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WinFS' Spot on Back Burner Nothing New
osViews.com writes "Charles Arthur of Independant.co.uk has an interesting editorial which analyzes Microsoft's recently postponed 'WinFS,' the file system that Microsoft had been planning to implement in Longhorn. His editorial reminds us that this technology, previously referred to as the 'NT Object Filing System' was intended for a previous version of one of Microsoft's operating system's code named 'Cairo.' Microsoft first spoke of the 'NT Object Filing System' in 1992 and scheduled a beta release in 1996 and then a full release in 1997. But limitations cause it to continue being delayed."
Storage would be one example. I bet there are others.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I'll pull out the link again: Storage (a GNOME project) uses some nice algorithms to let you look up anything from '1960s music' or 'films directed by Francis Ford Coppola' to 'pdfs from joe'. All in natural language and over a wide range of formats, although evidently it's still a work in progress.
ReiserFS version 4 is a database at heart. Its basic structure is just a table of FileName | Binary but it also contains a modular system where it can be expanded for many uses. There is a lot of talk of including meta data in ReiserFS for such a system.
http://www.namesys.com/whitepaper.html
BeOS ran on the beBox and it was a real product.
Not just vaporware. Infact Id software used it to create the textures in quake1.
Pink and risc got me all excited and scared my non nerd highschool friends back when I was 17. No I am excited about risci again and Unix when hopefully I get my powerbook next January. I had fantasies about owning my own hacking machine even at that age.
BUt was not Pink part of os/2?
IBM wanted OS/2 to beat windows and they planned something called CHIRP (powerpc reference platform ) to run this OS/2 NT on steriods. I was hoping to see IBM as well as Apple boxes to run it on.
The only good news is that the well documented chirp helped Linux get ported to that architecture.
Sure OS/2 never took off but we have a Unix to run it on the powerpc risc platform today as a result.
http://saveie6.com/
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
My understanding is that Daytona was NT4(yes 95 was Chicago), but had most of the features of Cairo, then the next roadmap, Cairo appeared to take on the features they couldn't tack on Daytona.
But exactly, how can you fork a feature list? I'm not sure yet, but it has been done, and repeatedly, by Microsoft(and also by Intel, among other manufacturers, whose roadmap featurelist are quite splittable) before, so I know it's possible, and not just in the software world. The quick and easy version seems to be anytime someone can promise something long term, and change their minds, you can have a fork.
The overall goal of NT Object Filing System is the same as WinFS. It's not the same code, just the same overall product.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Oracle still uses the database for the mail server. Check out Oracle Collaboration Suite. We use it internally. Best part is, as an Oracle DBA, I understand how to backup and recover the damn thing. Never could say the same for MS Exchange.
Oracle sure did try a database for their mail server. And they kept right on using it. Sun uses one (Berkeley DB) for their mail, calendar and other app servers. So do other vendors.
l
http://www.sleepycat.com/solutions/customers.shtm
In reality databases can be the right solutions for all sorts of problems - and cause a few as well.
Um, no, it wasn't. HURD was not specified in the original project goals. The goal was a free UNIX-like operating system, full stop.
Read the announcement. No mention of kernel architecture. Nor is there any in the Manifesto.
Now, if you want to say HURD is the equivalent of WinFS, I'd be inclined to grant the point. But the original goals of the GNU Project are fulfilled by Linux. Except maybe the Chaosnet thing.
True but Reiser4 is available now. Someone just needs to build a front-end into Gnome/KDE.
Other examples of vaporware in Linux:
- integrated NVidia or ATI drivers
This doesn't fit the definition of Vaporware because no one ever claimed it was going to happen. Besides, you have to download the drivers for Windows too.
- working USB 2 of Firewire support
Works for me, I don't know what problem you are having.
- fast boot-up times
25 seconds including init on a 700Mhz machine is fast enough for me.
What alternate reality are you living in?
Time makes more converts than reason
When I was at college one of the girls I went out with had a step mother who had no ability to organise her own information.
In her rolodex type phone number finder she had several of her friends listed under "H" for "Home number" with a sublist of name and numbers. She had a similar setup for "W" for "work numbers" and "M" for "mobile numbers" with a list of peoples numbers.
Obviously the cards for "H", "W", "M" where quite full as most people where listed there. Other cards where almost empty.
I asked her why she didn't organise people by first names or last names. She looked stunned that at the suggestion.
I would hate to see how this lady organises her computer files, but a search facility no mater how bad would help her alot.
Elivs
--
Sorry about any typoos in my post, Im having a busy day.
Wasn't BeOS's BeFS something similar to this?
It was a next generation file system, that afaik, is still superior to many modern filesystems. It even had methods for storing meta data from custom file types (ie- mp3), so you could search for an "artist" field with "Cibo Matto" in it, or whatever.
Also, it used a set block size (1, 2, or 4K) rather than a set # of blocks.
i miss BeOS...... *sniff*
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
> iTunes is an excellent example of this
iTunes is NOT an example of using directories. It uses MP3 tags and presents a "flat" playlist view no matter what the REAL directory structure looks like. ITunes is a database!
> c:\docs c:\mp3 c:\pics d:\download
Look kids - It's the last living DOS User! Who needs multiuser and file permssions and that jazz. (Hint: if you are starting at c:\ everytime, you're doing it wrong.)
Although it makes a nice tagline and dig in the ribs for Microsoft -- same delayed technology, different century, yuck, yuck -- the Cairo Object File System (OFS) and WinFS bear no resemblance to one another. Having worked in the Cairo/NT group at the tail end of the former and suffered through uncountable meetings about the goals/architecture/benefits of the latter prior to leaving MS, I can say this with some certainty. Saying they're the same internally or architecturally because both strive(d) to provide the ability to find any document by any properties or content (aka "information at your fingertips"... remember that?) is just vacuous -- you might as well talk about similarities between file-systems that support shell wildcard expansions * and ?.
OFS was about a lot of things, probably too many things. It was designed during the "object wars" and things like copeland and pink and opendoc were in the headlines. Document-centered work was the proposed user paradigm, where structured documents contained nested opaque data from many different applications, and so applications wouldn't need or want to know the difference between a top-level document or a sub-part of a document. This user paradigm did not entirely come to pass, and so an entire file and object-system architecture and shell user-experience premised on it was canned.
That said, a few features from "OFS" did survive into NT/XP, including:
From what I saw to date, WinFS seemed to be about the data/XML paradigm of data format transparency, not about opaque nested/contained data like OFS. It seems to be pursuing a different usage paradigm. At least I think so.
It's a confusing thing, and it shouldn't be. The basic idea of fusing a DB and a FS is dead simple, and if every OS offered structured and unstructured data, a set of simple core schemas, federated query across the two forms of data, and transactional/ACID cross-references between them, you could build many applications more easily. Why WinFS keeps taking so many more bits to describe itself than this is beyond me.
n@
That's not Webster's Dictionary. That's just another cheapass website which tries to make money by taking Wikipedia's content and jamming some ads on it. And webster-dictionary has the added quality of trying to rip off the good name of the real Webster's dictionary
(I'm pretty sure Webster's Dictionary's trademark has long since passed into a more nebulous place.)
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
the issue with XFS is it didnt mesh nicely with the existing VFS. XFS was a lot of SGI kernel code running on linux through a specially written translation layer, and it was very buggy for a long time.
Well, actually Reiser6 is vaporware, and Reiser4 is just the first storage layer that is really suitable for supporting adding database and search engine functionality into the filesystem. I grant you, it puts us years ahead of where MS is, but MS has much more funding, and our guys are spending at least half their time dealing with grubbing for money instead of coding.
Oh, and, let us not forget that there is a definite lack of political support for our work in the kernel community (especially among the other FS developers, ahem), and implementing the semantics would take 3-5 years if we got the funding today.
But hey, we do have a really sweet storage layer that blows away the other filesystems, while MS has seemingly given up on the serious algorithm issues we solved, and MS is now talking about putting the metadata into a layer above the FS rather than getting their tree algorithms right. Also, their semantics are probably going to be a confused hodge-podge of search engine and SQL shaped by turf battles with no single architect behind the design.
So, I have to say that things are looking interesting. I wish we had the funding I need to focus more of my time on coding and design.
No, windows server 2003 presents the login screen faster but the network services aren't all loaded yet, and if your running a server surely you want the services running and available?
Linux won't display the login box until after everything is initialized, windows will half load itself, show the login and continue loading in the background.
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