Talk:Semantic desktop

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I wonder why BeOS (and Haiku) isn't cited there, while WinFS is, which doesn't even exist unlike BFS. Lots of things could be learnt from it... -- Mmu man (talk) 17:14, 21 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I, 66.92.168.49, agree wholeheartedly with the above. I feel that there is a Great Collective Amnesia in computer science for all of the amazing technologies that have been crushed by Microsoft's scummy business practices and iron hegemony of Unix. These innovations range from the database filesystem of BeOS to the Transputer. This happens so much that I frequently read news articles presenting very old ideas as a bold new breakthrough, therefore I feel it is very important to link back to these old ideas so that they are not forgotten. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.92.168.49 (talk) 00:23, 25 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The line "Modern operating systems such as BeOS..." seems misleading, though. As far as I know BeOS was discontinued in 2001, nearly 10 years ago. I'm going to change it to "Some operating systems...". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.95.156.222 (talk) 03:26, 8 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

So someone put me on to this topic, and it seems there isn't a lot of criticism about it. I like the idea of being able to structure your data with more than just a single tree full of file types. I'm worried about a rather obvious flaw that presents it self. How can the Semantic Desktop ever be fully integrated with the Semantic Web when one is totally personal and the other is extremely public?

The standardisation efforts talked about here also worry me. Though I know it's not attempting to control the implementations and applications, I'm worried about this side effect creeping in.

To me the only advantage of the Semantic Desktop over a properly organised classic desktop is the flexibility with which you can structure the storage and access of your files to suit your own personality and mental thought processes. These can vary drastically from culture to culture and even person to person within the one culture. Standardisation of any form, then surely chips away at these advantages. If the software can't even function on such a platform without standardisation then I think we are pushing for something that will chew a lot of resources, may benefit many depending on who decides on how it's implemented, but is likely to alienate and disadvantage a significant proportion of the population.

This project seems to be an attempt to implement an unattainable ideal, though I'm sure plenty of good will spin off from it along the way. I'd be interested to see some real life test cases with reactions from an unsuspecting cross section of the community before I'm convinced that people need or want such a desktop. Or if it's indeed worth it if the additional costs and hurdles start to grow exponentially. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.161.9.32 (talk) 09:30, 25 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]