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WinFS to be available in WinXP
ScooterMcGoo writes "According to a Microsoft Watch blog, WinFS is being back ported for Windows XP.
From TFA: WinFS isn't dead, Tom Rizzo, Microsoft's director of product management for SQL Server, recently told Microsoft Watch. In fact, Microsoft is planning to provide an update on the technology at this year's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in September, he said.
Rizzo said that Microsoft is busily back-porting the WinFS file-system technology to Windows XP.
It's unclear if Microsoft also is porting WinFS to Windows Server 2003, but such a move would be likely, given that the Redmond software vendor is doing so with Avalon and Indigo."
I'll believe it when I see it... my sources inside MS (and no, I ain't giving any proof, so believe me or not, I don't give a shit), say that there are very hard deadlines for Longhorn, with features being left out if they don't meet certain benchmarks, etc... so to hear that they are now taking something, and wasting resources back porting it? Especially when they first said it would be dropped from longhorn? I call Bull..
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
I mean, jesus, its a file system, not a damn search engine.
Quote from MS on WinFS:
One of the monumental problems organizations face today is aggregating information that's stored in disparate formats. Knowledge workers have long wanted to be able to search for content independent of format. WinFS allows the user to perform searches based on the metadata of the stored item, regardless of what type of file it is or which application created it.
So not only is it a file system, it is also a search engine.
Source:http://msdn.microsoft.com/data/winfs/
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After all, they probably want to give people an incentive to migrate their servers, but realize that servers with WinFS will be adopted more quickly if the large installed base of WinXP clients can work with it. But if Server 2003 can support it as well, then there goes one reason to migrate.
Windows Server 2003
WinXP
Different products. What's the issue?
Despite the unforutnate name, WinFS is a service that runs above the filesystem. The data is still stored on a plain old NTFS partition(s).
source: Microsoft's WinFS developer page
The data is still just as (in)accessible as it's always been. The meta data is locked away in the WinFS store but we haven't been using that all this time so it's not like we're going to be any worse off.
as for writting NTFS, I suggest you take a look at captive NTFS which lets you read and write your NTFS partitions in Linux with the same confidence that you do in Windows.
Sounds perfectly nondescript to me, simply some buzzwords thrown together to give the impression of state-of-the-art design. Of course, I haven't watched the "show".
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WebDAV...It's gone, largely, nowhere.
Mac OS X uses WebDav to mount iDisks. Tons of web developers use it in Dreamweaver.
I don't know if that's exactly somewhere, but it surely isn't nowhere.
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the strongest word is still the word "free"
Well, considering that Linux does not officially support Reiser 4 yet, I'd say you can cross that off the list of filesystems you could access from Windows.
Not Reiser4, but there are some tools to access Reiser3 from Windows: RFSTool, and YAReG, a graphical frontend for RFSTool.
While what you say mostly sounds good, let's see all of them in practice:
The registry: hundred of applications forget to rmeove registry settings upon uninstall. Try running Norton System Works and running the registry cleanup editor; hundreds if not thousands of entries are reported as dead, and should've been cleaned up when the app was uninstalled.
Temporary files: go into your temporary files directory and see the hundreds, if not thousands, of files and directories that are no longer in use, but eating hard disk space.
Async file I/O: with a standard file system, we have to worry about file locking. With WinFS, there are no files to lock.
Making sure directories exist: developers have to worry about creating directories, with WinFS, there is no need for directories.
Clean up temp files: see my second argument.
Config files: no, users and other applications cannot touch your application's local allotment in WinFS, meaning your configurations and settings are safe.
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I'd love to be able to use a filesystem that can be seen in a dual-boot environment;
The "captive NTFS" driver that was easily installable in a kanotix environment seemed to work well enough, even for writing. I am not spending much time on intel linux so YMMV.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Yes, Windows most likely can support that. I mean, it does support ext3, ReiserFS, and even ext2 with write support. So I think there's nothing technically in the way. The problem is probably being lack of driver developers. ;-)
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Maybe the question to ask is how much money does microsoft make from the upgrade market versus how much they stand to make from being nice to their customer base. I imagine that very few people buy upgrades. As for organizations, I imagine that if an orgranization insists on having the latest windows software, they probably have some kind of licensing agreement that gives them "free" upgrades while simultaneously locking them into the agreement.
For example, at Ohio State University, we recently went from a perpetual license to a contract with a 3 year time span. Meaning, if we buy a bundle of software licenses from Microsoft for a pc, those licenses expire at the end of the agreement. Esentially, this means we'll now be repurchasing of all of our MS software every 3 years. It's basically a subscription model. Whether or not this is cost effective for us is debatable. However, under this kind of model, backporting features doesn't cost MS upgrade revenues and it makes those of us who have to maintain systems a little happier.
As others pointed out, WebDAV is popular among Dreamweaver types, where it replaces FTP, and Apple uses it for their iDisk service. I wanted to add a clarification -- WebDAV is not a filesystem like FAT32, NTFS, WinFS, HFS+, etc. It is a file serving protocol that uses extensions to the HTTP command set. It is more analogous to FTP, AFP, SMB, etc. The WebDAV server can run on any filesystem format it knows how to read.
The book you're talking about is "Practical File System Design with the Be file system".
Here's the slashdot article on it and here's a pdf of the book direct from the author's site.
It looks interesting, but it's been on my to-read list for a while.
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I recall my good ol' DOS times.
J OBG AMES\PLATFORM: \WIN95 -- my custom "WINDOWS" directory.
...
...
...
Here's more or less a list of my directories:
C:\DOCS
C:\DOCS\HOMEWORK
C:\DOCS\
C:\GAMES
C:\GAMES\3D
C:\GAMES\ADVENTUR
C:\
C:\LENG\BC
C:\LENG\TP
C:\PICS
C
C:\WIN98
C:\WP
So I could organize myself. Now, do you know what Microsoft did?
C:\Program Files\app 1
C:\Program Files\app 2
C:\Program Files\app 3
C:\Program Files\app 9,999
C:\Documents and Settings\me\My Documents\doc1
C:\Documents and Settings\me\My Documents\doc2
C:\Documents and Settings\me\My Documents\doc3
C:\Documents and Settings\me\My Documents\docN
C:\Documents and Settings\me\My Documents\My Images\img1
C:\Documents and Settings\me\My Documents\My Images\img2
C:\Documents and Settings\me\My Documents\My Images\imgN
Suddenly, the worst happens. My start menu is erased! Or my config got erased!
*cries* WAH!!! I lost one of my files! Where is it? They were on "My Documents", I swear!!
If Microsoft had ALLOWED the users to specify CATEGORIES for program installations... as in "Create Category", etc and made THIS feature an integral part of the system
("A certified WinXP application will present the "category" dialogue when installing something),
we wouldn't NEED WinFS at all.
Now that I think of it, here's a new motto for Microsoft:
"What do you want to hide today?"
I was lazy and should've grabbed a link from the old article. Here it is: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/27/195025 7&tid=201&tid=1
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Who said anything about software installers? No, the Linux filesystems aren't perfect, but the modern ones (ie, Reiser) do quite a good job of minimizing fragmentation, certainly much better than NTFS. I'm sure you can find the benchmarks with a little Googling.
Apparently, the only thing Longhorn will offer over Windows XP is a Direct3D interface that requires you to upgrade your computer in order to run it.
Actually, this tends to be a win-win for Windows users. (Pardon any puns)
People that want to keep XP and hold out for Longhorn, can do so, and still get access to most upcoming 3rd party next generation applications.
Developers are also helped, as they can start using the next generation technologies and tools and ensure that their target market is going to be larger than just the Longhorn crowd.
So in that respect you are correct and it is a way smart move on Microsoft's part to get the developers interested in Longhorn type technologies today.
However there a quite a few design changes coming with Longhorn that you won't get with XP.
As you state a new 3D interface, which comes with a new way of working with applications and folders as well as a new shell (explorer) for the GUI.
Longhorn also has a few other tricks up its sleeve that maybe most people won't notice or the press won't jump on. For example, its ability to do VM like work with existing 3D Graphics and video card memory, allowing more 3D applications to run concurrently than even what the hardware would normally allow.
There are also many NT kernel enhancements and stuff happening at the NT level (below the Win32 and Win64 layers). Also don't be surprised to see some new subsystems re-added back into the OS to be more competitive in the *nix markets, especially on the server versions.
Plus you have some of the optimizations and other things that still haven't been shifted into XP. Still take XP and Windows 2003 server, the revamp that delayed Windows 2003 server did great things for its performance, and it still runs smoother and faster than desktop XP.
The Longhorn/XP and the Win98/Win95 analogy people are using here is probably going to be somewhat true... But there were many features added to Win98 that nobody either picked up on or reported. Like the updates to the font rendering subsystem and many other OS optimizations and abilities. For example, Win98 was one of the first OSes that could multitask sound from within or between various applications. Prior to this, most OSes that played sound only allowed one application to play sound at a time. (And I can remember the days of writing sound multiplexing code; Win98's sound features were a nice feature for developers like me, as I no longer had to worry about it and could just let the OS distribute the sound in realtime.)
Or one that defragments files when you open them, like HFS+.
English is easier said than done.