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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?"
They announced they were cutting it from Vista (then known as Longhorn) in August 2004 - http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/188339_msft cuts28.html.
BeOS had an implementation of a fully relational filesystem. They dropped it in early versions and replaced it with a hybrid. It worked. And it worked amazingly well.
Microsoft could only hope to accomplish what BeOS/BeFS did.
Actually, spotlight doesn't have anything to do with HFS+ metadata. It builds a separate index of the data into two files stored in the root-dir of each filesystem. It uses mdimporter plugins to allow different file-formats to be parsed, so any arbitrary file can have metadata extracted and inserted into Spotlight's index.
Any filesystem could do this - you could do it using the DOS FAT filesystem. I think Spotlight is cool (though slow), but it's definitely add-on technology.
I wrote a full-text search index for Incisive Media which currently has over a million pages indexed - maybe a few hundred million word instances in total. Searching for phrases of words takes on the order of a tenth of a second. It takes a measurably long time to index and re-index, but it's blindingly-fast at search. Since you search a lot more than you index, it works for them. I think Spotlight got the balance wrong, or used the wrong technological solution.
Physicists get Hadrons!
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
It's windows XP + more CPU and RAM usage. Nothing special or useful
Unless you count the new start menu, the "sleep" mode (suspend to hibernate), the 3d-based Aero Glass, the "everybody's a user" security model, the sidebar, the new XPS print system, the bundle of included apps, the new WiFi networking model that can remember which security settings for which network, the new "Performance Statistcits" page on the computer management, and few hundred changes I haven't noticed yet. (Oh, and there's 64-bit support, to boot.)
Vista is easily the biggest change in Windows since the 3.11 / Win95 upgrade. To say that it's "just more CPU and RAM usage" is just FUD. (In fact, if you trim down Vista to match a trimmed down XP, I think Vista actually runs faster.)
Oh, and while you can probably say that most, if not all, of the new features are taken from OS X or Linux or what-have-you -- just because somebody else had it first doesn't mean that it's not an improvement.
right, but did Microsoft have you beleive you believe that WinFS was in each version at the time you bought it, only to find upon installation that Windows did not provide a file system at all? That would be fraud. Continually failing to provide a new file system, and announcing it months before the release of a new version, maybe stupid and annoying, but it is not fraud.
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.
As far as I understand, Reiser4 is meant to provide a foundation that can be extended through the use of plug-in(s) without reformatting or converting a volume. Reiser4 is only a framework where operatation's on the underlying store is filtered through plug-ins to make the filesystem appear completely different depending on the plug-in an application uses. Plug-ins allow the store to appear as different structures to different applications simultaneously. Specific plug-ins such as a relational directory structure are coded separately and are mixed and matched without conflict between applications.
ReiserFS' framework is kind of like Zope while a view (such as said relational directory) would be a Zope product. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Shh.
Actually, there is an open source community helping to develop a next-generation filesystem right now. In fact, it's already being used in production environments! It's called ZFS, and you can find out more about that community here:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/
What is ZFS you ask? Find out here:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/whati
ZFS highlights include:
Overviews of ZFS technology can be found here:
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/zfs_learning_
http://www.sun.com/emrkt/campaign_docs/expertexch
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.
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