Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Uncertain About WinFS for XP
Ant writes "As a follow-up to WinFS to be available in WinXP story from a few days ago, BetaNews reports that Microsoft (MS) stopped short of confirming reports that it plans to back-port its next-generation WinFS file system architecture to Windows XP. MS tells BetaNews it is only evaluating the move while also acknowledging WinFS is still years off. "We are currently evaluating making the WinFS storage subsystem available on this platform and will make the decision based on what is best for customers." a Microsoft spokesperson told BetaNews."
The term 'vaporware' comes to mind...
-- kortex "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts"
Its in consumer's best interests to force them to upgrade lest they be left behind and forgotten.
Douglas P. Price
Which means in plain english: It don't work yet and when we do release it you will have to pay to upgrade!
By saying that they're not sure, they are safely leaving the escape route unblocked, in case they fall behind schedule again or whatnot.
Microsoft has been working on this for ten years. It is never going to happen. This was supposed to have been in 'Cairo' and has been a listed feature in every development OS since then. It is never going to release.
.technomancer
If I was in microsoft, I would think that backporting a filesystem wrapper over NTFS is probably a bad idea.
It's hard enough to design this WinFS, much less change all the OS components to be compatible with this filesystem. I also think the learning curve/'WTF is this' factor is too great to drop onto Windows XP users. Let it ride on Longhorn, but make sure you give a really full explanation on how to use this meta-data FS well.
I certainly don't find a need for a DB-based FS, but I know that it helps. Will it help enough people enough to make it worth implementing?
That article contains a wonderful example of the difference between Microsoft and the OSS movement. Microsoft is developing a new filesystem that (one would hope) is vastly more advanced than the one they currently use. Yet they're hedging about making it available for older systems, because they have yet to decide what is "best for customers".
Now, if they were really interested in what's best for customers, you'd think they'd let the customer decide on a case-by-case basis. They could just release the filesystem for older systems via an extensive patch and see what the customers decide to do. Instead, Microsoft is going to determine what is best for all their customers.
The OSS folks would just release (and have released) new filesystems and let the bits fall where they may.
Central planning versus individual choices. Remind you of any 20th-century struggles?
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
MS release schedule == plan to maximize share value
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
>>what is best for customers... any time i hear a microsoft spoksmen say that, i laugh my ass off jordan
If you want a better way to find your files now, just use Google's free desktop search tool, or do a better job of keeping your files organized. I prefer the latter.
Isn't Longhorn (with WinFS) supposed to ship next year or so? With WinFS still years off, does it means that Longhorn (and WinFS) is still in vaporware status?
There are >limitless< posibilites for why microsoft would want to try out a new file system, not that I know them all. Most of the time when I read slashdot comments people leave little bits of ideas and information in their comments, kinda like everyones working in paralel out of ram (actually sometimes comments are so off the wall it sounds like they're working out of just the cache) trying to figure something out, but when theres these slashdot posts that have anything to do with microsoft everyone only sees one picture, one view, only one *real* motivation for microsoft to be doing this, lock out linux, duh, totally obvious, _everyone post this fact_
Yes, it could be true, but thats not the point, point is that nobodys is being the devils advocate here and looking for another side.
You guys are using the collective intelligence of slashdot to merely diss something instead of even thinking about it!
If Microsoft back-ports WinFS to 64-bit XP, it could hurt or help them. In one way, it could get more people to go for 64-bit systems. Those same people could make an easy transition to Longhorn because they would already have 64-bit systems.
But in another way, if they go to XP64, they might not have as much of an incentive to go to Longhorn. There would already be one 64-bit OS with WinFS. People might feel that Longhorn is unnecessary.
Competitor? What competitor?
I suppose that there is the usual chaos at Microsoft in the marketing department where a makreting person says something that is meant as the usual Microsoft vapourware in order to gather customer interest but where it is so obviously out of sync with actual developments that someone else has to clarify things a few days later.
.Net by default, Avalon, Indigo, WinFS) to be used by a critical mass of developers and users or else it could very possibly fail as badly as MS Passport did.
I presume that marketing also realised that too much talk about Longhorn features being backported to XP could significantly harm sales of Longhorn when it eventually does come out as people will obviously then simply use those features in XP instead of upgrading, thereby making the usual Windows version chaos (some 15% of all Windows users are still using Win98) even worse and pulling down MS' revenues.
On the other hand, MS knows that it needs to have some way to get the new stuff (XAML,
Damned if they do and damned if they don't. Strangely, I feel no pity with them whatsoever, as it was their own predatory monopoly practices, where they would kill their foes with beneath the belt tactics in order to get that very last 3% of users that they didn't already have, i.e. they were never prepared to sacrifice anything in order to have a cleaner and more unified user base.
Speaking of unlikely partners, I think I would rather Reiser4 be available for Windows.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
How about creating a Windows file system that is resistent to fragmentation?
Hell, Novell managed to do it ages ago, with the file system that they created for NetWare... 'way back when NetWare 286 was state of the art for Network Operating Systems...
Later, it just got better, with sub-block allocation, as an example.
NTFS is up to, what, version 5? And, Microsoft still hasn't managed to make it efficient... file system fragmentation over time pretty much creates the "need" to replace computers: The defragger that comes with Windows XP, for example, is woefully inefficient... and the users don't run it anyway.
So, over time the perception is that "the computer is too slow"... or, "the server is slow"... when the reality is that, barring hardware malfunction, the processor will run at its rated speed forever.. as will memory... the slowdown comes from filesystem access, which, using NTFS, will degrade over time, if the filesystem is not defragmented.
And,if you use the Windows defrag utility, it won't fully defragment the filesystem: It is a subset of Executive Software's Diskeeper, and so, it's in the latter's best interest to be sure that it doesn't.
As one example: It cannot defragment NTFS' Master File Table (MFT). Another: It requires multiple passes to come close to anything approaching what the purchased version does, and again, who's going to do that?
I wonder how many computer hardware upgrades have been driven by this over the years... more importantly, Windows Server upgrades?
Curious as to why open-source stuff isn't catching on? Go back and re-read your own post. It's complete gibberish. Many of the names you listed aren't even words, so not only can one guess what they mean, one can't even speak them aloud to ask somebody!
Names are important. There's a reason why pros sweat for months and sometimes spend thousands of dollars deciding on a name. A name can make or break a project.
Open-source stuff has shitty names.
I don't see the situations as comparable at all -- In the "Copeland" case, Apple desperately needed an new OS and faced huge technical challenges in getting there.
.NET. This is somewhat similar to Steve Jobs' NeXTStep project -- It's designed to make the whole thing more programmer-friendly, but may not provide any direct benefit to end users until years later.
Microsoft really doesn't need Longhorn at all, the core OS is in decent shape, the monopoly is chugging along, and they call add incremental features as downloads or service packs. Yeah, the next version of OS X will have more flash, but nobody has ever bought Windows because it's flashy. (Whereas Apple needs that consumer upgrade revenue.)
Avalon is already in Beta for XP and they've pretty much admitted that nobody was working on IE for the last few years.
The big news about really isn't WinFS or Avalon. It's the rewrite of the core APIs to support
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Can it be scripted? Are you operating under the mistaken assumption that Core Image is a program? It's not. It's an API, a part of the operating system. Its purpose is to be called by developers writing programs and scripts.
And again, you're comparing it to Avalon. Stop doing that. The two things do not do the same thing. They are completely different. Core Image will not "blow away Avalon" any more than it will "blow away" the baked potato I had for dinner.
Based on what is best for customers, my butt.
They will make the decision based on what's best for Microsoft. I don't think the customer has mattered to Microsoft much since about Windows 95. In fact, 10 years later, I'd argue that customer welfare is near the bottom of their priority list.
Offhand, I can't think of a single move they've made in the last 10 years that really and truly had customers in mind. Being in a monopoly position, their mindset has shifted away from 'what services can we offer in exchange for money' to 'how many feathers can we pluck from the goose with the minimum amount of squawking'.
They've always been nasty, hardball competitors, but at one time they shipped some pretty kickass software, too. Word for Windows was particularly good. Even that horrible flop, Bob, was at least well-intended. But now that they are in a position of real power... if you'll notice, they never, ever ship anything that's really disruptive of or threatening to their main monopoly.
Most likely, their internal studies will be focused around how much money they can make and how much customer lock-in they can manage. Will giving it away free give them enough power to be worth losing the cash from selling it? Should they sell it at a low price, to generate some cash but get it into fairly widespread circulation? Should they sell it at a high price to corporations, to gather lots of cash but gain little leverage over filesystem standards? Should they bundle it only into Longhorn to help 'encourage' upgrades? You can rest assured, thoughts like "Is this technology something that every Microsoft customer should be able to use?" will never even occur to them.
Whatever their actual thought process ends up being, actual customer welfare will not enter into it.
First, WinFS winds up not being a new file system, but a system on top of the NTFS file system. (Or, at least, that's their current statement on what it is)
/. regarding MS beating all sides of the horse until it is pulp? What exactly are you looking for? Someone to say that WinFS is going to be great? It isn't, and everyone here knows that MS is wholly incapable of delivering something like WinFS is claimed to be. It'd be like arguing that you could go back in time and buy Manhattan for a few beads + 1.
Second, WinFS is stated to be a DB like layer of the file system, improving search and visual representation by offering multiple views. You'd think they would have done this with email clients first, yet they cannot even make this happen in an intuitive way. I seriously doubt that WinFS will happen anytime soon. Earlier, I'd made the statement that WinFS would indefinitely delay Longhorn, which apparently I was correct in, as WinFS was pulled from Longhorn.
I laughed when they stated it would be released for XP in castrated form - no network connectivity, hell, MS can't even show a "network neighborhood" in a reasonable amount of time for a small network (only about 1000 nodes, takes more than a minute easily, long enough for me to forget to time it or try it again).
In any case, Longhorn will wind up being mostly eye candy that will lead to a slew of new problems (MS "innovates" new bugs like no one else;)
As for Devil's Advocate, isn't anything on
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
example mount my DVD-ROM at E: to C:\Devices\DVD
:)) Probably you'd need to take the time from befs to winfs and go exponential :) And remember Duke Nukem Forever in the meanwhile :)
[OFFTOPIC]
Yup, but you can't mount it under A: or B:. On other news, you can't load drivers during Win install only from A:, but you can't make anything A: besides FDD, which many of us don't have for years.
[/OFFTOPIC]
combined with the WinFS service running on top of NTFS
Actually this has been one of my problems since I heard the first rumours. Did you ever tried simply entering a directory under ntfs with indexing turned on in which there were hundredthousand+ files ? Yes ? Then imagine adding extra indexing/metadata extraction in the background to that. Well, unless extra speedup is achieved by Redmond fellows, I don't need that.
Expect this to be the first step toward the wholesale elimination of drive letters in a future Windows version.
And for which century do you expect that to happen ?
However, there's more to it than fast database searches in WinFS
Yes it is, and that is a good thing, be it MS or not. What I not really that much like is that I imagine what kind of fast hdd and pc one will need to be able to really seamlessly and unnoticeably run MSSQL upon NTFS.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.