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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."
Press releases like these are free ads for Microsoft. Does anybody here not think that Microsoft knew this was going to get released:
We will not cut corners on product excellence. Our powerful vision is intact; our shipment plan changes will let customers get access to parts of the vision faster.
Why don't they just admit that the market is forcing them to release parts of Longhorn (like Monad) earilier than expected! Leaks of betas and press releases like these are easy ways to keep the Microsoft buzz elevated.
If they didn't release a product until 2008, the market (mostly linux) would have time to catch-up.
"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."
Wasn't this the whole idea behind meta-tags for files? I thought thats why we had such tags in windows media too?
Or is this the same tags that winFS will use to search with?
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
updatedb and slocate, yeah that's it, just like that
One is (that) we have a date-driven release. Things that make that date get in.
Previously Microsoft were skirting around the 2006-7 point without being clear about when Longhorn would ship; it looked like they were going to try to finish features X and Y before release. So now they've moved on to a date-driven release, we can pretty much guarantee 2006 for Longhorn (client edition) and they're going to drop anything they have to, to make that date.
Bill said that the OEMs are okay with the delay, so why the pressure? Looks like Linux is hurrying Microsoft up!
I'm guessing this means that they'll be using some implementation of NTFS with longhorn. Could be good news to all those dual-boot people out there that like to be able to access their Windows files from Linux.
Just as they're making some progress with mounting NTFS filesystems under linux, MS changes the FS. Something which surely would cause problems in Linux.
Looks liks we'll be able to keep dual boots with Longhorn after all.
New system requirements?
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
Well it's sure as hell not going to be an increase in stability or performance. From the interview:
What is really causing sort of the rewrite on Longhorn?
There's no rewrite going on here.
Things I can think of: the tacky sidebar, the 'My Games' et al. menus which will only work with a handful of Microsoft games, and the new GUI look and feel which is probably tied to Avalon. So nothing worth upgrading for, then ;)
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.
Someone please call Oracle and tell Larry that Bill says that IFS (The Oracle Internet File System) doesn't exist.
What is iFS?
iFS can manage all content -- which is scattered across PC desktops, document management systems, and websites -- in a single repository, he said. It supports the storage and management of more than 150 different file types, including documents created using XML.
"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."
Didn't BeOS have something similar?
Also, won't OSX actually have something like this even before Longhorn ships (without WinFS).
Aren't there a lot of pretty advanced projects to do the same for Linux, for example beagle for gnome and the new kde search feature planned for the next release? (Granted, these won't be implemented at the fs level, but who cares as long as they work)
Isn't reiserfs4 actually providing some of this functionality (and much more) and has allready been released?
Doesn't MS have about 60 billion Dollars in the bank and still can't get its act together?
Didn't MS talk about something similar already years ago and wanted to ship it with what is now known as Win2000?
Does that mean that MS are now copying Linux...?
I hope not because then I'd have to start worrying about whether my device will be compatible with my computer.
Obviously you are trolling but this is a common belief...
However, Monad is obviously a way that Microsoft is trying to catch-up with the powerful scripting ability of *nix shells.
Of couse, some linux installs with have sidebars and other copies of new longhorn features. Longhorn will likely gain some new linux-like features between now and then as well... It's just the features race.
In competitive software markets one product will always try to match the bells and whistles of similiar products. For example, IE gained pop-up blocking.
Talent borrows, genius steals.
AC
Does anyone else hope that this new way of searching is actually an improvement this time? I hate the new search interface in Windows XP. For awhile I actually changed it back to the search interface from Windows 2000 (reg hack) but then finally decided that I better get used to the new one, since they would likely take away my reg hack down the road anyway.
Let's hope for an actual improvement this time around.
They understood all too well that the classic MacOS ... was not designed with networking and multitasking in mind.
We had our Mac Plus systems networked, along with a LaserWriter, in 1988 via AppleTalk.
SteveM
> Any guesses?
Yes, actually. That you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Come on, do you really believe that the windows development team would give that much weight and media time to a system that implemented find / -name $string -print?! And even then, that they couldn't hammer it out in a day? Please.
What they are looking to do is to integrate the filesystem into a database system, where files are organized not by directory, but by use/type/relationship. Even I have a hard time wrapping my head around what this will look like once it's carried out. What will it gain us in user experience? My gut says 'a lot' given the sheer amount of development time these people have put into the project.
I certainly feel anger, fury and loathing when simpletons critique what they don't understand.
AFAIK it's all about efficiency - we are talking about indexed searches. It's ok to grep 1MB, but even searching by filename on my whole HDD at home takes a minute maybe. As amount of stored data grows - we don't want the search times to grow linearly, we want indexed searches. Well - this said, the whole WinFS idea kinda sucked. It was intended to be applied only to "Documents and settings" and frankly - I guess I don't have anything of interest there. Why a simple (ok, _relatively_ simple) FS plugin, or rather a set of plugins for different file types, wouldn't suffice, I don't know. (May Reiser beat MS here?)
If MS did nothing innovative before 2006, it (Microsoft) will have to do the catch-up.
He said "the market", you're talking of "the product". Those two are unfortunately nowhere as closely related as one might wish...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Nobody except the people who brought you BeOS and Hans reiser has done a filesystem like WinFS :-)
WinFS is a blatant ripoff of the BeOS filesystem.
What Microsoft REALLY needs is a next-gen OS. The current codebase isn't going to hack it. The delays on Longhorn are an absolute giveaway. If Longhorn had come out in 2004, it would already have been out of date. 2006? Don't make me laugh.
Unix-like systems are going to win out in the end. That is why Mac's OS X looks like a smarter move every day.
Microsoft has so much cash and so much clout that it will take a long time to die, but it is doomed to do so unless at some point it ditches backwards compatibility and the current codebase and does something new.
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
Does anyone else think WinFS is a Bad Thing? A filesystem is a low-level, simple, reliable method of storing files on a disk and a database is a method of catologuing and searching through files. If you combine them, it will get hideously complicated. Which means it will probably be buggy and slow. It's almost as bad as putting windowing in a kernel...
Don't you hate meta-sigs?
I really don't see what difference it makes as long as longhorn is released in the next 4yrs. No matter how many computer-savvy people decide not to use it, it will still be THE os.
It matters because the market is now aware of Linux, which it never previously was. It has major corporations backing and investing in it (IBM, Novell, HP Compaq, Sun) and it has not only mostly caught up with the "features" of Windows but has surpassed them and approaching the kind of features slated for Longhorn.
Just look at the 6.8 release of the X.org X11 server. With the composite extension and cairo you'll be able to do pretty much anything offered by the Longhorn GDI. Of course, it needs to mature, to be further tested, to be further accelerated, and to have enough applications developed for it to become useful... but I think between now and mid-to-late 2006 is more than enough time for that to happen. Add to that the network transparency of X and all of a sudden Microsoft will be playing catch-up in that respect.
Also, look at Storage and the various other FOSS projects working towards that goal. It looks like WinFS may even be late in that regard to, again playing catch up.
Put all this together with the market momentum Linux is gaining (don't be surprised if it hits double figures in terms of market share by 2006) and Microsoft's position as the dominant OS player will be under massive threat.
Also, they can't afford to fuck up again on this one. The world is getting very impatient with the whole security mess. It's simply costing businesses too much to keep on top of it. FOSS operating systems have a far better security record making them even more attractive.
I could go on and on, but Microsoft is betting their monopoly future on Longhorn. And the free desktop could literally beat it to the punch.
Free Gamer - Free games list and commentary
you mean like spotlight?
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
So you'll convert?
You will take your hundreds (maybe thousands) of current files and insert meta-data into each and every one so they fit the new "paradigm"? I won't, and my guess is that a whole butt-load of soccer moms won't either.
I personally don't understand the need for the concept. I do my development, writing, gaming, and keep my photography on one computer. I find the current file-system completely satisfactory and sufficient for the job.
The way I work in the physical world is the way I work on my system. I keep everything in organized stacks, in specific locations. "Emails to Bob" are kept, for instance, in MyName/Emails/Bob. Not hard at all.
I see all this meta-tagging as making everyone into data entry clerks, and, personally, I don't need that.
I would entertain someone coming up with really functional reasoning explaining the need for all this.
okay, okay, so they are incompetent enought to be incapable to copy MacOs HFS w/ it's relations model and quickly hack something similar to IFS?
:D
Plueeze, ok, Microsoft employs some of the brightest minds in the world, but something here is totally wrong. Or maybe marketing departament simply is incapable to explain required functionality to programmers
There are many similarities with Windows and Longhorn - Microsoft also tried for a very long time to hack and upgrade their old OS, also designed for single user with no networking.
Seriously, have you heard of Windows NT? It definitely has it's problems, architectural and otherwise but to say it was designed as a single user system with no networking is just false.
"The problem with internet quotations is that many are not genuine" -Abraham Lincoln
Microsoft also tried for a very long time to hack and upgrade their old OS, also designed for single user with no networking
While DOS was still vogue, MS recognized that it was drastically limited, and began work on a New Technology. That was NT. They maintained both lines - improving and upgrading the technology behind NT until it could provide a consistent user experience with the legacy line.
It may not have been planned, but MS did a great job merging two completely seperate code bases. The DOS/Win9x codebase merged against the NT base under XP, and now, within 3 years, 50% of Windows users on the desktop run XP. The next 25% will be there within another year (the last 25% will probably take a decade; many will not move to XP until they are forced to by hardware failure, and that's their right).
and Apple's last chance to survive was to purchase NeXT, with their Unix experience, and thus MacOS X was born.
Don't forget that in there was CEO who had no idea of the business. That's an important factor, remember.
There are many similarities with Windows and Longhorn
Not as many as you pretend, let's think it through.
Microsoft has already moved the majority of it's users to an operating system that is truly mutlitasking, has fine networking support, and is in fact the industry standard for desktop operating systems. Not that it's the best mind you - but rather the industry standard. What Longhorn is adding is not core bits needed for a modern operating system. XP has those. The fact remains that if everything stayed where they are, MS could milk XP for 10 years. But of course, what MS wants is to continue to be dominant for decades, and that's where Longhorn enters. Let's face it, XP is good enough for just about every current Windows user. It performs fairly well, it's straightforward to install, it supports basically the entire universe of x86 hardware, it's cheap enough for OEMs to use, it's easy enough for users, powerful enough for administrators, flexible enough for developers, etc. It's certainly not perfect.
With Longhorn, MS is exploiting the weaknesses of the FOSS world, so they can continue to dominate the business, corporate, and home desktop market. What isn't FOSS good at doing? Changing rapidly. If a group of programmers get together and code some great new thing, it'd take years of flamefests and discussion to get to the majority of Linux users. Plus chances are it will fork within a few versions and the talent pool will be split. Add to this the fact that much of the really hardwork in software engineering is shunned - people want to work on the stuff they want - not the stuff that others want them to.
So this is what is MS thinking: implement the things that FOSS world can't do thanks to its red-tape laden world-view. Implement a filesystem layer that provides nifty functions that while aren't new are new in this scale. Writing a similiar filesystem and getting it into use in the FOSS world would not happen, or if it did, take a decade. Re-write the graphical subsystem to use strictly vectored screen elements. This is a huge boon to developers - any GUI programmer can tell you what a pain it is thinking about how your application will look at 800x600, at 1600x1200, etc. Will that panel here look funny since it will 99% empty at 1600x1200? Sure different programming enviornments will physically scale the interface for you, but how will it look, feel, and work? Enter Avalon, MS's solution. Screen elements will stay the same size while you increase resolution, but your workspace will gain resolution and capability. All of the sudden you can edit a large image in Photoshop on your high-resolution monitor without all the widgets becoming microscopic. How long would it take for the FOSS world to replicate this? X is completely widget agnostic. Every application or desktop environment has it's own set of widgets with it's own code tree and it's own egos. Not only would X have to ma
"Rapid Development" by Microsoft Press. There's this chapter on Classic Mistakes. To mention a few:
- unrealistic expectations
- wishful thinking
- placing politics over substance
- overly optimistic schedules
- inadequate design
- feature creep
Maybe this company should take some time to read their own publications.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
I love consistency in the tech industry. It gives me warm fuzzies.
my fuckign *windows 2000* has a sidebar.
it's hardly a new innovation(expect they of course make it too big so that people notice it..)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Now Longhorn isn't going to be shipped until late 2006. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt and say they'll hit that date (just in time for Xmas!). OK, so that means that they will have been working on this thing for a MINIMUM of 5 years. If there was any release overlap, and I am sure there would have to be, it is probably more like 6 years. WTF have they been doing in Redmond!? You can't tell me that everyone there has been working on XP service packs.
Now I am not discounting the complexity of software and what it takes to release something of this magnitude. But we are talking about the largest and richest software company on the planet! Surely if anyone could do this, it would be..... Hmm. Perhaps what seems to be an advantage is actually a disadvantage in this case. If you look at their OS timeline (I used this one ), it seems that it was usually around 3 years between major instances of their OS lines. Now, that has doubled for some reason? Maybe they had to start over from scratch and are putting some security into this one. (the good kind, not the DRM kind)
I guess we'll just have to wait and see. It's good for me that they are delaying, at least they won't be changing the "corporate standard" again where I work. I really don't care for XP and wish I had 2000 back...
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
IMO this is just going to encourage people for be even less organised than they are already.
Current modern filesystems allow names long enough to be able to sufficiently describe the contents of a file, people are just too lazy to give files decent names or to organise files in to directories/folders. And if people can't be bothered to give files decent names, what makes anybody think they will enter useful meta-data???
GIGO anybody???
Even if the the meta-data is available in files, I've seen enough examples of 'soccer moms' who have trouble finding things on the internet (via google etc) so how are they going to do any better when searching for files on their machine. I am not blaming the soccer moms here, just pointing out that putting a natural language search expression in to a search engine doesn't always give you what you want.
Because file extensions suck, that's why. All the rest of the meta-data abouta file (creation time, owner, author, etc) is in attributes, which should the type be encoded in the name?
.dat file was the film itself. Now, .dat is associated with Notepad on that PC - had I just double-clicked it, it would've opened in Notepad. So I had to right click, choose "Open with...", and select media player.
.dat files with media player, as the vast majority aren't films. If the file type was determined by the contents of the file (or some meta-data other than the name), then I could've just double-clicked and relied on my OS to work out what to do with the file. Sure, it's not difficult to choose something to open it with, but then I'm technically-minded. My parents (and some of my friends) would've been unable to play the disc.
Practical example: I have a couple of VCDs. My daughter wanted to watch one, on the PC (as my gf was watching TV). It didn't auto-play, and no application was associated with VCDs, so I had to try to work out how to play it. In the end, I realised that the ~700MB
I can't associate all
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Is LongHorn delayed bcos MS couldn't implement this simple stuff?
Don't be ridiculous. Windows (since 2000 at least) has had an equivalent to Linux's (s)locate tool. Clearly that's not what this is about, as it already exists!
I can't think of a word to describe this feeling of anger, fury and loathing combined.
Why are you so angry? Are you losing money (or anything at all!) because of the delay? Seriously, if Longwait being delayed and scaled back in scope makes you that angry, you need to sort your priorities out.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
"implement the things that FOSS world can't do" eh? Then you go and talk about filesystems and vector graphics, both of which, at present time, FOSS absolutely trumps MS at. Linux has ext2/3, ReiserFS, Reiser4(which was just released, and has the potential to do everything WinFS will do), Storage(another datastore similar to WinFS). KDE and GNOME are both moving to SVG, and are moving along quite nicely. The X.org X server is implementing loads of new graphics features, and since forking from XFree, they're actually getting done. Also, most of E17's base libraries are mostly done, and implement a lot of features MS is in the process of "inventing."
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
That's probably why their release schedule always gets pushed out by a few years. The interns are only available in the summer. Anyway, those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, that might be worth pointing out to any purchasing managers you might know. I'm sure the first release of Longhorn will be as half-assed and unstable as Windows 95 will and it'll take a couple years worth of patches to make it work correctly. You could start a migration to Linux now and by the time Longhorn rolls around the X.org guys will probably have the entire GUI running on OpenGL.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The real breakthrough happens when the system can decode and parse the file accurately to provide "automagic" meta-data.
Which will never happen, because the system cannot look at a jpeg and and say "Oh, that's Jim+Masai Warrior+Africa+Summer Vacation+Draped Clothing+Acacia Tree+Always reminds me of that cute little girl I never actually got to take a picture of+Masai Mara+sunset+. . . "
KFG
...what the grandparent poster was trying to say. At least, I took something different out of it than you apparently did.
It's not so much that FOSS can't implement these ideas. It's that they can't, or at least won't, do so in a way that's pervasive for the whole OS. FOSS can, for example, design a new filesystem or display model, but it can't make all of the apps written for Linux support those things. It especially can't make the apps support it in a consistent and comprehensible way.
Microsoft is capable of saying: This is the way we are going to do things now, and if you are going to make software to run on our OS, that's the way it's going to be. If the Office suite, for example, deals with the new filesystem in a certain way, that becomes the Right Way. Instant industry standard. Any software vendor who deviates from that method is going to be looked at as doing it the wrong way.
FOSS can't compell that kind of compliance. Developers are free to support or not support the work of other developers depending on how much time they want to put in or if they think it's a good idea. If there's a difference in vision, a fork can occur.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying the FOSS way of doing things is bad, and I don't think the grandparent poster was either. It's just different. It absolutely has its strengths, but it also has its weaknesses too. Microsoft is, perhaps wisely, choosing to try to push the strengths their model has.
Now that would be somewhat innovative because such a system would be protected against buffer overflows and would provide nice, all-managed
however, MS has not detailed how much of upcoming castrated Longhorn will be in managed code.Any thoughts?
would be cool if Ximian can pull all-managed desktop (based on Mono) before MS did.
Lately, I keep running into, Gee the Open Source world used to be cool and interesting. They used to talk tech, but no more. Now it is about gossip! However, "if you look at my other hand" Microsoft has this really cool stuff in their blogs and the likes...
I really wonder if there is not some stealth blogging going on...
Now to address your issues...
1) I read MSDN blogs and it is essentially the same material posted by ten different people. It is quite amazing how "monolithic" independent blogs can be. Scoblizer seems to be the only "oddball"
2) Slashdot has always been about both gossip and tech news.
3) More people use Open Source, hence more news will be about CEO's who give press releases about Open Source.
What I want to know is why posts that criticise commercial software are classed as Interesting or Insightful and those that criticise open-source software are classed as Flamebait.
I mean I really do wonder why the statement "Does that mean that MS are now copying Linux...?" is not considered flamebait. Where in the moderation rules does it say that criticising commercial software is to be encouraged but criticising open-source software is to be stamped out?
I do wonder what's wrong with the parent though. I mean it really is a right royal pain in the ass whenever you try to connect a device to Linux machine. Will it work or won't it work? Can I get the drivers? Or has Linux improved in this regard?
What is so great about Longhorn?
Seriously.
The only thing useful about it is WinFS, which sounds nice but even that is just a nice-to-have feature most people can and will do without.
"Avalon" is a buzzword just like Apple's "graphics-engine" (whoa, it's an engine, whoa!) with no real use. (At least no Apple user could explain the real-world advantages to me so far, also the Winlots failed to explain what *exactly* makes Avalon so great)
Actually, I think the sooner MS releases Longhorn the better it is for Linux. The incompatibilities, the headaches, the problems that come with each Windows-release (sometimes even with a servicepack) will push Linux. When support contracts run out and Microsoft stops supporting older versions of Windows, that will push Linux. When Microsoft stops to support MS-Office for older versions of Windows that will push OpenOffice.
So please Microsoft, ship it quick.
Windows 2000? Fucking OS/2 had a sidebar.
One reason I use linux is because I don't HAVE to have these features. If Linux gains some "features" like sidebars and whatnot, I can choose to not install them, or find an implementation that I like. Most likely with Windows, they will be ON by default and the means by which to turn them off will be buries so far in some sort of crayon bright eye-candied "configuration" that I would never, ever find it.
I really take issue with Jim's memo - the feature list MS is trying to fulfill, the list they say is what their customers want, still does not include a decent, 21st-century web browser! I mean, come on. This is rediculous. They have to bundle a decent browser.
What constitutes a decent browser? One that has built-in vector graphics rendering would be nice (no plug-in). One that has complete and really good CSS1 support. One that does not render really broken pages would be nice, too. One that is not easy to 0wn. One that has good popup controls. Tabbed browsing would be good, too.
1. Microsoft announces a new search feature with a layer on top of NTFS called WinFS and will be using MS-SQL Server lite to query the data. Huge bloated solution using technology originally embedded into Office 2003. (Office 2003 installs a mini MS-SQL Service, used with Mail Merge, etc). (I don't know which came first, the chicken or the egg. Microsoft may have announced this ambitious plan after seeing the news about Apple hiring the BeFS developers or they did it first and Apple responded, either way file searching has been itching for a major upgrade industry wide.)
2. Apple hires the BeFS developers and within a year integrates the BeFS metatag system into HFS+. It's extremely fast and it works great. Apple calls it Spotlight and it's available to developers right now in Beta form within the Tiger OS 10.4 beta release. Tiger's been updated a few times already. Expect in first or second quarter of 2005 for gold release. The system works across all file types and can handle indexing the contents of files. There is an API for more advanced metatag insertion and application specific search features and interface. I've seen this system in action and it is truly remarkable. Less then a second to retrieve all sorts of data. Email, AddressBook, keyword search in documents, URL's, Bookmarks, etc., etc., etc. It's so good, why even bother organizing one's data anymore?
- Microsoft forgot a primary engineering philosophy. "Keep It Simple Stupid" - KISS! They simply failed in their initial design of WinFS with MS-SQL Server. They need to scrap it and start over. The primary problems being it's too big and bloated and the potential for bugs is enormous. It's too difficult to build queries. They started with the work done on Office 2003 instead of being more innovative and starting over with a better design.
When XP changed it's search abilities I had endless calls from developers who could no longer search the contents of source code files or SQL files like they could with NT's Find command. Apparently, one had to write a plugin to the MS Search engine to add support for various file types. There were work arounds but they required re-indexing all of the files and it took hours and hours to finally start working. Also it was unpredictable in the way it began a re-index. A new file was not immediately available via search. If Longhorn really does not ship with WinFS then it is deeply disappointing. Well back to giving my developers a grep GUI...
The Apple Spotlight system instantly and on the fly indexes the metadata. It does so very quickly. The results are instantly available. You can save the query and add it to your sidebar so it's available from the main file manager (Finder). Click the smart folder (saved query) and it's always up-to-date with the latest data results. The Smart Folders idea was from iTunes, it's a way to represent a query.
Here's to looking forward to OS X Tiger and future Linux systems using similar metatags! And watching Microsoft fumble the ball and have a thirty yard penalty! Gee, by 2010 MS may actually have a viable search system. Perhaps Google will beat them to it by releasing a Windows file search feature. The Google toolbar and SearchBar are awesome all Google needs to do is add filesytem metatag layer and do the same thing as Apple Spotlight. Heck, I would pay for that solution!
Yeah, Bill also seems to forget about BFS. Tiger's Spotlight functionality was architected by the same person that created BFS.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
Please use consistent criteria in your criticism.
Micrsoft has announced WinFS and provided alpha code to developers. Apple has announced Spotlight and provided code to developers. Somehow Microsoft's product is vaporware and Apple's is not?
Difference? Bueller? Bueller?
...on Linux. IIRC, the whole point of WinFS is not so much the "find anything anywhere" stuff but that a version of SQL Server was going to be a part of the file system, so that, if I read it right, your receipes can be indexed and catagorized in the context of a rdms instead of folders and such on a "real" filesystem. At the end of the day, NTFS is still doing the actual heavy lifting of saying what block on what platter belongs to what file.
I admit to thinking this was kind of a cool idea...a big information store instead of a bazillion files. The actual implementation, I would think, wouldn't actually be that hard...again, you're not dealing with files per se, but with data.
The *nightmare* is probably in how you're supposed to interact with it. When your whole world is made up of the file/folder/cabinet metaphor, trying to define what an "information store" is, and how a user is going to interact with it in some seamless fashion, must be mind boggling complex because the only way it will work is if you have the relationships correctly set up. Photography cataloging programs do it by giving the user dozens of fields for him or her to fill in, and only on those fields that there is data is it useful to search on.
Back to Linux...I think that implementing this, presumably using a Reiser4 plugin + some RDMS, and then have the correct way to interact with it, would show Microsoft up to no end. "Information at your fingertips" is more likely to get the attention of a PHB than "10,000 node cluster" and anything to show how the Linux community delivered when MS couldn't, is obviously a Good Thing.
My reading of Bill's interview was that although they won't be putting WinFS into Longhorn they will be putting essentially a clone of Apple's Searchlight technology in there instead.
From what was briefly described all of the features of Searchlight would be there and it will be implemented in a similar manner.
WinFS goes further in its storage model, and this is where I'm not so clear. From what I've gathered it's akin to a fully featured SQL database system layered on top of the underlying filing system. Apple don't have that right now, although the storage model they had for the Newton was an OODBMS, not a filing system. It is possible (although I think it unlikely) that Apple could come up with their own "Future Storage" system based on the old Newton model before Microsoft finishes WinFS.
Given the lack of plans for server support for WinFS for Longhorn it seems very sensible to drop this right now and wait for it to mature. Networked environments are, after all, pretty important.
"That's simply not true."
Maybe, maybe not. But you have not provided any support that it is NOT accurate.
Yet there you have posted TWO references where it WAS accurate.
So far, the weight of evidence is against Microsoft.
"The latter incompatibility was somewhat justified in the fact that Windows needed to tweak the internals of DOS, but the way Windows reported it was extremely deceptive."
Then why was it encrypted and hidden?
"They go to great lengths to keep badly-written applications running."
So you claim, yet there are lots of examples that disprove your claim.
"I know that MS has made deliberate decisions in the past to make the OS incompatible with software that competed with another MS product, but that's unusual."
So, Microsoft has been guilty of this, yet without any evidence to support it, I'm supposed to believe that Microsoft has changed?
Does your dictionary have a definition for "Gullible"?
"Our scheduling and predictability on this project has been better than it was on OS 360. So software has not gotten more complex."
Bill seems to be forgetting that OS/360 was one of the first attempts at anything like a modern OS and whole books have been written about the mistakes that were made in its development. Fred Brooks "the Mythical Man-Month" is largely a result of the lessons learned in its development. What's he saying here? Is he implying Microsoft hasn't learned anything about developing complex software since 1960? As cynical as I sometimes am about the company, I don't believe that... they have put together systems successfully that are far more complex than OS/360.
Remember, OS/360 had to run on hardware that was less powerful than anything any Microsoft operating system all the way back to MS-DOS 1.0 has had to deal with. Features like being able to run a variable number of jobs were restricted to the top-of-the-line models, and most early installations ran it purely in a static batch mode with a fixed number of concurrent jobs.
This is a great soundbite, but it doesn't begin to address the question. The best answer to a question like "Has software just gotten more complicated to write?" is "Yes." I don't know if Microsoft accepts this or not, I have no idea, but if Bill Gates answers a question like that with a red herring like "We're doing better than IBM did on OS/360" I fear they're still in denial. So perhaps the best answer to the next part, "What, if anything, does Microsoft need to do as a company to reflect that reality?", is "therapy".
Allchin's "memo" is anything but. Rather, it's just a press release disguised as memo to make it easier for "journalists" to delude themselves into thinking they're publishing real news.
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I wasn't using ANY GTK1 apps two or three MONTHS after GNOME2 was released, which was a MAJOR switch. I think you should pay more attention to OSS so you can be more informed.
Yet Fedora still ships with some by default. As does Mandrake.
There are dozens of very complete SVG icon sets available NOW for KDE and GNOME.
So is it safe to say that 75% of all desktop icons used by Linux desktop users are SVG based? Can I ship a product that counts on the fact that the icons used on desktops are SVG based? Ohh, I can't? Because hardly anyone uses them.
As a matter of fact, I can't even ship an application that assumes you have KDE, or an application that assumes you Gnome, can I? Can I make assumptions about anything on any typical linux machine? Tell me, what are things that I, as a developer can assume about your box?