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Longhorn to be Released in 2006, Sans WinFS
skillio writes "Everyone's favorite OS maven, Bill Gates, announced a release date for Longhorn on Friday. He confirms what many had suspected - Microsoft will attempt to complete this release in calendar year 2006. The most notable element of this announcement was Gates' admission that WinFS, Microsoft's next-generation file system, would not be complete in time for this release - surprising, since this was the most hyped component of the next iteration of Windows."
You'll get all your upgrades anyway.
Many of the components in longhorn will be rolled out as individual services prior to the official release.
(Of course, Microsoft will package the official longhorn release with a few bells and whisltes to grab consumer interests.)
SP2 is a great example of this. The pop-up blocker and buffer overrun protection were all original longhorn ideas.
Longhorn almost certainly won't be the name, XP iirc was codnamed whistler, they use the names of places near redmond in seatle apparently.
Grandparent poster may have been referring to this, regardless of what CNN says.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
What was it - Cairo? Chicago? They ended up dumping them, and putting the "doable" stuff into their next "mainstream" product.
Cairo and Chicago both became mainstream products.
Neptune (WinME successor, for consumers) and Odyssey (2000 successor, for business) were merged together to create Whistler, which wound up becoming Windows XP.
...and that's all there is to it.
Ok, lets get this straight, once and for all - WinFS IS NOT A NEW FILESYSTEM!
It's a set of technologies that allow you to store metadata in a SQL-like database, and query for that information.
Think of it as content indexing on steroids.
So you winamp album metadata could be put in WinFS and then winamp (or WMP, or Soniq, or iTunes) could build virtual playlists from that metadata.
Or your picture keywords could be put in and you'd be able to search that metadata using a single common API.
It's NOT a new filesystem.
The goal is to make their hard disk search easier, handling all types of data. Another goal is to be like open source, by giving proprietary software more reason not to re-invent the wheel, because they can access the data through another application. They will use meta data to define everything so any application can use any data.
The problem is that 3rd parties all have to agree on a standard, and no doubt patents will be involved, licensing, preventing applications from working well with one another to gain an edge, viruses will have a MUCH easier time doing silly things with your data (this could make distributed data mining a reality if a worm spreads enough), who knows if it will work in practice as well as it should in theory.
This is why WinFS doesn't replace NTFS but cooperates with it, it's a layer of meta data. Needless to say MS have a huge task on their hands.
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
Supposedly it now stands for "Future storage". Just like NT and .NET once stood for something and then got real nebulous (NT was once "new technology", while .NET was going to be used on everything from servers to toilet paper).
Well, not exactly. I can see how I'd explain this to my grandmother ("Nana, type 'vacation photos from our trip to Italy'" instead of "Nana, search for files with the name DSCITALY001...") That's the ideal implementation any way.
I could also see this being a boon for business. Often when I'm on the phone with someone, I like to pull up all of our email coorespondance. They could do a "spokewheel" implementation: each person would be an axle and various spokes would link to business contact info, personal information, photos of them, etc. Think calling a client, having it pop up and asking "Oh, how was your son's birthday last week?" Again, ideal implementation.
Q: what's with the code-name Whistler'?
A: They were "Odyssey," "Neptune," "Mars", and before that they were using city names "Chicago," "Detroit," "Memphis". But now they've turned to mountain names: Whistler and Blackcomb are popular ski resorts a few hours from Seattle, located in British Columbia.
http://milkshake.dexy.org
NX (No eXecute) bit for CPU has been around for a while (for Alpha, and Sun's SPARC, for instance), and is not an AMD invention. On the other hand, AMD should be given credit for introducing such a security featuer in their new CPU. Intel has steadfastly refuced to implement such security features on x86, until forced by AMD.
"WinFS however allows more then just searching, it is attempting to allow the sharing of data between applications, like a data soup (the Newton reborn on the desktop :-)."
;) It's all in there.
Righto. And that's what CoreData in the 10.4 Preview allows.
WinFS is NOT a file system. It is a way of describing and sharing meta data so applications can use ANY data format used on the hard drive that is supported by installed applications.
NTFS is still used, WinFS runs on top, providing the meta data. WinFS has absolutely nothing to do with data being corrupted on the hard drive. In fact, it will perhaps prevent this, as data will be accessed through the program that created it, so the chances of corruption will be that much lower (as opposed to a 3rd party application trying to manipulate a proprietary format).
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
Whistler (canada, BC) is the ski resort of choice for microsoft. No surprise here its probably the best in the world. Their code names are almost always based on the Whistler region. XP was Whistler, Blackcomb (neightbour village) was their backoffice server and at the foot of the main whistler slope is the Longhorn bar.
Most file utils want you to boot to DOS, Knoppix boots you to Linux, and if you're lucky, you can read, but not write.
It drives me up a freaking wall. I've forced Knoppix to mount an NTFS volume r/w, and made a change to boot.ini once, and I got off lucky.
you do realise knoppix includes a util called captive-ntfs, which allows you to mount ntfs partitions using certian windows files (which it gets from the ntfs partition) for full read/write access? I've used this quite a lot since i found out about it and never had any problems; I'd trust it a whole lot more than I trust the hack-job reverse engineered ntfs write support from the kernel.
TIAEAE!
Here's a slighly more detailed list of changed plans:
:-S
- No WinFS
- WinFX, the new API to replace Win32 will also be released for Windows 2000 and XP.
- Indigo, the new communications infrastructure for Longhorn will be released for Windows 2000 and XP.
- Avalon, the presentational subsystem in Longhorn will be released for Windows 2000 and XP.
So, in essence, it seems like the difference will be as great as that between Windows 2000 and XP -- a bit of polish and a new interface, maybe semi-3D this time. And that's when Microsoft is working hard? I have no idea why I should check out Longhorn as Windows XP will be far more mature at the time (and maturity plays a huge role in Microsoft's products), and Longhorn seemingly won't even bring any major new features.
I have no idea why they're backporting a lot of key features to XP and 2000 either. I would understand it better if they developed under an open source model, but this company should want profit from selling licenses! Huh?
By the way, WinFS was never a file system, it's supposed to be an extension to NTFS. So one of the links that say "more than a file system" is horribly incorrect.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Isn't all information potential file data? Is Microsoft really doing something different than has been done before?
:-P
Not really, WinFS is a service that runs in the background to help in categorizing and searching for files that are stored in the good ol' NTFS file system. WinFS internally uses NTFS streams to store metadata. NTFS streams are already present and fully supported in both Windows 2000 and XP already, but not that widely used by these operating systems.
You can make some basic use of streams by right clicking on a file in Windows XP, selecting Properties, and then selecting the Summary tab. The information you type in there is associated with the file as streams. There's a program at Sysinternals.com to display and set any streams for any file.
Similarly, NTFS supports hard links, junctions (to mount drives as folders), sparse files and more "cool" stuff that the OS doesn't have graphical interfaces for. A bit funny.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!