Slashdot Mirror
Next Windows to Have New Filesystem
ocipio writes: "Microsoft is currently planning a new filesystem. Its planned that the new filesystem will make searches easier, faster, and more reliable. Windows will also be less likely to break, and easier to fix when it does. The new technology will cause practically all Microsoft products to be rewritten to take advantage of it. Called Object File System, OFS will be found in the next major Windows release, codenamed Longhorn. More information can be found here at CNET."
Just found this out last night: If you're in Windows 98 and you notice Explorer (the file browser, not the web browser) is crawling on you, remove everything from your My Documents folder to another! Instant (15 minutes later) speedup! Whee!
[o]_O
Refreshing to see an MS news item that has no bashing in it what-so-ever. How about we keep the discussion mature, also?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Yes, I'm cynical. But really, why shouldn't I?
:Peter
that they can simply take FFS and Soft Updates and embed it in Windows, and call it OFS.
Now that would be a substantial improvement.
Dictionary.com
4 entries found for longhorn.
Pronunciation Key (lônghôrn, lng-)n.
1) Any of a breed of cattle with long horns, formerly bred in great numbers in the southwest United States.
2) A variety of Cheddar cheese molded into a long cylinder.
Cheese wins it for me!
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
I hope this doesn't cause as many problems as the last feature they added.
Apparently MS wants to use SQL Server as the basis for their new filesystem. This is not a new idea (as the article mentions), but the first time I think it will be deployed on such a large scale
wait till you get incoming requesets from MS servers "SELECT * FROM ju4r3z" Uh oh, they found you out!
I thought I'd read at some point that they were going to make their filesystem based on sql server to improve performance and searching.
This is probably in response to open source software people finally
figuring out most of (the undocumented) NTFS. They don't want Linux,
*BSD, etc. to be able to read and write their filesystem easily, as that
would make it easier for people to dual-boot and/or migrate away from
Microsoft operating systems.
Note the historical sidebar on the article. It traces the on-again, off-again history of OFS. MS has been playing with it for over half a decade (!), and doesn't yet have anything to show for it. They've backpedalled and caught up again so many times that I think this article can be safely labelled as speculation.
In other words, it sounds cool. I'll believe it when I see it. (and only at that point judge whether it really makes Windows less likely to break)
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
So they are incorporating the work of Hans Reiser~!
Great idea MS! Perhaps slip in some DRM, maybe some NSA features as long as they are continuing to appropiate everyone else's ideas.
When we search the filesystem, get one result and the machine BSODs, do we get to call it MicroWhacking?
--
http://www.trackspace.com
They want to get their Digital Rights Management Software to infest every aspect of their OS as possible.
Do you honestly believe that the benifit of a faster search is enough incentive to rewrite such a major part of the OS?
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
Microsoft is actually "innovating" now... when will Linux start? OK, M$ is copying Be, but still, as a diehard Linux fan for a long time, I've been disappointed by the lack of new ideas in the Linux world. BeOS, Mac OS X (NeXT), and now Windows are working new ideas into their OS. When will Linux start?
To be honest, NTFS seems to be a tip-top file system to me. The only thing I can imgaine it missing is hardcore digital rights management (cant wait).
What a clever way to force DRM down every consumers throat: break every single windows program created prior to OFS.
fuckers.
(2,3-Benzopyrrole)
... my fat32 and NTFS seem to work okay... I dont think my concerns with microsoft are a result of their filesystems... this isnt a microsoft bash, I just think they would do better to focus their efforts elsewhere...
It looks like BeFS with XML descriptions instead of MIME types. I think.
[o]_O
You mean Microsoft finally figured out that NFS was the way to go? Oh wait, we can't call it NFS... A,B,C,D..N,O! We'll call it OFS!
*snort*
This is just because people finally figured out their so-secret NTFS.
Zaphod B
When duplication is outlawed, only outlaws will have
OFS? Why not just call it BFS?
As an added bonus, entertainment pack 1 will include binaries required for recreational activities such as "OFS whacking". When asked to comment, Microsoft Spokesman v3.0 stated that 'whacking' without EP1 would invalidate the EULA and could result in system instability, a general sense of self-worthlessness, and pocket lint.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
From the article:
Replacing its antiquated file system with modern database technology...
Now, if you were going to base a file system on a DB, what would you use? An Object-Oriented DB? Where organization is key (which you want for a file system), or a Relational DB for speed (which is why they are claiming to switch)?
I'm sure they are going to make a custom system, yes, but wouldn't it have to be based on one of the two major DB designs?
For the record, I'm no DB Admin, but, as I understand it, relational is the choice of DB for almost all projects for its sheer speed, OO is only good for academic reasons to show off organization...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
The GNOME project has an excellent overview of some of the issues with metatata in general.
Of course, this will mean a whole new found of application incompatibilities on Windows and a whole new round of reverse engineering to determine the filesystem and metadata layout.
"For years, Microsoft has sold two operating systems: a consumer version based on the 20-year-old technology DOS, and a corporate version based on the company's newer, built-from-scratch Windows NT kernel"
Don't they mean the "ripped-off-from-VMS Windows NT kernel"?
... Embrace-and-extend?
E3fs? Reiserfs?
Windows: Everything is an object
I guess it all comes down to whether they can make the surrounding environment rich enough that people can do everything they can do with objects as easily as they can with files (without writing a program).
Wow... This "database filesystem" sounds awfully familliar! Perhaps they heard of a company called Be, Inc? I guess at Microsoft, "Freedom to Innovate"="Freedom to Copy"
"Will we have two parallel tracks in the market at once? Not desirable. There are a lot of reasons why that was really a pain in the neck for everybody, and I hope we can avoid that here," Ballmer said. "But it's conceivable that we will wind up with something that will be put on a dual track."
Translation: No, but yes.
Way to go, Steve! Incomprehensible drivel is at the core of Microsoft's strategy, and it looks like you've got it down pat.
NTFS was supposed to keep the OS from ever corrupting your files, but it was flawed in a most obvious way.
It didn't check that its journal was correct. So, if your journal gets corrupted, it actually destroys your data.
Let me guess, this new file system will also have "security measures" that keep other operating systems (like Linux) from reading its partitions...
who could possibly want to use [...] a file system that might not only crash the OS, but corrupt all your files in the process?
From the sound of it, quite a few people.
It seems that the idea is not new: IFS :)
. But Larry is only second to Bill when it comes to ruling the world
É que os desafinados também têm um coração
I wonder how much code there will be in the software handling this file system which reports back to M$ what your browsing habits are, or maybe there will be measures to prevent you making back up copies of copyrighted materials.
"Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before you reach 18" Einstein
There's an older slashdot article with more info about Longhorn here.
/. ads really annoying? I think so.....
Aren't the new
Windows will also be less likely to break, and easier to fix when it does.
Doesn't MS say this about all the new versions of thier products ? Not that Windows hasn't improved, it certainly has, but they also never seem to live up to the hype.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power - Benito Mussoli
From what I understand, Veritas essentially rewrote NTFS version 5 (shipped with win2000 and winXP) and
integrated built-in volume management (dynamic disks) with some abstract layer to maintain the clunky drive letter schemes.
I dont' really see the reasoning by mentioning that all Windows applications will require a rewrite; they only need to abstract the Win32::File APIs to handle the internal OFS changes... the changes that they document appear to do essentially what the Indexing services do for win2000 and winXP now. I assume it is just extra metadata strings that they associate with each file inode.
It seems a bit arrogant of MS to think they can improve (or trash and rewrite) what is essentially Veritas' domain, file systems. But then again, we're talking about MS...
Big brother is watching!
It sounds tremendously like Microsoft is trying to emulate features already found in the Be file system, with respect to file metadata.
I don't see how this can be called a solution for reliability. Oh, I see, it will make searches more reliable... I am not sure how you can even make that statement? What is a reliable search? It will definately make backups more dificult. And, given the reliability of Exchange and the system registry, I'm not to sure I want all my files in any database, much less Microsoft's... I can only think MicroSoft wanted to boost sales of SQL Server, and this will do that. I wonder if you will then need a seperate SQL CAL to access content for what was once a fileserver?
How about some new slogans for MCSE's:
Beware the flat file!
Flat files are the cockroaches of the OS!
I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress -J Adams
Everyone would have to buy new versions of all their office software! Isn't that handy for MS?
I'll pass. I may be running (pre-installed) XP on my Dell but I'm still using Office 97. Why?
BECAUSE IT WORKS JUST FINE.
I don't need to "upgrade" to something even more bloated and bug ridden.
How long do ./ readers think it will be until the Linux kernel and/or Samba will be able to read OFS shares?
occurs 20 times in the article. As in:
But the benefits, if they succeed, will be huge.
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
ocipio writes: "Microsoft is currently planning a new filesystem. Its planned that the new filesystem will make searches easier, faster, and more reliable. Windows will also be less likely to break, and easier to fix when it does."
Wow, how on earth did you manage to type all that with a sraight face??
I remember MS talking about this years ago, even before NT came out. They were calling it Cairo back then.
In the end, IIRC, the UI elements of the Cairo project were recycled into the Windows 95 shell and the Object File System concept disappeared entirely... until now, it seems.
Is no-one else disturbed at the short memories in the industry? I was at the launch of Visual Studio.NET in Ireland a few weeks back and there was a Microsoft goon waving a Tablet PC around his head like it was some completely new thing. I mentioned the Go Corp/ Windows for Pen Computing FUD from the early '90s to the guys I was there with and was met with blank stares.
Windows? break?
To rid itself completely of the much-maligned 'Blue Screen of Death', and to drastically increase loading and rebooting times, Microsoft has teamed up with known software developers Etch-A-Sketch, to create a lightweight, affordable PDA expected to quickly gain dominance amongst the user groups it's difficulty is catering to: toddlers and AOL users.
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
How much do you want to bet this breaks samba. How much do you want to bet that Microsoft won't release enough information for the samba team to quickly support the new file system. How much do you want to bet this has nothing to do with making a better file system and more to do with killing non-Microsoft servers. I would give any other company the benefit of the doubt. Microsoft's history, however, proves everything they do is to increase marketshare and nothing to do with making a better OS.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Gimme a D, gimme a R, gimme an M. . . /. ads ;)
What's it spell?
I also see my ad filter is working on the new
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Rather a good thing to know.
dinner: it's what's for beer
windows security, and my file system easily accessible across the network...
I hope any changes that happen to the file system also include the removal of the antiquated concept of file extensions for type association. Here is another thing that Mac does very well. Imbed the type of a file IN the file. Why not give me a version number and some way to know what program created it.
Back to the original topic, I can't wait for an OFS. Just for my MP3's. Figuring out which folder hierarchy to use for genre/group/album/track is a pain. Let the file system group them for me.
A speech...
I think I'd have to give it a few years of public use, first.
I Haven't Read The Article (tm), but I read in eWeek a while ago that this may be based on MS SQL? Or maybe both are candidates for inclusion.
the great satan...
Microsoft want a faster way of working out if you have unlicensed digital content on your hard drive.
:)
Either that of they're giving up trying to fix NTFS
Martin Brooks / Slayer99 #linux / UIN 2178117
the article says they started work in 1992, with an original release of 1994. The article also says the problem dates back to the dawn of computer science, leading me to beleive the problem cannot be solved easily. Somehow I think this will backfire on MS, with the 8 year overdue release being their sign they should've backed out years ago.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
They're probably just gonna build FindFast into NTFS. I could disable it before, so they wanted to make it harder. There goes more system resources... I think I've searched my drive three times in the past year. Faster searches would have saved me, what, 18 seconds a year??? -no, because I said so
Just because I AM paranoid doesn't mean they're NOT out to get me.
-- Find the Truth...
I hope they haven't discovered the unified file system, something which all the unixes use to store their data. We might be looking at the demise of unix!
oh wait, where do we put Progra~1 then?
- runs away to see if it's patentable
OFS - government retrieval of white collar crime documents are now 31% faster!
your jesus is another mans xebu. chew on that hypocrites.
Looks like it's taking a team of MS developers years o do what one guy at Be (Dominic Giampaolo) did in very little time ;)
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
When?
Really, I say, when?
- I will be able to make notes to files?
- I will be able to store WITH THE FILE information about where this file come from?
- I can store its checksum WITH the file?
in Linux?
... right before the sledgehammer hits.
You can achieve this goal by the following process:
1. Store all of your documents in a simple, text based format, and not in some overly complex propriatary format such as ".DOC", ".PDF", etc.
1. This text based format is known as "American Standard Code for Information Interchange" (AKA "ASCII")
2. If you require more complex presentation of information, you might want to use something called HyperText Markup Language. (Which doesn't do much markup these days... but I digress)
3. There is a program built in to Windows 98 and above called "Find" (usually accessed by hitting F3), and in other environments known as "grep" which can search by content.
Use the tools you have, you won't have to "upgrade" to the latest bugs, and the computer remains useful.
--Mike--
ext2 is about the most fragile filesystem ever. any kind of un-sanction reboot and you will lose some files. In contrast, I've only lost files off of a FAT partition once.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
They should have it working by the second service pack or so.
I remembe reading about this (on slashdot?) when longhorn was first announced. From what I understand programs need not be rewritten to take full advantage of the FS, though might gain a little bit if tuned for it.
The FS is essentially a giant database, and thus all of the good search algorithms and recovery tools written for databases can be applied to the Filesystem.
But then again, given my experiences with MSSQL, perhaps they should just keep NTFS 5 and remove the 'alternative streams' and make junction points take UNC names.
I probably wouldn't trust a new file system until it has been proven for awhile. Compressed volumes (using drive space) for example on Windows are known to corrupt files sometimes. Funny, at one time during Dos 6.2 some manufactures sold computers with drive space enabled by default.
Early versions of BeOS had a full object orientated file system and found performance was abysmal. This was from a company with no backwards compatibility to worry about and a small OS designed for speed.
In the end Be developed BFS which is basically a standard file system with support for indexes and attributes, an overall much better performing system with most of the benefits of an object orientated file system.
[)amien
Heh... Fortunately that is not correct...
Ner lbh sebz gur HFN? Gura lbh'ir whfg ivbyngrq gur QZPN!
Sorry i don't think windows has suffered a major file system corruption bug in a public release...
Now linux, yup, linux has had plenty of filesystem corruption problems...
Sorry captain zealot but this is one area where you don't win.
Microsoft already sends more than they should and they only keep track of the Media Player 8 use... Just think when they have a nice tidy way of figuring out everything you use and how many times you say "Star Wars" and "Love" in any document or file...
... oh wait, they already do that...
Or what type of music you're listening to
I'd guess this will just leaded to an updated EULA if the MediaPlayer 8 mess is any indication.
That's just my two cents... i left my trust in M$ down the road completely after Xperiencing the Xcedrine headache of XP!!
------------------------------
Ray Raspberry
raspberry@b3l33t.org
I think they are already starting to do this. One time I downloaded a self extracting file from Microsoft (*.exe) and stored it on a Windows 2000 machine. Windows 2000 automatically set the permissions to the file in such a way that I could no longer modify the file on that computer (trying to add comments, or even allowing administrator to read/write to the file). I'm sure that it would be trivial for them to make their own windows media files write or copy protected.
[user] Open Excel document "Personal_Finances"
[windows] Please log into Passport so the $0.50 file usage fee can be charged to your credit card.
[user] But this is my file, I created it.
[windows] NO, I store your crap file, it is mine.
[user] THAT's IT, I'm formatting you!!
[windows] Please log into Passport so the $999.99 reformatting fee can be charged to your credit card
[windows] And have a nice day!
-- Find the Truth...
A problem I'd really like to be solved is the way that file extensions are registered (and then fought over by programs). Granted, this is in some part the fault of software companies (cough, real, cough), but if a more elegant solution existed to that sort of mess, then maybe it wouldn't be so annoying. I would equate that to if a program of mine that ran ".dum" files found and deleted shortcuts to other programs that ran ".dum" files -- and that's just unacceptable.
Down with MS? Nah, but the benefits listed here of an new FS don't seem to justify its cost (having to reprogram everything to take advantage of it... ouch!).
-Sou|cuttr
In short, every Windows OS will be bundled with the SQL Server DBMS. Bundling a DBMS with the OS is the *very* action that the DOJ attacked IBM with. Of course, Billy will get away with this one.
So what kind of DRM are they going to tie into the filesystem?
Liberty in your lifetime
Does that mean I have to stop running findfast.exe to speed up my file searches!? I can hardly believe MS thinks they can come up with something better than that little gem of an app.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Paul Thurrott's Windows SuperSite has had this information since January. He mentions the codename release as 'Longhorn/Blackcomb', I suppose referring to 2 different codenames, or maybe he was unsure (?). If the following link, he also mentions the OFS (new file system). Check it out here: http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/longhorn_prev iew.asp
------
Random, useless fact: I type in startx entirely with my left hand.
Be sure to check out my page linking the chief SW architect at Msft with the mascot of MAD Magazine.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
well, it's about time, since both of the existing filesystems they use are pretty poor in most respects, does this mean that their new FS will be written to be as difficult as ar all possible to write drivers for for support on other OSs?
Software Freedom Day!.
As I am not an expert in filesystems, how would this be different than NTFS5? The CNET artcile gives the impression that "file system work was abandoned because of complexity, market forces and internal bickering."
My question is, what changed?
Surely this is a sign of the Apocalypse...
Everyone would have to buy new versions of all their office software!
Ummm...Why?
Changing the FS would really only affect the way the data is stored on the drive, the AppFS interface should be abstracted by the OS.
C-X C-S
Maybe the rest of the world has a short memory, but I don't.
According to what Microsoft had announced some time ago, they are HALTING further new development while they focus on bug fixes. Can I then take this as a sign they've fixed all the problems with Windows?
So now they are working on new developments again? I'm pretty sure existing Windows is not completely stabiized...I know mine isn't. So what does it mean? Micrsoft can't maintain focus? They can't tell the truth? What?
Now for some speculation. The implementation is likely to be based on the same "pluggable" FS driver architecture first introduced in Windows 2000, where the NTFS and FAT32 drivers are just a layer on top of the kernel (you can actually buy a devkit from Microsoft that will allow you to implement, say, ReiserFS for Windows 200). This however poses an interesting question: do you make this newfangled FS to sit on top of tried-and-true NTFS, or do you implement it at the kernel level and make NTFS a layer on top of that? Either way, I think the article is overstating the devastating effect on existing apps. Microsoft is not about to shoot itself in the foot so massively. Whatever this ends up being it's a good bet it will be fully backwards compatible. Kinda like Win32, which can still run 16-bit apps, albeit slower (in 2K and XP). But this will make companies more likely to either port existing code or release newer versions that take advantage of the redesigned FS.
There's a interesting Register article here
It really is an interesting problem. My Wife's iMac only has a 6Gb drive. She's always saving info form the web into AppleWorks files. She has generating a LOT of little itty bitty files. Now our PC file server stores our digital photos and mp3s, and both iTunes and iPhoto make managing that mess quite easy and Sherlock is SUPPOSED to make finding in files easier (it kinda does), but does a poor job at it.
Now, my point is, I've actually thought about setting up some form of database so that my Wife can find her info for years to come. But my biggest question is NOT would a database help, I'm sure it would. What I would like to know, is how would the interface for that database look?
Considering what I have seen of XP (I got a copy sitting on a 2GB drive that sits on my shelf), MS knows very little about information management in the UI, and I would expect this problem to not get any better for the majority of PC uses, even if the entire file system was one big database.
Burn Hollywood Burn
I just look at the microsoft record where the 1.0 version of anything was not very good. Just look at the version one point oh of any of the name products. windows, word, excel, etc etc etc. This with their initiative to have "trustworthy" computing is going to present a major problem.
One of thesetimes they are going to try to retransformed themselves on time too many and it will blow up in their faces.
I deem to remember an article (and an extensive Microsoft whitepare, etc)from about a year ago. I don't remember if it is the same thing. (can't find the link right off)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
While they are dinking around with the file system they will most certainly change the way the SMB works. What is the purpose of having all of these spiffy new features in a file system that can't be "exposed" to other machines as shares?
NTFS has been a journaling file system similar to those for a very long time. Linux was the one playing catchup on that end.
Windows already allows you to right click on just about any file and add a comment to it. This is useful for example if you download whatever63ab435installer.exe and you forget what it does.
The point of this new data store isn't necessarily faster searches, although that is one part of it. The idea is to have a common data storage mechanism, used by all programs.
The underlying technology is to replace the NTFS filesystem driver with SQL Server, with a few tweaks. SQL Server already supports using a RAW partition as a data store, so essentially you just have to move the transaction log and descriptive info for the databases into a specific area of the disk. Add a little bit of bootstrap code to ntldr, and slap the SQL Server stuff into the startup driver list, and it's a done deal.
The next step is creating an NTFS compatibility layer -- it would allow you to mount tables as drive letters or network shares. A lot of the information wouldn't be useful when viewed in that fashion, but it would give you a way to run older programs.
Once all your data is in a common data store and can be manipulated as such, it opens up a world of new possibilities. The change will be long and slow; no need to kid about that. It will take years for all the 3rd party programs (and even Microsoft's own apps) to catch up and start taking full advantage of it. It's the same situation Plug & Play was in back in 1995; it sorta worked sometimes, but you couldn't really take full advantage of it. But here in 2002, you really can expect to grab a piece of hardware and slap it in your box without hassles. It took some time, but it eventually paid off.
But... are you having trouble, as I did, thinking of ways to make use of this common data store? Part of that comes from the fact that we've been conditioned and trained to think of data storage in terms of files; it's hard to shift gears... to think outside of the "filesystem" box so to speak.
For one thing, I could see someone emailing me a project. Not some word documents, an excel spreadsheet, and a database zipped into a ZIP file; they just email me the project. When I get it, and open the message, the project opens up presenting me with the various documents (linked to the database of phone numbers for example), and a little yellow stickynote window that has the project leader's actual email text. I didn't have to deal with unzipping the data, rearranging it, then opening the documents separately. Since the "rows" are linked, they open and act as a unit until I tell them to do otherwise.
It gets better though... imagine if I could run a query such as "SELECT f.*, s.filename FROM Folder1 f INNER JOIN folder2 s ON f.datetime = s.datetime"
It can get even more useful because you now have full SQL syntax available to you for manipulating the filesystem, with queries that are lightning fast. Throw in some Stored Procedures, Functions, Views, etc and I can see real possibilities.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
And IBM's AS400's have been doing this for years. Not to mention BeOS. ReiserFS is of perticular intrest because it will allow for attaching of arbitrary objects to any node. Only problem is we have five next generation file systems duking it out so generic Linux will most likely not see the benifits for some time as nobody will want to program specificly for a filesystem that reaches only a fraction of the usebase. It would be sure nice though to not to have to see .nautilus-metafile.xml stewn about my file system. sigh! What would be nice is generic system calls for filesystem metadata that would write out .nautilus-metafile's for FS that don't support metadata and node metadata for FS's that do. Of course we would need a standard format but it would be instantly useful.
it has a web front end but another could easily be written in C or whatever:
the project is hosted on savannah. this is the webpage: dbpack
i'm currently working on the documentation:
manual.pdf
-- john
Why fuck with the file system? Why not
just use a database in the first place?
There doesn't seem a reason to have file
system semantics for this sort of thing.
Especially when there are so many database
tools in place.
Brought to you in another effort to turn an open standard to a MS only standard. Hell, it will probably be partialy encrypted for "security" reasons so that you can't write any applications that even work on it with out MS approval for fear of violating the DMCA.
A new filesystem isn't needed.
A new software vendor is.
Ra7
"Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds" - RWE
Hey, if all these software developers have to rewrite their software, why not rewrite it for linux, etc.? Could this be a golden opportunity here?
The submission form is acting weird so here is the link again: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010802. html.
This New File system sounds to me like something similar.
More like Be.
BTW, this was on osnews.com about a month ago.
>>The new technology will cause practically all Microsoft products to be rewritten to take advantage of it.
What better way to force Microsoft's customers to upgrade their applications.
They are running out of ideas for things to stuff into Office, for example. Why would anyone upgrade, unless they were forced to? Now they can require that all customers pay them three hundered dollars again for the priviledge of staying current. And that's just for Office.
They proved with AS/400 that using a DB for the file system was the way to go. It's too bad they did it way ahead of their time.
I'm personally glad MS is finally changing their OS. Now that my workstation has 70GB of files, searches are taking an incredibly long time.
I have less than 100,000 files on my workstation. Each has maybe 10 searchable attributes. A full search on this can take over five minutes. (Athlon 800Mhz w/ 7200 RPM IBM drives on a Promise controller)
I know from experience that querying an Oracle database (on a cheap 500mhz linux box) on 100,000 records with 30 non-indexed columns/attributes generally takes around 2-3 seconds.
Imagine if MS were able to build a file system with such capabilities.
Really... so, for instance, Red Hat 7.2 would have a Major Filesystem Corruption Bug?
I really don't think it's zealotry to point out that you're comparing a bleeding-edge release using hours-old code and a full release version of something.
Jackass.
Everthing is a file, says Unix.
But that was 30 years ago. Perhaps its time to extend the unix-doctrin: Everthing is a file and a directory.
Why? Metadata.
Todays file-formats store informations about the file inside the file (thing id3-tags) or abuse file-attributes (such as the filename(.html)).
With files as file and directory, there would be no need for that. Imagine: you store informations about the authors of a file inside metadata-attributes. There would be simple possibilities to search for these informations, so one could easy pick up all "draft" files inside a direcory (ls -al *../status=draft, maybe)
p.
NTFS is a very solid filesystem and seems to recover problems well when something bad does happen. The only complaints I have are slow searches and reports. It takes a LONG time to find a file on a big volume, or try and do reports on file system usage. A good database system should speed that up tremendously.
The idea of having to rewrite the apps is interesting though. That tells me this is at least 5 years off, and longer before it would be used widescale. But I guess that makes sense, would you be the first shop to put your big fileserver on a new filesystem like that? Not me.
Wow, someone actually writing software at pitt?
Did they finally tell sun to shove Java?
Do the hardware classes still tell people that x86 is the greatest family of processors?
Pitt sucks soooo bad as a computer school
blah
Its planned that the new filesystem will make searches easier, faster, and more reliable. Windows will also be less likely to break, and easier to fix when it does.
One would expect that you would only create a new filesystem if you were actually going to improve it. These are good things in a filesystem...
The new technology will cause practically all Microsoft products to be rewritten to take advantage of it.
This doesn't surprise me at all. Compatability is always going to be an issue; who knows to what extent.
Yep, and real ACL's would be nice too. And while I'm waiting for the two minute limit to expire, I'll add that ideally this file system could be made network-transparent and synchronizable to disconnected machines (laptops).
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Reiser would have gotten zero dollars from MS. BeOS has prior art.
does this mean they'll finally manage to have TYPE and CREATOR code metadata so you can name a file what you want, and it'll still work if you forget to put
Yes,and the minimum requirements will be a 2Ghz Processor and 512M of ram, which will be the bottom of the barrel whenever the "next" generation of windows actually gets released. Any advantage gained won't be discernable from the gain of better hardware. Believe it or not I actually hope they get it done and get it right... I WANT them to make their products better..... based on promises in the past compared to what they have delivered however, there is good reason to be skeptical.
In the process, the plan could boost Microsoft's high-profile .Net Web services plan and pave the way to enter new markets for document management and portal software, while simultaneously dealing a blow to competitors."
OK I know FAT is antiquated, but NTFS is modern. In fact I recall it was announced at some point 3-4 years ago that OFS wasn't necessary because all the relevant features were being merged into NTFS? Maybe that was an internal announcement, one of the annual "we are finally merging our data stores" emails the top Microsoft brass would send out to the troops.
Anyway I don't see why this would make Windows less likely to break or easier to fix, or what it has to do with .NET...why does that kind of marketing fluff have to be included in a pretty reasonable article (and the sidebar is very nice)?
- adam
Anyone remember the way that the GUI in OS/2 (Workplace Shell) would store store extended attributes of the WPS objects in the FS? I know that HPFS was far from a 'object file system', but once again, this sounds a lot like 'Windows 200x = OS/2 2.0'.
I loved the WPS. *sniff*
You ain't kidding.
Want to have some fun? Use Win2000 and a FAT32 partition over 50 GB.
I *dare* you to fill it past 94%. I did. Instant W2K crash, no BSOD. Scandisk/Chkdsk ran on next bootup....
...and totally destroyed my data. Perhaps the secret indexes couldnt be written, I dunno. No windows (98, ME, 2k, XP) could read that partition.
So I installed RedHat 7.2, mounted & copied the files to a EXT3 partition. Never had another problem until power went out.
Reboot check: 5 fuking seconds! F-I-V-E. And Zero data loss. On a PI/166 mhz, 64 mb.
Take one damn guess where ALL the files in my house get stored now?
They should call it FS.net and when bundled with Outlook Express, makes Windows the ultimate in File/Email Sharing technology.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
I seem to remember a byte magazine article maybe 7-8 years ago, right before windows 98 came out that mentioned this.
It's funny that microsoft is working on a filesystem to 'help users find stuff faster' when they have been so adamant about hiding the file system from users for quite awhile.
"In addition, Microsoft has already developed the database technology it needs for a new file system. A future release of its SQL Server database"
deltree.bat will now contain....
Delete * from drives where folder = 'c:'
Aren't the new /. ads really annoying?
I wouldn't know. I block them.
Mozilla users: add these servers to your "do not allow images from this server"
images.slashdot.org
m.doubleclick.net
Who got the hairbrained idea that having file metadata was superior???
Sure its great for marking a file as executable or not, instead of having the OS itself guess based upon the name.
But for documents, if all the type information is stuck away inside some metadata, then what happens when you transfer a file over FTP? do you have to guess what type of file it is?
What about the output of a pipe or socket? How does my PDF generator know tha "output.pdf" needs to have its metadata set to some damn obnoxious xml snippet? Is the file unusable until someone does that?
And its not like you can have different files with the same name having only different metadata. I cant have "temp/document.txt" and "temp/document.rtf" because they would be "temp/document" (ambiguous) to a shell script.
And what the hell does a version number mean? Does it have the same meaning for a word document as it does for a Makefile as it does for a device driver? Then why should they be stored the same?
Im not a big fan of MS's retarded implementation of OS enforced extensions, but I do think that filename extension are here to stay because they work better.
A file is a file, and the extension is just a hint on what to do with it, or what it might contain.
And if you want to sort your MP3's, there is this nice thing called Id3 tags, you might want to look into it...
Sadly, OS X uses the glorious idea of file extensions. Metadata for storing file information is only just tolerated. So much for progress.
but we still have to put up with C:/D:... When will they just use regular mount points??!?!
...that software companies, instead of having to support two different file systems will now have to support THREE different file systems otherwise they will loose clients. I can't see how Microsoft expects to slide the entire paridigm of what they've created out from everyone and think that everyone will come along for the ride. Face it: Older versions of MS products will be out there for a LONG time, regardless of what Uncle Bill wants...But, maybe that's their plan? Force all the smaller companies out of business! Microsoft products for everyone!
"But Judge, really, we're not a monopoly....those other software developers just couldn't keep up with our new innovations...."
...reminds me of South Park, where the general hauls in Bill Gates and says, "You promised us Windows 98 would be faster and more reliable, with better access to the internet!" And Bill Gates starts squeaking, "It is! Over 6 million --" and then the general shoots him in the head. Bang. Bye bye.
I guess what I'm saying is "talk is cheap", but it will be interesting in any case to see what develops.
One of M$'s greatest goals is to seize control of all digital formats. This will lock them into yet another monopoly in the consumer electronics world. They've been pushing their media format hard for a while but they know that it will always be possible to break it. Enter the new file system. By putting smarts in the file system and locking it down heavily, they fortify their media formats (as well as all their data formats) and make it that much harder to break and store media files, not to mention applications. This is something that the RIAA wants. If M$ can provide them with a secure digital media format and playing environment, they will hand the keys to digital media to M$. What does this mean to the consumer? No more M$ free formats, no more M$ free electronics. If M$ gets it's way you will not be able to buy a CD, DVD, TV, media player etc, that does not contain their software and enforce the protection of their formats.
As I understand it, the file system will be a SQL Server database.
This is such baloney, IMO. The SQL server files have to be on a "file system".. so what's THAT going to be? Whatever the BASE file system is, that, to me, is the FS that the machine is using.
Vortran out
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
us poor sobs will be stuck with the same old file concept from the 60's: A stream of bytes associated with a filename and stored in a heirarchical tree of directories.
It is funny, we accuse Microsoft of using other people's ideas - but are we really any better? How much of Open Source development is really just reimplementations of other people's ideas?
And it will slice and dice, cure male pattern baldness and be able to detect alien lifeforms! NOT!
I heard about this before, the whole thing will be based on MS Exchange format. File systems in the traditional sense of the term will plug in to it.
If anyone has more info on this please post below.
What the hell is wrong with ReiserFS? Oh, I forgot, it's Free Software. >^..^
I just have this feeling that completely replacing the file system can't make it less likely to break. I've had no trouble with FAT32, and I seriously doubt MS's ability to write a filesystem that has no bugs. But maybe I'm just being pessimistic today.
Clearly, then, Microsoft want to dominate the database market VIA the filesystem. Woah!
Oh, and does this have anything to do with the newest Linux kernels supporting NTFS?
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
I'm surprised nobody's posted this yet, but ReiserFS is working on something similar, described in this whitepaper.
>Beware the flat file!
>Flat files are the cockroaches of the OS!
Yeah and what's going to survive one of them thar
tactical nucular strikes the Dubya wants to have a plan to use --- the cockroaches.
Keeping things simple, to many people, seems inconsistent with keeping their jobs.
BTW, tactical nuke is a oxymoron.
I ve found FAT to be pretty reliable. Never lost any documents. As much as I hate windows, I have to admit fat is much better than ext2 (lost an entire directory after a power out). ReiserFS is a great alternative to ext2, and I use that to mount /.
When I read this article, I immediately had two thoughts:
Thought 1: "You know, they're right" Current file systems are outdated and are not really serving the needs of modern applications. Take for example, Microsoft Outlook (and Outlook Express). The programming teams for these pieces of software were forced to implement a "filesystem within a file" in order to achieve their design goals (I believe the files are called DBX files). Or take for instance, the Windows Registry, or, even better, the Gnome registry, GConf. Why do programmers have to implement dozens of different abstract filesystems in order to achieve their design goals? Simple, the present filesystems are not sufficient.
Thought 2: "Another way of attacking the Free Software Movement." By creating a new filesystem, Microsoft achieves many goals. First, they make Linux filesystem developers start from scratch again. I mean, the NTFS driver isn't even done, and this means we would have to start over. It gets even worse: From the sound of this article, it seems that OFS would be fundamentally incompatible with our conception of a filesystem today (possibly including features such as resource branches, GUID tags, and other metadata forks, ad nauseum). This would make it difficult to write a usable Linux driver for OFS. And finally, to top it off, my gut tells me that the POSIX file access calls would _not_ be sufficient to access such a rich filesystem. The introduction of a new, richer file access API by Microsoft would make writing cross-platform software much more difficult.
Microsoft can kill two birds with one stone here.
Ben
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
(user intends to delete all temp files from his OFS partition)
DELETE FROM OFS_store (...)
(user gets distracted by girlfriend and leaves computer momentarily)
(meanwhile cat walks across keyboard hitting enter first)
oops...
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
Those with good memory will remember that Microsoft was promising something like this about 10 years ago. Don't hold your breath.
I hate doing that, I always forget to back up a critical file. Maybe they'll make one of those programs that converts your hard disk to the right file system without formatting. Oh well, I'll just buy a new computer with the operating system already installed. This computer is getting older and older. Anyone know any fun games that a 350Mhz computer can run?
Dean Dickison aka Winand
Granted alot of things are wrong with it but NTFS,in general, works. This DB file system just makes me wonder. With fast hard drives becoming the norm, it doesn't take that long to scan a disk. Linux has locate and other file indexers to assist in searching the hard drive. I mean I HOPE there better be some other reason to do this because it doesn't make sense. To me, it seems that this DB would add overhead to the whole thing and of course require more CPU, Memory and disk space. How about just fix the bad stuff in NTFS Microsoft. Also, those who have a clue don't really need to do file searches because we usually know where all of the important stuff is. That's not saying I don't want that feature, it's just that adding that soley for increasing search speeds seems like over kill to me. Again there may be other benefits to this OFS, but they had better be more substantial then just faster file searches.
Gorkman
Good old Microsoft marketing engine, again in operation.
Slashdot me with L$s!
If you take a look at the XP interface, it feels (to me at least) a lot like a candied up BeOS -- a lot of the icons have a similar look, there's the grouped taskbar items a la the BeOS tracker, etc. And seeing as BeOS has been around for years, it makes a lot more sense that the Microsoft engineers would have been able to start reimplementing ideas like this by this point.
And now we start seeing articles like this one, and it becomes clear that just as the XP interface has started to resemble BeOS, the XP native filesystem is starting to resemble BFS. This isn't the first time in recent months that we've seen reports of this -- not long ago there were articles saying that MS wanted to ditch Access and it's Jet engine (or whatever it runs now), and turn the SQLServer engine into the core of the next generation filesystem. This is of course exactly what Be wanted to do, but couldn't due to performance constraints, so they went with the scaled back object oriented system instead. Hey look at that, now we hear that Microsoft is also going with an OO-FS instead of a full SQL-FS.
Microsoft already ran Be out of the market, and are rightfully getting sued now for doing so. I wonder if Be would be willing to use this increasingly familiar evolution for Windows as evidence that Microsoft wanted to eliminate their strongest OS competition while ripping off all their good ideas. As much as it's vindicating to see that BeOS's best features will live on in new versions of Windows, I'd rather have the chance to see the original around today...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
ReiserFS does this type of stuff, or WILL before M$ gets its act together.
I was hoping they were going to call it AFS (Almost a File System).
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
If, of course, by hours you mean days. 2.4.15 was released on Nov. 22, 2.4.16-pre1 was released on the 24th.
Wow, my clients will all have to run SQL server on their desktops. Each time a file is open, the data has to be read from the database? Yeah, finding data will be faster, accessing it all?
So I guess my P4-2GHz will be obsolete RSN. :-(
* - Not my quote, wish I knew who penned it, I love it!
That's what they said about the registry. It will solve all of the problems with ini files.
But as everyone knows, with totally undisaplined usage of the registry, the registry is a nightmare. In some cases it is impossible to clean it up and the only solution is a reinstall.
Ask any dba. Even with the most heavy duty industrial strength db, somebody can come up with a schema and application that will bring that db to its knees. Prepare for deja vu.
[user] Meet my friends Mr. Debian Boot Disk and Mr. Debian Root Disk
[windows] A priority alert has been dispatched to the BSA.
[Debian Boot Disk] So Boss, do ya want to just rough him up a little or completely murdalize the bum?
Well, if you went and installed 2.4.11 (which is labeled DONTUSE, so you really shouldn't), or 2.4.15 (which isn't labelled as having any serious problems) then yes, it would. And I believe both of these were considered to be 'stable' releases...
Microsoft likes to build new things - too bad they can't fix all the shit they've already built/cobbled together.
Why does Win 2000 have THREE different screens that tell me Windows is starting?
It's called BeOS...
It's kinda intriguing how a company with a decent, fast, stable, innovative product like the BeOS, which by the way, goes belly-up forever on March 15, 2002, and also which has filed an anti-trust suit against Microsoft suddendly has one of it's most publicized features (the SQL-like query engine and attributes built into the file system) being pronounced by the idiotic mass-media mavens as a new, innovative Microsoft idea... My gawd - don't we even wait until the companies bones have even started to rot before we begin stealing?
Windows 2000 automatically set the permissions to the file in such a way that I could no longer modify the file on that computer (trying to add comments, or even allowing administrator to read/write to the file).
That's effectively chmod, which can be a checkbox. It's not an access control mechanism.
I'm sure that it would be trivial for them to make their own windows media files write or copy protected.
Unless and until Microsoft controls the PC BIOS (effectively turning it into an Xbox), it'll always be possible to run the entire OS in Plex86, Bochs, Virtual PC, or VMware and capture stuff that way. (Ignore that those apps might need minor updates to run new operating systems, as that's standard practice.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
"We've been working hard on the next file system for years [since the early 1990's], and -- not that we've made the progress that we've wanted to -- we're at it again," Ballmer said.
While the Cairo project eventually resulted in Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system, the file system work was abandoned because of complexity, market forces and internal bickering. "It never went away. We just had other things that needed to be done," Jim Allchin, the group vice president in charge of Windows development, told News.com.
Those other things most likely included battling "Netscape and Java and the challenge of the Internet and the Department of Justice," Gartner Group analyst David Smith said--issues that continue to persist today.
<snip>
The more important reasons for the renewed development effort, however, are strategic. If the plan succeeds, it will give Microsoft a huge technological advantage over the competition by making its products more attractive to buyers and giving large companies another reason to install Windows-based servers.
So if they hadn't been trying so hard to kill off Netscape, they would have had the time to spend on creating this. Something that seems to offer actual advantages to the user, and that would be "a huge technological advantage over the competition by making its products more attractive to buyers."
I wonder how many other genuine advances have been put on hold in the name of detroying someone else first.
Nope, no sig
I wonder if M$ will fall into line with the RIAA and MPAA and implement some sort of DRM scheme on this filesystem. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised.
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
User: "Hey, an MP3! Save it to disk!"
Storage Medium: "FILE ERROR!"
User: WTF? emusic.com and mp3.com [1] don't work. Let me try this "Man-drake" thing I keep hearing about from my friends. *format*
If Microsoft breaks Windows's file system in such a way as to kill popular and legitimate applications, the effects can only be spelled S-U-I-C-I-D-E.
[1] Two popular sources of legit MP3s.
Will I retire or break 10K?
As I see it the file system is for storing files and a *small* amount of system-related information about those files.
.xyz without making the filesystem so complicated and non-portable.
The need for metadata seems to be centered much higher in the system, at the user or application level, not at the filesystem level. I think that the best way to do this would be to implement a file(1) into the system that other applications (file manager, desktop GUI, applications) could use to determine what a file is.
Most files have header information in them anyway that describes the file's information in pretty great detail to begin with, and this and the way the data is structured can be more informative to the user or an application than either
I know Oracle will take raw disks... won't SQL Server 2000?
In any case, raw disk access is nothing new. The implications for IDE drivers, however, would be interesting. You'd basically have to write the driver for SQL Server and read it with direct hardware.
I don't think 7.0 does this, but I could always check.
In 12 years, I've never had to defrag a Unix FS. I defrag weekly on NT. NTFS performance goes to hell when fragmentation is bad, so you must defrag frequently, but th supplied defragger isn't schedulable.
Maybe I just missed the ':-)'.
Joe
Joe Batt Solid Design
Here Microsoft is pushing the envelope I think. More power to them... Be had the best FS (aptly named BeFS), but there has been nothing for linux or Macintosh that comes close. Linux is just now starting to get JFSs, and while HFS+ is slightly different, it still isn't everything it's cracked up to be.
Wouldn't it be dreamy if MS actually teamed up with other developers to create an open file system that was as robust as they are hoping... I know it's a long shot, but god damn... we need it.
Does it come with a deed for the Brooklyn Bridge, too? *snrk*
-K
Liberty in your lifetime
This sounds a lot like what Hans Reiser is trying to accomplish with his FS. I wonder if this will drive the OSS community to try and compete with MS and support Reiserfs, or will it/we try and reverse-engineer it ASAP. If reverse-engineered, it would never find its home as a Linux/BSD user's FS of choice, just because of the loyalty to pure OSS projects.
Additionally I wonder if Reiser has licensed any of his code to MS, or if MS has even actually "borrowed" some of it themselves.
where'd my typewriter go?
Crikey, symlinks have been around for ages ('82?). How can MS say they have a modern FS without these?
Don't tell me short cuts are equivalent to symlinks. They are a veneer on top of the OS. They are not transparent as symlinks are on UNIX to programs that don't know about symlinks.
especially since it's illegal to figure out anything but what they tell you
This applies to Microsoft too. The DMCA (17 USC 1201(i)) permits circumvention of measures that collect a user's personal information. If Windows Media Player begins to phone home too much, a decent lawyer will note subsection (i), and any rational judge throw the DMCA out the window for that case.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If this is so beneficial, is there something like this from the Open Source community? Could something like this be developed for Linux, et al?
you couldn't delete it or anything? even as administrator?
Microsoft has not had the most exemplary record when it comes to filesystem changes. All their changes to FAT were sloppy hacks, and NTFS--while more stable than FAT32--has its own slew of issues.
On another note, do you think for even a second competitor's file formats will work as well as Microsoft's when this new OS becomes the Windows standard?
Worst. Thread. Ever.
Did you actually bother to READ the article?
Because if you had, you'd realize that the important aspect of this 'new filesystem' is that it's really not a filesystem at all. It's a database. A 'filesystem' interface will be implemented on top of it to make old applications compatible with the new storage system.
Geez, people. READ before you post.
- Disgruntled Goat
Aside from the fact MS is evil, and they don't innovate. It is good to see MS borrowing from other companies and academic research to improve and fix windows. Though it scares me a bit to think they are using code from sql server. I don't consider MS sql server an enterprise quality RDBMS, but maybe it has improved since sql server 7.x.
A lot is in the works for ReiserFS 4.0, including a plugin infrastructure for advanced features such as security, and database functionality. Open source software has the potential to match and exceed every bit of functionality that Microsoft includes in Windows/Office, and lead in performance. If these features are what corporate users want, they could have a choice, but only if Linux/Unix/Mac developers move to take advantage of such new and existing technolgies
Theyre bringing Coolio into the mix and calling it PHAT32.
Kiss my bass.
Just like Windows 2000... it will be faster. Oh, but did we forget to mention that it will require new hardware to take advantage of the new speed?
This is just Microsofts way of moving everyone to serial ATA or some other new hardware.
that we've obsoleted all our programming languages (and all programs developed with them, since they likely won't compile anymore), we'll obsolete all the existing programs too by making sure they won't work with the new file system.
Sounds great.
I don't think removing file extensions is a good thing. Looks what happens when a Mac users send any other OS users a document - they have no clue what format it is in (and Mac users notoriously are good at not mentioning it in the e-mail despite knowing not everyone uses a Mac).
.JPG to the end of that graphic they send me, I would know that it's a JPEG and what to open it in (and if I'm using Windows, I can just double click it).
.TXT to the end of it) to open it in Notepad. Sure, I could use the "Open With" feature, but that takes like 5 minutes to load on even fast systems.
However, if Mac users would be so kind as to add a
It's also handy to be able to rename the extension of something (like at
And finally, when I write a script and I can just name the output file "whatever.txt" and double click to view it. I would be annoyed if I had to take the time to make the code to embed whatever type of file it is each time for a quick script. (I realize I could still open it in a simple text editor, but not by a quick double click). Maybe I'm too reliant on my GUIs, but it's handy to me.
Depends. I almost get the impression they want to make the data entirely self-describing (think XML)
M$ can't make the data entirely self-describing. If M$ did, each document would contain a DOCTYPE that points to the specification of the format, and Microsoft would no longer be able to lock Office users into Office.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The "administrator" on a Windows box gets "permission denied" messages all the time.
Kinda makes the whole concept of "administrator" rather academic.
Faster Searches If someone thinks that their search needs to take 10 seconds less, what is wrong with the current Indexing Service that is in win2k/xp?
More Comprehensive Searches Why not have the current search program be able to read more file formats than just simple text files. There is no reason to force a database on the system.
Windows is less likely to break Why would I believe that? That has been said about every version of windows. I believe that with a newer OS, there will just be a newer set of bugs for MS to [hide from public]/[deal with]. Programmers make mistakes. It has also been shown that you can't test non-trivial code for absolute correctness. Windows will always break in one way or another, just like any other piece of code, except that we must continue to rely on MS for the fixes.
Indiscriminant Rants
you can't with ntfs, i know you don't normally need to but for naming mp3's from cddb it's useful (and there are no problems doing it with ext3) Yes this is less important than many things that ntfs does but worth mwntioning
I agree, but the only I see to really allow for good backwards compatibility while simultaneously allowing for new features would be maybe have the document file carry two copies of the document, one formatted in a way that the older one can read, and another with all the pretty formatting when needed.
Yes. Place all the *text* of the document in one area and the styles in another. (SimpleText on Mac OS 7.5 through 9.x did this.) Then you can go in with fscking Notepad (which doesn't have the 32 KB restriction under NT systems) and recover the text.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Linux users couldn't understand the NTFS so they theived and whined and cried till they got it right now MS is shooting for a whole new level and the little /. wennies are crying again. Reading /. posts is like listening to Jack Nicholson ask "Where does he get all those neat toys?" when Batman saves the babe.
*I'm* cynical
This could be very bad and annoying... but then MS should realize (they do in name) that people are tired of their crap in growing numbers. I doubt that many will stick around with Windows if all of their libs, apps and API's now suddenly don't work. Graphics will require new DirectX that is compatable with both... OpenGL will have to be rewritten... flesh will melt off your face and plagues will infest your innards... ok, sorry got carried away.
I am sure many are asking about the security issues of this new system. If MS uses this as a method of locking people into an even tighter and more viscious upgrade cycle just to keep the very same functionality they have now, but with the 'added reliability' of this new Filesystem, I doubt they will stick around.
I seek not only to follow in the footsteps of the men of old, I seek the things they sought.
Blackcomb was supposed to be nt 5.2, but they made it 6.0 so that longhorn can become 5.2. If you want your XP system to look like Blackcomb, right here, right now, do the following.
1 Load Style XP onto your XP system.
2 Choose one of the many styles from this site, themexp.org in which I did a simple recursive search for blackcomb. There is even one for "The Matrix" lovers.
3 Change your splash screen. These are also on the link above.
Does "OFS" constitute a tacit admission that NTFS wasn't the best thing since sliced bread, but only a retread of DEC's Files-11 filesystem, and that NTFS had all the problems systemic to Files-11, like needing defragmentation?
Or is this just another instance of MSFT using it's monopoly power to screw over people who have bothered to reverse-engineer and implement a "de facto standard" like CIFS and SMB?
I really don't see how any rational being could interpret OFS as any other alternative.
Since MSFT did a half-assed job of copying Mach when they developed NT, they should take a look at Jeff Mogul's doctoral dissertation, "Represeting Information About Files": J. Mogul. Representing information about files. In Proc. 4th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, pages 432-439. IEEE, May, 1984.. Maybe MSFT can read this and get it right, instead of half-assing it like 8.3 file names, drive letters, NetBIOS, NTFS, NT, and many other examples.
I havent read the story but never the less i had to respond, a database like filesystem sounds great, but now a filesystem isnt more then some bits ordered in a simple way with a small index of it ( maybe it bit more complicated but its the idea that counts ) now if you add a real database doesnt that mean you need a process running to keep that data in a nice order ? doesnt that mean that it should be stable ? i mean ever hear of a harddisk crash, corrupt file ? i mean what happends if your file system sql server crashes ? it restart and works tru its logs and is up in five minutes ? so you can continue your work ? isnt this making things over complicated ?
:) but dont put it into the core..
;)
Why not make an external database program that index's the whole drive which in you hook programs like search and stuff, bit like locate on *nix, but then 100% updated all the time
I am not sane at this moment trust me
Drop the table and embrace the inode.
It's bad enough they screwed us with the '\', we're now going to be stuck with a XML compatible filesystem for hackers to play with.
If only XP pro weren't so SWEET! :)
Polemics aside, why is this a good idea? Am I the only person who thinks this all sounds familiar? Am I the only customer who has no desire what-so-ever-for this?
Can anyone tell me why?!?!!!??
A lot of people seem to've totally missed the point of what would be different about a database-oriented filesystem. File extensions? Not bloody well relevant! Let's consider the issue of searching. A database-oriented filesystem might allow you to create directories that are basically "views" of your filesystem, perhaps including all files that meet certain name, attribute or content criteria (like Evolution's vFolders but available to any app). These views would be up-to-the-instant accurate at all times, with no dead links and no problem with apps replacing links with actual files instead of updating the file that the link pointed to. Filesystems could also benefit from other things like referential-integrity checks, triggers, and cross-file transactional behavior. In fact, there has been a lot of work in the kernel-hacker community to figure out how just that last feature could be added to Linux filesystems. Basing a filesystem on a database also allows you to leverage all of the tools (e.g. efficient snapshots and replication) that have been developed for the database. There's a lot more here than just journaling and BeOS-style metadata.
It's not that I think basing a filesystem on a database is a great idea. For one thing, it's a pretty good bet that performance is going to suck because of all the extra DB-related overhead. Administration might become more of a PITA too. I'm just trying to explain that the idea of a database-oriented filesystem has much broader implications than the trivial crap (much of which is relevant to neither filesystems nor databases) that people seem to be focusing on in this thread so far.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
I keep hearing people say, "don't take our file extentions away; they're ok!". Well, let me tell you, moving content type into meta data does not take away the functionality that file extentions provide.
There is only one problem with file extentions; file extentions are not reliable. There is no requirement for a file to have an extention. If there were, extentions would actually be meta-data seperate from file name; they'd just be stored right beside file name. Implementing meta-data based content type does not mean that content type must stop appearing as part of the name of a file. It does not mean that content type will stop being a delimiting factor between naming of files. When you create two files, one "document.txt" and one "document.xml" you are creating two files called document; one is a text file and the other is an xml file. The only difference between those two file names was extention. What would make it so impossible to have two files called document that are set appart from a user interface perspective by file type? Yes, I know that pretty much every program would need to use a different API for accessing files, and yes I know that your directory type inodes would need new formats (but who cares, it's a new file system any way).
Storing content type (extentions do not count as storing content type, they only do sometimes, if we're lucky as they are not reliable) does not mean that it'll be hard to interopt with non content-type systems. For instance, Linux and Windows both interact with HTTP just fine. HTTP uses content-type headers to define type, and totally ignores the extention; the servers and clients must translate between the content type header and extention if they want. There's no reason that other applications can't do the same for interoperability between systems.
People just don't want to do the work to change pretty much every application for Unix that exists. That's a very valid arguement. Adding a new file system that supports meta-data would change the UNIX API for files, and would probably break POSIX or something. We use old standards like FTP and EXT2 which don't have much of a concept of meta-data. It would be a major piece of work (and really a new OS - although it'd be very easy to port unix apps to it) to fully implement extended meta-data. But it's damned cool to do it! If we did it right, we'd listen to Hans Reiser's paper at http://www.namesys.com/whitepaper.html and make a damned cool awesome file system. And why not? (appart from all of the work)
Think about it. Searching for content across an enterprise will be used primarily by middle managers and others of higher order ambiguous executive titleature. It will be used in the never-ending quest to micromanage and meddle with formerly successful projects. The downfall of this system will result from one word:
Synergy
The PHB types just can't resist that word, and when the going gets tough, the feeble minded will grope the enterprise file system by searching for this single word. With either the volume of searches or volume of hits, the system will melt-down and freeze as only Microsoft crap can!
-- Len
And it'll probably still include drive letters and backslashes as directory/folder/whatever separators. Plus naturally some locale-dependent case-insensitivity to mess up apps. And who said anything about open specs?
I thought Microsoft had ceased all development in favor of fixing the security holes.
On that note, I wonder if this file system will be any more secure than their previous attempts.
~.Evanrude
You should take a look at the as400 file system from IBM. It's a keyed file system. That has had a db2 abstraction layer placed on top of it. Kinda freaky. It makes every data file in the system queryable. It's very wierd trying to move around it. But it works.
-jj-
MSK
Anybody remember the Apollo workstations and the object file system from circa 1984? It was a neat system, good performance, but got killed by HP when they bought Apollo Computer.
The new technology will cause practically all Microsoft products to be rewritten to take advantage of it.
I don't get it, why rewrite the applications if they are running on a new filesystem? fopen/fclose/etc they should all work the same on any filesystem. Heck, with linux I have multiple file systems on different partitions. I've copied entire partitions from one filesystem to another with no problems. Am I missing something here?
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
FYI, The reason you can "expect to grab a piece of hardware and slap it in your box without hassles" is PCI not PNP. Plug and play is really only for ISA hardware, which still doesn't always PNP correctly. PCI assigns I/O based off of the slot the card is in. Since you can't have more then one card in one slot, conflict are a thing of the past.
Thankfully ISA is now dead.
(appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
What does all this mean for the way that SMB works with the windows FS? It seems like with all the hubub that was raised about Samba (court filings, etc.) that this would be a move to lock out certain free inter-os file sharing programs..
Why not? They did it to OS2..
"I do not fear computers. I fear lack of them." -Isaac Asimov
back to that German Ad MS had
a while back showing all the mutating penguins
to represent the forking potential of Linux.
Here's a new slogan for Softy.
Windows.
IT's forking unreal!
Let me guess... XPFS?
Naturally, it wouldn't be compatible with Windows XP.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
That you are complaining?
/. reader here. Most will think it's a flame, specially moderators. Thos things don't bother me anymore, I hit the Karma cap, there's no reason to post what I truly believe. Just trying to think outside the box for minute.
I thought they did, in a business sense perspective, they did what was best for them to stay in business, and not only that, to be the number one.
What was best for the company, to destroy Netscape or to make this new filesystem? Obviously, you are judging MS now based on the fact the it is, indeed, a monopoly.
But maybe they would never had the chance to implement this if they weren't dominant.
BTW, I do know I am largely touching the heart and soul of almost every
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
I don't think it's imperative for the administrator to have the power by default to completely break an OS. Sure it's good to have that option and power, but I like the OS not letting me do something really stupid because I'm tired or distracted. For every "denied" message you get as an admin, chances are you can give yourself access to do this.
An example is SYSVOL on Win 2000 - by default, you should not have to modify the Active Directory by hand or see its file structure, you should use the tools that are built-in. But if you really want to, take ownership of the directory and give yourself rights - now you can do any sort of damage you wish.
Please subscribe to see the more insightful version of th
but if all those extra dll's are integrated into the operating system, that means there's less memory left for quake when everything's closed.
Yes, other platforms have had this forever, but they were fringe, or as is the case of MacOS, still pretty minority.
And yes, Microsoft's implementation will undoubtably suck in some way, or is being done for the wrong reasons, or whatever.
None of those things matter. This is still good news anyway. Why? Because it will finally get modern filesystems into the mainstream.
And then the Unix guys will have to get it. Just like the KDE and GNOME projects, they won't do it because metadata makes sense (even though it does), but because they'll want to keep up with the Gateses. They can't stand MS having a bullet point that they don't, or another "Linux isn't ready for the mainstream" article.
Result: a few years from now, my Linux fileserver will have metadata. About fscking time!!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
You see, with Microsoft Windows the more DLLs there are the more DLLs there are to break. Windows DLLs don't have versioning (unlike UNIX or Linux). There's only one copy of the DLL. So when you install another, newer app, Office can break.
I think that the best way to do this would be to implement a file(1) into the system that other applications (file manager, desktop GUI, applications) could use to determine what a file is.
How much have you used file? According to it, about 10% of the Project Gutenberg texts (virtually plain text, with some HTML) are spreadsheets for some Apple program. I run it over a directory full of program source, executables and half compiled stuff, and get told I have DBase files, a PDP-11 overlay, Spectrum TAP data and X11 SNF font data, none of which is right. It calls the Ada code variants of ASCII text or ASCII English text. file's a great tool for manual use, but it has way too high a error ratio to be used automatically.
Rumor has it that if you click on "About Windows" in the Longhorn Help menus and type a few secret keystrokes, you get to play the closed beta of Duke Nukem Forever. Now this is just a rumor, so don't get too excited.
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
1. This text based format is known as "American Standard Code for Information Interchange" (AKA "ASCII")
ASCII became obsolete the day the first PC was imported into Japan. Better use a Unicode encoding such as UTF-8, which has full backwards compatibility with ASCII.
Will I retire or break 10K?
So let me get this straight.
Microsoft wants me to "upgrade" to their
new filesystem.
Soon I will need to replace/upgrade:
Norton/Symmantec Ghost.
Partition Magic
and according to the article, even
Microsoft Office & Outlook
Will I make the switch?
Not likely but sure it's possible, BUT it had better be DAMN good.
I think it would be F'ing Hillarious if
the open source community beat them to the market.
I'm a windows user... Windows 98 that is. I'm not one of these Linux or Open source evangelists... I basically like Windows. Basically. I don't like the instability, I don't like the crashes, and I don't like some irritating things about how the interface works, like windows taking over when I'm in the middle of typing shit in a window... but basically... I can live with the OS.
But you are alienating me, your faithful windows user with this shit you're doing.
I will not be upgrading to XP anytime soon. If I DO eventually upgrade, you can be damn sure I'm going to patch the software so that I don't have to report to you when I want to upgrade my PC or change my hardware.
This Digital Rights Management crap is really irritating thehell ouyt of me too. Your stupid ass proprietary windows media format has to go. When I download a video off the web, I want to be able to keep it. I don't want to have to revisit the site to view the video again. As the consumer who paid for your software I expect you to protect MY interests, not the interests of a few web media companies. A lot of companies use your software without even realising it's harming them! I had to jump through hoops to save a commercial from Blockbuster.com so I could keep a copy of it around for the future cause it's funny and show it to people once they take it down. They probably just used your frigging software without even thinking about the fact that most streaming video formats are made difficult to save inherently. Doesn't do their business justice. And by making it imposible to save videos from news sites, you're basically preveing people from fair use so they can report the news themselves. When the WTC disaster happened all the news sites except for a select few technology saavy ones went down. If people had no way to save the videos and images from those news sites then they would not have been able to distribute the media to the sites which were available so that people could still get the information. Thus you're compromising national security by implemeting DRM into your software.
But you probably don't givce a shit about that you money grubbign bastards.
And this latest file system idea is a crock. Object oriented file system? Object orientedness SUCKS. It slows stuff down.
I don't see how your object oriented system is going to be faster than a file based system, and that's because it's not goingto be faster. Faster searches my ass. Do you know how often I have to search for files on my own hard drive? Maybe once a week at most. Do you know how often I have to load applications quickly? Several thousand times a week. Faster searches at the expense of slower loading applications is a bad idea.
An object oriented file system will probably also make it even more difficult for me to clean up after evil applications. Not every installed application WANTS to remove all the components it installed when it is uninstalled. Like spyware for instance. And just plain broken software.
Oh but you don't care about spyware. Because again, you don't really give two shits about the consumer as long as your softweare continues to be installed on almost every PC. You put spyware in your own products like Windows Media player to spy on what videos I watch and what music I listen to.
Microsoft, you suck. If you wonder why you have a bad reputation, these are the reasons. Don't continue to be a farking idiot and ignore these reasons to look more appealing to businesses and screw the consumer over.
I don't know why I bothered to write this though. Yeah like there's any chance in hell of microsoft realising the error in it's ways.
You know Microsoft, if you continue to do this crap, and Linux actually becomes soemthing viable for me to use, meaning it runs most of the games an applications I want to run, then I'm gonna switch over to it and star programming all my commercial games for it. In fact, I'm already planning to start programming my future games for Linux and the Mac in addition to the PC. Hopefully this will strengthen those markets so eventually one of them will take over. I'm not sure whether to hope it's linux or the mac... Mac's better, but proprietary like your crap and not as upgradeable as the PC.
Anyhow every change you've made recently has been bringing you one step closer to your own destruction.
Oh well, I won't weep for you when you're gone, assheads.
will outlaw Linux! :-)
Consider Oracle running on an OS (Linux, Solaris, Windows, OS/400, whatever). Do you trust the OS more or less than Oracle to have up to date journaling entries regarding the most recent transactions prior to a really bad, catasrophic event that causes an uncontrolled powering down of the server?
Anyway, visit the Oracle 9i DBA Guide to see Oracle's current capabilities in terms of working with raw partitions.
I highly doubt that MS is actually re-writing NTFS. In fact, the drive will probably be accessable in an NTFS mode.
.exe's is supprising. The file system should be smart enough to say, hey that is an executable, why the f*ck would anything need to be written to it, regardless if it's read only or not.
If they were going to use SQL directly, unless SQL got some new functionality, they would have to use blobs, which as far as db's are concerned aren't that great. Each one would require a database page, the performance wouldn't be that great.
Not only that, SQL uses NTFS to store it's DB file, in some way SQL needs a file system.
Of course I'm talking with no real facts, but I am a SQL DBA, so I at least understand it. Chances are they will just write a bunch of extended stored procs for SQL, then re-write the file system a little bit so that file writes and reads call these SQL procs to update the database.
Microsoft has been planning this since before 97, it was code named Jaws at that time, but it never took off. Personally I think we could do the same thing with postgres before they even it get it out door. Basically the file system drive sits on top of any file system, auto indexing it, and storing any number of properties. Use XML and some kind of standard file description standard and we can top microsoft. A classic example of the linux community thinking it has to be "unix".
The advantage I see, is at last a true seperation between application and file system, like what the kernel was supposed to do. The fact that a virus can infect
Databases are finally starting to get the mainstream credit they deserve.
Expect to see DRM at the filesystem level as well.
And plenty of breakage, at least in the first several iterations of the versions of Windows using the filesystem format.
Unfortunately, of course, upgrading is unlikely to be optional.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
--yeah, sort of like how in my transition from ext2 to reiserfs i really had to recompile everything. (sarcasm)
a corporate version based on the company's newer, built-from-scratch Windows NT kernel.
--can we say a shell over the BSD kernel?
doN'T forget to vote here
use [computername];
delete * from [C:\];
I'm mostly indifferent to this announcement because I'd be happy if I could never use another Microsoft product. What I think would be interesting is a filesystem that somehow uses a transparent CVS mechanism to keep each revision of a file. It would all be done automatically without having to checkout or commit changes. Everytime you save the file, it would increment the version. So as not to have to keep a full copy of every version, maybe it could just be a thread of patch files with each revisions changes. If you could also do this with binaries, it would be easy to revert back to a stable system - sort of like those products which allow you to change your system back to the last stable setup.
I personally can't wait for this (and for *nix's to follow of course). Here's a good example of what we were dreaming of doing with it:
Each mp3 on a file server has a file entry of course. The schema is then extended to add attributes such as "last played" "last played by user" "times played" etc.. then when the song was accessed by the web server, it would increment the times-played, change the last-played timestamp, etc..
sure you can accomplish all this in other ways (like meta files, dedicated databases, etc), but it would be more convenient this way, especially since files could be moved around without having to worry about creating an indexing scheme to sync the file location and the external database.
Other tricks that could be done would be to better organize the music selection, so that browsing by artist would SELECT ALL WHERE ARTIST = foo, even if they were in albums, compilations, etc. You could also store things like images, videos, lyrics, etc.. in with the song, too. Personal playlists could be built with a simple schema as well.
_______
2B1ASK1
Is it dependant on Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player???
thelikesofwhich.com
:)
hawk
Relational DB for filesystems? If this is based on SQL Server, that is exactly what it will be. Will that help or hurt?
It seems to me that the traditional concept of a filesystem is that of a hierarchical database manager more similar to LDAP than SQL-92.
Will this have serious performance tradeoffs?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server with Citrix MetaFrame is ALMOST identical to WinFrame 2.0 Gold that never shipped. Microsoft wrote a BIG check to license Citrix's codebase for NT 4 and NT 5.
If you honestly feel that Web Browsers and RDBMS systems are chosen for the same reasons... well you probably feel that MySQL is a RDBMS...
Alex
Someone got it right. If I had any mod points, I'd mod you up. I am one of those rare platform-neutral people. I use WinXP on my main PC because I play some Win-only games, and I actually prefer MS Office to any currently available Open Office (so shoot me, I actually like an MS product) and I think XP is by far the best OS to come out of Redmond since... Uh, I was going to say DOS, but that didn't actually come from Redmond, and really wasn't any good.
.Net Server, along with a network of "MS Desktop Office"s...
I actually like the task panes that XP adds to folders, and Office uses. They are how the UI should work. You should have your data, and you should have a list of things you can do with it. To me, a perfect world would be one where there are no independent programs, per se, only a uniform interface for the computer where all your data is readily accessible, and you work on your data, without having to worry about which program does what. For that, Microsoft's new FS is perfect.
Heck, I forsee that Microsoft is going to divide what we currently call the 'PC' into seperate machines. You'll have your 'Office' appliance, where you have this database-based data store, with one interface on boot that just displays your data, you work with it without seperate 'applications', you just work in the one main interface to do everything office-wise. Think of a hybrid between Office and Windows XP. No discernible filesystem, no 'Windows' directory, only a list of your documents, and your contact/organizational data (calendar, email, all the 'Outlook' functions.) You have a task box on the side/top/bottom that shows what you can do with your data, and you just work your data, you don't worry about any OS type issues.
The second box is the 'multimedia' box. This is what Apple is going for. For this to be perfect, you wouldn't even have an OS interface, you'd just choose what task you want to do, along with a list of your current projects. When you plug in a camera/camcorder/music player/etc, it asks you what task you want to do, and helps you do it easily. If Apple keeps their momentum in this field, Microsoft has no chance in this arena.
The third area is gaming and home entertainment. This is where the X-Box (and "Home Station"?) come in. Microsoft wants gaming to be a no-interface kind of thing. With no disc, you surf the web or watch TV, with a disc, you play games.
Obviously, MSN comes in here, as well as MSN broadband. They want every home to have MSN broadband connected to a 'home gateway' (MS will probably release one of these, probably a re-badged LinkSys combo DSL/cable modem and 802.11a router.) From this gateway, you'll have highspeed access for your Home Station connected to your TV, your MS iMedia (bad imitation of the new iMac in functionality), and your "MS Desktop Office", which will be the office-type machine that uses this new FS.
Businesses will have the closed-box, headless
At least, that's Microsoft's vision. They don't want to rule the OS market, or the Office software market. They want to move to have *NO* independent PCs, but own every category of seperate information appliance.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
So then this bug doesn't exist?:
NTFS Corruption
There are probably better FS bugs under windows, but this one was all that was required to render you statement false.
First Slashdotter: MS is coming out with a new "revolutionary" file system! *bash* *bash* *bash*
All Slashdotters: Burn it! Burn it!
Rational observer: Well, how do you know it's so bad?
First Slashdotter: Well, it's from...MS!
All Slashdotters: Yeah! Yeah! Burn it! Yeah!
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In the process, the [object file system] plan could boost Microsoft's high-profile
news.cnet.com is now cnet.microsoft.com
Update your bookmarks accordingly.
My hidden files summed up to a couple of hundreds of megs of wasted diskspace from my primary disk...
The owls are not what they seem
"Search will become much easier, and this should make it cheaper to build new systems because customers only have to learn one database."
If they were any funnier I'd die laughing.
Worse is that it scares me a bit instead.
free the mallocs!
It's not perfect, but it relies on magic(5), the hints file with signatures of the various types of files. If you have a small magic(5) file you get stuff wrong, and some signatures need to be made "deeper" or smarter tests built in so that otherwise similar files can be told apart.
I can see where it would be advisable to have your file manager or desktop GUI be able to update the magic(5) file by being told that one or more of the files are different and that better signatures need to be generated -- eg, find out what's the same about files a and b but isn't the same as c and d.
Anything is naturally going to have some glitches, and some choices will always need to have an arbitrary definition since the definition of what they are may vary depending on interpretation.
I just think that the overwhelming majority of files *will* be machine-typable based on contents with hints and that adding a lot of extra data to the filesystem will cripple its speed in the long run.
They always labeled it "RECYCLER" =)
Amen to that.
Unfortunately most of the comments here are dissing on MS, or saying "use ASCII!" or some other lame cop-out. Yes, MS has an illegal monopoly, and yes they are horrible, yadda yadda yadda. That's not the point. We're so busy talking crap that no one stops to see the good ideas here, and how we could benefit on Linux.
The point (I think) is that this is useful. This is like Be's filesystem. I would love to have that under Linux. Or even, to merely have OS/2's extended attributes under Linux would be wonderful. THAT is what we should be discussing. Everything else is just noise.
I'm working on my own Linux-based OS (who isn't? *sigh* I try to keep it in perspective, though; I'm just doing this for me and family for now). I have no sacred cows, with regards to designing an OS. I would love to support a database-style filesystem. I would love to have metadata supported in the filesystem. I would love to have the entire user interface and all applications take advantage of this. But how? As a first step, could ReiserFS take plugins to allow metadata to be attached to files? Could Qt be extended to interface to that? Is there any general format that existing tools (tar) could use to not lose this metadata? As an example of how this could be useful, I take lots of pictures with a digital camera. I would like to annotate the images somehow. Embedding those annotations in HTML doesn't work because the annotations are lost when, for example, the image is emailed. (Yes, JPEG has a comment field, but what about the hundreds of other file formats out there that don't?) Think like a computer scientist--this is generally useful, so it should be generally available. Abstract it out; think of the jpeg comment field as a single hack; I want the full elegant solution. It should be in the filesystem.
MS's vision is larger than what I've said here, but even this would be a huge leap forward for Linux. I would like to see it happen.
I could go on and on... But most people would rather bitch about MS, rather than thinking how we can improve a free operating system. *Sigh*.
(If anyone wants to post more ideas rather than anti-MS rants, post below. Maybe we should get together on this.)
-Charles
They're going to commoditize sql server the same way they did iis in Win2K and XP. Then some latent hole that has been around forever in sql server but nobody ever really exploited because only a moron would have a sql server box outside a firewall will get rediscovered, and it will make nimda look like the chicken pox. It will spread faster than nimda, and it will be way more evil. Because blowing up an SQL server is one thing.. you might lose a DB. But blowing your DB'd filesystem...
Just think how Remotely exploitable this will be. And if it uses SQL commands... deleting all the files will be MUCH simpler than del *.*
Microsoft will flop on this one too. It will be badly executed and Implemented and I for one cant wait to see the exploits and laugh. Course then I'll see SQL access attempts on my firewall rather than Errors on my Apache.
January 2002: CEO Steve Ballmer says, "We want to evolve our storage system."
What ever happened to the market deciding what features are in demand?!
I'm a 2000 man.
Wow, I'm sure you convinced a lot of people that I'm wrong. My post was from my experiance. How the hell would you know what my personal experiance was?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Don't forget that it is going to contain Digital Rights Management. Say bye bye to your illegal MP3s.
If you look around, people are saying this is just going to make your file system into one big database. I'll leave the reliability of M$ databases alone to answer your pressing concern. If you read the intro to this article again in the right light you have it:
ts planned that the new filesystem will make searches easier, faster, and more reliable.
That's searches of YOUR file system, but not always YOUR searches. By the new XP EULA M$ has delcared the right to check your entire file system for copy-right violating material and remove it. They also reserve, as do all the slave masterts, the right to terminate your license at anytime they decide you are non complient. So put it together. You copy N-Stink, they turn you off. Nice eh? You don't put it past the company that records every song you listen to and how many times with their media player, do you? Pay per play is on the way.
If there exists files on your computer not needed to run the computer itself which you can not modifiy, copy or remove, but someone else can, Then they are root and you are not.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
The OS/2 file system had the beginning of an object orientation famework embedded into it. And yes, it worked. And yes, it was good. And yes, it was sort-of-backwards-compatible, too. And yes, now you mention it, it was 6 years ago.
free the mallocs!
The new file system sounds like a smart idea. I'm a MS-SQL Server dba, and have been for years, and let's just say it's a much smarter way than storing all your info in a flatfile well before you get above what you could store on a floppy. ;^)
But rewrite Office? I think all that would really need to be written would replacing the bits that handle file I/O with ADO.NET. Every other part of the application would be essentially the same, whether the dll's and ocx's are stored as blobs in a dbms or not.
What am I missing?
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
For every "denied" message you get as an admin, chances are you can give yourself access to do this.
An administrator (sysadmin, root, whatever) should never be denied access to anything ever, no way, no how, zip, zilch, nada.
Without full access to the machine, and every resource on it, it is impossible to properly administrate it.
"Permission Denied" shouldn't even exist for the administrator account.
Now that I have thought about this some more, this doesn't make a fricking sense at all!!
What is the deal with having to rewrite apps to support a new file system? I thought the whole idea in MS developing Windows was to put an abstraction layer between the applications and 'what lies beneath'. The reason for doing this was to beat Lotus and Wordperfect, both of which had superior printer drivers in the DOS versions of their software.
So now MicroSloth wants to turn this around. The whole idea behind installable filesystems and an abstraction layer was to protect the application developer for having to deal with those types of details be presenting a uniform API to different resources. Maybe I am just being naïve, but this smacks of 'forced upgrades' to me. Bah!
For a end-user OS, the metadata mechanism should not have "some glitches". Furthermore it requires opening each file and therefore is far slower than storing some bits for filetype (think of a situation where a user is using a GUI filemanager instead of ls to view large directories).
Magicbits is a hack that gets perpetuated for one reason -- It's The UNIX Way (Amen). Which is fine, but you sometimes have to break some eggs to make an omelette. If MS could abandon TLEs, magicbits shouldn't be a holy cow.
That's like 25 to life under SSSCA. They're gonna save you from prison by including DRM.
DISCLAIMER: I'm being sarcastic and just imagining what MS will do with a new standard :)
"Search will become much easier, and this should make it cheaper to build new systems because customers only have to learn one database."
Ladies & Gentlemen, MS would like to introduce a new and easy to use database that will become the only one you'll need: MS SuQL! No more weird SQL even if it is the standard. Why even a lawyer could figure out how to work with this.
Let's compare. Here's that old SQL..
>SELECT * FROM tblCustomer
WHERE money_owed > 0
ORDER BY co_name
Uggghhh! That's pretty ugly, huh? Let's see that in MS SuQL.
>get everything from everybody who owes us money in alphabetical order please.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
When you look at an 'assembly' in .NET, you'll see it's not 1 file, but a name for a lot of files, with different data. Still, it's seen as 1 unit. The same with f.e. Worddocuments with embedded COM objects. As a unit, the .doc file, it's known to the user, but in fact it's a store with a lot of blocks of data, which could be seen as a 'file'.
:)
_that's_ the reason for this change (which was expected for some time though). The filesystem as it is today is too limited to cope with units with blocks because you can't see a subset of blocks from, say, 3 files, as 1 'file'. You can when you have a 'filesystem' (a store is a better name) that doesn't use 'files' but just stores the atomic units and the relations between these atomic units. A 'query' utilizing these relations will then result in what we know today as a 'file'.
It's nice to see that the store will be based on SQLServer's OFS. MS has 2 database teams: SQLServer and Exchange. For long it was thought that the Exchange serverstore database would be the DB format of choice for this OS store. It's more optimized for using with large amounts of small blobs. But it seems SQLServer can do the job
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
I don't want to flame you, but did you read the post you're responding to? That permission denied shouldn't exist is your opinion, but obviously MS and many others disagree. When I choose to delete my Windows directory while Windows is still running, or try to rename my AD database file, I'd like to be stopped thanks. You go right ahead and get full rights and break it for no reason.
To break Windows legacy apps completely to enable IA64 emulation on their .NET platform! I wonder if I'll be able to access my Passport Account to buy stuff using Hailstorm with this new OS!?!?
:)
/note sarcasm
Yeah man!!! LINUX R00LZ!!!!!!! M$ sucks! Nevermind the fact that Win2k is infinetley faster and more stable than ANY Unix desktop.
The fact is that you really can't search for images with current technology, you can only search on the text that describes them. (Which once again brings GREP, etc. back into the picture).
Layout sucks, it's overrated, and is just a pain in the ass, (on the web, at least) for those of use who like to keep our monitors set to 1600x1200.
--Mike--
Possible bootstrap: build an enhanced Konqueror that uses the ReiserFS API (whenever that new stuff is ready, that is). Suse already defaults to KDE and Reiser, a popular distribution like that could release an enhanced filebrowser using this stuff and probably make some money doing it. There are all kinds of ways you could use these capabilities in a filebrowser - want something like Gelernter's Lifestreams? Just sort your entire filesystem by date. Then filter by keyword....
If this causes a good portion of the code of existing apps to be reworked, don't you think it may be rather likely that a few of these developers will go the extra step and port to other platforms too? I hope so, it's always nice to have fair commerce.
today is spelling optional day.
I suspect the new file system is an attempt at forcing all users of older windows versions to upgrade. Since adding features has not significantly increased the number of users upgrading, making the file system incompatible will. While this move may make only marginal technical sense, it appears to make good business sense (if the goal is to increase $'s to M$)
I wonder how many R&D projects get canned in MS. Probably a whole lot. And considering building a new FS is nowhere near innovative. Are you suggesting that MS thought up the idea of this new type of FS? Puhleeze.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
When will it work on Linux? YESTURDAY.
Windows XP includes ntfs, so it's not a msdos based fs, they stole ntfs from IBMs' HPFS.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
I just think that the overwhelming majority of files *will* be machine-typable based on contents with hints
99% will. That last 1% will cause a lot of pain and stress everytime it comes up, though. I have a file of OCR'ed pages from a book, and 3 of them come up as MSX game cartridge dumps. A visual inspection reveals no reason, it just happened to match the magic. So what happens when I'm working through the directory? I hit page 178, and for no apparent reason, my system tries to load it into game emulator. There's no way to permentaly tell it that this is a text file, so either I have to mess with the hints or handle it manually everytime. Ugh, ugh, ugh.
What about the flip side, all the files that file doesn't match? Like the gcov files I was complaining about. They all have sane file extensions - in any system where metadata was included, the creator could easily have set it to "GCOV Basic Block data". It's a lot harder to get file to guess it, though, especially as it probably is an ad-hoc file format with no magic numbers.
Furthermore, if the metadata's wrong, I can usually blame on a program and possibly get a fix. I can also easily change the metadata on that file to fix it. file is not an exact tool, and cannot be an exact tool, and there's no way to fix it for one file, and it's a pain to add a file type.
adding a lot of extra data to the filesystem will cripple its speed in the long run.
The Be filesystem was known for being fast, and it had all this data. How's one string going to change things? There may be metadata that shouldn't go in the filesystem, but file type has a long history of being in the filesystem, and working nicely.
The real question is, what will Microsoft's apparently new file system actually do? NTFS is fine for everything that I need to do.
;) But, that's a different story.
I'll switch to another another OS once Mac OS X gets ported to x86.
Magicbits is a hack that gets perpetuated for one reason
Magic bits shouldn't be the only way to identify a file - they indeed have all the problems you mention. However, the reason why magic bits exist and will and should continue to exist, is because stuff doesn't always work right. Gnutella is filled with mislabeled files, and I've downloaded a file, just to come back and realized I've actually downloaded a 404 page and saved it as a zip. It's cheap and easy to put a few bytes at the start of your format and provide a way for a tool to fairly reliabaly tell whether it's really a TIFF file or not. It's good for verifying a file, not so much identifing a file.
Until a finished, free (for commercial as well as noncommercial use!) VBA interpreter is available, nobody'll handle Microsoft documents *quite* the way Microsoft's apps do.
If you want this, conribute to GNOME Basic by submitting patches or buying Ximian products.
Will I retire or break 10K?
OFS is Microsofts attempt at virtualizing the filesystem. It is a new layer between the OS and low level filesystems such as NTFS, FATxx, CDFS, etc. and from I have heard even Ext, and Reiser. Using the OFS, an application only sees a single unified view of all files accessible to it regardless of media type, format or location. This way OFS can deal with different filename conventions (DOS 8.3 or long), read-write privileges, owners, ACL, etc., access method (rw, r); media (flash, WORM, CD-RW, RAMDISK, etc; NFS, etc.) and the countless other things that differentiate one filesystem from another and keep it away from applications. Additionally OFS maintains a database (hence builtin SQL Server) of all files in the system, complete with attributes, properties, and where the physical file resides.
Arguably this is nothing new, and has been discussed and even implemented to a certain extend (Plan 9?).
Another view would be that it is a database, that allows you to store files as BLOBS, but as with most databases (Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase) the actual data is stored on a filesystem, and the database only has a link to it.
"We're going to have to redo the Windows shell; we're going to have to redo Office, and Outlook in particular..."
All this coming from the same man who claimed that "the only viable solution to the disputing states' proposal is to take the Windows product off the market"
Can you say "empty threat"?
I find it particularly amusing how the apologists have spun the M$ OS over the years. From "Who needs a mouse and windows in their OS?" (DOS days) to "The browser is a *part* of the OS." (Win 98) to "All your files are belong to us." (Proprietary FS). Why more people aren't leaving in droves, fleeing a company that has neither vision nor integrity boggles the mind.
And yes... a proprietary file system is all about Digital Rights Management. Your digital ass belongs to Microsoft. Can you dig it?
Microsoft has really dropped the ball on file systems over the development of their Windows operating system. While the users of Maciontosh, Linux, BSD, almost any other operating system has expierenced a major improvement in filesystems, for example, for Linux from EXT2 to EXT3, XFS, ReiserFS, and many other virtually "unbreakable" filesystems, and Maciontosh systems have gone from their classic FAT like filesystem to their new Extended Hierarchial Filesystem. The only thing that Mirosoft has come up with is their NTFS, which really is a huge misnomer since it is not "new technology," it's just an update to a very old technology - FAT, and when I used Windows NT computers with the NTFS, I didn't notice a major improvement in speed, nor was it any more "fixable" than using regular old FAT. When I switched to Linux about a half year ago, EXT3 and Reiser were already avaliable. I tried them and I thought they were excellent because I never actually have to run fsck, they're faster, and much harder to corrupt. I hope that the new OFS from Microsoft is as good as Reiser, but seeing from the description, I really don't think they're aiming for the same thing. Even if they do make a better filesystem (I really doubt it) I'm never going to go back to Windows as my primary operating system.
so, being root on *bsd is academic too?
/bin/sh /bin/sh /bin/sh /bin/sh: Operation not permitted
... yet more evidence that *bsd is years ahead of linux.
[12:06pm] root (/home/me) # ls -larto
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel schg 452412 Jan 28 05:11
[12:07pm] root (/home/me) # rm -f
rm:
[12:07pm] root (/home/me) # whoami
root
[12:07pm] root (/home/me) # id
uid=0(root) gid=0(wheel) groups=0(wheel), 2(kmem), 3(sys), 4(tty), 5(operator), 20(staff), 31(guest)
Yep, that's right. Root can't delete the file. Why? Its not in use, not that it would matter, but rather, its defined to be immutable. Safety precautions: not even dumb admins or hackers can modify or delete that file. Period.
Eventually Linux might have this feature
Video for Online Dating Profiles
Google doesn't 'grep' its entire data repository of text each time you do a search. It uses an indexed database, much like what Microsoft is proposing to use (only Google's is designed to scale much much higher). So sure, you can store everything in ASCII, but then you still need some sort of indexing to make searching of a reasonable speed when you get up to large (hundreds of gigabytes) filesystems. And if you're going to do that anyway, you might as well extend it and allow yourself to store textual metadata about binary files instead of limiting yourself to 100% ASCII files.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This is only the public unveiling of a technology that has been under development for some time, probably as part of the Cairo project. Our first glimpse of it was actually in the first Halloween Memo of 1998, whence it was referred to as 'Storage+'.
Eric's summary from the relevant section:
"I'm told by a former Microserf that the references to "Storage+" here and in the executive summary are much more significant than they seem. MS's plan for the next few years is to move to an integrated file/data/storage system based upon Exchange, completely replacing the current FAT and NTFS file systems. They are absolutely planning on one monolithic structure, called "megaserver", as their next strategic infrastructure. The lock-in effect of this would be immense if they succeed. "
From the Halloween Docs:
However, other OSS process weaknesses provide an avenue for Microsoft to garner advantage in key feature areas such as architectural improvements (e.g. storage+), integration (e.g. schemas), ease-of-use, and organizational support.
{ This summary recommendation is mainly interesting for how it fails to cover the specific suggestions later on in the document about de-commoditizing protocols etc. I'm told by a former Microserf that the references to "Storage+" here and in the executive summary are much more significant than they seem. MS's plan for the next few years is to move to an integrated file/data/storage system based upon Exchange, completely replacing the current FAT and NTFS file systems. They are absolutely planning on one monolithic structure, called "megaserver", as their next strategic infrastructure. The lock-in effect of this would be immense if they succeed. }
I'll leave aside the story of a friend who did a full restore from backup (which in theory should produce 0% frag or darn near) to find his hard drive fragged far worse than before....
I've got Win2K doing nothing special (development, mainly), and the hard drive becomes hopelessly fragmented in an alarmingly short period of time. Couple that with the s-l-o-w-n-e-s-s brought on by the overzealous virus scanner (thanks for locking us out of customizing how it scans, IT guys!), and this supposedly state-of-the-art machine can be infuriating to use. Ah, for the days when my 512K PC booted in only a minute!
"I call a baby goat a 'goatse.'" -- my non-Internet-savvy 6-year-old stepdaughter
If you had a NT box then why would you need a Lunix box anyhow?
Don't mod me, bro'!!!!
I don't get how that begs the question.
However(!), in my personal experience, NTFS has been absolutely TERRIBLE! I have run both workstations and servers with NTFS and disk access is always abismally slow, permissions never work as expected, and corruption is a recurring problem. This is on a number of different machines with different hardware and different versions of Windows.
Does anyone have an explaination for this? Were there serious problems that have recently been addressed?
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
those are good points, and would definetely give a user leverage in finding their data. I purport that it's windows own doing, window's file browser window is pathetic, and the find utility plain sucks.
So would this be useful in unix? Sure it would. But is it necessary? Watching any seasoned unix d00d walk a filesystem is a treat. Using find, grep, awk, perl, etc gives a tremendous advantage over the windows side. I'm just not sure that this type of filesystem is necessary.
I'm not one to nitpick, but based on your grammar, I've decided that you're either 1) high, 2) extremely sleep-deprived, or 3)a non-native english speaker. Whatever the case may be, you should work on it, because it's adversely affecting the quality of your posts.
But root can redefine it so it can be deleted, right? That's a nice feature. Doesn't change the point.
There are things that are not only not permitted by an administrator on an NT machine, but also CANNOT BE CHANGED by the administrator on an NT machine.
Therefore, they are not administrators. Period.
'Nothing is as simple as it seems at first Or as hopeless as it seems in the middle Or as finished as it seems in the end.'
Quoted by the slashdot quote generator at the bottom of the Next Windows to Have New File System article.
Perfect.
Windows will also be less likely to break? Isn't that the same crap we have heard over and over again with every new Windows release? That's another promise they can not keep. Windows XP was supposed to be (according to Micro$~1) extremely secure, yet it had some major flaws in it. You shouldn't talk about security if you don't know what you're talking about. As we have heard, the whole computer running Windows XP could be taken under control over the network with a few simple tasks. Where is the security in that? Where? Somebody please show me! Talk is cheap, let's see some facts. It's amazing how soon people will forget the broken promises made by companies whose priority number one is to make money forgetting quality.
So they can better gouge their customers.
but obviously MS and many others disagree
Fine. Then don't call it an "administrator" account. Call it the "Person who is sort of in charge of the machine, but we'll decide if we think they know what they are doing" account.
You go right ahead and get full rights and break it for no reason.
Break a Windows install? That happens by itself. It certainly doesn't need an administrator account.
As for Linux, I've typed a wrong command or two as root before. It happens. But not having 100% control of a system is a security hole that a cruise ship could be driven through sideways.
Will this create a new type of defragmenter? One that boots up into DOS level and defrag the drive or will there be new database optimisers? Ideally it wont be needed but just a thought.
Having a SQL core will also benefit clustering.
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
I just hope they make it into the 80ties and get rid of the blackslash, and replace it by the normal slash, like god supposed it to be :o)
... mountpoints are directories where another file resides, so you're cdrom is example not D:\... but /cdrom/... , what are the advantages? Simple, if you plug in a new hardware the drive positions do not move, or break installed applications like on windows. You can add a new partition to you're first hard disk, and don't watch the letters of all partitions of the second hard disc move. the name /cdrom is self speaking, but E:\ is not. and of course you can have more than 26 devices :o)
And mount points! Will they finally get rid of the these stupid drive letters, and get mountpoints instead? I mean what can be so difficult with that, unixes managed to do a lot better since 30 years.
(For the windoze only people
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
How would this handle large files? 1 gig+ files like DivX etc... and lots of them? Just plonk them in as binary? How about integration with NON DB core OSs like Windows 2000 and NTFS5, just have paths in the table field pointing to that share?
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
As others have indicated, the ^H indicates a CTRL+H character (ASCII 8) which is a backspace/delete on old VT100 and I believe ANSI terminals.
When someone writes something, follows it with some ^H^H stuff, then writes a different word, it's like saying:
Potential Sucker...er...ummm...I mean...uhh...Customer.
But what turns me away from the new OS is SUBSCRIPTION and ACTIVATION enabled technology within the OS. Ill be on Win2kAS for a long while until either something better comes along or this subscription stuff isnt bad and can be removed disabled etc. I want the DB core though.
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
/. should just rename the "Microsoft" topic to "5 Minutes Hate"
I was hopeing to read some insightfull and technical opinons, but as usual all I see are "They won't pull if off becase thay are FAGORTS..."
One post in here got me thinking. Maybe part of this is intended to be a shot at Oracle. If their file system is really a database, and they provide standard database functionality (including SQL, etc) with the filesystem layered over it, then they can argue more reasonably that which was so obviously false with IE -- that it is an integral part of the operating system, and cannot be removed.
When the OS ships with the database build in and "free", Oracle is a much less attractive choice. No, it won't destroy Oracle due to many of the other advantages it has (cross-platform, arguably better features/performance), but it could certainly give it a good smacking around.
Thoughts?
-Puk
Considering this was promised with Cairo (back when any feature that would FUD OS/2 to death was open for promising) in what, 1994. I guess they're right on schedule?
User right clicks on OFS.dll.
Selects properties.
Properties box comes up.
User clicks on Company Name.
Stac Exlectronics comes up...then after a brief flurry of ethernet packets over User's cable modem..a series of ^H's is sent and now reads:
Microsoft Corp. (A.D.) {A.D. = After DoJ).
Of course that would never happen.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Sure it's good to have that option and power, but I like the OS not letting me do something really stupid because I'm tired or distracted.
... but really: when i use an admin account i pay attention to what i do, i read critical commands before hitting return, and i have 'mv' and the like aliased to 'mv -i' (chicken mode). One can argue that different levels of administrative power make sense, (not on private PCs) but the highest instance should be able to do anything, including breaking the system.
Don't drink and root
For every "denied" message you get as an admin, chances are you can give yourself access to do this.
While that might be the case i don't consider it the OSes job to pamper the sysadmin. If Windows changes file-attributes on a whim it is actively getting in the way. I prefer to do what i need to do without first overcoming hurdles thrown in my way by a tool that is supposed to help (not hinder) me. Asking for confirmation is ok, but flat out denying access is not helpful.
Note that you can change file attributes in Linux/Unix too, so the admin first has to change em back before anyone (including him) can remove them. But this is not applied automatically. This uppity behaviour of Windows is actually what i hate most about it. It's still me that owns the computer, not the other way round.
--
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
1. It is vital that it be easy for a program to get *all* the data about a file (the metadata and data) into a single block of bytes. This is because a huge amount of software is concerned with transferring of file's contents from point a to b and needing to force the data through unknown communication mechanisms, most of which involve imbedding the file into another file. Most people here think MicroSoft is going to put us back to the 1960's where "pip" was a huge and complex and bug-loaded mess, and abandon the Unix "cp" which is tiny.
2. It is also vital that *every single piece of data* be accessable by a single string name passed to the *SAME* call (ie "open"), followed by some seeking and reading (the less the better), and the data is retrievable. Both Unix and Windows fall down badly here (see Plan9 and the Linux /proc for examples of solutions) but it is strongly believed that MicroSoft's programmers are too stupid to do this correctly.
One reason a lot of people say "imbed the data in the file" is to solve #1. However this makes #2 difficult. It is also impossible for file formats that don't have the ability to store an arbitrary-sized comment. But conversly (unlike what I think MicroSoft wants to do) we should not *disallow* putting the data in the file, this would instead be a last-stage fallback. It is also the only way to store this data on legacy file systems so it is still readable by older systems.
My proposal requires changing the file system so that very small files are FAST and every file is a directory. I believe ReiserFS has both of these requirements.
1. Pieces of metadata is accessed by opening and reading or writing "filename/metadataname". Attempts to write badly-formatted metadata may fail on close() and leave the data unchanged.
2. Every single piece of information about the file except it's name is metadata. This includes the date, owner, group, permission bits, ACL. (obviously you need the correct permission to change any metadata, and some hacks are needed to prevent "give this file to somebody else" security risks).
3. A "block" of data including all metadata is accessed by opening and reading or writing "filename/". Seeks are not allowed. The resulting data would be somewhat like tar. This should return the entire contents of directory trees as one block.
4. Add some calls to libc to use this to atomically copy or move any name to any other, preserving metadata and recursively copying subdirectories (like cp -a).
5. Provide a library that constructs missing metadata by examining the file itself for comments, examining the filename, etc. Programs may call this library instead of reading the metadata directly.
Since when were relational databases considered fast? Did i miss something? They ARE NOT FAST. LOL
If you start an X session as a normal user, then open a term and su root, then try to run a gui app the X server won't let you.
So another way in which linux is like Windows.
graspee
I did it on a VERY large disk just yesterday. The problem is you dont get the tools that are built into the filesystem anymore - you cant back up the data file (DUH) and you have to really think and plan allot more carefully than most MS shops are willing to.
Benefit? No filesystem overhead - 15% performance boost on our very read optimized drive - no - I dont use this method for my logfile disks.
Me: What happen?
Windows XP: Somebody set up us the upgrade.
Me: What !
Me: New operating system turn on !
Me: It's you !!
Windows NG (next generation): How are you gentlemen !!
Windows NG: All your file are belong to OFS.
Windows NG: You are on the way to .NET and DRM.
Me: What you say !!
Windows NG: Your mp3 have no chance to survive make your time
Windows NG: Have a nice day.
Me: Take off every boot disk
Me: Load Ranish Partition Manager
Me: Move Mandrake 12.0 install DVD
Me: For great justice
--
Why do we need all these fancy database tricks? Why doesn't Microsoft just redefine the NTFS spec to support 512-character file names?
Why don't people simply use nice, descriptive names when they're naming the files?
As far as full-content searching goes, who needs it? If you name a file well, then odds are that you can do a pretty fscking good job guessing or remembering what's in it.
Yes, I know this might get hit as flamebait, but do give my questions some serious thought first.
Please.
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
For a end-user OS, the metadata mechanism should not have "some glitches".
Name one widely used OS that has a perfect, glitch free metadata system? Windows has its problems, MacOS has its, Unix largely relies on extensions or ignores file metadata altogether.
Furthermore, I dont think any system will be perfect -- I can open EPS files in at least 3 or 4 applications, and there's nothing in the file that says I should open it with any of them, since I may go from Illustrator to Photoshop to Corel Draw or vice-versa with a file created by any of them. Only I can choose which file will open them yet I guarantee that the goal of most metadata systems is primarily to open the right program when you double-click on the file.
Yeah, I overstated my case -- Magicbits have a place as a secondary mechanism. Even on platforms with some form of metadata like MacOS they get used frequently (is this WDBN file Word 4.0 or Word 10.0? is this TIFF LWZ compressed? etc).
Still think it's retarded that Unix can't get past this as a primary mechanism, and the metadata stuff is instead implemented on the app level (Gnome, KDE, etc).
...which VP Jim Allchin has been working on since the days of Chicago (Windows 95). It's a good idea which has been promised over and over for most of the OS's since Memphis and always derailed. And this was BEFORE the advent of XML and the complications that XML compatibility will require in any future OFS.
Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
A "file" expresses a fundamentally useful idea: a clear demarcation of data that lives independent of the host filesystem. Once you start tieing and interweaving data tightly with the host filesystem, how do you export it without a significant, altering transformation?
That is, when someone "just emailed you the project", what did you get? How much of the filesystem did or didn't come along with it? Have we openned the door for Version Hell? Also, can the data be compressed without having to know that it is?
Let's just be careful to clearly define what we want and how we get it.
A "file" lets us abstract the data from the filesystem. It is then trivial for that data to live on Ext2, Ext3, FAT16, NTFS, Juliet, in a zip, in a tar, as an email attachment, or in a pipe to an arbitrary process.
With a "common data storage", it sounds like what is really wanted is for each "object" to emit a standard, common interface. Once everything has that interface, we can wrap a database system around it to transform the data in lots of unique, interesting ways. Is there something implicit about this new abstraction that it has to live in the filesystem instead of on it (Is-A versus Has-A inheritence)? Does it require that we to throw out other, existing, useful abstractions ("files") to get it?
It sounds like an equivalent solution is to encapsulate each file in a platform independent, self-describing data structure. Then, impose the database query system on top of that. That both maintains the separation between file and filesystem provides all the features of the "common data storage".
Is this similar (in theory) to BeOS FS?
I believe that be used a pseudo db but they may have been only for the meta data..
ok i'm really not sure as i haven't read up on Be/BeOS in a long time.
Cairo (NT's sucessor) was once announced to have this feature, with automatic indexing in the file system and so on. I don't remember the time it was supposed to be relased. Was it 1997?
I like win2k pro myself and if they can make a better OS than that (and no I don't think XP is better than 2000 yet) by fixing the file system, I say go for it. As long as it's out before I get out of college... our university has a deal with MS on their products to get them insanely cheap.
For now though win2k pro is what i plan to stick to...
>Eventually Linux might have this feature ... yet
>more evidence that *bsd is years ahead of linux
No, its evidence that you don't know what you're talking about. Linux has supported immutable and append-only flags since the 1.1 series of kernels, way back around 1994.
Matt
Let's just hope that MS realizes to stop using BACKSLASH as a directory separator. Let's just hope that C realizes to stop using SLASH as an escape character. Let's just hope that Perl realizes to stop using ... whatever the user wants ... as a delimiter. Or else, a lazy programmer might forget to fix them.
Sounds like somebody needs to get a little bit more professional and rigorous about coding practices. Sure, VBScript doesn't give you much help - but be a man, suck it up, and write a function to escape those single quotes. There, that wasn't so hard, was it?
Sounds like they are ramping up for a the same pattern as 98->ME. The first version will have this great new filesystem that crashes only once a week and then a little while later they can release the whole thing with a special great wonderful "Back Up Restore Feature", that constantly backs up your database i mean file system and offsets the speed of it enough so that 2 years later they can justify doing it again.
There's more to metadata than just file types. What about comments, icons, ratings, and other stuff that nobody's thought of yet? In a GUI shell, directories need stuff like icon positions, default view mode, default sort order, etc.
I dunno if you've got access to an OS/2 machine around somewhere, but if you do, look at the properties of a directory or a file sometime, to get some idea of how many small, but useful, pieces of info get attached. At work, I recently switched from OS/2 to Linux, and the limitations of a Windows-styled GUI (Nautilus) are pretty jarring. Having that stuff was sooooo nice... I miss it. :(
Ok, let's take a best-case example, such as PNG or IFF with their chunky and extensible structure, so that anything you might want to add to the file, can easily be done. You wanna rewrite part of the file whenever someone moves or changes its icon? Ew... I do a "window clean up" and suddenly all the dates and times on all my files are the same? Ick.
Portability. *sigh* I guess that's the problem: if Gnome is to be portable, then it will always have some pretty severe limitations. This is one of the things that makes the whole Gnome/KDE battle so pathetic: they will always suck as much as Windows.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
How old is this?
/. several times.
Some of those articles go back to 98, and yes it's been on
Microsoft are going to use an SQL-based filesystem, and only offer hierarchical (old skool) file access though an NTFS abstraction layer. Essentially, there will be a copy of MS-SQL server bundled with the OS, which will always be faster than any SQL database running on top of the OS, which is really going to piss off Oracle.
This feature was originally planned of Blackcombe, but it was decided that another iteration was needed before then. Hence Longhorn.
And I didn't even bother to read the article.
"I think he was truly surprised at how little I cared about how big a market the Mac had" - Linus on Jobs
Slashdot is a perfect way for brainstorming!!!! Now, Microsoft does not have to even think nor write code (BSD)....
(?) XCXCV-XD3LF-3SDFR-GVFGW-SEWSH-AGBXC
Ummmm, it certainly will if you do "xhost +localhost" or whatever.
Oooh! Is this the one that physically rewrites the disk, and if we try to install Non-MS products it says resistance is futile??
Or was Windows XP?
I fear this. I will have to support it eventually. From personal experience they still have not figured out what a 'stable' fs is yet. Sql6.5 was an example about how it took them 5 OS patch levels and 5 Software patch levels just to become 95% stable. (I dare you to try and restore 10 DB and not have a problem with memory fragmentation)
BTW IBM have had this since the S/36. Its called a filessystem for the data and a database for the databse type needs.
A large portion of 'data' in the filesystem is wothless to search on. Take a image file for instance. The only 'real' database worthy information is about a image. So why not just have a DB with the info bits of relavant files included. Maybe text files should be put in the db verbatum, but raw data (images, video, audio,etc) just don't make sense to include in a all-for-one-and-one-for-all approach.
Pretty soon we will have google-type-bots on or pc's finding lost info for us. ala locate/updatedb.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
" If you start an X session as a normal user, then open a term and su root, then try to run a gui app the X server won't let you."
What distrobution are you using. I do this all the time in Debian.
Sounds like a bunch of bull to me.
Better yet, disable the Active Desktop. (Uncheck "view as web page".) If you just have to have a jpg/gif as a background, convert it to a bitmap and set it up the traditional way.
When AD is installed, it uses processor power to generate the desktop view (refreshing the screen). When using a bmp the image is cached in video ram and the video card is responsible for refreshing the desktop view. After all, that's what it's made for, but AD basically runs your desktop in Internet Explorer in a hidden window. At least that's what I'm guessing.
If you don't understand what I just said, you are too stupid to use a computer. Buy a pencil.
Recent media reports about Micros~1 new filesy~1 have revealed that in order to make search~1 docume~1 easier, all words will be trunca~1 to eight charac~1. In order to mainta~1 backwa~1 compat~1 the indexing will begin at 1 and go throug~1 to 9. Micros~1 is accept~1 submis~2 on which words will make the Micros~1 contro~1 list of availa~1 words. Micros~1 CEO Steve Ballmer admits that in some cases plurals and at worst, whole words will not make the list.
"For instance, there have been so many submis~1 for the monopo~ and anti-t~ domains that we have not been able to includ~1 the words 'anti-trust' and 'monopoly' in Micros~1 Englis~1 (tm). We do not howeve~1 see that this will limit our abilit~1 to commun~2 effect~2", said a smirki~1 Ballmer.
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
so if this is new technology..
who did they steal or buy it from ?
Can't you do that already with the Amiga File system (FFS ?) on Linux ? There is a comment field with each file.
We had an etablissement here which was called Longhorn City. It was a country style brothel!!
Latest Windows, not usable by kids because of bad naming!! Wuhuahahahaaaa!!!!
Microsoft will not copy-protect the actual data within the OFS "filesystem", but you can bet your sweet ass that there will be encryption and/or copy-protection built into the indexing mechanisms that will put there under the guise of "securing and protecting your data". The data within the OFS will be completely unusable and worthless without access to the indexes. Any non-MS means of accessing the index structures will be a violation of the DMCA.
How many times can microsoft scam the whole world, and have the whole world fall for it? MS *always* promises that the next "upgrade" will be the greatest thing since sliced bread - and the next upgrade *always* sucks.
Free clue -- Explorer.exe does not encompass all the capabilities of the OS.
Even if Administrator isn't a completely privledged account, it has the rights to elevate it's own privs and get what it needs. It also has access to the APIs to delete a locked file or whatever problem you had.
The only thing that I can think of that an admin can't do is the kernel voodoo stuff. This would include changing your licencing status from NT Workstation to NT Server or bypassing the new DRM crap. I'm sure that some UNIX OSes implement features like these.
No. I can't. Because NO programs in standard distributions know how to make it. And not a lot of distributions can run under that filesystem...
OODB technology was old when I first learned about it 10 years ago. But I'm certain it's the future.
I'm not sure you should wrap an old OS, API and apps around such a new idea. You _could_ do it, but it won't be optimal.
UNIX is _the_ poster child for flat files. Everything should be flat files. I'm afraid UNIX is in big trouble trying to compete with this new beast. I don't think UNIX can or should make the change.
It's time to start thinking about UNIX2. Start again from scratch. Everything is objects. New rules apply.
Who wants to be Linus this time?
Isn't it great that we can all visit Slashdot and not be exposed to any nasty opinions with which we might disagree?!
Am I crazy or you just said ....
"I am one of those rare platform-neutral people. I use WinXP on my main PC because I play some Win-only games, and I actually prefer MS Office to any currently available Open Office (so shoot me, I actually like an MS product) and I think XP is by far the best OS to come out of Redmond since... Uh, I was going to say DOS, but that didn't actually come from Redmond, and really wasn't any good."
How the hell are you NEUTRAL??
Don't spend much time on a shell prompt?
^H = Ctrl-H, the Delete key on your keyboard.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Hopefully the move to a database based file system will provided Windows with a certain feature I have wished it had since well, Windows 95. I'm not sure how many of you do this too, but I am constantly reorganizing the folders and shortcuts in the Start menu, usually breaking them up into function categories. I've always thought it would be useful if you could dynamically sort the Start menu items based on the properties of each item, say grouping them by the Vendor/Developer or by their function/use. You can already do this in Explorer under Windows XP (more so than in any previous version), and I'm sure it wouldn't be all that hard to extend this to the Start menu.
But root can redefine it so it can be deleted, right? That's a nice feature. Doesn't change the point.
no. they cant. not without dropping to single user mode.
Yeah, it's different inside the box. But are they going to immediately make SMB incompatible with all their other products as well? Are they going to stop large corps installing this OS because they cannot afford to switch every desktop and/or server overnight just because MS have a cool idea?
.NET to see how they intend exporting these filesystems around a network? Why export filesystems when they really want to export data sources?
OTOH, it will make building dual-boot machines even more fun, and you can be damn sure it will implement some form of copyright control.
Perhaps look at
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
I was reading throught all the posts and remembering all that I've read about this project, and I thought of this... Will documents and programs all reside in the same database? Or will they be stored seperately like the Public and Private Stores in Exchange Server? I personally would much rather have them seperate, so that when I'm searching for documents and such I don't get results pertaining to installed programs. Hmm...
Haven't database features, in addition to other things, been in planning for reiserfs for a while now?
So for those people who say "It would be neat if linux got something like this" can now say "It will be neat when reiserfs for linux, does this".
Does anyone else want to see reiserfs supported by other OS's for better interoperability? I hate that FreeBSD won't read my reiserfs partitions.
I think MS is doing this for a better filesystem and to keep out os interoperability.
My 2 cents.
This move is designed to avoid the Settlement terms.
By making the filesystem a database, and conveniently sourcing the database from a third party, they won't have to release any specs for interoperability etc. since their filesystem will essentially be supplied by a third party who is not required to disclose anything under the terms of the MS settlement.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
I recall a Microsoft Windows 95 ("Chicago") demonstration in March of 1995. They were claiming (and I've got magazines and books to prove it) that the new Windows NT 4.0 beast (then called 'Cairo' and was planned as the next version of NT but it became 5.0) would include an object oriented filesystem.
.net. I'll believe it when I see it.
I was expecting it in NT 5.0 (after they decided not to release NT4 with FAT32 and full PnP/multimedia) but it never came. XP? Yep, expected it to be there, too. It's not going to be there in
Microsoft have always wanted to replace NTFS with an OO-based FS. Probably to get away from HPFS (IBM's OS/2 32bit FS, where NTFS was derived from) more than anything. Heh.
I'm just trying to imagine the Windows "CE" version... and other 'mobile' devices. What then?
Incorrect. There are files that cannot be changed by the administrator, unless the administrator goes and resets the permissions on the file. (Same with registry entries; HKLM\SAM, for example).
This has been pointed out to you in other posts, but you're still not getting it.
OFS, wasn't that the os prior to FastFilesystem on amiga? (FFS)
:)
they should have skipped to the next letter. PFS... uh no ProFileSystem on amiga again, is there a QFS yet?
Anyways, With the current stuff microsoft is hiding in it's OS/filesystem I wouldn't be surprised to see a LOT of spyware/logware in an obscure filesystem like this, and this time, *REALLY* hidden, at least for a year or two the time some people code low-level disk tools.
The scary thing is I don't see the need to upgrade past NTFS5 until I get 13+TB raids (ntfs's limit). I am currently at 1.2 on my datacenter so it's probably still going to be a few years (I hope). I wonder what tactic they'll use to shove it down to reluctant people like me into using it. Up to now I didn't need to use XP, and I'm happy with win2k. I evaluated XP for 3 days and I've returned it (didn't activate it). I hope the next generation won't suck as much, and if it does, I hope I'll be able to keep win2k for that one has well.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
You will frequently get access denied as an admin on windows, but you can give yourself access. If for ex I'm an admin, and I have zero access to a file. I try to delete that file I get access denied. What I can do is change the owner to myself, and give myself permissions. That ability cannot be refused from an admin unless the file is in use. An admin might not be able to be opened only if it is encrypted.
Sorry... Got so into my rant I forgot to include: "I also use a large number of Macintoshes running all levels of the MacOS as a hobby, and have a Linux-based router at home, as well as supporting Linux-based and NT-based servers in a previous job. I honestly have no preference in OS in general (I think Linux is the best server OS, MacOS X is the best 'general consumer appliance' OS, and Mandrake/Gnome, MacOS X, and WinXP are tied as far as general-use desktop.)"
hehe... I hate it when I go so far off on a tangent that I forget to include a point I meant to make in my opening sentence.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
The point is there should be no such concept as "permission denied" for an administrator. Either they are administrators or they are not. The very notion that there is some process/account/structure that must bestow permission to an administrator, even if it is their own account, redefines the role of administrator to something else.
The details are really irrelevant. The point is that the administrator should have permission to do anything, without any redundant "grant permission to myself" process involved. Anything less is in itself a security problem because there exists the possibility that the administrator can be "locked out" of a system.
If I "chmod 000" a file, then theoretically even root should not have the ability to delete it, right? It's world-non-readable/world-non-writable. Yet, root can rm -f the file with no problem, error messages, warnings, dialog boxes, requests for permission, meetings, resolutions, upgrades or "Are you sure?" questions. Why?
BECAUSE THEY ARE ROOT AND DO NOT REQUIRE PERMISSION.
You can cache the id3 tags using the index server. its built into windows and is utilized by the f3 button. you have to manually set it up to do so, but i can search through my entire collection of 7324 mp3s by artist, band or any other id3 field in less than 1 second on my amd 1200/512 beast. FOOL.
Sure it will: man xauth.
I think you meant to say that the Japanese language become obsolete when computers were introduced. Seriously, after the typewriter they had plenty of warning
No. Typewriters using kana (the Japanese phonetic script) and bopomofo (the Chinese native phonetic script, which superficially resembles katakana) had been around for a while. So had typewriters in the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets. However, ASCII (a 7-bit standard which defines only 95 printable characters) doesn't support kana, bopomofo, Greek, or Cyrillic. Heck, ASCII doesn't even support Italian, Spanish, French, German, Finnish, Swedish, or any other Latin-alphabet-based language whose writing system uses diacritic marks.
International support is why NTFS and FAT32 use Unicode UTF-16 to represent file names on disk.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Name one widely used OS that has a perfect, glitch free metadata system? Windows has its problems, MacOS has its, Unix largely relies on extensions or ignores file metadata altogether.
But their glitches are predicatable and usually fixable on a file by file level. If a file is named foo.txt, Windows and Unix will handle it as a text file. I can change the filename and fix that. A Mac has a certain metadata that can be changed if it's wrong.
But in a file(1) system, there are unpredicatable and unfixable glitches. I have 200 text files in a directory, and 3 don't work. Why - I don't know, they just happen to match some magic. There's no way to fix it, short of messing with file(1)'s internal data, or changing the problematic file; the first is difficult and fruitless (as you can't, in general, tell a text file from another sort of file), and the second is unacceptable.
Windows NT is not based on VMS. It is in essence OS/2 version 3.0. MS did all sorts of things to OS/2 that the IBM engineers were disgusted by so MS took their bat and ball and went to play in their backyard. The only relation that NT has with VMS is the one guy.
There's an article about it somewhere but I can't find it at the moment.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
The very notion that there is some process/account/structure that must bestow permission to an administrator, even if it is their own account, redefines the role of administrator to something else.
The point is that the administrator has full access to such process/account/structure that elevates her privileges. The safeguards are in there to prevent users from inadvertently f***ing up their $BIGNUM system.
The point is that the administrator should have permission to do anything, without any redundant "grant permission to myself" process involved.
No, it's a concession to the fact that administrators are human beings. Think of it as analogous to the safety on a firearm.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Of course [ch* is] an access control mechanism. It allows the network or system administrator to control access to the files. What else would you call it? What it is not is a DRM technology because it still leaves the administrator in control.
However, unlike SDMI and similar proposals, chmod/chown/chgrp is not DRM and doesn't attempt to prevent the administrator from elevating her privileges to the point where she can access the contents of the files. The use of the words "access control" confused me because the language of the DMCA treats "access control" almost as a synonym for DRM.
Will I retire or break 10K?
As the user, type "xhost +localhost". Now everyone on your box can run apps that connect to that user's X session.
(I don't think we can necessarily hold something stupid that X windows does against Linux. After all, we usually regard X as a blight, and rightfully so).
--
Daniel
Bedevere: "What else floats in water?"
Townsperson #1: "Apples!"
Townsperson #2: "Berries!"
Townsperson #3: "Very small rocks!"
Townsperson #1: "Churches! Churches!"
Townsperson #2: "Lead! Lead!"
I agree that the admin should have the right to do anything, I think my point was that if Windows is trying to stop me from something, chances are I shouldn't be doing it. There's nothing I really wanted to do in Windows and haven't been able to figure out how to get the rights to do it. Files, registry keys, AD nodes, just take ownership and it's yours for the wrecking. I think it's just a matter of background, it sounds like *nix admins love having the built-in ability to kill the system without any safety checks, while I might not have the same opinion. To each his own, right?
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SMBFS can go away. The preferred filesystem access is now by sending connection strings to the other machine. The concepts of needing to know a drive letter, etc, are all meaningless to a connecting computer. Think of drives as tables, individually locked by user or group accounts. It would be really elegant, if not horribly slow.
If all OS's went to this, we would have total platform independancy of filesystems. A SQL interface (not XML, that's silly) for network filesystems! Cool!
Of course, Microsoft is liable to wrap this up in obfuscated API's so we would never have anything this cool. But Linux could someday.
Example:
SELECT * from drives?
DELETE * from drives d
where d.letter="C:" and d.path like '%windows%'
In tex text files, special characters might get encoded in various ways, e.g. "a to specify ä.
Searching for the German word "während" will fail if the ä character is encoded differently.
January 2002: CEO Steve Ballmer says, 'We want to evolve our storage system.'
If that doesn't prove my point, I don't know what it proves!!Corollary to Moore's Law: The IQ of new computer owners is declining.
Good point -- one of Microsoft's arguments regarding Internet Explorer is that it is embedded in the functionality of the operating system. If they create their own relational journaling filesystem they can optimize it for SQL server, skewing performance results and limiting competing RDBMs. But by that time it will be a part of Windows that can't be removed.
MS seems to continue their usual stuff, a new filesystem shouldn't mean that basically all applications should be rewritten. When will they learn that integration is not the answer to all questions?
"Permission Denied" shouldn't even exist for the administrator account.
:)
Just to fuel up your thought, it is the case in Lotus Notes.
Administrator cannot access to users' mailbox, or document one owned. The user ID is actually a private key which is used to open the mailbox which receives public-key-encrypted messages.
Unless, of course, the administrator made a cross-certification with every users' ID. In most case the users don't want administrator read their mails.
Yeah, I know you are talking about filesystem. I'm not arguing with this.
I am forever amazed at the lack of understanding of what Lotus Notes is and does. Lotus Notes already address a conundrum as old as the computer industry itself: how to quickly find and work with a piece of information, no matter what its format, from any location.
"The new technology will unify storage in a single database built into windows that's more easily searchable, more reliable, and accross corporate networks and the Internet."
This new technology simply implements the fundamental structure of Lotus Notes applications. The document-driven database origin of Lotus Notes already addresses the wrapping of unstructured data and adding meta data to facilitate quick and easy organization of related documents. Full text searching of binary data - it's in there. Preservation of one copy of the data with all users accessing that one copy (as opposed to distributing and maintaining multiple copies within traditional file directories) or built-in version control if desired - it's in there.
"Despite advances in Windows' design and networking technology, it's still impossible to search across a corporate network for all e-mails, documents and spreadsheets related to a specific project, for instance. Searching through video, audio and image files is kludgy at best."
"If I'm looking for anything where I interacted with one customer in the last 12 months, I need to search for e-mail, Word documents or information in my database,"
Save your files within Notes databases and I'll retrieve any and all of it in seconds. Guess that's why I do it.
And the fact that Lotus Notes isn't even mentioned in the article is just amazing. Seriously, with Notes' multiplatform support, Object Store foundation for storing unstructured and semistructured data, why aren't people knocking down the doors to implement it? Run Lotus Notes on Linux for less than $500 per server and you've got enterprise level messaging, object store, collaboration and workflow features on an Open Source platform.
That's to prevent people from doing stupid stuff like modifying critical stuff [sh/csh/kernel] . chflags [schg|noschg] sets/unsets this. EXT2FS has this as well, (via chattr -i) and has had such since at least 1.3.7 (and before then I imagine). It's been a part of most modern OS's for the last 20+ years and definitely isn't a superior feature of *BSD.
(* screw the strict hierarchical view of the world. Directories can finally be SQL queries! *)
You sound like me, dude!
Some ideas for alternatives to tree directories:
http://www.geocities.com/tablizer/sets1.htm
Table-ized A.I.
So that when their customers ask what this "OSF" thing is they will say "Oh! you mean OFS".
well, i'd SAY! it's due(!) to you BEING a fucking idiot. pretty(!) MUCH, anyways.
They don't call it windows for nothing, see through everything, security issues again, will they keep up there promise, is this anti-trust?
Beer, now there's a temporary solution -- Homer Jay S.
windows xp being the next best thing since windows 95 (sliced cheese)? Have they already forgotten what they said? Was it just a waste of our time, should we be really looking towards this newer windows for true innovation? looks like business as usual to me
Your ideas of adding metadatas to file, accessed by reading the file like a directory, has already been discussed on the Linux kernel mailing list; I found this summary in kernel traffic, but I don't know if it ever evolved since then.
The thread also discusses the compatibility with existing apps.
I know- I just wanted to point out that under linux there are some things were it will tell you as root that you don't have permission to do...
graspee
.. because we no longer can trust what we see on the desktop. you would be able to discard the true identity of a file from the user. like renaming 'evil_virus.exe' to 'naked.gif', giving it the standard icon of a .gif file, but keeping the meta-information ("windows exectuable"). No user will check the meta information before clicking on this file.
When the MIS guys came and upgraded me from win98 to win2k a couple of years ago, I'm guessing the installation was botched, because I'm unable to run the defrag program. After two years of heavy software development on this machine, I can confirm that it really, really, really needs defragging.
Cross your fingers, they reckon I'm getting a new PC today...
"When I choose to delete my Windows directory while Windows is still running, or try to rename my AD database file, I'd like to be stopped thanks."
So the rest of us should be hobbled, just so that *you* can be prevented from doing something that is patently absurd? I seriously hope that you're not administrating anything too important.
I could do all that with OS/2 and it's WorkPlace Shell.
Can't Microsoft come up with anything origonal? The IBM iSeries eServer (aka AS400) has had that for years.
Mike http://thenextgenerationofradio.com
This would include changing your licencing status from NT Workstation to NT Server
The Administrator can change the two registry keys that determine the version - the catch is SYSTEM (the real superuser) notices and changes them back. The easiest way to hack workstation to server is to use a second install of NT to edit the first install's registry whilst it is offline. Also if you open RegEdt32 as SYSTEM then you can get inside the HKLM/SAM|SECURITY keys.
--
Reverse outsourcing: it's the future
Honestly? I'd love to, but there's no where to go.
Be OS is dead. Macs are even MORE proprietary, lack software support, have no games, etc.
Linux is vastly underdeveloped. (Not trolling here, but it is! It's really not ready for large scale desktop use by NON-specialists.)
I tried linux years ago, got it going and went "Now what?"
Another point to make is that there's really no REASON to go. Despite all you say, and despite MS business practices, from a consumer point of view it's pretty peachy. AH! Microsoft killed Netscape! So? Netscape sucked. IE didn't. (That's an important factor that gets overlooked.) Microsoft killed BeOS. So? I wasn't using Be OS anyway. Or more likely "What's BeOS?"
Whether DRM will happen or not, I don't know, and neither do you.
Read the handwriting on the wall. The Mac if anything, is getting more open with BSD UNIX at its core. It shares all the same standard P.C. parts sans processor and BIOS. The P.C. on the other hand, is making "proprietary" calls/technology the number one priority... under the leadership of Microsoft.
How much hardware out there is going to risk loss of sales by not complying to M$'s demands in order to get the "Works With Windows" sticker? How long is it before every P.C. peripheral is useless to Linux the same way a Winmodem is? How long is it before certain hard-drives need to be "upgraded" to clasp M$'s tentacles around both the HW and SW side of the file system?
Better wake up and start making plans to move to Linux or the Mac, otherwise you can stay in that increasingly proprietary cage M$ has made for you -- singing the praises of your own imprisonment.
Re: "ACLs are one thing that should be prevalent on new filesystem designs."
Before Microsoft puts too much time into a new file system, I'd like to see it make full use of the existing NTFS one -- especially the ACLs. I'd like the OS and program files to be in an area that cannot be written to by anybody on the outside, or even by myself unless I'm logged on with a privileged account -- to eliminate any possibility of upgrades/viruses and other stuff getting installed over the net or from e-mails, etc.
John Gorentz
Anyone want to venture a guess as to why this wasn't posted under the Microsoft classification?
Where is OOG? Where are his open-source biotchae?
I figure a cruise missile headed toward Redmond should do the trick
Directory Opus on the Amiga had such a function, you had to manually define filetypes and some actions to perform on those files (tho some defaults were included).
You could use file extensions, or patterns from the file itself to identify files. You could also give it several example files from which it will determine the similarities, I never seemed to have any problems identifying files, and anything unidentified was displayed in a hex display.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
PICK uses a database for it's directory and file structure (loosely speaking) and Clearcase (a version control/configuration management system from Rational) create what *appears* to be a directory tree with files in it but is just a view into a database. Different users can have different views depending on permissions, versions, filters etc. This is great and powerful stuff. With the avaerage PC having 10k plus files and larger systems having 500k plus files, a hierarchical access mechanism becomes pretty inflexible and inefficient. For old die-hards the files could always be viewed as a directory hierarchy to stay compatible with legacy programs etc.
pithy comment
the new filesystem will make searches easier, faster, and more reliable
Yeah, but... searches by whom?
Anonymous Coward
Linux: chattr +i file
achieves EXACTLY the same effect as the chflags schg command on bsd. There are some other attributes which can be set too.
As for your coment about hackers, i have seen several linux and bsd rootkits which check for and remove these flags before overwriting a binary with a trojan, and later they set these flags to slow down the admin when he tries to remove the trojan.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
And also has a LOT to do with the intended userbase. Windows is intended to be easy to use, and therefore will be used by non computer literate people. Unix on the other hand is usually aimed at more technical people, and assumes a higher level of literacy.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
If you're really hosed, use a disk imaging system like norton ghost to backup, then restore, your hard disk.
The files will all be defragged, because norton reads one file at a time into the image, then writes back the restore one file at a time.
Presto, instant, fast defrag.
hanzie.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
Right. First of all, we were talking about administration, which hopefully assumes a higher level of literacy. Secondly, remember when users would telnet into Unix to use all their applications? I bet all of them were very very computer literate. The "Windows users are dumb, Unix people are smart" is such a tired tired cliche, shame on you for retrudging it yet again.
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But I thought you just said that it was a nice feature that in various flavors of Unix, you could set a file to be immutable so that even root couldn't delete/change it:
Of course, it's possible to take that flag off if you boot into single-user mode. That's even more restrictive than in NT, where you don't have to boot into any special mode, you just have to give yourself permission. So either Unix root is even less powerful than NT Administrator, or they're both all-powerful. I don't care which you pick, but you have to be consistent--you can't say that Unix root is all-powerful, but NT Admin is weak.