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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."
It seems to me that every major component that Microsoft has promoted for Longhorn is eventually being backported to Windows XP. What's going to be new in Longhorn?
As the article states: "Microsoft decided to back-port both Avalon and Indigo to older versions of Windows -- Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 -- in order to maintain backward compatibility and help seed the application-development market, officials said. "
If Microsoft wants to make WinFS a fundamental part of their strategy, they must back port it. Forcing developers to upgrade before they can develop is foolhardy.
WinFS is not actually a filesystem. It's basically NTFS+ (compare to HFS+). If a computer that only understands NTFS reads the disk, it'll look like an NTFS disk. If WinFS is enabled, the indexes become avaliable. Basically, it's the Indexing Service on steriods. Or, at least, that's how I'm understanding it. Correct me if I'm wrong.
And if I am right, this will be one feature I'm turning off. The Indexing Service already pisses me off.
Longhorn won't come out until 2010 or so, and Microsoft will be able to charge for "Windows 98^K^KXP Special Edition".
Not a bad idea.
If you have the ability to put off the release of another OS for years, you can save loads of money on development, but still have a steady income stream from copies bundled with computers (every dell, etc from 2001 to 2006, and those of us who had beta copies of windows 97 all know how the 2006 date will work) and the occasional consumer retail purchase.
Look, I'm not saying that MS isn't innovating anything, but compared to everyone else, they move at a glacial pace.
Since there really isn't any competition (and I use this word as "an OS that could hurt significantly MS financially", so please, no flames), they can sit back and release stuff whenever they feel like, but still have a pretty much guaranteed income stream.
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what's the point of a search engine built into the filesystem? ... keeping files in a logical directory structure along with copious use of find and grep commands seems to be good enough.
Here is a fundamental basic of what's wrong with Linux:
Developer: "I use grope, pully, xtract, gunit, and other nonsensical named 3rd party tools AND I organize my files in a logical directory structure, which gives me everything I need!
User: "Where is my Word Document?"
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
Give an option for the metadata to be transmitted separately
There is no such option in FTP, or in most other protocols.
XML of course, cuz it's 2005, or tacked onto the end of the file, in some cases, ala id3 tags, or whatever.
Well, if you "tack it on", it's part of the file.
Second, corp intranets, which is what this is primarily aimed at, probably aren't doing a whole lot of FTPing of internal documents.
Corporate intranets are using CMS, document management systems, P2P, instant messaging, E-mail attachments, etc. None of those have provisions for transmitting, storing, or indexing separate metadata forks.
Third, the existance of FTP and the like haven't stopped Apple's file system, or NTFS itself, from having things like resource streams.
NTFS has resource streams, but they are rarely used and they are actually kind of a security problem (viruses like to hide there, and even AV products often don't look there).
Apple's resource streams have led to a decade of incompatibility and usability problems for no appreciable gain in functionality over single-file multi-stream solutions based on standards like ZIP.
Proponents of hacking up the file system to add all these complicated features have failed to make a sound engineering argument for why the functionality justifies the complexity or why it needs to be in the kernel. And they have failed to do so for several decades (because these ideas are not new). At this point, when Apple and Microsoft are pushing this sort of thing, it looks like they are doing it out of proprietary interests, not out of any engineering considerations.
All file systems claim they "don't need defragmenting" when they are released. Mostly that means they "don't come with a defragging tool". It's all hype. The only filesystem that really doesn't need defragmenting is one that runs a defragmenter all the time as a background process - which, of course, you can do with NTFS if you really want to.
I'd bet you're seeing a syptom of the common software installers (and how they deal with compressed files) on Windows vs Linux, not the filesystems.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.