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WinFS Beta 1 Released Early
Mouldy Punk writes "Infoworld is reporting that WinFS Beta 1 has been released. The new relational file system for Windows is posted on MSDN Subscriber Downloads. This release is designed to offer developers a preview of WinFS capabilities. WinFS will be in beta when Windows Vista ships and will RTM afterwords. WinFS, when it ships, will be available for download for Windows Vista and possible support for Windows XP is being considered. The distribution mechanism for WinFS will be through an add-on download much like the .NET framework is today. Tom Rizzo also notes that there is a new blog dedicated to Win FS."
What should Hans has to say on this fs.
Chances are, they rushed it out the door and it's going to be absolutely terrible. In other news, Microsoft released something ahead of schedule! Unlike 'Vista' (I'll always call it longhorn)
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
MS just found the backup disk.
1) Offer nothing new in Vista
2) Release an add-on with "BETA" in the title
3) ???
4) Profit!
A file system that you get by an add-on? What good will that do, most desktops in Windows have partion set to ntfs under XP what do you do with it once you added it on. Is this really a file system or is it a indexer of files.
Isnt that a bit more accurate?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I wonder if there is a possibility of MS releasing the NTFS specs for the FOSS community once WinFS becomes widely used? That would be great, but seems unlikely.
I realize that this is a story about WinFS, but I'm hoping someone knowledgeable about GNOME Storage is reading.
I'm just wondering if any progress has been made on GNOME Storage or if it's just completely stagnated (a Seth project stagnating? Why I never!). My guess is all he did was some special natural language interface (which should have been an add-on later) and did no real work on a relational file system.
I wish that guy would finish something for once.
C:\
dir
What will Microsoft think of next?
So this is what MS looks like when it's dying.
No more fast growing stock options to keep people working hard long hours. And benefits are being scaled back.
Sucks to be one of the poor sods slaving away up in Redmond these days.
It's not offtopic - WinFS is an important step in filesystem technology, and it is imperative that an open source alternative is made available.
This pre release is out for people who know what they're doing to get a preview of WinFS. When it comes out in full, it will probably be included in Vista from that point on, and they might have Windows Update automatically convert the filesystems for people. Or something.
I hope people find it usefull. I tried the Vista beta a month or so ago and I wasn't impressed one bit. Nothing felt different or improved. I don't know if I was expecting some radical changes, but other than the "theme", it looked the same as XP. In fact, judging from "look and feel" it rendered the clear type fonts very blurry compared to xorg on gentoo which I'm currently typing this on.
However, the only thing I can saw I was pleased about was its performance. On a 2.4 ghz celeron with 512 mb of ram, it ran fine, just as fast as XP on the same system.
What did impress me about a week later was when I took that spare HD I used for vista and loaded OSX on it. Now that looked beautiful, ran fast, ran native OSX apps fine, and my conclusion from that week of OS experimentation was that if OSX ever made it to whitebox computers legally (let's not start this discussion again) it would knock Microsoft out of the water.
Let's face it, few home users will switch to Vista legally. Most will get it with a new computer. My school uses Windows 2000 and probably won't switch to even XP for a while. So go figure.
Seriously, if this is being backported to XP then what will be the difference between XP and Vista? Afaik all the avalon and .net libraries are being backported. All i can think of is a glass looking interface, some toolbars and a bunch of wizards?
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
As far as I know, WinFS won't replace NTFS but sit on top of it, allowing you to do querries a la SQL on your files.
i might be wrong..
Check your facts please: the last thing people need is more FUD about what is and isn't DRM.
Anyone have a link to a download for non-subscribers?
Jay | http://oldos.org
WinFS is not a separate filesystem. It uses NTFS as the filesystem, but then stores metadata on top of that (the same way other filesystems like HFS+ have for years).
You don't need to reform to WinFS, it's not a filesystem, but a relational database that carries metadata about existing files on an NTFS partition.
Before Windows vista? Hmmm...
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Maybe they are taking a hint from Google with releasing products as beta. I understand a news search being released as beta, but a file system (or filesyste add-on) ?? . This way they can escape any responsibility for the thing if it compromises systems, causes data loss or sucks in any other way.
-- www.punkmusic.com
When Microsoft first introduced WinFS in 2003, the company said it would include a new synchronization engine that could index a host of disparate Windows files
I'll bet it is based on the Unix 'file' command.
WinFS
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Afterwords...?
What does anything in the article have to do with a book?
Or did you mean afterward?
Slashdot editors - you fail it again.
Seriously, people seem to not know what WinFS really is, and the parent informs us all!
I've seen a lot of stuff about WinFS and I do RTFA, but I'm still a little puzzled. Is this supposed to be like a labeling file-system where instead of having folders you apply labels to each file (document, music, etc.) similar to Google Mail's system? That's what I think of when I think of "relational" as in database design.
But from what I've heard, WinFS sits atop of NTFS and simply connects it to a SQL database for indexing. How the hell is this revolutionary. You could place all your files in a "My Documents" folder and then make a nice pretty front end to it, categorizing each file, and then hacking the file chooser to use your interface.
I really think Microsoft should have though harder about this and made it a real filesystem with a new structure and layout on disk. It could have really be different and revolunatory, but from what I can tell, it's just a layer now and offers nothing really new or innovative.
99% of windows users have no need for partitioning their hard drive. Do you know what happens most of the time when people create windows partitions? Someone thinks they are clever and creates seperate partition for their data, another for their programs, and another for a swap file, etc... This whole system quickly breaks down when one partition becomes full.
The only real use for complex partitions is under Linux or if you are sharing files accross different operating systems on one PC.
When buying a Vista license, you'll be paying for XP a second time ... but you're really saving in the TCO.
Yeah, I should use a Microsoft beta file system, because my files and documents aren't in enough danger as it is....
...aaaand I just bluescreened my brain.
Seriously, is there an upside to this system to the casual-to-serious user? Or is it mostly a DRM-delivery platform? I read TFAs, but this sentence hurt me: "(Integrated data initiative is a term used to refer to a group of technologies whose goal is to provide better integration for data..."
You are (deliberately?) misunderstanding what WinFS is designed to accomplish. But like everyone else you seem to have made up your mind. Whereas you avoid mention of the numerous limitations that traditional filesystems like ext2 and even journalled filesystems have.
There's a reason Vista took so long to develop and it wasn't the end user interface
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
If this is an add-on which interfaces to the kernel through an API it should be possible to get it to run under Wine, right? I'm fairly ignorant about how Wine works, so I'm wondering. That would be cool to have WinFS running on Linux.
Well, of course, things went pretty smoothly. Users were able to easily convert their partitions to NTFS when upgrading (even if they didn't know what a partition was). New PCs came with NTFS by default, and Windows XP+NTFS succeeded largely (unless you're a Linux fanboy and don't want to admit it; in that case it never happened, how could it?). The (Windows) world was a better place now that FAT32 was largely a thing of the past. I'm not so sure if WinFS will be all that great, but we'll see.
Windows Vista will be no different than the 98 to XP conversion. NTFS users will be able to easily convert their partitions. Again, they will be able to do it even if they don't know what it is exactly. As long as they know it's recommended, they will keep clicking the Next button. You're worrying about something that will clearly never happen, given Microsoft's track record.
The add-on will likely be via Windows Update and extremely simple to apply. People who buy PCs after the add-on is released won't even have to do that. They will just have WinFS.
I also want to touch upon the phrase "idiot windows users" that you used. Saying something like that only serves to make you sound like an idiot. Windows users are largely novices, but you can't expect everyone to be an expert user able to keep up with the quirks of Linux et al. Calling Windows users idiots is like calling people who drive car's with automatic transmissions idiots. Sure, automatics are easier to learn to use, but that doesn't make those drivers idiots.
Now, I could go on to write a whole article bashing Geek Squad, but that would be pointless since we all know they suck and they overcharge.
-William Brendel
Not only that, but wouldn't releasing it with the OS would result in more people being able to actually use it? I can't see many people reformatting their machines because MS released a new file system. Especially for the masses that don't know what a file system is.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.
- George Orwell
Right now you can add attributes to NTFS files, but there's no decent way to do it. Likewise, ANY DB-style FS is going to be limited to the ways that the vendor (MS) provides for you to access the data. Remember those ridiculous dialogs Winword used to prompt with? Asking all that crap about the author, and topic, etc. etc. until you asked Clippy how to turn the fscking thing off?
The "DB based FS" is only as good as the data that you put in, unless you solely want to make virtual folders of "all my MP3s that I warez'd last week from Rancid", but I'd say those sorts of things are going to be in the minority.. and again, depend on the metadata of said pirate MP3s.
Now there will be code jocks out there who would LOVE this sort of thing, since you could probably use it as a halfway decent free CVS replacement, but I'm thinking more of Joe and Jane Sixpack. How is it going to make their AOL experience better?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Are they going to "fix" the performance problems in NTFS? I've done a comparison several times, usually dual-booting on the exact same hardware.
Every time I've compared filesystems even EXT2 and EXT3 spank NTFS. More modern filesystems like Reiser and XFS do even better.
My comparison is usually building a large application, so it involves a lot of small-file I/O. And I mean serious perf problems, like 30% to 40% differences in build time.
I am a .NET developer by trade (but use a Mac at home and my Intel boxes run Linux).
In response to the idea that WinFS is going to get it's indexing power from a custom SQL engine, I have to say that SQL Server on our XP boxes isn't reliable enough to use an an integral part of the file system. IT JUST IS NOT! Consider how many implementations of home and small business users won't have the benefit of IT support staff. Sure there are implementations of SQL on XP that are stable and blah blah blah, but we deal with SQL crashing in dev or even production environments regularly. Sometimes it is just restarting SQL that does the trick, sometimes it halts the whole server.
Point is I don't want something as critical as my OS file system relying on SQL to tell me if my files should be backed up or not...one bad worm and bad news for everyone!
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
I hate to admit that the _name_ WinFS looks very cool. It's probably gonna be the new buzzword.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
.. what about fragmentation? We're now going through what? 6 to 7 different Windows versions and we still can't fix the basic problem of file fragmentation? Good grief.
Yet another requirement that non-Microsoft folks won't be able to meet.
That argument is simply lame. If you can't see the holes in it, you wouldn't understand if i explained them.
... does it run linux(TM) ? :>
99% of windows users have no need for partitioning their hard drive. Do you know what happens most of the time when people create windows partitions? Someone thinks they are clever and creates seperate partition for their data, another for their programs, and another for a swap file, etc... This whole system quickly breaks down when one partition becomes full.
Eh, no. Seperating user data from applications is a very good idea. It has saved me a lot of time and trouble (on Windows and Unix) when things went wrong, and I've helped other people who really wished that they'd done it too.
http://www.sun.com/emrkt/campaign_docs/expertexcha nge/knowledge/solaris_zfs_gen.html
Steve Ballmer promises that Vista is going to be free from serious bugs. Unlike Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP...
The ClearCase* source control system has a nifty way of making a database appear to be a file system. You tell the "file system" version of the source tree you want to see, and it makes it appear automagically.
Is this anything like what WinFS will be able to do? The one-line description (NTFS with metadata on files) doesn't make it sound like it, but it is hard to be sure.
If not like ClearCase, will it nevertheless be useful for source control?
* by Atria, then Rational and now IBM.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
i bet WINFS is not much more advanced than the ancient BeFS was. but im open to let my friend Bill and his crew convince me with their linux version of it...
free 880 megs file hosting - www.FTPZ.US - best
Under what circumstances have you seen SQL Server be "unstable"? I've been a database guy for a *long* time and I've never seen any kind of "crashing". You're talking about a pretty prestigious database. Not quite on par with Oracle, but there's no comparison with something like MySQL.
I don't respond to AC's.
Maybe by examining the facts? Sensible people don't rely on advertisements. Check out WinFS yourself and come back to us when you think you see the DRM.
When Microsoft first introduced WinFS in 2003, the company said it would include a new synchronization engine that could index a host of disparate Windows files
In 2003? Jesus Christ!
I seem to remember that in 1994, Cairo was all the rage. Hell, it has been an idea since 1991. If I did not toss them out before I moved into my current house, I'd have scans of each individual article in Windows Magazine about Cairo from 1994, 1995, and 1997.
WinFS is not even close to being called "new."
WinFS will be very fast like ... find fast ?
More info on early WinFS development is available here.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Excuse me, but does anyone in this industry even KNOW what relational means any more?
What is the type system used by this "relational" database? What are the candidate keys? What kind of constraints can I specify? What or where are the relvars? Can I create views? Does it allow declarative queries? How do I issue arbitrary relational expressions? How does it reconcile the hierarchical storage of most filesystems with the more general relational model?
Oh, you mean it just indexes metadata from files, for more speed? THAT'S NOT RELATIONAL! That's not even the level of abstraction you get from SQL databases (which are also definitely not relational).
Then again, this is the same Microsoft that gave us this utterly useless paper.
Aside: can you believe that both Jim Gray and Ted Codd received Turing awards???
I think they're backporting the subsystems so that there will be enough of a userbase for developers to target the api's. This bridges the transition between the operating systems. And eventually everyone will have Vista anyway/too.
Shh.
This WinFS is great I'm sure, but does it fix the file locking problem that's been plaguing Windows (heck, even DOS)? It a really annoying problem that needs to be addressed (and *nix does it so nicely!)
What.... $29.95 to install a SODIMM is an "overcharge"?
I guess I'll pick my next computer service center by something other than how cool their logo looks on a Volkswagon...
I sat back and saw most of the video demonstrating the WinFS beta. Clearly the guys in the video are pretty excited about what they've done. But shouldn't the gnome community be excited by projects like Dashboard? What about gnome storage. It seems like both of these projects accomplished a lot in a short period of time. It seems like these projects should get "marketed" a bit more.
:) The video reminded me of the Wobbly Windows demo.
Dashboard is a great example of what can be done once information is easily searchable. MS makes these demos and tries to get people all excited about search. But come on, how hard are these things once the data is indexed? Like most things, it's all about how the applications use the API that make it cool. Having folders in a DB only goes so far.
What about Reiserfs4? Another project that could take the whole gnome-storage and WinFS concepts a bit farther.
BTW, It's interesting that MS has decided to try the non-polished look to get the word out on things.
"The only real use for complex partitions is under Linux or if you are sharing files accross different operating systems on one PC."
Wrong. An unfortunate fact of life for Windows users is that we have to reinstall our OS's every few months. Why? Bloat. The registry gets cluttered and everything becomes slow. The only real way to deal with it is to do a wipe on it and start over. If Windows is on its own partition it makes the task a hell of a lot easier.
On a side note, I always keep a partition ready so I can quickly install a second copy of Windows in case something breaks. Though I cannot really say I've needed it in the last 3 years or so, shit happens.
Okay, I'm not '99%' of users. However, if I were setting up a machine for even a casual user, I'd still put Windows on its own partition. You're right that a partition can fill and cause problems, but I don't know many people who have 120gig drives. Give them a fixed swap size and a shortcut that'll clear their temp directory, and for the most part this isn't a huge issue. I wouldn't criticize somebody for partitioning their drive.
"Derp de derp."
i thought longhorn was already late
Interesting?! More like MS-bashing fodder.
You think you're going to need to use Query Analyzer to change permissions on a file or folder? Ever consider it might be a small subset of SQL Server engine with a fancy GUI?
We have had 4 production servers with SQL Server (Win2k Server) running for the last 4 years, and I have never experienced this problem. The only headache I've experienced with our MS SQL Server was when a RAID controller died and corrupted some data, but that wasn't MSSQL's fault.
So you think because it's running a subset of SQL server that it will be vulnerable to the same worms as MSSQL? Please. Once the bugs are worked out, it will probably be vulnerable to no more exploits than current NTFS. Are you still using FAT32 because it doesn't "lock you out" of your files?
ok, that has got to be the lamest M$ flame I have.
Control? I think you mean money.
I have to say that SQL Server on our XP boxes isn't reliable enough to use an an integral part of the file system.
.cue broken record.
I'm no Microsoft lover, but I think you may need to look at finding a new system administrator.
Sure there are implementations of SQL on XP that are stable and blah blah blah,
No "blah blah blah." Other people do the same thing and it works. Lots of other people in some very large deployments.
but we deal with SQL crashing in dev or even production environments regularly
. .
M$ will announce that the, like IE, the filesystem is embedded in the Oper...oh yeah
Seems like this is just an indexing tool... I wonder how much larger files will get due to this. I'm all for it since storage seems to be getting cheaper by the day.
Under what circumstances have you seen SQL Server be "unstable"? ... You're talking about a pretty prestigious database. Not quite on par with Oracle, but there's no comparison with something like MySQL.
Agreed on many points - MS SQL Server is one of the best things to come out of Microsoft's campus - and I wouldn't compare MySQL to an enterprise DBMS like Oracle or SQL Server - but I contend that there are significant issues with integrating a DBMS - ANY DBMS - with your file system. Such core systems should be able to function with minimal overhead for the very reason that it makes them less vulerable.
But let me answer your question directly, I have seen SQL hang or eat so many system resources while executing a stored proceedure than the process has had to be stopped or the entire system has had to be restarted. The tools MS provides (Enterprise Manager and Query Analyzer) have crashed my workstation, and my illusion to the idea that one errant Worm could create havoc if SQL were embedded in the FS is supported by Slashdot article a couple years ago.
MS has worked very hard over many years to errode my confidence. Once upon a time I didn't want to install Norton Utilities because MS didn't make it. Now I won't use MS software in my home. Who's fault is that?
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
I have never had SQL 'Crash'. Actually it is more stable than oracle, at least on a windows box.
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, and assume that you were going for 'funny'.
;)
Because certainly otherwise your argument is quickly broken down. Uzis have no other function than to a) put holes in things or b) threaten to put holes in things.
WinFS is capable of being a file system [well, this IS microsoft, so....YMMV] whether or not any of these supposed hooks exist. Or 'threaten to exist'.
If you're not living on the edge, you're just taking up space!
You still need an indexing service.
All that metadata isn't just going to poof out of the thin air. Metadata where it gets entered (save dialog in office, ID3 tags, thumbnails on pictures, etc.) needs to find it's way into this API, or it needs to be programmatically extracted by background processes.
I actually like the latter, it takes the burden off the applications.
Also, it'd be nice if concepts like the "Recently Used Files" and stuff like that gets rolled into it (that is, recently used is just a metadata field and the RUF directory is a "view" or "Select" against the database with appropriate criteria).
It's too bad WinFS isn't a real database-backed file store. Because then you could do all sorts of weird stuff... (and it's easy enough to provide a compatibility layer for a hierarchical-filesystem-assuming Win32 API)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Sure, users were able to convert their partitions to NTFS when upgrading because WinXP steamrolled everything. Take a look at what a new install does--it just wipes out whatever is on your hard drive, with no attempt to partition or protect any other file systems that may be made present.
The Windows world isn't a better place now that FAT32 is "largely a thing of the past." All it's done, from my perspective, is cause problems transferring files.
Not to mention my run-in with a person trying to use an external NTFS hard drive with a Mac, I've had problems with NTFS.
Microsoft deliberately crippled FAT32 support in XP. For some unknown reason (actually, no, just to get you to use NTFS), they disabled the ability to format drives larger than ~34 GB in FAT32. Windows *refuses* to format it in anything other than NTFS. Go figure.
Fortunately, the support isn't crippled at all, and all one has to do is download a free application off the internet (and maybe an accompanying DLL), and that hard drive can be formatted in seconds into FAT32.
I discovered this feature/bug of XP when I recently tried to get an external hard drive working. FAT32 is perfectly capable of handling drives up to 2 TB in size (mine was a mere 320 GB), but Windows initially, silently formatted it in NTFS. What a surprise I found when I booted into Linux and realized I couldn't edit my files.
A quick Google search yielded a suitable app with which to format, but the discovery of Window's crippled formatting nature had a much more permanent effect--to disable deliberately a legitimate ability, simply to promote your own product, is not acceptable.
A warning or dialog would excuse their action, but outright refusal? Absurdity.
From the application programmer's point of view, it can be treated like a FS-layer object. A .NET application will be able to open files or return a file set based on a SQL query, in effect. The explorer shell will be able to implement a bevy of virtual folders... etc.
Which is the whole point.
It seems the "WinFS"-ness of WinFS extends into the kernel such that a WinFS filesystem will be considered a seperate type from NTFS and FAT. I think they'll probably take of the reserved MFT entries to point at the dedicated relational metadata store to be used by the system-level Yukon engine. So it'll be "part" of the file system, the database using some of the space that you lose to "formatting". Of course, it's still using NTFS internally, and if you mount it as NTFS, it'll behave the way you expect (minus the metadata system).
Sort of like ext3 vs. ext2 (ext3 is a reserved inode pointing to a journal that the ext2 driver ignores)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
You are a bunch of clueless nerds.
this is why slashdot is laughed at by anyone who can tell the difference between ill informed nerd blather and informed commentary
of course I'll get modded as a troll. you group think outsource fodder
From the WinFS blog: "It's an amazing opportunity and responsibility. I sometimes think how my young children (just toddlers) will only know WinFS as the filesystem - provided that we build WinFS correctly, and succeed with developers."
...
Think of the children using the file system! How sweet (not to mention a bit presumptuous).
Excuse me while I throw up.
Of course I fully expect WinFS to go the way of all other nice technologies Microsoft has given us (in no particular order): OLE, ODBC, DAO, ADO, COM, structured storage, DCOM, MTS, MSMQ
What the hell is wrong with the submitters and editors on Slashdot? WinFS is not a fucking file system, it's a relational data storage system.
Oh yeah, and fix your layout and overall site style Slashdot, it looks like shit.
...A microsoft supported file sharing program! wait... what does the FS stand for again?
So I don't know how much credit they really deserve.
Was the really good stuff Sybase's work or their own?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
MS SQL Server is one of the best things to come out of Microsoft's campus
Micro$oft purchased it from Sybase...
there's no place like ~
I am not really sure how involved the SQL server engine will be in the end but....
I can crash or lock up any db very easily.
Begin transaction
update something
never commit
Select data from other threads.{data locks, wait times, and other good stuff for killing a CPU}
SQL Server is a very good product. However I do not want it responsible for my file system.
Does GeekSquad ever battle supervillains or anybody trying to take over the world?
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
One may or may not agree with the guys opinions (especially about his stance on non-technical issues), but the fact is that Hans Reiser is one of the top experts in the field of filesystems.
I for one would like to know what Hans has to say on this fs.
The filesystem is the package manager
That's why there's a very popular Windows program called Partition Magic. If I want to move partitions around, I just run partition magice and move them! No muss, no fuss.
Best Buy can have you arrested
Instead of this lame attempt to flank google desktop, how about refining data integrity. What happens when inevitably some unforseen combination of data causes your widget driver to BSOD "KMODE EXCEPTION NOT HANDLED" in the middle of a metadata update. Probably nothing good.
Restore this guy's karma to neutral for the love of god. Look at his history. He got modded troll once because some linux zealot who can't take a joke had and 'insightful' hissyfit about a previous post. It is a disgrace to slashdot that some humorless twit with a thick pole up his ass could ruin someone's karma for such a lousy reason.
This post is absolutely hilarious and the poster deserves at least neutral karma for making it.
If you do get back to neutral be sure to make a couple groupthink compliant posts to give yourself a good karma buffer.
Ummm, maybe that is correct with very large drives but I have formatted a 40 GB (37.2 GB formatted) drive several times as FAT32/Windows XP Pro and it worked fine with linux.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
I can testify to this !! 2nd install of an equal or superior MS OS is always handy :) but dont insall the 64bit version off the cuff or your 32bit windows boot goes bye bye...
:-| lack of an easy, fast and reliable way of resizing partitions always makes me have too much space on one drive and not enough on another (no matter what size hdisk you have) I have about just over 1TB of disk spread over multiple drives and I still have issues trying to fit a movie in a films partition thats only 100GB. So I have to create partition 'films 2' or whatever :-|
:D
seperate file systems also are brilliant in windows for all the times I've had to reinstall and I DO have to do that every three months, even if I do try and drag it out till 6.
Sadly, I do still agree with the parent a little too
The again, I too am not 99% of users
-William Brendel
My gut feeling is that the end result will be to make spyware easier to install and harder to get rid of.
Windows Vista will be no different than the 98 to XP conversion. NTFS users will be able to easily convert their partitions. Again, they will be able to do it even if they don't know what it is exactly. As long as they know it's recommended, they will keep clicking the Next button..
Indeed. My bets are that things will be little different. More specifically, that some people will keep drinking the kool aid and enthusiastically repeat what they've been told.
Google for "ntfs+fat+convert" and see if you can come up with the magical 512-byte number that idiot users who opted for conversion were suddenly introduced to, along with the prospect of a reformat/reinstall.
If you don't see a problem with 512-byte clusters before Googling for related problems with which you also are most likely blissfully unaware, I'd suggest taking a break from criticising the critics and consider they may have something to say.
Windows users are largely novices, but you can't expect everyone to be an expert user able to keep up with the quirks of Linux et al.
Everyone has a soft spot for novices, but I'd suggest Windows users are novices and remain novices precisely because Linux et al provides manpages and documentation defining how things work. Microsoft's quirks, on the other hand, remain largely undocumented, like much of Windows in general. Your automatic transmission analogy seems valid, but for the wrong reasons.
Up, I say!
Your description sounds an awful lot like what the AS400 team used to describe when I worked at companies that had good AS400 techies. It hybridized the mainframe-style contiguous file allocations with an integrated RDBMS that tracked the file information, much as the file information pages do with other file systems.
I find it interesting that so many "advances" other systems are making nowadays sound exactly like what the AS400 developers used to talk about. Using databases to store configuration information. Making the database an integral part of the OS. Virtualizing all storage so the system could shuffle files based on size changes and usage patterns to minimize head thrashing. Using wizards/forms for adding new software, changing configurations, etc.
I guess it's all considered "new" because so few people ever actually learned anything about the AS400 internals -- they just used them and counted on the system to do it's job properly.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Just thought I'd share. I haven't anything against you; and your post seems perfectly sensible and reasonable. But sure starts kind of weird...
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
Performance depends a lot on your load patterns.
A friend of mine runs a file sharing server setup at home that has had Linux boxen running Reiser, XFS, EXT2, EXT3, and JFS. When copying large files from client boxen to a Linux server using SAMBA, an XP box with NTFS spanked Linux every time because XP would pre-allocate the space for the data it expected to receive, while Linux/SAMBA kept expanding the file.
Having done extensive software development under both Linux and various flavours of Windows, I never really found either to consistently outperform the other by much of a margin. What I did find was that a Linux box with a lot of memory would use enough of that memory for disk caching that it didn't keep re-reading the headers during the build and would compile the application faster. If there wasn't enough free memory to keep all the headers cached, it didn't perform all that much better than XP.
My bet is you're seeing the same memory caching advantages, not a huge difference in the actual file system performance.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
"pretentious" ? trust me, I am not PROUD of being a .NET developer, I just say that to give some context to my post (seeing as here on /. I could be a physicist or textile-chemist or any of a laundry list of nerdy things. Me, I'm a .NET developer.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Thanks for the insight Petronius. I Always thought SQL Server grew out of the Access DBMS, though I never understood how the two could be so very different.
Considering MS's M.O., the buyout now makes sense!
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Ok, fine... you have just heaps of data, with a myriad of references to them.
What then is delete? How does a user distinguish between "remove an association from the blob of data" vs "remove this blob of data altogether". Should the blob automatically delete when you remove all metadata around it? If not, how will you find it again? If so, would you really want data vanishing just because you removed a keyword?
What does partial backup look like on a system? How can you have a combination of partial backups and know you have a whole? I can do that with a set of five directories. Let's say you tag a set of files with "project fred". But one small file, that you almost never care about, gets tagged with "project ferd". What good is the ol' Fred backup now?
At some core level these blobs of data that users place on a system need ONE meaningful location where they always "are". You need someplace where the file will always be, no matter what other associations you remove. You need somewhere you know it will be to assure yourself EVERYTHING you care about is backed up or moved between systems.
The perfection you seek can just as easily be obtained with files in directories that allow metadata on top of them and things like smart folders that are essentially queries over the user-defined and automatically extracted metadata. In fact I think that's what WinFS does anyway (just like OS X does today).
If you really like the system you describe nothing is stopping you from storing all your files in a DB and writing an explorer on top of that. Yet all this time, things like that have never taken off in the market.
Some things do not take off because the technology to make the useful has not yet arrived. But some things simply never take off because in practice they are not practical, and the filesystem as a full-fledged database with no default structure is one of those things.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I remember "FindFast", it was a great idea 7 years ago... if you had a pentium 4 7 years ago... and a gig of ram... so they finally have a beta of "FindFast"
Maybe soon they'll come out with "ProgramFast"...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
WTF is RTM?
The "all it needs now is a text editor" must be, like, the oldest Emacs joke _ever_!
And you can't be excused for being new here, because I've seen you around for a long time by now, Mr. Coward.
The filesystem is the package manager
People seem to think WinFS is about the user experience -- where your files will be kept instead of folders, what meta data you can search on or what the new Explorer will look like. Somebody on the WinFS blog wanted screenshots (even). But it's really about programming standards and flexibility. When you write a program, almost the first thing you do is create a data format which might be an XML or RDBMS Schema or a text file format with a lot of commas. If you want to share that data between apps or between computers, you really have to create your own API with users and security and all of that junk. In general, you have to do a lot of the low level stuff. If it's built into the OS, it's a terrific thing. It just has to be efficient. MySQL is integral to the LAMP platform. Maybe it's not a file system, but from a programming perspective, that's what it is. Screenshots of MySQL aren't exciting, but having a ubiquitous MySQL with a direct API through the OS integrated with the OS security would be nice. Maybe that's what WinFS will partly be.
A beginners' guide to Portland, OR?
Reiser4 is technologically ahead of WinFS as a high performance storage layer, see www.namesys.com for details on its design. When you do this layering the way they did it, with the metadata stored in a layer above the FS rather than integrated into it, you lose a lot of performance while gain the advantage of successfully avoiding dealing with a host of technical issues. We are at least 5 years ahead of them technically in the storage layer.
That said, semantic enhancements matter more than performance, and it is better to do something semantically than to do nothing, and what Linux currently is doing is nothing.
The political support for adding semantic enhancements to Linux namespaces is mixed at best. I worry we will see that death by committee rules, and there will be no belief that each FS should try to innovate in its own way and compete with the others until one is proven the right solution. We are in serious danger of having MS implement bad technology, and Linux having to devote large amounts of resources to copying it in 5 years because we were late and chose to trail rather than lead. If the filesystems were free to compete in semantics, we could have one or several of the Linux filesystems leading them instead.
SQL and the relational model is fundamentally the wrong model for semi-structured data. See www.namesys.com/whitepaper.html for why.
Technically, I would worry much more about Apple. Dominic Giampaolo is very bright, and well funded. His chances of delivering on a good set of semantics are high because he and Jobs are very sharp, and neither of them is afraid to go where no one has gone before. Our chances of losing technically to Giampaolo and Jobs are high, because we are frankly not well funded, and a lot of us are complacent with semantics that are still pretty much the same as their father's Unix box.
So, in summary, I would say that we are still ahead but losing speed fast.
Thanks for your kind words Hisham.
So...with WinFS Beta released...where's the answer from the open source world? How is GNOME storage coming along? What about applications using the metadata capabilities of reiser4? What's happening on the BSD front? How are things with OpenBEOS^WHaiku? Any chance the features found there will be ported to other free operating systems? Or do people feel we just don't need a richer system than the current filename, modification date, and user/group/other permissions?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
``My comparison is usually building a large application, so it involves a lot of small-file I/O. And I mean serious perf problems, like 30% to 40% differences in build time.''
Windows is generally built with the "one big thing" mindset, unlike Unix, which is generally build with the "many small things" mindset. This is reflected in many places, for example, Unix has always had cheap forking of processes, whereas this has traditionally been expensive on Windows. To work around it, Windows introduced threads. Of course, threads have very different semantics from processes; memory is shared by default rather than isolated by default, which leads to lots of bugs (many people have problems with concurrent programming).
Almost sadly, threads have since made their way into the Unix world, and the mistake of having expensive processes has been copied in Java. Similarly, we're seeing more and more heavy-weight software on Unix; graphical applications typically lack the flexibility and scriptability of command-line ones; things like GIMP and OpenOffice.org take waaay too long to start if you just want to do something simple (hint: all the advanced features could be in extensions that only get loaded when they are used), GNOME even has something that looks suspiciously like the Windows registry, etc.
Fortunately, movements are also happening in the other direction. ReiserFS and reiser4 have excellent performance in the "many small files" scenario. Languages like Perl and Ruby provide an easy interface to forking processes, not just on Unix, but also on Windows. KDE makes graphical applications embeddable with KParts and scriptable with DCOP. All is not lost.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
RTM = Release To Manufacturer.
Took me a while to find out. *sigh*
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say. - Will Duran
Instead, try "find *filename*" or "find file associated with *filename* by *date of creation*" or "find file associated with *username*", or "find file with name like *blah*, that is a *filetype*, and was created by user group *administrators*". Try THAT with your current Linux terminal. It'll bark a bunch of program errors and junk. Yet all of those find functions above are ways I feel you should be able to find files.
I'm not quite sure if this is exactly what you are asking about, but everything sigle thing you just asked for can indeed be found pretty easily by "find".
Here they are, in the order you presented them, with a bit of dicussion:
find . -name '*filename*'
- finds all things that have filename somewher ein the name
find . -name '*filename*' | sed -e 's/\/[^\/]*$//g' | ls -t
- returns to you the directory listing of all files held in the same directory as "*filename*' ordered by date of modification. After all, if they are in the same directory they are related, right?
find . -user "me"
- Not a wildcard user like what you were looking for... but why do you want to look for user files using wildcards on the username again? That strikes me as fairly unlikely in practical use.
find . -name '*blah*type' -gname administrator
- Admittedly using extensions for filetypes is not ideal; yet it does work and all systems still use this today as basicalyl the primary way to identify fieltypes (I really like the OS X way to look for filetypes and wish the OS X find had a way to look for the more extended types).
I'm not sure why you view any of these searches as anything near hard in systems today, though I'll grant they are hard indeed on systems that do not see fit to include "find" by default.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When I first read the CalDAV spec (http://ietf.webdav.org/caldav), I wondered if the same idea (using WebDAV as the underlying protocol) could be used for storing email (instead of IMAP/POP), contact lists, etc.
I'm not too familar with WinFS, but would this give most of the benefits of WinFS but in a more modular and interoperable way?
If WinFS is just a SQL Layer of metadata over NTFS, then why should anyone wait?
Surely it is a case of MySQL, a new (file) explorer shell and dialog, and a supporting service.
Surely someone could hack together an open source WinFS in a couple of months?
Do it in python for laughs.
koan
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Has anyone had chance to run any speed comparisons, with the hard drive already the slowest component in my system I'd be concerned that extra layers for metadata and DRM would just increase the problem of slow data access.
:-P
Though on the other hand it seems like metadata layers are the way forward and will enable us to get closer to pieces of software like the librarian out of Snow Crash, though no doubt as soon as it's made someone from Slashdot will ask it to go and collect all the available porn off the internet and bring the whole darn system to it's knees
... because he's right?
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
> There are only so many people who are psychologically inclined to write or perform guitar music.
Elvis Costello wrote and recorded My Aim is True and This Year's Model without being able to read or write music.
You technology weenies need to realize process skills are vastly overrated.
OS X didn't start out slow, it ran pretty well. It got better with each release on my hardware, and 10.4 runs well on it too! Openstep on a PPC was experimented with at Next, and since Apple got ahold of it and Steve again, they have optimized it by improving features while improving speed as well. OS X is truly just souped up Nextstep.
The optimizations carried out on Windows have resulted in a system that has become slower with each major release, expanding to consume available hardware. The APIs are often unstable between versions, and things frequently break. Longhorn/Vista has terrible performance at this point from all reports compared to XP, and it will predictably be so at launch too. And I'm sure that Vista's successor in 2015 or so will be even more bloated. The gap will continue to widen between Windows and OS X, with Apple actually deploying solid systems that run faster and are better with each release, and Microsoft again quite predictably reacting a few years later.
Ah, like the Workplace Shell, only ten years later?
you might want to install a spell checker. I think you accidently hit Shift+4 isnstead of 's'. It's a common mistake though, no worries.
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
You know they're thinking about it.
While its not a 'drm product' as such, it is the foundation for a filesystem that eventually will support drm at the byte level.
Its been stated once long ago that was their goal.
So you go hide your head in the sand if you wish, and belive 'big corporations are all good' i prefer not to.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'm guessing that you never use your apps, then. I've been a database guy for a little while, and I've seen MS SQL Server crash (i.e., queries take an eternity to complete and finally there's nothing for it but to shut it down and restart and hope nobody was counting on those transactions making it through "just in time") three or four times.
... when it was so late that it didn't make the Vista dev releases?
I wonder how much of it is covered by software patents ?
from reading the kernel mailing lists it appears you will need it.
i'm sure this is unfair to the kernel-devs, but; rule by committee can be a stifling environment in which to create, but R4 appears to hold great promise so soldier on.
Indeed. In fact, I want to be able to say "Computer, get me four beers, my address book, and my conversation hat!" and it just does, rather than me having to remember where the hell I put them.
Wonder what effects it would have on backups though...
J.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
The magic is in the hands , not what the eye can't see, as long as it doesnt crash , people will use it, they always have, even when it does crash.... ; )
Our marketing director asks me, as a favor, to take a look at a temp worker's personal laptop (which we normally wouldn't support). I go and take a look at it... and it's a Toshiba 2535CDS (aka doorstop) running Windows 98 SE. The machine is running a bit slow and has some error messages. Great, I think... it's going to be an infected, degenerate mess. I re-activate that part of my brain filled with all that wonderful Win98 goodness and tool around in his laptop for awhile.
.DLL files in symantec's system repair utility from a botched upgrade (fixed with a few simple regsvr32 commands).
First thing I notice, he's using Firefox instead of IE. Good call. Second thing... there's no spyware, at all, after scans with three good tools. Third, he's got symantec firewall and AV running, and there doesn't appear to be any virii. The machine was virtually spotless.
Let me stress that this is a clueless computer user. He is completely non-technical. The only reason he was using Firefox was because it was faster than IE for him, and he was running the protection software because it came with the system and he had paid for upgrades regularly for several years. His machine was cleaner than any WinXP box I had seem come through in months. It was also sitting right on our cable internet connection, fully exposed, and had been for weeks. (Guests use that instead of the corporate network).
That old, POS version of Windows was damn near hackproof because of a couple simple programs and because it was so damn old that nobody was actively attacking Win98 anymore. It also ran like a champ on that doorstop of a laptop. His problem was an overabundance of temp files (fixed with a couple deletion scripts), and a few unregistered
That made me think twice about the misconception that one must upgrade one's operating system. Apparently there is such a thing as being 'too old to hack'. Maybe that's why educational institutions like to keep everything important on those ancient VAX systems that no recent IT people understand anymore.
Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots.
Mike essentially is spitting in the face of the good people who work on the LSB. His attitude towards the LSB is unrelentingly negative.
Makes sense. :-) I feel your pain... :-/
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
From Rob Pike's slashdot interview:
5) Database filesystems - by defile The buzz around filesystems research nowadays is making the UNIX filesystem more database-ish. The buzz around database research nowadays is making the relational database more OOP-ish.
This research to me sounds like the original designers growing tired of the limitations of their "creations" now that they're commodities and going back to the drawing board to "do things right this time". I predict the reinvented versions will never catch on because they'll be too complex and inaccessible.
Of course, this second system syndrome isn't just limited to systems. It happens to bands, directors, probably in every creative art.
I think what we've got in the modern filesystem and RDBMS is about as good as it gets and we should move on. What do you think?
Pike: " This is not the first time databases and file systems have collided, merged, argued, and split up, and it won't be the last. The specifics of whether you have a file system or a database is a rather dull semantic dispute, a contest to see who's got the best technology, rigged in a way that neither side wins. Well, as with most technologies, the solution depends on the problem; there is no single right answer.
What's really interesting is how you think about accessing your data. File systems and databases provide different ways of organizing data to help find structure and meaning in what you've stored, but they're not the only approaches possible. Moreover, the structure they provide is really for one purpose: to simplify accessing it. Once you realize it's the access, not the structure, that matters, the whole debate changes character.
One of the big insights in the last few years, through work by the internet search engines but also tools like Udi Manber's glimpse, is that data with no meaningful structure can still be very powerful if the tools to help you search the data are good. In fact, structure can be bad if the structure you have doesn't fit the problem you're trying to solve today, regardless of how well it fit the problem you were solving yesterday. So I don't much care any more how my data is stored; what matters is how to retrieve the relevant pieces when I need them.
Grep was the definitive Unix tool early on; now we have tools that could be characterized as `grep my machine' and `grep the Internet'. GMail, Google's mail product, takes that idea and applies it to mail: don't bother organizing your mail messages; just put them away for searching later. It's quite liberating if you can let go your old file-and-folder-oriented mentality. Expect more liberation as searching replaces structure as the way to handle data.
As a small aside, Novell has ported it's high-performance file system, NSS, to Linux. The first implementation is pretty clunky (requires its own physical array) and Reiser has a leg-up on a couple of items (like block suballocation), but it shows a lot of promise, especially if you run a good-sized network.
Regards;
this is not new in mainframes..ZOS structure... even on mainframes theres nothin like a file/directory structure (aprt from just 1 level of partition data sets)... when u create a file (or so called dataset)..the catalog system stores which DASD (hard drive for PC users) & other info to find it in 1sec. Mainframes gotta track zillions of files on millions of DASDs & even billions of tapes...they get this thru CATALOGs & stuff....
MS just ported that to normal PCs to use this concept & bloating 'u need not remmbr blah blah blah'
Just another brick in the wall from MS
Retard....
I see ^H^H etc. in many posts on Slashdot. Why exactly does that happen??
Think the Google Desktop search had anything to do with the 'early' beta of WinFS? This is essentially the same idea right?
As much as some people dislike the disorganized but indexed file system approach, one thing it is effective at doing is to provide a simple, common interface that does not require advanced knowledge to use - for ANY operating system. The technical challenges that this brings to IT people are not going to be a big factor if the masses decide that this interface is the way they prefer to use their computers.
I see a lot of talk in this thread about how users "don't understand how to use a heirarchy properly." I'd just like to take a moment to say that this statement is not exactly true.
People use heirarchies all the time, without thinking of them in those terms. Office buildings label offices things like "4-M243", which refers to building 4, ailse M, floor 2, room 43. That's four levels of heirarchy, including one which most people think is backward (most would think about going to the floor first, than the ailse). And yet, I have seen this exact scheme work (it was used in the old Bell Labs building in Holmdel, NJ). People just got used to it after a couple of days.
Another, simpler example is street addresses. Adresses in the US come in the form YYXX, where YY is the block number and XX is the house number. So, if you live at 1534, you are in block 15, which is sandwiched between blocks 14 and 16, at house 34.
Yet a third example - telephone numbers! (Area code)Exchange-Number in the US. People have no trouble understanding that exchanges in the same area code are usually near each other.
So, I'd just like to hear a little less talk about people not understanding heirarchies. They are perfectly capable of using them if they are just educated a bit about them.
SQL ain't relational.
That says "SQL and the relational model". Compare:
Apples ain't oranges.
That is not a logical reply.
The filesystem is the package manager
Aren't highways still around?
As on off-topic aside, the comment to which you responded has mixed two separate phrases. One is "going the way of the dodo," meaning extinct. The second is "hitting the highway," meaning getting on its way, out of your life.
--
Promoting critical thinking since 1994.
I think many of the people commenting on this are completely missing the boat. Microsoft will probably add some end-user facing features to Windows that take advantage of WinFS to enable better search on individual PC's but the big opportunity is for developers (either at MSFT or elsewhere) to build applications that take advantage of the API's. WinFS (and Windows Vista for that matter)is a developer release with a few nice features for end users. It's about MSFT making Windows attractive for application developers again.
'Perpetuating the "hide things from the stupid user" UI philosophy only makes people less willing to learn'
Why do people always assume that everyone wants to know, or even should know how their computer works.
Do you know how a modern car works? And more to the point could you fix or improve upon one?
Aside from the world of ricers, jane double chin couldn't give too shits about how her car works, so why should she give two shits about her PC?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Um.... OS X 10.0 was dog slow. And much of the API for OS X changed in between point releases. The Windows API is far more stable than the OS X API... most application developers are only now starting to phase out Win9x, whereas most OS X apps require at least OS X 10.2.
I think you're wrong in your objections, for the following simple reason: the functionality of a metadata FS is a superset of a traditional hierarchical FS. EVERYTHING you're claiming is missing in a metadata FS can be accomplished in metadata. One set of tags, for example, can mimic the unique file/folder structure you're used to, if that's what you want. I really don't see what the problem is. If you insist on the old disk/folder/file thing, you can have that. Just have a , tag on each file. Have a ball!
I don't understand your problem with the fact that files could theoretically get 'lost' if you erase enough tags. Isn't that kind of like objecting to the fact that one can unlink files (i.e. delete them) from volume maps? Yeah, you can destroy stuff. How is that different from anything else? If anything, you're more likely to lose files with a standard FS, because one you misplace a file, it's harder to find by content.
In fact, everything you objected to seems to be BETTER done in a metadata FS. For example, if you want to do partial backups, you can have sets defined in metadata. These can be much more flexible than partial backups based on physical location or file.
Seriously, it's about time we throw away the ludicrous folder/file paradigm. A computer is a conceptual clean slate. I have no idea why we so often insist upon porting concepts from the real world (folders, desktop, pages) when there's no reason to believe what works in physical space is the best for virtual space. There's no reason for computers (and their file systems) to be conceptually backwards compatible with the physical world.
I think your talk of deleting delete is crazy, but I like the way you are thinking regarding versioning. I would like to see more research done on how to bring decent versioning to the masses as I think that would be a lot more help to many people than metadata will be.
I would personally like to be able to select areas to version though, not just everything in the computer.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The thing is the current system is much more heavily optimized for the location attribute.
Yes you could still use a DB and generically specify name and location. But then you suffer a performance hit going through some motions that work very well on filesystems but poorly on databases, unless you make them look like filesystems.
Also the way you define the current working location sounds nice in theory but presents a whole different set of UI issues. I've thought about things like that quite a bit before and in the end I prefer problems we have now to problems that arise in that system.
Instead of declaring me pig-headed for not wanting to go to Oracle to store all my files, why not come over here and admit filesystems with metadata enhancemnets are just specialized databases that already do everything you want with just a little more effort.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You haven't worked with many databases then.
Only about fifteen years or so - with commercial ones. Or perhaps you were talking about my range of experience which includes everything from Oracle to ISAM to Ingres to Postgres to XML files as database stores. And of course I've only written one filesystem from scratch which is rather a poor sample size.
Perhaps the issue is you have used them too little to realize what you are getting into.
Sorry I don't have time to discuss this further with you (you really missed most of the points I made before and failed to understand what I was tryin gto say, too long to say why everythign you said in your post is basically what I was saying), perhaps someday you will have that database filesystem you are looking for. But I tend to think thing will evolve in a more practical manner that works for real users and not just guys that know and think in SQL.
I feel the draw for such a thing but f you think about it long and hard enough I just cannot see any wins you get outweigh the issues you come across, and the duplicaiton of effort with filesystem research that has come and gone and been down this road before to end up where we are today.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Interesting. I ran into this problem formatting a drive on WinXP the other week. I think it was a 160 Gig or 250 Gig drive.
I think I kept another FAT32 drive in the machine for Linux, but left the NTFS drive for Win.
Man that sucks, and it's a really great way to edge people out of using Linux, seeing as the Linux NTFS support is either non-write, flaky, or non-existent, depending on what you read.
Anyone know if it is possible to format drives as FAT32 using Linux tools ?
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
Ditto. My shop runs MSSQL Server 2000, and we've never had it crash on us. Make sure that you have decent hardware, and the service itself won't have any problems.
We have had more issues with IIS getting borked by a MS patch/update than with SQL Server.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
Well I'm afraid I disagree that we are stuck on "files needing locations".
I think it's a match for how our brains organize invisible things.
We can use metadata to provide other relations on top of that - and then if some better relation comes along we can turn around and optimize a filesystem over that.
But what is this better relation? Would you honestly prefer to give up twenty years of optimizations on the off chance someone might discover a better relation? Would such a relation really be as universal as location? Remember that people have been thinking along the same lines for the same twenty years, and have yet to come up with something better. There are plenty of ideas (like that timestack thing) but again, in practice, none of them have really panned out for general use.
A database system could be optimized just like todays are. In fact Oracle is able to run on top of a bare drive with no filesystem underneath, kudos to them. But there's a lot of cruft in there that filesystems do not need at the moment, so it would just be trading a system that works really well for most people with one that chews up a lot of resources.
For anyone that wants to move this forward, and work on a project, I wish you luck and am not against it. I am just saying look at the full, and very deep history of the problem before proceeding thinking that no-one has bothered to try this amazing concept.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Even then, how much overhead would a proplist parser really add? It's not like we're using a full XML format here. Considering the potential performance benefit of easy parallel booting and a nice dose of consistency, 100k of extra footprint in the init process just doesn't seem that huge a price to pay. Consider the overhead that the current system introduces, running a shell script with common idioms is at least as much of a computational chore.
It's this kind of attitude that's also standing in the way of other innovations like the new FS the GP is talking about. People are so convinced the current way is right for performance/compatibility/congative-load reasons that they can't even ponder the thought of changing things.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
In the case of your story I think versioning would be really helpful in just that case - the user deletes it and the data is gone from that version of the directory, but still there..
Then you would check from time to time what you really wanted deleted, or moved.
The reality would probably be in-between though - like if the user had removed a file from the floppy, then tried to fill it up again the file really would be destroyed. Otherwise users would be equally dismayed to find floppies getting smaller and smaller.
The core poit on delete I disagree with is the concept that we really have so much space we can just keep everything forever. There are going to be classes of things that are not that way, like temp files - again why I'd want to have the option of declaring particular directies versioned, and not others. Just as in OS X I can say some places are off-limits for indexing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley