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."

Comments

Re:No.

[wbren]

WinFS is not a DRM product. It may be used to implement a kind of DRM, but that is not Microsoft's fault.

"This uzi is not a tool for killing people. It may be used to cause deaths, but that is not Israel Military Industries' fault."

Re:Is this really a file system?

[ciroknight]

Um.. why? Why do you need name your file with six hundred underscores, don't spaces still work? Why do you even need to use that long of a file name; if you use a unique id system, you can associate a file to a program, and thus, give the file a whole seperate namespace to work within. Then add a session namespace identifier, and you're done. Of course, this will be hidden from you within the database, but it will prevent namespace collision. it works off of this idea that humans have had for a long time called "relevance" and "situational awareness".

If you find your current situation ideal, than this system is not for you, and it's easy enough to disable. Hell, it'll even save you time because you won't have to run it, thus reducing the overhead on your computer. But for those of us with literally millions of files to index of different types dating back ten years, it's distinctly difficult.

Lastly, I'm a man of the GUI situation. I can't stand "locate filename | grep "s0m#thin%^9&%&3". It looks horrible it's hard to remember the different syntaxes, and it's terrible for new users. And I can't even mention how stupid the names are; "rm" for "remove"? "cp" for "copy"? These are short words people.. not that difficult to remember. Oh, I have a solution! Make a symlink from cp to copy and everything's fine, right? Wrong; only works on your system, new users get confused when they go to other machines, et cetera.

It's time we grow up. Some of us want to live in a GUI world, and for those of us who do, we shouldn't be held back by those of us who are too unwilling to learn something new and easy. But, in this environment, this kind of arguement is a troll, and falls on completely deaf ears.

*sigh* back to my Mac.