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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?"
"Am I being paranoid ?"
:)
Talking about a filesystem that you never used, as a user/developper/hacker, and criticizing it's features 2 years before it is out, for me is not a solid argument.
So IMHO you are paranoid...well, for the moment
____
nico
Nico-Live
It is feasible that even home users will be encouraged by the variable structure to adapt file management functions such as searches or the file explorer to their own specifications, for example by standardizing search paths.
In short, everyone who will benefit from a unified way to organize their data regardless of type. Heh.
Your question doesn't make any sense, nor is there any information available to base an answer on, because:
Complete implementation of the system, on the other hand, is likely to take one or several years to come to fruition.