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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."
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
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.
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?
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
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
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.
There's one good reason to switch to vista: Microsoft ends support of their OSes after 5 years. Windows 2k, as much as I love it, isn't going to be much fun after a few years without a single patch. XP will go the same way before long.
About performance...
It's somewhat telling that you were pleased that it ran just as fast as XP on the same system. On my Linux box, when I upgrade the kernel or even KDE, I generally expect better performance than before. I get the impression that OSX users expect the same.
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.
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.
i thought longhorn was already late
Control? I think you mean money.
Beagle is a carbon-copy of Apple's Spotlight, which I noted in my original post. As far as I can tell, inotify was added to the kernel for the explicit purpose of allowing something like this to be created.
That being said, I cannot solicit Beagle, as much as it is a part of GNOME. First of all, it's written in C#, which I am against, but even averting that point, Beagle is slow, it's very, very buggy, and for some insane reason, they decided to go with Lucene as an Index server, instead of a fully qualified SQL server which could be connected through ODBC or any other database abstraction method.
I've said these things before and been modified as troll, with people responding with "if you could do it better, do it yourself". Well, this isn't my capacity at this point in time; I'm simply observing and reporting on the product. I understand that it's deep in alpha right now, and I do have hope that it'll get better, but in the meantime, it's connection to C#, Lucene, and fundamental archetecture problems as to where the program is allowed to index makes me doubt it's future relevance.
My point is that we need a database file system, but that Linux as a whole will be in last place to get one. Beagle is a good attempt, but I can't see it as anything more than a graduate project. I offered to port it to C++, a database agnostic implementation, and to add Kerberos/PAM support to it as my Google Summer-of-Code entry, but as I was declined, and because I do need to stay alive and eat, I can't just code it for free.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
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
I worked at MS on filesystems for a dozen years, and I totally agree with you. WinFS has been kicked around (and cancelled) since OS/2 days at Microsoft. Its a conflation of abstractions that needlessly complicate the data-structure of the file system. System recovery will probably be completely impossible in WinFS. And it can only slow down the system. And what does it buy the user? Faster file search. Except it will be beyond most users comprehension; a recipe for disaster rivalled only by the registry.
Someone will probably have at least partial support for it before it ever even gets out of beta.
And then it will stay only partially supported for 10+ years, just like the NTFS support.
From reading all that, it seems that it won't yet use trusted computing hardware to provide those DRM functions. Which will make them breakable.
.doc files on your computer. How the hell are you supposed to move to third party office suites?
NGSCB will come into full swing post-Vista.
Anyway, I sure as hell hope the Mac doesn't go that way. Of course, if web sites start refusing access without remote atestation certificates (that are immensly difficult to forge), then the Mac may have to adapt or die.
The Remote Atestation feature seems to be the most worrying. It will become very difficult to lie to other machines about what software you're running.
Not to mention, if say, MS Word decides that it is the only program authorised to read
Hans... I use your wonderful reiser3 filesystem. I really do support your innovations and hope that a happy medium can be met with the guys at LKML (I do understand their concerns).
When I first read about Reiser4, I knew immediately that it would blow the pants off all competition. Please don't stop innovating -- even if getting Reiser4 merged is a long battle, I think it's going to be better for computing and humanity as a whole.
I could not agree more. I would very much like to see more advances/innovation/inventions out the F/OSS, and here's a place where it has happened but apparently is at the risk of stagnating.
Is there a recommended place (hopefully one of the big distros) where we can get a kernel that supports the hooks you need?
Personally, I'd speculate that these benefits would be a nice point of differentiation for one of the commercial distros; and its proven success in that environment could be a big motivation for the kernel to approve the changes.
Notice that linux kernel developers haven't neccesarily opposed to reiser 4 ideas, but how they have been implemented. Hell, Linus even likes the "files-as-directories" thing, a idea which makes many UNIX zealots vomit...
The problem with reiser 4 being merged (as I've seen it in the flam^Wdiscussions) is that they seem to implement things that should be implemented at VFS level, not in the reiser 4 code like they're doing now. It's that what is stopping reiser 4 from being merged, not the "ideas" themselves. Some people don't like reiser 4 ideas, but as long as they're not forced to use them and the features are well implemented they won't oppose to it.
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.