Slashdot Mirror
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 thought the Bill-Gates-as-borg icon had a slightly wider smile today ...
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..
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
I'd love to be able to use a filesystem that can be seen in a dual-boot environment; that's better than FAT32 or FAT16; but those are really the only choices now.
I don't know about you, but NTFS is fine for me. I mean, jesus, its a file system, not a damn search engine.
WinFS announcements are one of Microsoft's most popular products. Thanks for the upgrade!
--
make install -not war
If everything will be back-ported to XP and Windows 2003, how does Microsoft plan to make any money off Longhorn, which has cost the company a lot in development time and money?
Do they plan on back-porting the first versions of Avalon, Indigo and WinFS, and then providing feature updates to Longhorn only, forcing customers to update? Or is Longhorn really just XP SP3?
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?
Frankie Avalon and The Indigo Girls?
It's important to Microsoft as a way of preventing Google Desktop Search and Copernic from gaining mindshare and installed base before they introduce their final version in Longhorn
Incidentally, Copernic 1.5 beta now supports Mozilla Thunderbirds email and contacts and Firefox history and bookmarks - and does it well. This is a double threat to Microsoft, as their vision sees WinFS as a factor which ties people to Outlook and IE6/7
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Could we please stop using the word "technology" when "component" or "chunk o' software" would do fine. It's Microsoft speak.
Depending on when this arrives, this could possibly be an attempt to take the wind out of the sails of Apple's Tiger release-- probably to arrive sometime before midyear-- which lists as one of its major selling points a new feature called "spotlight". Spotlight is a system service that has been described as offering similar functionality to WinFS, but does it without filesystem changes. I don't know exactly how accurate this description is, of course, since though Microsoft seems to talk an awful lot about WinFS and talk about its hypothetical technical capabilities, they never seem to give specifics on exactly how it works for the end user and what it means for the end user...
Of course, the above assumes Microsoft still actually cares about what Apple does, which isn't all that likely.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I think that the most important Question here is ... is microsoft going to provide an specification for the fs?, and, in case they do, will it be licensed in a GPL-compatible way?
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
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.
After seeing how completely incompetent and pants-wetting funny awful Microsoft is at file searching with the little doggie, I can't wait to experience having a few more unnecessary, superfluous, extravagant, and bloated layers HELPING me.
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.
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.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Yes, I'm a UNIX-type person but keeping files in a logical directory structure along with copious use of find and grep commands seems to be good enough on most of the systems I work on. I even use WinGrep on Windows for that level of text searching...
The Registry is a database and definitely a weak point of Windows when it comes to resilience. NTFS seems to do a reasonable job of keeping the filesystem intact, why add a risk of introducing resilience problems into the filesystem by linking it to a database? Unless it's just a marketing ploy to sell you an MSSQL license at the same time.
Whatever anyone says about UNIX/Linux, the concept of keeping operating system tools simple and doing a good job of one specific task has allowed it to earn the stability and resilience reputation. Sure, you've got to spend time shell-scripting to unleash its full power but that's half the fun of it.
I'd love someone to give me a definitive answer as to why the concept of WinFS is so good - I genuinely don't understand all the hoohah about it.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Getting WinFS out there means they can work out more kinks before release of Longhorn and at the same time provide the "benefits" of WinFS to people earlier. Separating out key pieces of the OS is always good for the still changing OS. Similar to the Linux/UNIX FSes, after all. This will make the transition to Longhorn "smoother".
Not Reiser4, but there are some tools to access Reiser3 from Windows: RFSTool, and YAReG, a graphical frontend for RFSTool.
This, along with Avalon being ported back to XP and IE7, is interesting - MS is responding to consumer demand for new features instead of doing the usual: forcing people to upgrade operating systems for them.
One thing though - I would hope that MS allows us ambitious types to activate a new XP installation so that we can try this out on a different machine. Otherwise most people like me will adopt a real "wait and see" attitude when it comes out.
Schnapple
In other words, there isn't a single reason to upgrade to Longhorn.
.NET? Available for XP.
1.)
2.) Avalon? Available for XP.
3.) Indigo? Available for XP.
And now...
4.) WinFS? Available for XP.
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.
Perhaps Longhorn always should have been just a collection of technologies released for existing versions of Windows rather than a whole upgrade. Because I don't see many people upgrading with all of Longhorn's technologies being made available for Windows XP anyway.
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.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
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.