pleasure of being part of, only behind Windows ME. It took Vista a really long time to be a stable, fully-usable OS and, while I'm glad for the steps they took with it, their execution was terrible.

On top of that, this is completely due to the user.

> On top of that, this is completely due to the user.

What? All the user did was install Catalina and leave it alone for a few hours. How is this all "due to the user"?

Because, in this particular case, the user was using software (Alfred 3) that he knew wasn't going to work right on Catalina prior to upgrading it. Newer versions of Alfred exist that support the newer permissions model in Catalina. He knew that version wasn't fully compatible with Catalina and chose to install it anyways. A normal user isn't going to get that.

Uh, okay. Now explain all the other software requesting permissions:

- Acorn

- HazelHelper

- Plex Media Server

- Keyboard Maestro

- Parallels Access

- Bartender 3

- Arq Agent

- Nextcloud

- Tweetbot

- 1Password

- Spark

- Drafts

- OmniFocus

- Dash

- Bear

- iCloud

If you have dozens of apps asking for permission, then you need to have a better system of displaying those requests than one off popups/notifications.

This is not on the user. Don't victim blame. This is what any other person upgrading would see, maybe not to the same extent but I'm not sure it'd be that far off.

Except that's not true at all unless every single one of these is an old version of the software that hasn't been updated since High Sierra. Any app that was developed using the sandboxing paradigm from High Sierra (and nearly every app in that list has been updated to support this) would not need to ask for all those permissions.

This would not be common for the vast majority of users and it's only caused by someone explicitly ignoring warnings and notices. It may be a little more common for power users but the average user may get 1 or 2 of those prompts and nothing more. The OP is only in the situation they're in because they either upgraded the OS without updating the individual apps or they purposely ignored a prior prompt to give access.

Did you actually look at the article you're replying to?

I literally took the screenshot that was posted and enumerated every application asking for permissions. If it happened to them, it'll happen to many, many users. Especially if those apps are updating outside of MAS.

>every application asking for permissions

Only every outdated application asking for permissions. The author of that post already explained why he was getting so many of those prompts. He admitted that it probably wasn't reflective of what the typical install will look like specifically because he was purposely using older versions of software.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com