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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."
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.
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
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.
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.
> Unlike 'Vista' (I'll always call it longhorn)
.bat files that will run under anything from DOS 5.0 upwards.)
Vista is not Longhorn -- at least, not as Longhorn was envisioned at one time.
Longhorn, it was said, will use WinFS as its native filesystem. (It will include support for fat32, ntfs, fat16, iso9660, and possibly fat12, but these will be "legacy" systems, deprecated, and probably not supported for the main filesystem where the OS is installed, only for additional filesystems, such as on removable drives.) Vista will still use ntfs as its primary native filesystem; although WinFS can be added to it later, that is an add-on.
Longhorn, it was said, will include the new shell, Monad. Vista will not.
Oh, and Longhorn, it was said, will ship in 2004. Vista will not.
Vista is the Windows 98 SE of our time -- it's not the big upcoming release Microsoft has talked about for so long, and it doesn't have the capabilities that the big upcoming release was supposed to have, or in fact any new capabilities, and it's not going to be a compelling upgrade, but it has to come out, because it's just plain been *too long* since the last release and the market can't wait until the real thing is done.
Microsoft's release cycle gets lengthier with each passing year. Nine months after they finally release Vista, they'll be talking about the next big release (not the server version of Longhorn, I mean, but the successor to Longhorn), but you won't see *that* one for a good long while. Even giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming they manage to get Vista out the door in 2006 as they currently say they're fixed to do, that means they'll start talking about Blackcomb in 2007, and by 1Q2008 they'll be predicting they can have it out by "next year) (2009), but the earliest you might possibly see it on store shelves is 2012, and frankly 2015 is more likely.
This is actually good news for the OSS community. It means we have a fairly good idea what the Microsoft desktop is going to look like for the next 7-10 years. Sure, there'll be add-ons, WinFS and eventually Monad, but add-ons are add-ons; if you want add-ons on an OSS system you can have Reiser4 today (though I don't know how stable it is yet -- but WinFS hasn't even been officially released, so I guess we're okay there), and Perl6 is likely to beat Monad to market, or in any case there are a number of excellent scripting languages available today; we haven't had to get by with just a bourne shell for quite some time, to say nothing of making do with the likes of cmd.exe. (Yes, there are people who advocate doing everything in old-school sh for the portability, but they're talking about portability in terms of running on fifteen-year-old systems; the Microsoft equivalent would be writing
I guess what I'm saying is that we know what to expect. Microsoft has grown large enough to become fairly predictable. That's good for the competition.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.