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Gates Explains Longhorn Delay, Diet
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has set late 2006 as the deadline for shipping Longhorn, but to make that date, it had to delay the full implementation of WinFS, an ambitious file system geared at letting users search through all of their files at once. In this interview with Bill Gates, he provides a summary of why Microsoft decided to drop WinFS, saying: "WinFS, I'd be the first to say, is very ambitious. Nobody has ever brought together the world of documents, media and structured information in giving you one simple set of verbs that lets you richly find, move around and replicate those things." Meanwhile, MS Watch has published Longhorn head-honcho Jim Allchin's memo on why some Longhorn features had to be axed."
"WinFS, I'd be the first to say, is very ambitious. Nobody has ever brought together the world of documents, media and structured information in giving you one simple set of verbs that lets you richly find, move around and replicate those things."
Maybe Bill considered them nobodies...
It's not about finding files by filename, but about finding files by content.
It was always going to be NTFS, WinFS (Windows Future Storage) was a layer on top of NTFS used solely for items in "My Documents"
Don't be silly. What they're looking at is something like GNOME Storage where you can type in some search terms and semantically find the files.
Something like 1960s music or e-mails to Bruce, I'd guess. WinFS ties up all your documents, media, mails etc. into one database for indexing and searching, and beats the hell out of DIR C: /s/a.
So, what we have been shown in the next release of OSX Tiger that lets you search your documents, email and file system isn't anything like this. We have seen it in action and the set release date is 2005.
Come on Bill....Steve can pull this off and he doesn't have 50 billion in the bank.
Evolution or ID?
No. updatedb and slocate find on the filename, not contents.
blah
According Allchin's unbiased memo, here's what's new.
* The highest quality OS we have ever shipped
* New information management tools to improve productivity, including fast desktop search and new, intuitive ways to organize files
* Major security advances that build on Windows XP SP2, such as new technologies to make clients more resilient to attack, viruses and malware
* Flexible and powerful tools to reduce deployment costs for enterprise customers, including technologies for image creation, editing and installation; and much simpler upgrades for consumers
* Significant improvements in reliability, including a robust diagnostic infrastructure to detect, analyze and fix problems quickly, and new backup tools to keep data safe
* A platform that creates Developer excitement with the availability of rich APIs [application programming interfaces]
Feel the developer excitement yet? Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!
Wow. Sorry. I didn't realize that Allchin's memo was so hypnotic. I started channeling some fat, sweaty monkey man there for a moment.
Phiwum's law: anyone that names an obvious law after himself and then puts it in his own sig is just pathetic.
The Register interviewed Dominic and Benoit Schillings a couple of years ago and is a very good read.
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
No, not the type of content, the ACTUAL content. Like searching for "pictures of houses" and the system going away and generating a list of all the jpeg images that are tagged with the "house" keyword.
Other useful examples might be "films starring Tom Hanks" or "music by The Red Hot Chilli Peppers"...
The problem with meta-tags is that they have to get populated somehow. Only the anal fill in meta-data, everyone else either blows it off or takes the defaults.
The real breakthrough happens when the system can decode and parse the file accurately to provide "automagic" meta-data. Otherwise meta-tags are a nice academic exercise that is either ignored or misused in practice.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
I didn't interpret it as an ad, either. I'm bemused by the whole Longhorn issue and will keep on converting people to Linux. I was just saying that it wouldn't necessarily be pointless to advertise here. MS actually did run actual ads on slashdot a while back.
~phil
BeFS was the FS for BeOS. When introduced in ~1997, it was really extraordinary, with 64-bit addressing allowing file sizes many orders of magnitude larger than competitors (also much larger than physically possible), plus extensive support for metadata. BeOS implemented a great MIME-type system to identify file types using BeFS' metadata support, so the file type was cleanly split away from the file name, unlike the DOS/Windows hack of using the file name extension as a file type identifier. Furthermore, certain BeOS apps used BeFS metadata to allow extremely powerful query operations, including "live queries" that were updated every millisecond or so. BeFS was not really a database FS, but it did incorporate some cool indexing features that allowed database-level performance for certain filesystem operations. The earliest versions of BeOS really did use a true database as the filesystem. This idea was discarded due to excessive performance overhead, and BeFS was created as a compromise.
I have not used ReiserFS 4, but it sounds a lot more ambitious than BeFS. At any rate, the Linux BeFS driver is really a compatibility option that does not provide the same features as using BeFS natively under BeOS. fwiw, I would really love to see someone implement BeOS-like queries for Linux using one of the new metadata-enabled FSes.
Go ahead, remove all the libraries that make up Internet Explorer, change the shell to cmd.exe and nothing outside of the shell will break. Delete shell32.dll, msi.dll, netshell.dll, shdocvw.dll, browseui.dll, explorer.exe, userenv.dll, urlmon.dll, shlwapi.dll, webcheck.dll, mshtml.dll and anything else you find that implements IE; nothing server-side will break.