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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?"
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
Of course, what do you think the whole Vista release is? It's windows XP + more CPU and RAM usage. Nothing special or useful. It's pretty pitiful that developers being paid 6 figures work at a slower pace than volunteer open-source developers. It also fits into Microsoft's motto: Less Later. Just like Halo 2, one of the most anticipated games was out years late and really sucked.
Microsoft will always do this, just like Vienna (Fiji, whatever) is supposed to be a complete re-write, bullshit. They'll probably just add some crappy RAM and CPU hogging features and call it inovative.
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.
Simply call it what it is, fraud, from a company that knowingly engages in deceptive business practices.
To be fair, I would call this a failure rather than a fraud. They probably believed their own claims about WinFS at the time that they made their promises.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
And meanwhile ReiserFS on Linux provides much of the functionality today that WinFS only promised for the future.
Shh.
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?
"Yeah, sure, WinFS will be in this one. It's not like last time, or the time before that, or the time before that. We mean it this time."
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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.
Hell, it makes you wonder if they had an idea they weren't going to ship even as they demoed WinFS at TechEd just two weeks ago.
And just think, enterprises rely on this company's OS, which is so internally complicated that its own developers call it "broken." It's amazing the economy came to rely on a company so unreliable.
"Sufferin' succotash."
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'
How many articles have we read that tell us that the boys over at Redmond lack organization? There's the famous story about the two Office development teams that built two versions of Office with incompatible file formats, because neither team knew about the other. There's all the stories about managers being forced to lie to make time table deadlines.
Now, all of that boils down to one simple thing: The left hand REALLY has no idea what the right hand is doing. What makes you think that their marketing team is any different?
Its easy to point the finger and cry that they lied, but is it really a lie if they didn't know any better?
"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.
I hope Vista will come with some serious eye-candy
If the betas are any indication, you'll be disappointed.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Fraud? So you lost a lot of money due to this whole WinFS thing? Did it kill your children or something?
So ext3 was a clean sheet re-do? Isn't it backward compatible with ext2? Indeed, isn't it just ext2 with journaling?
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.......
It's amazing the economy came to rely on a company so unreliable.
Microsoft isn't unreliable, not when viewed from the proper perspective. Microsoft is almost one-hundred-percent reliable when it comes to pulling the wool over the eyes of gullible customers, which they have managed to do to a customer base numbering in the hundreds of millions. That kind of reliability doesn't just happen, you know. It takes true dedication and an unwavering belief in one's own rightness. Ask yourself just how many politicians would give their left testicle to dissemble with such awe-inspiring efficiency. When someone can perform some complicated task with the appearance of effortlessness, it is a sign of true competence in action. With Microsoft, lies and deceit come so naturally one has to believe that one is in the presence of greatness.
Of course, if they'd focused even a fraction of that effort to the end of producing reliable software, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Granted, in the past several years they've improved substantially, but that still leaves untold millions of copies of Windows 3.1, '95 and '98 to be explained.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
MP3s which were ripped from your own CDs have good metadata, if the information was put in by the ripping program. If you download them from the internet, well, let's just say there's varying quality. Then there's images with EXIF data that have lots of good meta data like shutter speed, whether or not the flash was used, and when it was taken. Unfortunately, it can't tell you what is in the picture. That is the most important piece of data. I think MetaData is dead on the personal computer, because nobody wants to be a data entry clerk. People just find it easier to put their files in an organized place, so they can find them later. People don't want to spend hours entering data.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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
Most of these things that you mention are fixes to sub-par elements of the OS. These aren't new innovative things to be excited about, these are basic functions that any OS would be embarrassingly incapable without, in short, the things you mention are the ante to just keep playing in the next-gen OS game:
... Windows Movie Maker? Windows Mail? You can't say that with a straight face surely!?
- The new start menu is not an enhancement, just more functionality glummed into an 11-year old UI device stretched way beyond breaking-point.
- Sleep mode is something Windows should have had half a decade or more ago, it's practically a goddamn necessity with a portable.
- "Everybody's a user" security - a huge flaw with Windows that is finally seeing some action, unfortunately looks like there's plenty of tuning to be done before it actually works.
- The sidebar - seriously, you're excited about a technology you can already have (Dashboard, Konfabulator etc.) and implemented in a boring, unimaginative and sceen-hogging way?
- Print system - I'm not qualified to comment
- Bindle of included apps - such as...
- WiFi networking which remembers the settings of each wifi network you connect to - um... come on, 6 years wait for THIS?
- "Performance Statistcits" - god, go download one of the dozens of benchmarking apps... why does this make you want to buy Vista at all?
- 64-bit support - seriously, it needs this to even be in the game, it's not some special feature to trumpet above any other OS, it's an absolutely basic necessity.
The only thing you mention which IS slightly exciting to those watching Vista is the new compositing system, Aero. Which will allow some nice effects and finally decent non-flickery, back-buffered drawing to sceen.
Talk about scraping the barrel, these things that you seem so excited about - they're nothing but the absolute basic necessity to even have the OS worth considering in 2007 when it may be released. Where are the things that make you really excited about the OS, the things that make it special? The things that elevate the experience of using the OS rather than a tick-box driven nightmare of minimum-level-of-attention-to-detail copy-cat features.
This sig has been deprecated.
Since when do people buy windows?
They'll just go along buying computers with windows pre-installed.
Of all the features that I have seen or heard of that are supposed to be in the final incarnation of vista I cannot find one that is not either 1) a tweak, 2) something already available in either Mac OS or Linux or 3) A fix of something that is broken in XP. In short Vista is not at this point coming across as innovative. Actually if I think about it it appears that its Microsoft playing catch up.
Even Aero isn't innovative, I've been playing with Sun Microsystem's Project Looking glass and whilst it doesn't do a lot for me (it makes my laptop an interesting talking point when giving presentations....) and it feels like something dumped on top of the OS to make it look like a major change.
I cannot see corporate users migrating to Vista for any real reason, even the "new" security model isn't going to be a winner there as it will break any application that through lack of proper design requires admin rights (and there are a few out there).
As for it being the biggest change since the 3.11/95 upgrade Im confused how you could even relate the two. Windows 95 was a totally different user experience from Windows 3.x. This isn't. If you look at the last real upgrades for home users (excluding DOS and whatever interface was thrown over it (buttons for DOS anyone?) it was windows 3.11 to 95 for a huge difference in usability, 95 to 98 for a massive boost to hardware support and management (in my opinion anyway) and then 98 to XP for the benefits of NT (After all I don't know many home users who got their hands on 2000 and I discount ME as it was appalling...).
I see no innovation and no reason to upgrade if you are still using Windows. As far as RAM and CPU usage, Well Im not sure I am fairly confident that you could get Vista slimmed down to normal XP performance, but then I can get XP to perform quite well, it just takes a lot of effort. Realistically though Vista is going to be on a new PC or you are going to have to upgrade something (probably add more RAM or upgrade your graphics card rather than upgrade your CPU but still.)
The really sad thing is that 6 months after the launch there will be a huge number of users, and why? because its the best OS? because its worth upgrading to? because its more secure? No. It will have a user base because it comes pre-loaded on N number of new PC's.
"For example, with FAT16, there's no way to get the file-changed notifications that Spotlight needs to know when to reindex a file."
Of course it can. The filesystem is irrelevant. A feature like this would be present in the driver's "write" function (or at a similar level), and could be implemented in several ways (which I'll skip so as to not get bogged down in details). The storage medium matters not one bit.
To be more precise, it's the hooks into the VFS layer that allow notification for Spotlight to update. Take a look at bsd/vfs/vfs_vnops.c in xnu (you might need to sign up for a free ADC Online membership in order for that link to work). In particular, take a look at vn_close - in particular the ..._fsevent calls. (NOTE: this is not a published interface, and is subject to change without notice. Don't start using it in your apps unless you're prepared for an app to stop working in a future release; it might continue to work in future releases, or it might not.)
My home directory at work is on an NFS server, and everything under it it's indexed by Spotlight. It happens to be on an HFS+ partition on the server, but Spotlight on my machine has no clue that it happens to be on HFS+, and the indexing of my stuff there is done by Spotlight running on my machine, not on the server, so no hooks into HFS+ were used to do the change notification (because, among other things, no such hooks exist; the hooks are in the VFS layer, above the individual file systems).