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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.
So, in his (apocryphous) diary, he mentioned being the inventor of product pre-announcement, now he's just invented the post-pre-announcement. :)
Way to go, Bill
Trolling using another account since 2005.
"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
"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...
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.
Translation:
We thought it was a good idea but no-one else has done an implementation that we can copy off, so we can't really figure out how to do it.
Can anyone explain exactly what will be in Longhorn, now that the new filesystem and graphics system is not going to be in it ?
"Free software as in beer, copy protection as in racket" - Telsa Gwynne
So that's bye bye new file system
bye bye new GUI
bye bye new API
wtf is left ?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/27/microsoft
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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 must admit I'm getting more and more of the deja vu feeling, reading Microsoft's statements on Longhorn. I've seen it before, when Apple representatives struggled to explain the delay with shipping their ultimately sophisticated version of MacOS, codenamed Copland. They understood all too well that the classic MacOS is a bloated unstable construction based on a single-user single-machine Macintosh System, that was not designed with networking and multitasking in mind. They managed somehow to hack this system to have a sort-of poor man's multitasking and also some rudimentary networking capabilities, but they knew it's not gonna last in the Internet Age. They needed a new system and they needed it ASAP. Yet after millions of bucks and years of coding, Copland turned out to be just nothing but very expensive vaporware, and Apple's last chance to survive was to purchase NeXT, with their Unix experience, and thus MacOS X was born.
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. And yet they were strangled by their own limitations they needed to keep for sake of backwards compatibility. Can they solve it on their own or will they just, say, buy Sun for their OS experience?
It already does. I've had a sidebar on my desktop for the last 5 years, thanks to gnome.
Oh, wait, do that mean that MS are now copying Linux...?
T.
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.
I guess Linux coders copy MS features for the benefit of those who wish to migrate - not to enhance the power and usability of the OS itself. Secondly, these changes would take a few days in Linux (KDE or GNome); not years as with Microsoft.
-
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Introducing Microsoft Longhorn Millenium edition!
Preorder now and recieve a copy of Duke Nukem Forever!
If people are waiting til 2006 anyways, Gates would have been smarter to delay Longhorn until WinFS could be totally implemented. If they need more money coming in on the conveyor belt, then they could have just released Windows XP OSR2 - essentially a service pack/ upgraded version people would have to pay for. I seriously doubt I will be paying for a cippled version of Longhorn - especially if its best parts are going to be made available for XP.
Looks like maybe MS should have spent a little more time getting WinFS working instead of tweaking the UI to make it "oh so pretty." Unfortunately, I think MS realizes that a slick (albeit graphics intensive) UI will likely sell more copies to the ignorant masses than an innovation like WinFS.
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?
Maybe he should have a look at iTunes and GMail.
For me, a kind of "iTunes for files", including smart queries, would be fairly enough. And it doesn't require a brand new file system and its instability risks...
It's not about finding files by filename, but about finding files by content.
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
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.
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.
imagine that... treating everything as files...
;-)
how inovative...
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
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?
> 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.
winFS doens't seem very usefull in my eyes. it's just a layer on top of ntfs. in the end (windows 2012) you'll see they rewrite it to be a true filesystem. reiser4 seems to do this the right way. having a nice filesystem that you can extend all the time using plugins. I think microsoft wastes a lot of time by doing this in 2 steps. I also understood that winFS is "My Documents" only (or something like that) and cannot be used on the entire harddisk (atleast not in longhorn).
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.
;-)
I just hope to god it doesn't end up like the Nautilus "Spacial browser" - maybe the worst idea of all time
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
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.
*cough*
Microsoft still can't come up with shit until Apple has done it better, first. Sad.
Always ask 'why?'
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
No. updatedb and slocate find on the filename, not contents.
blah
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?
4 years without a release....I think they might still be number 1 but the distribution would be much more like 60:40 Linux is really gaining traction now....more so than ever before. Barely a day goes buy that I don't see linux in business week, CNBC, Wall Street Journal, etc....I mean this little guy is taking off with wings and people are noticing...I predict almost total server domination within 5 years as well as some descent in roads int the World (Not USA only) desk top market by then..perhaps 20%
what?
That Micro$oft will be making Windows XP OSR2, followed by Windows XP ME?
Get a free ipod.
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
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!
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.
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"...
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
"One problem with Konghorn..."
Oh dear Lord. Don't tell me the KDE team are reimplementing Longhorn.
Free Gamer - Free games list and commentary
It doesn't view my pron collection while i'm away does it?
Didn't you ever wonder why "FindFast.exe" kept hogging your computer in spurts?
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
"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
"Isn't reiserfs4 actually providing some of this functionality (and much more) and has allready been released?"
:)
Yes, it has.
I was just thinking that it would be cheaper, easier, and faster for Microsoft to just license Reiserfs v4. Just the atomic file writes/updates would be worth the effort! And the filesystem supports plugins.
Some people in the Linux community don't think Reiserfs v4 is stable... but I'm willing to bet by 2006 the issue will be settled.
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.
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.
- http://www.sunrizen.com/ It basically does what was taken out of Longhorn- turns the filesystem into a database, and uses that for fast searching. It doesn't have the SQL and real-time queries that BeOS does, but it's hella fast and really cool. I've used it for bug-hunting code, since it searches for text inside documents hella fast. It's much better than MS's shipped in search utility.
click me
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.
Okay, so the idea is brillant. There's been quite a few brillant ideas in the past of Microsoft. And I mean really brillant and great. But so far Microsoft managed to screw up implementing ALL of them. Just think of Samba, what a great thing. But find a neighbour computer in Microsoft Network. About 70% success rate. Thanks. What about getting internet URLs interchangable with file paths? Wow! But the support for that feature at best, lacks in many places. Maybe ability to upgrade transparently from Internet without any user interaction required? Okay, cool, but it takes AGES and computer is insecure in the meantime, plus the upgrades often break the system.
I guess the great idea of database of files will turn into another dull "clippy-style" annoying misfeature that pisses users off because of some stupid flaws that shouldn\t be there but are there and are unremovable. Microsoft screwed up too many times in the past to let me believe they will get that right this time.
Sorry.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
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.
Why don't you check those out to see how much it will do for the interface. What will MS "invent" next?
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
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.
Commercial vs. open source ethics aside, Microsoft aren't going to allocate their entire workforce to this one. It's quite a heavy task; GNOME Storage has been in development for a few years and is still heavily in beta. It probably only handles a small subset of file types.
;) ) and feedback cycles involved with releasing such an important part of Microsoft's 'most important' operating system to date.
Whereas Microsoft's task is far greater. They're not delivering a CVS demo, it's a cornerstone of the OS (or rather, was) which means coming up with means to generate metadata, deciding what metadata to store, indexing it and returning it in a manner that's fast and accurate, for every single common format out there.
Microsoft have a fair number of software products and generating metadata is quite difficult (since the user isn't going to supply it himself - how many times have you filled in all the Microsoft Word 'Properties' for your documents?). So it could easily take years.
And don't forget the QA, testing, bugfixing (maybe they'll skip that part
Windows is close to 50 million lines of code with several enormous subsystems, including .NET and the whole GUI presentation system. To integrate those systems with WinFS involves touching almost everything, with combinatorial complexity. Even with $5 billion/year to spend on developers, it was just too much to get it done and get it stable. It's probably the biggest software integration project ever attempted, by far.
To disagree with one earlier post, I think MS has a pretty good idea of what they were trying to do with WinFS. It was simply too much to do.
Besides, WinFS is superfluous, since Google (and its nascent competitors) will evolve into a global implementation of the same idea. That's vastly more efficient. Hey Linux guys: make a Reiser4 plugin that accepts search-like verbs and automatically searches the Web!
I was going to post a draggable link, but it seems that slashdot filter does not allow javascript hrefs, so it will have to be done manually.
Create a bookmark with this location.Next time you are offended by the it color scheme, just click.
Pretty much untested, and has no failsafes (as in it will ruin other sites), for that open source look and feel.
In the next version I plan to add ability to remove any slashdot section as I think the apple theme is a bit overdone as well....
badness 10000
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.
> However, Monad is obviously a way that Microsoft is trying to catch-up with the powerful scripting ability of *nix shells.
I think MS just thought it would be funny to release something that would "have to be" called "Gonad" if it was copied and release in open source! (Hmmm, or maybe Gnunad?!)
Not to mention the time it will take the user to enter and maintain the metadata.
I feel so sig.
"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
Take a look at OS/2 with its meta data for files. While sorting, searching, et al would be an addition, I pretty much never had an issue with a file made by program 'X' trying to be opened by program 'Y' because of the common extension. Actually, extensions were irrelevant, something I still miss in today's MS software. MS really does need to completely drop the 8.3 notation (and if you think they already did, please view your local file types in the explorer Folder Options, they're pretty much still stuck on the .3 part)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
"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."
Nobody, Mr. Gates? Apple announced this was going to be a key part of OS X Tiger. It is scheduled to be released this coming year, and they have already implemented it in the preview versions of Tiger that they have made available to developers. By all reports it is working just fine, today, right now.
So please, lay off the "nobody" stuff, mmmk?
My favourite quote, by far:
"Well, basically, Apple isn't releasing Mac OS X 10.4 until 2005, so we've got to wait a little while longer before we can finish Longhorn."
Oh, wait, I guess they left that out of the article.
100% USDA-approved flamebait or your money back!
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
"... we couldn't figure out how to do it in time."
__
Thou hast besquirted me, O leotarded one.
...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.
Are they going to ship a Linux distro?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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?
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!
Say you're a lawyer and you file your cases something like:
c:\year\case\client\outcome
Now you want to search these according to:
c:\client\year\case\outcome
This is not currently possible with directories without a huge PITA and this is one area where winFS can shine.
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...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.
Apple's Quartz Extreme off-loads compositing of the graphics display to the GPU. So, while I'm dragging my truly transparent Terminal across my desktop, the CPU can still work on the DVD encode it was working on without worrying about my window drag. However, you and your faux transparent terminal on Linux will have to steal cycles away from your ray-tracing program in order to do the same. The same thing happens with every window you or I move.
Core Image and Core Video will allow the GPU to do much of the same for filters. They'll be produced by the GPU instead of the CPU and they'll happen in real-time instead of me having to wait for the CPU to render them.
So, while Windows and Linux users' GPUs are usually idle unless they're playing a game, Mac users' GPUs are providing a faster, richer experience.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
But on re-reading this phrase, I see a key word I had overlooked... it's "richly". Gates is telling the absolute truth; let me paraphrase: "Nobody has ever brought together the world of documents, media and structured information in giving you one simple set of verbs that lets you
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.
I guess this means that we'll see Windows XP2 (Longhorn) SE (Search Edition) With WinFS to instantly find all your data around 2007 or 2008.
I really, and I'm not trolling, expect that MS saw what Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger's Spotlight technology was capable of and realised that WinFS was not going to make the huge dent that they first thought it would. I assume that they scrapped the original SQL based technology and started from scratch using Spotlight's abilities as a guide.
That said, I can see the wisdom of getting Longhorn out the door with Avalon. Home users, gamers and newbies are bought and sold on eye candy and Avalon promises to bring loads of that and it is probably extremely important for MS to compete there finally with OSX (which has been around for 3 years now).
So in early 2005 consumers will have a meta data file system, and since Mac OS 10.2 they've had 3d accelerated GUIs... Now if WinFS did get released in longhorn (which it won't be, according to MS.) We'd still be waiting until late 2006, for these features.
I wouldn't place too much emphasis on MS's ability to timeline a product to market. After all windows 95 was meant to have the 3D accelerated GUI, and NT 4 was supposed to have WinFS.
At this rate it'll be 2010 before WinFS sees sunlight.
Last Linux was a Red Hat 7 point something a couple of years ago. It found pretty much everything on my laptop apart from the Winmodem (no surprise there then). I had some trouble with XFree but the latest and greatest sorted that out.
One of the great things about Windows XP (and to a lesser extend 2000) is that you can almost always plug a device in and it works straight away. I have found this really useful with friends' digital cameras. It's the same with portable media players - you just plug the thing in and it's another new drive. Also, I just bought a v cheap 7-in-1 memory card reader, plugged it into a USB port and hey presto, a whole host of new drives appeared. Remember also that these devices will have been released long after XP. So I guess there must be a standard somewhere that Microsoft and the hardware vendors are complying to.
I believe that even the latest Linux distros will not be able to match XP in the way it allows hot plug and play of such devices. I'd quite happily be told otherwise though!
I've got nothing against Linux. I imagine that the Linux developers are concentrating on gaining an even stronger foothold in the server market before getting cute on the desktop. This makes a lot of sense but people need to realise that it's horses for courses. I would avoid Windows as a server platform but I wouldn't want to use anything else on the desktop - at the moment. I think that's called the freedom of choice!
"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."
Lotus Notes has been available since 1989, but of course that is IBM.
When they say "better searching" all I hear is "retrain Grandma" -- if that's even necessary, because they will likely support the legacy way of doing it.
When they say "better security" all I hear is "our previous OS was awful" -- and besides, they will need to patch the older OS.
When they say "better interface" I hear "confusing visuals" and showing Grandma where to click all over again.(Now we'll be able to start a program by clicking on either the start menu, the quick launch, the systems tray OR the new FastBar-Zip-Wham-Clicker!!)
WinFS, whenever and however it is released, seems to be completely untranslatable into average-user speak. Although like everything else I'm sure the MS marketing machine will be able to turn it into bland hype that has consumers vaguely worried about not buying the upgrade.
When I hear the word 'Security,' I reach for my shotgun. Robyn Hitchcock
Gnome Storage is everything WinFS wants to be when it grows up. It's a real RDBMS storage system with complete metadata support, natural language support (with references), network transparency, etc.
It's still in the development stage, but it seems to be moving forward quite nicely.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
"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".
MSN
Competing with Google for Web searching
MSNBC
Their upcoming iTunes-type store and iPod-wannabe
MS media center
XBox
Trial attempts at subscriber model software
Discontinuation of Explorer
Lackluster updates to XP
Attempst to discontinue older, widely used OSs like NT
Pushing their media players and format into other arenas (CDs, film, etc.)
Now, contrast to Apple, a much smaller company with fewer resources, fewer customers, and look what they've managed to pull off in the last 3-4 years. There is no reasonable excuse for MS dragging their feet with Windows beyond a genuine lack of interest in going much further with the product. I know it sounds crazy, but what other reason could there be? At least, that's what it looks like to me. I think they desperately want to succeed in some other area besides software, want to move away from their core products. In pursuing that, they've let the software end of their business lag badly.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
hum...very interesting theory. It wouldn't suprise me in the least...knowing how microsoft has played in the past.
Problem with them doing this is a lot of coporations use Unix based servers...there is no way that they are gonna just up and switch everything to the new windows based OS because microsoft decided to break compatability....no I suspect that micorsoft will initially make it backwards compatable They will fiercly defend patents they have on winFS so that an open source equivalent doesn't crop up...then they will slowly try to tstrangle the industry into using the new technology.
Of course I really have no clue what they are ultimately up to.
what?
Each application that supports WinFS will act as an API to access their own application's files and deliver the requested content. It will work something like how piping in Linux works, but using XML to define the data as well.
It might be possible to build rich applications out of existing applications. MS are trying to build something comparable to "OSS doesn't reinvent the wheel"
The search portion of WinFS will just work by going through the XML data. You will be able to narrow your searches for specific content, search various content for different things.
Searching by specifying a resized cropped bitmap and finding the original picture is an example, or finding pieces of the picture in other pictures. Searching by specifying audio clips is another possibility. Of course all the other meta data in files already present will also be searchable. (Search for music: by artist, title, length, etc).
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
Well, you can use the magic file to determine file type. The Nueros MP3 player can identify songs based on a 30-second clip, using an on-line service. There are systems that can automatically identify a person in a photograph, though these are not yet generally available to the public, nor are they 100% accurate. (But, they would be more accurate for organizing photographs, as people tend to take pictures of a small subset of the population.)
Cameras often encode date and time.
Then, there are remembrance agents like Dashboard that can help, as well.
There are already a lot of relationships embedded in our email and other documents. There's no reason these relationships can't be automatically extracted and formalized by the filesystem for rapid access.
In general, there is a *lot* of metadata that *can* be automatically populated. A lot of it is only of general use. However, that is still a step in the right direction.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
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.
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
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?
Yes, they have.
And this is a FAT/NTFS issue... my 68k Mac from 1992 can find a file faster than a 3.4 GHz P4 with a gig of ram, if it's running Windows. Some filesystems are simply superior to others. The mistake MS made when making NTFS was to not provide it with any sort of indexing, making it impossible to search the directory tree without traversing each node.
HFS/+ has never had this problem. Hit Cmd-F on a System 7.0 box, type a partial filename, and bam... it's there. It's that simple.
That said, WinFS is a really cool idea, since we see hard drives getting bigger than anyone needs them for (read: room for metadata) and systems getting faster and faster (read: easier to parse through metadata). I do, however, wish it was an open implementation. This could be a chance for MS to gain some credibility with the F/OSS world.
I mod down pyramid schemes in sigs.
This is about more than eye-candy. I used the transparent Terminal as an example of some of Quartz Extreme's additional benefits, but it comes into play when any window is moved. Mac OS X had a real transparent Terminal before it had Quartz Extreme, but it used a lot of the CPU to composite it.
It's about freeing up CPU cycles for other tasks.
I have a website. It's about Macs.