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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."
news of further delays is a kind of marketing in itself. logic of anticipation. lets just call it "Windows Stillborn" and forget about it.
Do you remember back on July 12, 1979 at Chicago's Comiskey Park when radio jock Steve Dahl rode the rising setiment of anti-disco and held a promotional where if you brought a disco record to the game to be destroyed at half-time you would get an admission for only $0.98?
It got me thinking about a little project I think would be at the very least, ammusing.
Something like, a cordinated anti-MS day in about a year when LUGS all around the world get together on a certain day and destroy MS software as well as MS effigees to protest our discontent. I'm picturing piles of old win3.11 floppies and cds of 9x, NT, office, games, books, and hardware billowing thick tenticles of black smoke, smearing the sky with... I don't want to pollute the environment with smoke, especially with MS's taint, so make that piles of stuff to be blown up with demolitions and shattered with small arms fire.
Then we could build a huge effigee of Bill Gates and Steve Balmer bowing before the penguin. Then have the penguin announce in a booming voice that tyanny in the land of Microsoft has to end and that his cleansing fire clean MS of dishonesty, at which time the penguin effigee would belch a fire ball that consumes the Bill Gates and Steve Balmer effigee.
Heck, this could even be an annual event or a holiday comemerating a specific moment in history when man freed himself from one of the worst tyrranies this world has yet faced and to celebrate the general spirit of individuals who wish to free and those around them as well.
This suggestion is to be taken with a grain of salt, but in a lot of ways, I'm serious. At the very least, if one LUG were to host something like this ala Burning Man style, I'm sure there would be a huge draw with resulting publicity and maybe some eyeopening in Redmond. However, it's time for the people to take to it Microsoft instead of them doing it the other way around.
Microsoft, and in particular Bill Gates, have stated numerous times that Longhorn is the most expensive and time intensive project MS has embarked on and would be as complicated as the Apollo space program. With that in mind, WinFS was really the cornerstone and pride of the Longhorn project as MS would like to say it. With that in mind, this is akin to cutting the goals of the Apollo space program drastically ... like not landing on the moon at all!
Granted a system like WinFS can be extremely complicated but it is not a "selling" point to me for Longhorn. I will compare it against other features it offers and decide to buy it or continue to use XP.
Eek.... who would want to trust their data to a file system so complex that even Microsoft can't finish it after multiple years of development?
A feature that solves no problem. An interesting idea placed in the wrong location. And I'm glad its shelved.
On paper, this sounds neat kind of in a thesis paper sort of way. But the practicality of it was way beyond what any desktop user would need. I had problems figuring out how to use it efficiently (after all you have to have meta data lined up). I couldn't even begin to figure out how to explain how WinFS would help grandma and grandpa.
I do see WinFS as an interesting tool for server applications but for a desktop it isn't feasible without a whole heck of a lot more tools. On a server I can see this being a powerful tool to help keep your web app file data sane because you can force metadata and relationships there. On a desktop it would have been a feature with cumbersome tools used once a month. This is the very definition of bloat. I am very glad it was shelved since the cost vs benifit of WinFS on the desktop was completely off.
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
I thought the buffer overrun protection was AMD's idea, with the NX page flag.
Marketing. WinFS sounds sexy. It will get the Windows geeks talking about the revolutionary never-before-seen features, and when the Windows geeks are lusting over the next version of Windows, they 'ain't convertin' to Linux.
It's the old bait and switch. Now that WinFS has served its purpose, it's being moved back to the _next_ version of Windows after Longhorn. But don't worry, Longhorn+1 will be the best version of Windows EVER! It has this revolutionary new filesystem, WinFS. It will also be faster, easier to use, more compatible and more secure! Why risk changing to another operating system when the next version of Windows will be everything you have ever wanted, AND MORE?
Prediction.. In a year and a half, Microsoft announces the real name of Longhorn:
Windows XP SP3
If XP is going to get Longhorn Technologies, and Longhorn isn't going to get the rest (best?) of the "Longhorn Technologies", then thats all it is. A new service pack, just like XP was.
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!