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WinFS Gets the Axe
commander salamander writes "Over at the WinFS Team Blog, Quentin Clark states that Microsoft no longer plans to ship WinFS as a standalone software component. Instead, portions of the underlying technology will be included with the next release of SQL Server (codename Katmai) and ADO.NET. Does this spell the end for the true relational storage paradigm that Microsoft has been promising since Windows 95?"
How long has the promise of WinFS been on the table? Microsoft has dragged this teaser on 10-lb test in front of drooling long-time loyalists as the newest and amazingly innovative piece of their "best OS ever". Aside from the fact it really wasn't amazingly innovative (well, in vernacular maybe it was), now they're close to closing the door on this. I wonder how many sales they've pulled off with these lies?
HINT: Here's a snippet from an October 2003 PC World article:
Microsoft may not have thought they were lying at the time but they must have had an idea they not only weren't on target but they weren't even close! It's amazing a company can get away with this -- call it genius marketing, I call it deception at all costs to keep their customer base intact.
Sometimes these outcomes seem to say more about the Microsoft loyalists than Microsoft.
Yes.
Maybe it was supposed to be "WhenFS?" (FP?)
I hope Vista will come with some serious eye-candy then, cos there's little else people will want it for. (Other than to satisfy their own bandwagon-jumping egos.)
the layman's guide to computer science
If they didn't put back WinFS, they couldn't use it as vapo^W a feature of their next product. And when that product comes out, they'll push it back to the product after that, just like they've been doing for the past seven or eight years or so.
WinFS is the perpetual motion machine of vapourware. They are constantly promising it for their next product, but they never seem to deliver. That doesn't stop $NEXT_PRODUCT from being compared favourably with the competition because of WinFS by PHBs though.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Their structured, indexed filesystem that operates much like a database, will be released with their database software!
Is it just me, or does that sound slightly redundant?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
a. WinFS had difficulty functioning over a network
b. Microsoft's target customer is business
c. Businesses use networks
Therefore, WinFS would not be suited for business usage, making it unimportant.
Hey, if everyone wants to bag on Microsoft not making a next generation file system, what is stopping Linux and the Open Source community from doing it? Oh, that's right- it's easier to just complain about MS than to actually get your hands dirty. Nevermind then, carry on.
Yes. As Mini-Microsoft puts it:
WinFS now joins a series of other broken promises from Microsoft. Interesting that just two weeks ago, they were demoing WinFS at TechEd. At this point, I'm really surprised customers don't treat this as flat-out lying on the part of Microsoft. Overpromise and never deliver. This company is a sinking ship.
"Sufferin' succotash."
This is not just about Windows, but filesystem design and engineering is extremely complicated to get right, even for filesystems that only implement the basics. They take years to design, engineer and debugging will take at least the time it took to design+engineer. Not to mention joe blow can't walk in and look at the code and figure out the problem in most cases. It takes quite an understanding of the internals. Then, when you try to add a few extra layers of complication things will get really hairy, and I suspect that's what they're dealing with here. Then, if it is not done right then you're in an even worse situation where UserX will have files go missing, corrupted, or unmountable.
"Does this spell the end for the true relational storage paradigm that Microsoft has been promising since Windows 95?""
Were's the F/OSS equivalent?
And meanwhile ReiserFS on Linux provides much of the functionality today that WinFS only promised for the future.
Shh.
From what I remember the funky file system was the last piece of the Cario product/suite of technologies to need to ship since Allchin announced it in 1991. Sadly for Allchin, they were unable to deliver on the last great promise of Cario before he leaves, and the poor guy waited 15 years for it too.
$2B OR NOT $2B = $FF
Windows Vista has now been renamed Windows XP Service Pack 3. More at 11!
What's really sad is that BeOS had a woking usable dbFS TEN YEARS AGO!!!! I bet Visa idles more RAM and CPU resources than an BeBox had to begin with.
Why do microsoft bods keep using the term 'rich' to descibe their technology?
Most notably, how is it that they seem to apply it to technology that never gets to the production stage.
It's almost as if they feel it aboo to admit that their technology is untested, nay imaginary.
I don't care if they have some in house code. If it isn't in circulation, it's not technology, it's a unproven concept, and definatelly not 'rich'
It seemed to be a very formidible challenge and I think MS was the first to attempt it. No cigar this time, but perhaps in the future.
WinFS was a bad idea and I'm glad MS finally saw the light.
Keep the base file system lean and mean.
There are better ways to add "database functionality" to Windows than add it to the file system.
Duke Nukem WinFS Edititon
You'll need the latest Direct X to play... oh, I won't say it.
I have freaks! I did something right...
"Copland is to Mac OS 8 as Longhorn is to Vista" seems to be becoming more true every day.
Though it was promised as a fundamentally ground up re-invention (Pink, Copland, System 8), the Mac OS 8 product that was actually shipped was mostly a cosmetic upgrade with the bits of the promised technologies that could be made to work. The new graphics architecture became a new font subsystem. The new document archicture (without developed parts making use of it) became a built-in web architecture. System wide document content searching became better file finding. The goal became to try to keep whatever anticipation was already built but jettison the "hard problems" of making it actually work in the ways that were promised. Tell everyone that Feature X has evovled into something beyond what we had ever anticipated rather than the world passed us by while we were shooting for an old target.
It may be that Microsoft still has the inertia to pull off an almost completely cosmetic update, but it's going to get pretty ardurous environment on the development teams. After all, the goal isn't going to be to even ship a feature reduced product. It's going to be to ship cosmetic filler that covers up the need for what was really promised. Maybe Blackcomb or Fiji or whatever it's called now, will become a stage for the proper solution, but that's a very big IF.
No problem, you can still have a content indexed file system in vista. Just use spotlight. Here I'm naturally assuming everyone will own a macbook and be running Vista in a VM (in Lion or Parallels). In that case then as long as the disks are shared you can just content index the windows files in Mac OS.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
What else is new, this is MS, after all. On the up side...Beagle wins!
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
They all laughed at HFS+ with it's resource forks and meta data and built in filesystem execution hooks. Aw that backward little OS. But now look, those little hook, now allow it to do content indexing without changing anything about the FS structure. And that meta-dat solves an awful lot of problems with filesystem extensions. And let's not forget the non-consecutive node list layout makes it easy to detect fragmentation and auto-defragment. Hmmm....looking pretty good.
Of course, one can point to ext3 or ReiderFS and say, hey these have cool features too. But the reality is this, windows could not get these into NTFS without junking the whole FS and it killed them Likewsie ext3 and reiser are both clean sheet re-dos an FS so they naturally can have whatever feaatures they wanted. Thus the miracle of HFS+ is that is got all those nifty features without having to toss out the old FS and invent a new one. it was upgradable.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Does this spell the end for the true relational storage paradigm that Microsoft has been promising since Windows 95?"
Absolutely not! Apple will someday invent it and Microsft will copy it.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
Linux already has different filesystems that have implemented the "features" of WinFS for decades. Take ReiserFS, JFS, EXT3... they are all journaled database-like systems. Even some engines in MySQL can do what WinFS wants to do. What Windows REALLY needs is native support for said filesystems, so they can go on with the rest of the world.
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Anyone remember BeFS it came out in 1996, supported most of the "difficult and innovative" features WinFS was advertized to have, and WORKS. Its not quite relational, but it has extensive indexed metadata that makes it act as if it were. There's an open-source reimplimentation . Be, Inc. really did have some great technology, pity they couldnt make a buisness of it.
Katmai? Intel did it a long time ago!
Katmai was also the name of the original Pentium III (slot loaded version). Although at that time, the newly released P-III was not much different from the mainstream P-IIs of the time. So maybe the next version of SQL server will not be much different from the current release (which IMO is not saying much).
Always thought this would happen. Not only was the original concept of WinFS pretty difficult from a technology point of view, but people at Microsoft suddenly thought: "Hang on. If we deliver a rich database storage engine integrated into Windows then that threatens the existence of SQL Server." This is confirmed quite adquately by this:
"We are choosing now to take the unstructured data support and auto-admin work and deliver it in the next release of MS SQL Server, codenamed Katmai. This really is a big deal - productizing these innovations into the mainline data products makes a big contribution toward the Data Platform Vision we have been talking about."
Notice the word 'productising' (productizing for you yanks). Productising here means "Why give this away for free in Windows where it would actually threaten the existance of SQL Server when we can just bundle it into the next release of SQL Server and charge people more for the *new* features?!". This is confirmation, if ever it were needed, that WinFS is totally dead as a Windows component. You're not going to be able to tag your files, or 'objects, with metadata and search for it seamlessly along with new integrated and built-in Windows file management support out of the box in Windows. Unless of course, you cough up for SQL Server and maybe even some client license add-ons into the bargain.
I also really, really love how every Microsoft employee has it drilled into them from an early age that any decision made, in reality for the pure benefit of Microsoft, is actually a decision made for the benefit of customers and as a result of extensive customer feedback! This is so deeply embedded in them I'm sure they believe it themselves now:
Today I have an update about how we are delivering some of the WinFS technologies. It represents a change to our original delivery strategy, but it's a change that we think that you'll like based on the feedback that we've received....It's great technology and we are super-excited to be productizing this way. And most importantly, it's what people have been asking for - as we work with customers, we're constantly hearing that they want many of the technologies to be more broadly available in the data platform products. That feedback was taken seriously."
Yer. Especially where it means more money for us.......
And what exactly do you think NTFS is? it is a Journaled database like filesystem, and has been out for more than a decade. Did MS invent it, no, but the Open Source community is not exactly cutting edge here.
The fact is, what they are trying to do hasn't really been done before. AND, they're trying to tack it onto the enormous pile of legacy code that is Windows.
I wonder if the problem of integrating it into Windows itself stems from the fact that next to ZERO file formats that are currently in widespread use by the computing world know anything about "metadata", which is kind of key to the whole "SQL as a filesystem" concept.
Plus, I've always wondered how they thought all that metadata was going to get there in the first place. Most users don't even bother to name their files properly (e.g., every folder is named New Folder), and now they're expected to *decribe* them, too? Doesn't seem likely.
I thought "WinFS" meant "Windows File System", but I just checked Wikipedia and it actually means "Windows Future Storage". Well, if it is ever released, it is no longer in the future, right? It's like "Duke Nukem Forever": if it ever gets released, you're no longer waiting forever...
Circumcision is child abuse.
From the almighty Wiki:
* WinFS is the codename for a planned relational database layer built on top of NTFS, and is loosely based on SQL Server 2005. In August 2004, Microsoft announced that WinFS would not be included in Windows Vista. This was due to time constraints in developing the technology. Microsoft has been working on this technology since the mid 1990s. For a time, Microsoft had said that WinFS would be released separately of Vista, but on June 23, 2006, Microsoft announced that they decided to integrate some of the developed features into the next versions of ADO.NET and SQL Server, effectively cancelling the WinFS project. .NET managed code), the Next-Generation Secure Computing Base architecture was abandoned for Windows Vista.[14] Some aspects of the NGSCB initiative, such as support for Trusted Platform Module chips, are still present, though its role is now limited to being a provider of cryptographic functions which will support BitLocker Drive Encryption.
* Due to scheduling issues, the Windows PowerShell, code-named Monad will not be included in Windows Vista. However, Microsoft has announced that it will be available as a separate download in the fourth quarter of 2006
* Owing to significant difficulties in getting third-party developers to support the system (particularly due to the lack of support for writing for the Trusted Operating Root using
* Support for Intel's Extensible Firmware Interface was originally slated to be included with Vista, but has been removed due to what Microsoft has described as a lack of support on desktop computers.[15] The UEFI 2.0 specification (which replaces EFI 1.10) wasn't completed until early 2006, and as of mid-2006, no firmware manufacturers have completed a production implementation. Microsoft has stated that it intends on incorporating 64-bit UEFI support into a future update to Vista, but 32-bit UEFI will not be supported.
* PC-to-PC Sync, a Peer-to-peer technology for synchronizing folders on multiple computers running Vista, was removed due to quality concerns. It may arrive sometime in the future in some form.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista#XP_feat ures_dropped
Well, all I know is, everytime I think of cutting up my partition for Vista Beta, I end up in the shower sobbing Unclean, Unclean. Still haven't tried it, Would be nice to skip this whole OS cycle.
Still a proud debian pc.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
Not that I'm blaming them -- all software designs have limits, past which they can't be stretched any further and still be made to work. But perhaps Microsoft should be looking at starting over with a fresh new OS design (with backwards compatibility provided via virtual machine emulation only, a la MacOS Classic running in MacOS/X)?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Then they should have designed it better, managed the project better, etc. Again, they were just demoing WinFS two weeks ago! What you're saying is that there's nothing wrong in your book with promising a major feature for almost half a decade and then going back on the promise.
"Sufferin' succotash."
I would be happy to have a relational file system. Hierarchies grow into big messes over time because one cannot group by multiple orthogonal factors very easily. You can't willy-nilly add and subtract factors/attributes without rewiring large branches, busting bookmarks and path references in the process.
Every file server more than 5 years old is usually a tangled mess, and I've seen many. However, it takes time to get used to a relational file system such that people may not want to change. They want to stick with the devil they know.
Table-ized A.I.
fuck you i am 1337er than j00 in every aspect
How dirty filesystems get clean.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Wonderful Innovation, Not For Sale
I'm a supporter of open source software as much as the next guy, and I wish what you said were true, but it simply isn't.
Reiser, JFS, and EXT3 are definitely journaled, and they do allow metadata to be stored with files, but they're NOTHING like what was intended with WinFS. And in all actuality WinFS doesn't really count as a filesystem per se, at least not like the ones you mentioned.
WinFS sits on top of NTFS, and is nothing more than an abstraction layer. It lets you do potentially crazy things like (and I'm making this up, purely for example purposes): "SELECT * FROM documents WHERE type IS image AND SOUNDSLIKE ohhhyeaahh"
If you're curious what WinFS is all about give the wikipedia entry a read.
The closest comparison (I can think of) to WinFS in the open source world (which one would argue is already better since it's not total vaporware) is Gnome Storage. There's also GnomeVFS, and the creators of the now defunct BeOS had a wonderfully similar BFS that supported relational style queries. There's probably tons more that I'm not aware of as well.
I predict we'll begin to see more and more of these abstracted file system layers in the future, but they're no replacement for (and will be useless without) an underlying filesystem architecture like Reiser, XFS, NTFS, etc, etc.
Oh, this one is a real gem. A true diamond from a chirping Microsoft canary:
...if MS had shipped it, and it wasn't up to the quality standard they promised it would be...
It would be... just like every other Microsoft product!
ROTFLMAO! HAHAHAHAHAHA!
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
A relational file systems is the next generation of OS design and a necessary evolution of the concept.
Put it this way, your computer stores hundreds of thousands of files, the current paradigm of treating them as files stored in a folder tree is absolutely antiquated and ridiculous.
I should be able to ask my operating system, "Show me all my picture files", and it simply can list ALL the image files on my computer, regardless of how or where they are stored. Features like Spotlight in OS X or Google Desktop are "nice" ways of trying to deal with this problem in a folder tree, but they are just an expensive to generate index file and it takes way too much time to return a result. Spotlight not only has to return if the index entry for a file matches, but it also has to verify if the file still exists on disk. I could take minutes for spotlight or Google desktop to return ALL image files on your computer. You will also notice that these systems often display something like (and 5000 more) link, this means that in order to have the search return results quick enough, it didn't REALLY find all 5000 files, it just says that according to its index file, there appears to be 5000 more image files, when you click on the link, it take more time to finally list all these files. Indexing a folder based tree structure is a solution, but its not an ideal solution. It is limited by the limitations of an antiquated file tree structure.
In a relational file system, if I ask for all image files stored on my computer, the result should be instantaneous, or near to it, as the fact that the file exists as a database entry means the file exists in reality. The time required for the results is simply the time required to build a query and return a result from a database.
Also, why do we even have to name files? Why do we have to give them a file extension. These are all antiquated file system concepts which are completely meaningless for a modern OS. A relational file system stores more then just a file name and a file type, I should be able to search for a file by date, description, keyword in the file, etc, etc, etc. I should not only be allowed to name the file, but provide any meta tags I want to help me locating that file quickly. An extension was a cheap way to get the OS to launch or open a file related to a specific program, but it would be completely unnecessary if the file itself embedded its type or had an entry in a database record. The name of a file would purely be a description and only one of many ways to identify a file.
Ultimately, a relational file system will allow such concepts as "Show me the letter about taxes I wrote to Bob Smith last week." and it will return the email or document you wrote, period. You don't care what the file name is. You don't care what type of file it may be, whether it was an email or text document. A file system should know that a file exists on your computer that is a texted based document, including keywords taxes and Bob that was generated within a week of the current date. This is a sorely needed concept in ANY OS, no OS to date has anything near that powerful a concept. There is no reason for a file system not to be able to handle these requests, and if we EVER want something like what we have seen in Star Trek, where people can ask a computer real language queries, we NEED a relational file system.
Relational files systems will bring a whole new level of superior storage capability to computers that will eventually start storing millions of files. We can't just keep a "lean and mean" tree based folder structure, that paradigm was never intended to manage millions of files.
I applaud Microsoft for at least trying, because unlike Google or Apple, they realize that the future is in a database driving relational file system and not stop gap pseudo-solutions like indexing. Its obviously a difficult concept to implement, but once anyone is able to implement the idea, it will be a VERY welcomed concept and improve the functionality and usability of an operating system. I for one would switch to and swear by ANY OS that implements this idea properly, whether its Linux, OS X, or yes, even Windows.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
...they've recycled an old Intel codename ;)
Anyone remember the old Pentium III?
ummmm, let's see.... VMS --> WNT --> XOS THat's it! the next stage of operating system evolution,! We'll call it XOS... Nah doesn't have pizazz. Uh,,,, OSX! Yeah that's it we'll call it OSX! the bestest Mickey Soft operating system evahrr!
Damn straight bro!
Unless you count the new start menu
How is this fundamental? Stardock's WindowBlinds has been offering the ability to create a custom start-menu for years.
the "everybody's a user" security model,
Microsoft had the ability to implement this in Windows XP. They've supported Limited User Accounts since Windows 2000. Its a change in default user settings, not an earthshaking new security model.
the sidebar
Does Google Desktop ring a bell? How about ObjectDock?
the bundle of included apps
Oh, you mean new skins for Minesweeper, Wordpad, and Solitaire? Or do you mean 3-d chess? Last I heard they weren't even including a basic office suite. For a 7-gig disc, I expect more.
Face it, Vista includes little that's especially new, even for Microsoft.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
No, not the end...
In 6 months to a year, we'll start seeing Linux distributions shipping with a "true relational storage paradigm" extension to ext3 or a plugin for reiserfs as a install-time option.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
FileSystems always have been Databases. There are so many design options that we have many great FS that focus in different areas of that 'narrow' design space.
Any metabase IS an add-on tech for a FS unless it merges functionality with some fundimetal structure, like directories for example. As long as it retains the old function, one could argue that its an add-on for that component of the FS.
Metabases SHOULD be FS independent that use kernel notifications like Spotlight does-- indexing is slower than the notification overhead anyway.
I'd like some APIs for notification & metabase so we can replace Spotlight with something that indexes FILENAMES!
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When I first heard about it, the idea of replacing the file system with a DB didn't really sound that cool. General-purpose DBs are just that... general purpose. A file system is a special purpose DB for files, and everybody has been working on them for years. At the end of the day, I still want to be able to open a file. I write C. If I couldn't use fopen() on the new OS I would have been pissed. So, somebody would have had to come up with a way to layer a traditional file system on the DB file system, or am I displaying ignorance here?
Maybe using a general purpose DB for the metadata tree would have made sense--if you already have a powerful general-purpose DB lying around and built into the OS. At the end of the day though, you still want your files--your JPEGs, your MP3s, whatever.
In other words, I just didn't see what all the fuss was when it was suggested, and now that this silly idea is out, it doesn't sound like something I'd miss. Oh, and I also seem to recall being concerned that it might make it impossible to write software for the OS without using proprietary APIs, or to transfer data out of a MS environment without turning the data into... ordinary files! The "file" paradigm is such an entrenched idea, replacing "file" with "data in a database" just makes no sense... especially with MS and their tendancy to muck up formats.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Mod parent up. Excellent description of why a relational FS is the next logical step.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
The original announcement then was that WinFS would not ship in the RTM of Microsoft Windows, and instead, it'll be offered at a later date, as either a seperate download or part of a service pack.
The new article says that they won't ship it at all, not even as a seperate download.
So lets recap, it goes from being included to shipping seperately to not shipping at all.
and must cut out features from Vista in order to ship it. There are too many features in Vista that Microsoft cannot make a release deadline unless they cut some features out of Vista. WinFS can be added in later, or be part of a service pack.
Actually Microsoft might have better luck with EXT2/EXT3/JFS etc file system support that is superior to NTFS/FAT16/FAT32 and the standards are already well published and should be easier for Microsoft to adopt than the WinFS system. Microsoft should look out because ReactOS is planning for EXT2/EXT3/JFS file system support and it is starting to run some Windows applications without problems (most Windows programs have issues, but ReactOS is slowly improving) and while ReactOS is not ready for Prime-Time, in a few years, who knows? Once it adds Windows driver support, DirectX support, sound card support, and other features, possibly by a 1.0 release (now in 0.30 RC1 release) it might steal some thunder from Microsoft Windows and Vista, if it runs on systems that Vista won't run on.
Vista is a resource hog anyway, it needs 512M of RAM just to run, and still the swap file keeps growing. You will find many effects will be disabled by some systems just to get a decent performance out of Vista. I think the public release Beta ISO was like almost 4 gigs in size, showing how huge Vista really is. I figure it is like Microsoft stuffing 15 pounds of manure into a 5 pound bag.
Me I am going to stick with Windows XP and ignore Vista until the service packs fix Vista to be stable enough on hardware I can afford to run it on. I'll use Linux until then as well. I am keeping my eye on ReactOS to see if it reaches XP level success, and then I might switch over to it.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
There are some fishy things here.
One is that WinFS was not promised for now: it was promised for, say, 15 years ago. MS Access was said by Microsoft to be a first step towards a totally relational OS really soon then. Just as Cairo (MS Windows NT 4) was supposed to be totally OO, and now we are told native code will still be with us for several years yet.
But the worst thing is that they don't understand what they intend to ship. WinFS is not relational, not it can ever be, since being based on (a bastardised version of) ISO SQL it violates the basic fundaments of the relational model. Incidentally, this non-relationalness makes it much larger, less performant, more complex, less powerful than it should be. Coincidence?
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DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
The idea of making file systems more database-like has been around for as long as there have been databases. There have been dozens of implementations. The upshot? It doesn't seem to work well for general purpose computing.
Where it does work is some niche areas of business computing. Integrating WinFS into SQL Server makes sense. Of course, other database vendors have had equivalent technology for a long time.
All in all, with WinFS and SQL Server, Microsoft has retraced the evolution of the industry--only a few decades late. So, it's business as usual.
...GNOME Storage is still going.
I have gas, but my car uses petrol.
Too many people I talk to (and read) have the wrong idea of what the latest WinFS iteration was and what it was supposed to do. WinFS was intended to provide sql query like filtering to files on unstructured file metadata. While this is certainly 'file search' for those who know how to make it work, it was not a consumer friendly mechanism. It was intended to be the underlying API that a consumer friendly search like desktop search would use.
If you read the article(s) you will understand that a) it grew into something more / bigger that overlaps with ORM mapping (and what was ObjectSpaces) b) it will exist in the not too distant future (next SQL server version) and c) consumer friendly desktop searches and apps you probably haven't even thought of will be able to use it. For example, why not search SNMP trap data, html log data etc. the same way you search for a file? You will be able to.
Obligatory MS bash - the fact that it has taken so many iterations does worry me as to how much longer it might take before I can actually use the technology. We are probably talking at least the next version of office - 4 years away? Thinking back, that was obvious even from the last public WinFS CTP, so I guess this whole 'WinFS is dead' (which it's not) announcement is no surprise, just a re-packaging of what I already knew.
It is not the end of the WinFS concept - it is the end of the WinFS stand alone product and the beginning of the concept's availability as an enabling technology.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
It was also designed for the 64 bit chips... 64 bit Windows is nothing new, i mean NT isn't entirely a "New Techonology"
Every bit of pissing and moaning about what OS gets your willy wet is so much farting in the wind compaired to what computers should be. You should be able to converse with your computer in a normal fashion and get the results you want everytime with no downtime or upgrading cycles that can be measured in hours. All computers today are lumps of crap that piss you off. Some piss you off less than others or maybe they don't at all until something faster comes along but computers are all designed to piss you off right now. It only makes sense that the OS of such an evil machine should also piss you off. Using this reasoning it becomes easy to see the real problem that microsoft has been having with Vista. They reached a level of complication that turned chaos into elegance, every bug in every corner of the software formed a program all its own that made Vista so stable and so fast and so secure that no other OS would ever be needed and no patches would have to be written. Everyone would have figured out the perfection of Vista (because even the dumbest knuckledragger can figure out that he hasn't felt like shooting his computer in a long time) and would never use any of the updates until finally Microsoft turns into a game company that gets spanked by sony.
Wrong. It's the hooks into the filesystem that allow notification for spotlight to update. Spotlight is external to the file system, so it's the existence of those hooks that allow it to function as a real time up to date DB rahter than batch processed.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Undoubtedly you meant,
"It sounds as though you have been too near the bogon flux"
or perhaps
"you sound like a Vogon".
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
"On the contrary, plenty of corporations might lie, but how many companies can get away with telling the same lie over and over and over again?"
Well someone should sue the makers of Old Spice then. They keep telling me I'd attract women if I used their product. So far no luck.
BeOS had BeFS. That's off the top of my head. There probably have been others.
Yes, interesting how all of these innovative ideas start under the "evil corporation" cathedral instead of the genteel "bazaar".
Being ready now (google, spotlight) and "good enough" > being ready "real soon now", but being perfect.
Don't get me wrong, I too, applaud microsoft for trying, and if it ever gets released and works, it will be the superior solution. However, people need the type of searching ability *now* - and if google/spotlight are able to provide a "better" solution today, then that is what will be used...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Haven't you heard of Duke Nukem Forever?
This announcement makes more sense than I think people recognize, particularly if you posit that they ran into performance difficulties.
Remember that they were going to put it all into the filesystem? Then they put it into a layer above the FS. Bet you a bitflip that they found performance problems resulting from mixing large files and small files in the same filesystem. It is very easy to have such problems, you have to get quite clever to avoid them, and expend a lot of effort on it. Rather than take the extra time, they pulled the enhanced semantics out of the filesystem. That was the wrong thing. Then, look at the descriptions of how some of the queries they supported took too long. It is really easy to design things in that area wrong, and get unacceptable performance impacts. Rather than solving the deeply challenging problems, they punted and put the stuff into SQL server. Why? Because people who don't want things to be slow can just not use the feature until they figure out how to make it not cost performance. Of course, that means no OS integration but..... it is so nice to not be designing Reiser4 by committee.
I see Microsoft responding to difficult technical problems not by solving them, but by running from them, and that explains the entire trajectory of WinFS.
Another consideration you can see between the lines is that they don't want to lose the revenue from SQL Server by doing everything that it does in the OS and doing it better. Marketers will do things like make the first release of something only available at a higher price. They do that a lot. They'll do it even if it robs Vista of most of its excitement to do it.
Large corporations often have real problems handling tough research projects.
Reiser4 took 5 years to get into working at all (v3), and 10 years of sustained development to get right (reiser4), and it is just the storage layer. You can't do that in a large corporation.
In a large corporation you are thinking that you need 3 years to do a project that is a paradigm change, and you go talk to management, and you sense that they have patience for 9-18 months, and you really want to do the project, so you tell them you can do it in 9-18 months.
18 months go by, and you are 1/2 of the way through the first version (you think you are 90% of the way through), and the first version is going to suck badly and take years to be well optimized. Now, if your product is the first in its market, you can make it even though it sucks, and get the money for the version 2. If you are going into a mature market, well, things are tough. Very tough. WinFS is going into a mature market.
Now, into this reality throw corporate managers. They think that if they intimidate the programmers a lot, products ship sooner. So, technical shortcuts get taken. Only problem is, in a product like WinFS, going into a mature market, taking technical shortcuts kills things. Especially since for a product like WinFS the technical shortcuts affect DEEP decisions that you will never be able to reverse out of. Like, whether the enhanced semantics are in the FS layer. Or whether the whole OS is designed around using the enhanced semantics in every component. Then, managers feel the need to prove they are tough about schedules, and they cancel for being late projects that everyone should have known were going to take a long long time because they were hard. There is some very interesting recent research suggesting that if you want an accurate project length forecast, you don't ask for an estimate, you create a betting pool.
The sad thing is, since everyone copies Microsoft, now there will be more people saying that Reiser4 shouldn't do what WinFS backed away from. We can do it. We solved the hard storage layer design problems, our stuff works. Now we can finally go after the enhanced semantics. It took 10 years, but we got the storage layer into the shape we want it in, and one plugin at a time the enha
Hey, a guy says 16-bit 486 and you people pick on him for a bunch of other shit?
/. goons give a hard time over spelling, vocabulary, grammar, and anything else they can find but miss the geeky details.
A little news for all of you know-it-all teeny Omega geeks out there who don't pay attention to us geezers talk about processor history... the last 16 bit chip in PCs was the 286.
The 386sx was a 32-bit chip on a 16-bit bus. The 386dx was a 32-bit chip on a 32-bit bus. The 486sx and 486dx were both 32bits internally and externally, the latter having a built-in math coprocessor. The 486dx2 series were chips with the core running at twice the bus speed. The dx4 series usually ran at 3x the bus, but could be run at 4x a slower bus. The first Pentiums were monstrous 5-volt parts with no MMX. Then there were the Intel Pentium Pro and the AMD k5. Then the Pentium MMX and Pentium II vs. AMD k6/k6-2/k6-3, while Cyrix actually looked threatening for a while with the 6x86 series. Then the Athlon and Athlon XP took off, the Pentium 3 and Celeron lost a little ground, and the Cyrix M2 was a laughing stock. For a while Via and Transmeta had some somewhat promising offering in the mobile/low power embedded space (where AMD has the Geode positioned).
That brings us to the current chips. In case you're still lost, that includes Pentium 4 / P4EE / Celeron / Pentium D / Celeron D / Pentium M vs. the Athlon XP / Athlon 64 / Athlong 64FX / Sempron / Athlon 64 x2 / Turion / Turion x2.
Damn, it's a sad day when
Maybe it's just me, but I find one of the coolest thing about a new operating system is all the cool backend stuff, the new features. Primarily of course those which aren't just simple gimmicks (luna)
... sadly no)
I really enjoy not understanding the new OS and discovering the cool things it can do, it's fun to learn and take advantage of (like that first time you discovered cut and paste and just how much it helps with everyday computer use.
The file system in it's current form in in XP / 2k is holding the system back, the way we work with data on a machine, how we find it, sort our stuff, file it etc is pretty piss poor right now.
Bringing in a new more efficient file system at the base level opens up a whole new world for us file system and performance loons to get excited about. On top of that though for the common user you can DO more, imagine being able to find things MUCH faster and easily in the OS.
Being able to tag files would rock with (ideally?) unlimited tags or specifying our own tags for the database of files.
Look at what id3 tags have done for mp3 files when worked with PROPERLY (itunes)*
Further to this having it BUILT IN is imperative, because sure google desktop and a heap of other packages can provide the fast find features, but that guarunteed integration on ALL systems means it's something other developers can write for in their applications and hook into etc.
Look at such simple things as duplicate files, if the CRC matches you could have a SINGLE FILE on the operating system and any other references to the file are just a link (yes, I know linux can do this, infact I know NT can do this but do you see it being cleverly implimented properly,
Windows XP to be honest in my opinion is really not that bad of an OS, once you've patched it up, locked it down a little and know what the heck you're doing it really does a fairly good job, there's just no compelling reason to get rid of it for Vista right now without something very compelling for the users.
It's really time for Microsoft to step up to the plate and offer something REALLY compelling for Vista, because right now deliberately holding back DX10 "only for vista" and a shiny new UI is NOT doing it for me, oh and of course Halo 2 only for vista, lol - please!
(rarely are those shiny new flashy UI's actually faster to work with, cooler to look at perhaps but faster to work with? - no, 99% of IT guys turn XP back into standard 2k style UI)
I want big changes in my OS, I've learnt the 95 / 2k / XP systems fairly well, I know how to get my work done quickly (enough) with the systems and I don't feel disctintively limited but I also feel that in 10 years! or so it's time we should have had some really CLEVER stuff which makes things easier, niftier, smarter!
Microsoft just don't seem to be able to provide us with anything which is well,.. "clever" at all, google seem to be able to, apple seem to be able to a shit load of open source developers do but Microsoft nope. Very sad really such such a giant of the industry.
* note! I realise that some people hate itunes, infact I'm not a big fan myself for many reasons but it would be silly to deny how powerful the browse function is within itunes when your id3 tagging is actually done right, just an example of how good databases can be for sorting / finding files and data.
"I should be able to ask my operating system, "Show me all my picture files", and it simply can list ALL the image files on my computer,"
That would not be very useful to me as I have millions of images probably. I'd have to use tags or some crap. The folders keep them organized believe it or not. I suppose you could say that folders are just another kind of tag but then I'd have to remember what the hell I tagged them with. Following the tree of folders is easier.
Now I do see the benefits of the relational file system but let me ask you this... what would the files look like on a computer... on an OS? Would there be folders like now? Would every file just be dumped in C:\ ??? Maybe you would not be able to see the files at all and would have to do a search everytime? How would I find something that I haven't thought of in a very long time? It might be gone forever. I'm really just curious.
simple, fast homepage with your links: http://www.ngumbi.com/
WinFS wasn't supposed to replace your hierarchical filesystem. .NET integration. So, programs could tag opened files through the interface to add meta-data... and it would be stored in indexed form inside the filesystem.
Instead it was a way to add a metadata-indexed database to the existing NTFS that could accessed through new FS-layer APIs by software that cared to use it (for example, Explorer, or Outlook). It was also going to have some nice
But you could still open the FS in WindowsXP and it's a normal hierarchical FS. You just couldn't see the metadata (it hides in a reserved file in the MFT).
So I don't understand what the problem was... why couldn't they just increment the version number of the NTFS header and leave the APIs available with an SDK.
They didn't have to tie it into the interface, if that's the reason why they didn't ship it.
I don't know... I'm disappointed.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
And in XP if you install a free download. (But IIRC it only works when talking to shares coming from a 2k3 server)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Linux? It has a wide variety of filesystems, but they all work roughly the same way. No huge paradigm shift required. Still POSIX-compliant. Different journaling, better performance for servers, better recovery options. Nothing too drastic.
Mac? They added journaling to catch up to Windows and *nix. But a radically new filesystem? Nope.
It's a huge problem to shift to a completely new type of filesystem without breaking compatibility. I'm sure it's a really tough project to get a handle on, and would be very easy to underestimate. BTW, you have, for almost a year now, been able to download a beta of it. Just don't expect it to integrate with anything else.
FUSE is where it's at. User-space loopback. Forget trying to run databases and such in your kernel-space (and IIRC WinFS didn't do that anyway, it ran a Jet engine in user space to manage the meta-data indexes).
People have done CRAZY things with that.
For example, GMail FS?
And a very interesting project: NOOFS. Basically it lets you present a virtual, network-capable FS using FUSE that is backed by a database (with small files inlined and large files as on-disk blobs). You create virtual folders made of SQL queries, can attach arbitrary metadata and ACLs, etc. Can be MySQL or Postgres backed (and I'm sure you could twiddle the Postgres code to talk to Oracle if that floats your boat).
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Good point on the usefulness of relational concepts for accessing files, however, the relational part needn't be build into the file system. It can be added at the operating system level. The file system should handle a few basic things:
1) looking up unique filenames
2) reading and writing to the files
3) keeping the data consistent in case of a crash
Any more than that is overkill.
Take TCP/IP for example. It's very simple. Instead of redefining TCP/IP into a 900 lb gorilla to do web browsing and and instant messaging we wrote applications that ride on top of TCP/IP.
That's how this relational file system should work. It should ride on top of the basic file system. With operating system support the relationship tags of files could be maintained on the fly. With solid API support it could be easy to program with.
... any app the sends email to add meta-data entries to an on-disk copy of the email, with the auto-extracted keywords (concert, tickets) and add the Sent data or something.
WinFS just provides the tools to make something like that possible.
And really you can't expect any application except for the one that made the notes in the first place to be able to show you that file, or show you a search query interface that makes sense, unless some kind of standard was enforced on wide-classes of metadata.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
http://noofs.org/
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
How to Use NTFS Alternate Data Streams
"You should actually read what is being said before making statements which clearly illustrate that you have no idea what you're talking about."
Not knowing shit about the subject matter is a common theme among anti-microsoft zealots. You keep arguing with them, but they will never concede anything because they ignorant morons and are incapable of thinking for themselves.
Give up. Let them stew in their own cesspool of ignorance. Because they yell so loud, they may seem large in numbers, but they are not. They are an insignifgant portion of the computing population, and while their views may seem popular or widespread, they routinely get shot down in the real world because the people around them are competent and know that they are full of shit. And when I say give up, I don't mean don't call them on their bullshit. Just make your points and don't bother dragging out the conversation.
It's more intuitive than it sounds. Folders are a one-tag system. What if you want more than one tag? Like say a vacation photo. You could put it in Vacations\Hawaii\, but what about the people that are in it? What about if you love all your pictures of sunsets?
With a database filesystem, you should be able to tag it: "Vacations, Hawaii, [wife's name], [daughter's name], sunset". Then you could be provided a UI where you can click any one of those tags and it would show you all matches, or select a few at a time to narrow it down further. Add filetypes, dates, authors, etc. and you can do even more with it.
Essentially, yes. The files would just be in one big alphabetical list ("media"), or perhaps broken up by content type (video, audio, pictures).
There could be some handy options for "Today's media" (created today), "This week", etc. To find a file you hadn't looked at in a while, just click or search for "media last accessed in 2004", or whatever a more friendly name might be for that. Or "untagged photos", so you could just leave your photos you just transferred from your camera in a pile until you felt like organizing them. Or better yet, have the application apply a tag to each set of photos (=directory), which you could later organize further.Coincidence? I think not...
WinFS was a solution looking for a problem. It finally gave up the search, that's all.
No sig today...
So what's left after all this stuff has been removed? Taking account of stuff that's not available for download for other OS's (such as IE 7) and not already in XP by default in some other form (e.g. Outlook Express/Windows Mail):
- Higher system requirements
- "updated" GUI
- Windows DVD maker and some other small utilities
- Lowered privileges (welcome to the new millenium, Microsoft)
- Parental controls
- Speech recognition
- That flash/disk thing
- Drive encryption
To me, that looks like stuff that most people have available to them in one form or another and which, if they don't, they wouldn't ever use. GUI changes are ten-a-penny for Windows, DVD software is bundled with every PC that's capable of doing it or available free, parental controls are widely available for free or quite cheaply (and hardly EVER used anyway because they are just NOT reliable... I speak as a primary school technician who's had to explain that if you google for "Little Red Riding Hood", it's quite possible to find unpleasant stuff that will bypass a filter), speech recognition? Hell, my browser's done it for at least two versions, the libraries are installed with no-end of utilities and it still doesn't work very well at all - most people don't even HAVE a microphone on their computer because there's no practical use for it. There are also dozens of decent voice-recognition programs out there that tie into Windows just fine. Drive encryption is, again, easily available. However, it's not something I'd recommend a newbie to turn on until they were sure they had ten backups of their key or some kind of recovery disk.
It really bugs me that Windows, in every previous incarnation, has missed out "obvious" features, tweaks and utilities and instead bundled stuff that nobody wants/uses. Now they seem to be finally taking that cue and putting stuff that's easily available as freeware into Windows and releasing it as a new OS. A previous example would be Windows Firewall (which came along just after software firewalls had established themselves as a necessity). Unfortunately, they are still missing the obvious things that both ordinary people and the average tech NEEDS in an OS, mainly concerning control over what programs can and can't do.
A fully-installed Windows system has always needed some freeware to prop it up. Let start with "choosing which programs can run at startup". I install Startup Control Panel and StartupMonitor because I WANT to know when a program deigns itself so important that it should want to run at startup without asking me first. I get a pop-up dialog and a choice of whether to allow it to do so, EVERY time it tries. That's useful. That's simple. Complete IT-incompetents realise what it's asking and say no unless they think they need it - it instantly stops computers slowing because of accumlated startup/taskbar icons like RealPlayer, QuickTime, Adobe Acrobat etc. that DO NOT NEED to be loaded at all until I decide to load a RM, MOV or PDF (ARRGHH! What a stupid idea to "preload" these sorts of apps! Anyway...). Where was the OS facility to do that? You could regedit. You could go into some obscure menu in later versions of MS System Information (if you even KNEW how to find it, which most people don't). But nowhere did you EVER get a choice of "do you want to allow this program to run at startup?" or not.
Now, hopefully, someone who's run the Beta will tell me if that's in Vista or not. I would hope yes but I haven't heard of it yet. Also, I always install a Print-To-PDF driver of some sort (depending on the client, either freeware or something from Adobe). It turns ANY file (even Publisher) into a usable, transferrable file format that will print out on any machine (so you can transfer the PDF to a computer with any printer that uses the same paper size and it will pretty much work... that is invaluable in my line of work). Now it looks like MS finally caught up and then Adobe said no? I can't say I blame Adobe and I'm actually wondering why
This would make sense if you had the time and patience to add hundreds of tags to your files, or if you had only a few tags. OS X's iPhoto already sorta tags my pictures already when I drag them into the program by putting them into dated folders.
What you describe can already be accomplished via applications today--look at the Smart Folders in iTunes, for example. Why not have a basic application like a graphics viewer sort graphics files for you? Only applications can do anything meaningful with a file aside from copy/delete.
Same works for intel. The local computer guy ensured my dads company, that you might have problems with AMD, it is still a clone... So they buy intel, nothing about it.
OTOH, the implementation of such a FileSystem would get the unix world to work on a new (database) filesystem level too. There is just no way that MS has a better ::something:: than unix, right?
--- Above all the frustration, I still feel bad about it
If Hans Reiser and a bunch of guys can knock up an extremely sophisticated journaling file system from scratch AND rewrite an even more advanced pluggable replacement in the space of time that WinFS *hasn't* appeared. Perhaps WinFS should have set its sights lower to begin with.
Almost everyone here wants a relational FS, and there is no doubt that such a system would be extremely powerful. However, most users are not geeks, and are not very good at using computers. There is a reason that the hierarchal structure is so popular, and appeals so much to most users. 1) People are used to such a system from real life. When they want a knife, they dont go to a central database and say i want a knife. They go to a kitchen, then look in the closet that holds cutlery, and then look in the section that has knives, and then pick up the knife they want. A folder structure works in a similar fashion so people are comfortable with it. 2) Most relational FS need you to use the keyboard. Most people just like to point and click and folder based file systems do that very well. I am not saying that we should not have relational FS'es, just that they should be added to traditional FS'es and not replace them, because most people prefer the traditional way.
I suspect that both the move to 'Managed Code', which may increase the stability and security of Windows, and the games lock-in of DirectX 10 should be acknowledged, even if my response to Vista is 'meh'.
In fact, no.
/type/ is meaningless ? What does this means ? Should I store all my DVDs in little sealed white boxes with no title, that all look extactly the same as the boxes where I store my books and my cat food ?
The GP is an excellent explanation why the problem is NOT a file system problem. You may notice that he talked about files everywhere, so there are still files. You also noted that he only talked about haveing additional attributes linked to files.
Here is the breaking news:
NTFS already supports that. Extensible file metadata. Of course, performance is not perfect, but that is not the problem.
The problem is what metadata do you keep ? What is the taxonomy ? What are the APIs ? What is the user mental model of his documents ? What is the file identity ?
In the real world, object have a physical identity. If I look for my DVD of Funny Games, I can find it easily: I go in the room where my DVDs are stored, I look in the shelf where my DVDs are stored, I scann the DVDs, and I find the box. I hate to break the news to you, but this is a hierarchical model.
Let see the GP post:
"Also, why do we even have to name files?"
So, naming is optional ?
"Why do we have to give them a file extension?"
Well, that is the file type. '.doc' means 'application/msword'. Do you think we could avoid file types ?
"These are all antiquated file system concepts which are completely meaningless for a modern OS"
File
That was an extremely stupid comment. Files are objects, objects should have mandatory properties, or you end up with a big disorganized soup.
"A relational file system stores more then just a file name and a file type, I should be able to search for a file by date, description, keyword in the file, etc, etc, etc."
Well, this already exist. There is no need for a SQL-like filesystem for that. Btw, two sentences ago, the name was optional.
"I should not only be allowed to name the file, but provide any meta tags I want to help me locating that file quickly."
That is the crux of the problem. He want to provide meta-tags BEFORE locating the file. This is the exact opposite of the underlying problem. Users don't want to tag. Tagging is difficult, unscalable and error-prone.
"An extension was a cheap way to get the OS to launch or open a file related to a specific program, but it would be completely unnecessary if the file itself embedded its type or had an entry in a database record."
That is meaningless. From the user standpoint, the file already embeed its name and extension, so what is the problem ?
"The name of a file would purely be a description and only one of many ways to identify a file."
Identify. He keeps using that word, but I don't think it means what he think it means. He is messing indentify and locating/accessing concepts. And take look a systems that already does what he wants (iTunes, for intance). Take an disorganised MP3 collection (ripped by hands, lacking ID-3 tgs), put it into iTunes, along with a few duplicates. Have fun making sense of the mess. It is impossible.
HFS did the "the name of file is unimportant" a few years ago. That was a pain. And don't get me started of the really hard problems, like network, removable storage and versions.
What is needed is a simple file system, with support for attributes and a query system. Application-level support should then use an API to set the attributes on the files (say, "this is an mp3 file, I add the mp3 related tags", or "this is a picture, I add the idfc tags", or "this is a DVD rip, I add the chapter count, length, etc, etc", "this is a text file, I index its content"). User-level specific applications (iTunes/iPhoto/WinWhatever) will then use those tags to present information. Google-like system-wide search system will also the user to find things.
That is how the industry is moving forward. This is similar to what BeOS did. This is the future. It may not be perfect, bu
BeOS had a 64-bit database-like file system way back in 1995!
"I'm not a cool person in real life, but I play one on the Internet". Galley
Why is there so much anger and disgust oozing from the replies of the anti-fanboys in discussions like this? It does nothing to help support the validity of your arguments. After all is said is done, Microsoft still appears to be the winner to me. If it's all so simple and their work is so floored where is the competing OS to topple this scourge upon the IT community? Seems there isn't one to me. Maybe that's because MS get all the most important things to the majority of the people right while failing in a few areas that matter mostly to the very vocal minority above, all the while no doubt creating many of your jobs. Google appears to be creating a possible alternative but it won't be in the form of any traditional OS, as innovation has always been their way forward. I don't think the infrastructure or hardware is in place yet for what Google has planned so it's very hard to say if and when they might pose a real challenge. Point being that any real facts mention here as to why Vista might not be everything Microsoft is promising are completely voided by the pathetic one sided arguments of those that are unable to remove themselves from the overall situation and speak objectionably and unfortunately that appears to be the majority of you. Yours truly, Unimpressed & Uninformed.
"A relational file systems is the next generation of OS design and a necessary evolution of the concept."
:)
A flying car is the next generation of automobile design and a necessary evolution of the concept.
"Put it this way, your computer stores hundreds of thousands of files, the current paradigm of treating them as files stored in a folder tree is absolutely antiquated and ridiculous."
Put it this way, your automobile covers hundreds or thousands of miles, the current paradigm of running it on tarmac road surfaces is absolutely antiquated and ridiculous.
"I should be able to ask my operating system, "Show me all my picture files", and it simply can list ALL the image files on my computer, regardless of how or where they are stored."
I should be able to ask my car "Fly me to this destination", and it simply can fly me to ALL destinations in the world, regardless of how far away or where they are.
On a slightly different tack:
"Also, why do we even have to name files?"
OK, so you want some super-duper metadata-based storage system, but you don't even want to bother giving the file a name ? And how is a database-based file system going to store files without some sort of unique primary key (such as the full pathname) ?
".....Why do we have to give them a file extension. These are all antiquated file system concepts which are completely meaningless for a modern OS."
So something that all popular modern OS-es use is completely meaningless for a modern OS ?
"An extension was a cheap way to get the OS to launch or open a file related to a specific program, but it would be completely unnecessary if the file itself embedded its type or had an entry in a database record. The name of a file would purely be a description and only one of many ways to identify a file."
Do some reading-up on how the Unix/Linux "file" command works.
".....and if we EVER want something like what we have seen in Star Trek, where people can ask a computer real language queries, we NEED a relational file system."
The only thing I've ever wanted that I've seen in star trek is this (and it doesn't rely on a relational file system).
OK, OK, I'm kidding
It doesn't sound like you've actually ever used Spotlight. It seems that you've only used Google Desktop and figured that "Spotlight must be the same thing". Wrong! Spotlight uses filesystem notifications to keep its index up to date - it does not need to verify that a file still exists because it knows when any file is deleted. This is one reason why it's only available in OS X 10.4, they had to add the FS notification support to the kernel. Of course, sometimes there might be such heavy FS activity that notifications cannot be delivered and processed in a timely matter - then the kernel informs Spotlight and Spotlight knows that it must catch up during idle time. But these are extreme situations: ordinarily, the index is kept synchronized during usage with no polling and with negligible overhead.
At least for Spotlight, that is just an UI feature that lets you see the most relevant results in each catecory without needing a humongous window: the entire result set is actually collected, and it gets displayed immediately when you request it.
I just did atest on my OS X system: I did a search in the Finder (it's still Spotlight powered, just a different UI with more options) with all results displayed by default and with "type is image" as the only predicate. It found and displayed the full set of 32898 images on my computer in 30 seconds. That's nowhere near the "minutes" that you're making up, and it was from a cold start, and I had the window set to display thumbnails, so Spotlight was being slowed down by concurrent disk accesses as the Finder generated a thumbnail for each result. Doing the same search in list view takes a mere 4 seconds for the full list of 32898 images.
OH OH - Feeding frenzy for the linux nuts! Everyone out of the water!!!!
so relational DB based WinFS is now abandoned, and good ol NTFS brought back for Vista?
do I remember complitely wrong, Microsoft was suppose to introduce also revolutionary directory server (AD fashion) based filesystem in Win2000, back year 97-99(?), instead NTFS? after struggeling with it for a while, it was silently abandoned.
Gets postponed again, this is a good thing.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I really don't get it - are they so out of phase with reality where:
Anybody involved in search application development will tell you that the current systems are in their infancy and that they are inadequate due to the lack of a relational structure and most importantly a query language.
WinFS was Microsoft's chance of actually being ahead with a technology. Given both the bad press that Vista has been receiving as well as the fierce competition they are facing, they really needed this.
Thats not a typo is it? 6 years? What the hell were thousands of programmers doing for 6 goddamn years?
6 years and thousands of programmers should not have had a problem actually finishing all the features that were originally promised. If all they can do is 3.1 to 95 in 6 years they have got to be the most poorly managed horde of programmers in the entire world.
Check out the cave on the east side of lake Hylia. Strange and wonderful things live in it.
"pity they couldnt make a buisness of it."
..
The following might have something to do with why they failed
01. The OEMs were forbidden to display non-Microsoft systems.
02. Booting to BeOS required the use of a floppy.
03. Microsoft leaned on Hitchai to remove BeOS from its pcs in Japan.
04. BeOS went broke suing Microsoft.
A Crack in the Wall
He Who Controls the Bootloader
Be Inc sues Microsoft
davecb5620@gmail.com
"what they are trying to do hasn't really been done before"
The Hierarchical File System
DBFS
Project: OCFS
`next to ZERO file formats that are currently in widespread use by the computing world know anything about "metadata"'
ReiserFS
XFS
davecb5620@gmail.com
"I think MetaData is dead on the personal computer, because nobody wants to be a data entry clerk."
That's why you get clever with your solutions.
"People don't want to spend hours entering data."
Like spreadsheets, or documents...
Does this spell the end for the true relational storage paradigm that Microsoft has been promising since Windows 95?"
Well, who wants a RELATIONAL filesystem anyway? I'd rather much have a filesystem with search-engine like capabilities. Tags, keywords, etc.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
A lot of people say they want Microsoft to get a clean start but they don't really understand what that means. Running your legacy support in a VM is a really stupid idea. Remember when Aplpe did that with Classic? It was horrible. Overnight they basically lost all compatibilty with scanners, tons of printers, camera and lots of other products. Not to mention that various production enviornments involving audio recording, video creation, or digital imaging is going to suffer for years to come.
It took Apple about 3 years to get OS X usuable. That's counting from the day 10.0 was released but in reality they had been working on OS X and NeXT for at least 5 years before Panther came out. And Apple had the NeXT code base to draw from. Microsoft would be starting from scratch so it would probably take them much longer and there's no way they could spend time creating "cool" new features because they'd be busy re-implementing basic stuff like DVD burning and file encryption.
Sure, every other Linux kernel can throw backwards compatibilty to the wind because they know everyone will upgrade quickly and all the software is free but Microsoft doesn't have that option. The Windows world would be split between the new and the old for the better part of a decade and the cost of re-buying all your proprietary software (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Nero, Acid, Office etc.) would be prohibitably expensive.
For some people the move from Win9x to WinNT (XP) was difficult enough and that was after 6 years of transitionary work on the NT platform to make everything as seemless as possible. You guys say you want to see that future but in reality you really don't.
Plug: http://www.osreview.com/ for more commentary
I am quite shocked that (especially commenting on the upstream article) nobody mentioned The Dead Parrot. "WinFS is not dead, it is just morphing" (comment for upstream). Wov! http://web.ukonline.co.uk/thursday.handleigh/humou r/monty-python/dead-parrot.htm
Why? Well, if you don't ever add tags that are meaningful to you than you don't really gain anything. You already tag things when you put them in folders. Whether the file manager provides the GUI or the app, doesn't matter too much for those tags. As long as it's intuitive.
"What you're saying is that there's nothing wrong in your book with promising a major feature for almost half a decade and then going back on the promise."
That reminds me. How's the Hurd coming along?
Looks like you don't have to worry that much anymore.
It's a shame that WinFS has been dropped. However, Vista has TxF, which is a framework that allows for database-like ACID transactional semantics in an NTFS file system. This is an awesome advancement in filesystems, and a similar model should be proposed for the POSIX standard.
All right, I guess it wouldn't be too bad to make ONE tag because I already rename the folder my camera puts my photos into. I know I wouldn't be adding more than one tag though. The problem is that I don't know exactly what I named it. For example, I have a folder " My Pictures/_photos/2005-06 California "
Now I didn't realize that was the name until I went there just now. I could have named it San Jacinto or LA or something else. I might take a while to find it with tags, and especially since I only made one tag. The best way to find it in the relational system I guess would be to sort everything by date and then I would recognize the name when it showed up. The bad part is that it is sorting EVERY JPG file I have... You'll be able to restrict it to certain file types I am assuming, but still that is a lot. Hopefully there is an option to only show tags in the results otherwise it would show a zillion photos, and other images that I would have to wade through.
"have the application apply a tag to each set of photos (=directory), which you could later organize further"
Yeah this would make it the same work as just renaming the folder of photos that my camera creates when I transfer photos like I do now. However, this might be more work when trying to find them. The fact that you use search for everything scares me a bit. What if none of the pre-set searches like "media last accessed in 2004" match very well and I don't know what I tagged them with?
I just thought of something though. I guess I already use a relational file system in a manner of speaking since I am a Flickr user, though I don't upload everything there. It IS harder and takes longer to find a specific photo on there!
simple, fast homepage with your links: http://www.ngumbi.com/
The problem with that is then I have to go through the tedious process of defining and specifying this fixed relational metadata on all my files. No one will bother. Google's approach is far better. Make the computer get smarter and smarter about *automatically* learning the meaning of the contents of the files so I can eventually ask the computer in the way I would ask a human to retrieve something. Google is early along this path but at least on it.
In a relational file system, if I ask for all image files stored on my computer, the result should be instantaneous, or near to it, as the fact that the file exists as a database entry means the file exists in reality. If you have millions of records in a modern relational database, how does one make sure that useful queries are instantaneous? That's right - one builds indexes.
Everything an OS X user could brag about is wiped away and now Vista has a lot that OS X doesn't.
Not hardly. One glaring "feature" that OS X users can brag about is that OS X is a real product you can buy in stores- one that has had years to mature and improve- whereas Vista is nothing more than a beta and a litany of press releases. You're comparing the last version of OS X with the next version of Windows, and bragging about it having features that, for the most part, have been available in OS X for the last several iterations. Microsoft bashing aside, Vista is a startlingly unimpressive successor to XP.
Additionally, the laundry list of "new features" that Vista sports come with a steep list of system requirements. Meanwhile, I have a lowly 400MHz G3 iMac (remember the multicolored ones that shipped with OS 9 waaay back when?) that runs OS X quite happily. No, it's not going to win any benchmark competitions anytime soon, but it's perfectly usable and absolutely stable. Good luck getting Vista to boot on a CPU that's 3 generations behind.
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
Ok.. So if I'm reading correctly, the point of relational filesystems (future storage W(TF)E) is so that we can blindly drop a file into a pool of data, and trust its retriveal to a database? pfft.. no thanks.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but when I want to see every photo I have, listed by category I have no urge to type "show me all my photos please, Mr Computer... sir".. no, I type #cd ~/pictures & there they are in all their indexed glory: one index might be called /prOn, and another called /holidays, and yet another called /random within each of these will be /teenies, /fatties, /oldies, /dogs: /christmas, /fiji, /iran, /swaziland: /whatever /etc. Is it so hard to follow the path? Is it so hard to keep anything you might actually want to see in one place? Sure, if you use winblows your forced to put things in stupid places.. but that just means you should ignore winblows advice as much as possible, not implement a whole new layer of bullshit to deal with it.
Speaking of bullshit, after reading all these posts, I have a better understanding of what I didn't get about the concept and confirmation of some things I got. Such as: Ok good idea being able to search your files by tags (not exactly a new concept is it?) but, on the subject of mp3 tags... Am I the only one cold-sweating at the thought of having to tag every piece of media I own... by hand!?
Maybe someone can explain the advantage of tagging application files.. I thought a good app is supposed to know where to find its files, having installed them and all.
Maybe having a wall-less data-pool makes retriveal as low-key as possible, but c'mon... lose one piece of your DB and your fucked.
yes/no?
axis discrepancy indicates hexagons beyond control anomaly
So, all those developers who worked with WinFS Beta 1 have had all their work wasted. Why does the phrase "business as usual" spring to mind?
However, there are two workarounds to this.
1. Write your own WinFS. Get a VB or VC++ program to index all the files on the disk and organise them into repositories. Or
2. Run Linux and use GNOME Storage when it comes out. Or better still, write your own filesystem and OS. Replace Windows and give Mr. Gates a run for his money...
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.