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WinFS - Who Will Actually Use It?
Hel Toupee asks: "Tom's Hardware is running an article about the file system to be employed in Windows Longhorn, the to-be-long-overdue successor to Windows XP. According to the information that the authors could get out of Microsoft, WinFS seems to be little more than an indexing and searching service that sits on top of NTFS or FAT. It is also very flexible and extendable, which, for Microsoft, can mean 'slow' and 'exploitable'. For instance: quite a bit of the inner workings of WinFS rely on XML data tags which can allow 'for instance, that developers will additionally be able to automatically display or execute commands linked to items located by a specific search'. This seems to imply that the new generation of spyware only has to change a bit of XML and it can add entries to your context menus, or open webpages when you click on a file, or, since files can be grouped by content in 'virtual folders', spyware could effectively add entries to these folders, or reorganize your entire filesystem on the fly -- all with slight tweak in some XML file! Am I being paranoid? WinFS seems fairly insecure, and I will not be using it if given a choice. What's your take?"
And why on earth can't spyware do any harm if it doesn't have "root" privileges ? What's stopping it from popping up ads ? Or running a mass spamming process ? Deleting all files owned by you ?
I know this might be a shock for you Linux users, but it's time to move on: Files are no longer files as we know them.
Why? Because using normal files is just too slow. E.g. How do we know which part of a 1gb file should lie in memory, and which should not? We need attributes, we need information, and this information are also files. You see? We end up describing what I would like to call another step for Operating Systems; Object-oriented file systems. Windows allready has some of this in their AD structure.
This will of course need a better file-handling tool. It's just like a big database where we need good rules of what's good and what's not. And this is what WinFS is trying to give us. I'm sure Microsoft takes the step that Unix should had taken years ago.
The scary thing about WinFS will be the patent protection.
We've seen too many patents granted for which there certainly appears to be prior art. Someone else brought up the moniker, "Object Oriented Filesystems," and danced around the concept of single-level-store. That stuff goes back to the old IBM System/38, whose patents have probably expired. (It actually goes back further, but S/38 made it out the door.)
As others have said, metadata has been on the Apple resource fork since 1984, and OS/2's HPFS had Extended Attributes (OS/2 even had Extended Attributes kludged onto FAT.) prior to 1990. Then you (and others) bring up Reiser4.
I wonder what the patent filings on WinFS will look like. Reiser4 is obviously "published", but it would be good if there were some way to make the USPTO aware.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.