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WinFS' Demise Not a Bang Or a Whimper
Shadowruni writes "The Seattle-PI confirms with Mircosoft what MS bloggers and pundits have been saying all along. WinFS simply isn't going to happen. Some of its features have been 'merged' with other projects." From the article: "WinFS was dropped from Vista in what company executives described at the time as a trade-off to get the operating system completed in a timely manner. The release of Vista has since been delayed again and is now scheduled for November for large customers and January 2007 for the general public, though some observers say it may be out even later." Final confirmation of a story from last month.
I would lay even money on Spring 2008. How long did Win2k take to stabilize? Granted XP went a little quicker, but the explosion of mal-ware made this an almost impossible, and some say unachievable task. I am sorry, but 10+ million lines of code just do not strike me as reasonably predictable and thus stable. At some point, the combinatorily explosion even might give the code sentinence...
really this could have been an inovation worth looking at from microsoft. to bad it's not coming.
The longer it takes for Vista release the happier I'll be. I have no need for it's bloat and no desire to strip it down till it works well. Here's hoping Apple and Linux can break into the market more in the future and most critically get support from game companies (tho I suspect MS will work hard to block it).
is a Mircosoft?
With more and more announcements like these, does anyone else think it is inevitable that Linux will overtake Microsoft on all bases one day? I mean, it's starting to show Microsoft is only one company devoting a portion, large but just a portion, of it's resources to its OS while Linux is an entire industry with a bunch of diverse people working on small parts seperately.
I wonder if the Vista's voyage is any kind of vindication to the Linux side, who was always ballyhooed as having "too many distros" earlier, but at least we could depend on someone, somewhere releasing some small update with some type of progress (small but frequent steps) rather than the monolothic approach of large but infrequent steps.
How about a Poot?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Ooooooyaaaawwwwnnnnnn (no kidding)
So MS has was founded just over 31 years ago. Wouldn't a company that has spanned that many decades have a better understanding of software engineering and have a better grasp at making deadlines? I just don't get it. I'm not a fan of MS, but I'm trying to look past that: I just don't get how they can keep underestimating Vista the way they are.
:wq
I would love to see an OS released for the market that combines all of the research done within the past 10-15 years in kernels, file systems, HCI, application development, programming languages and APIs, virtual machines and virtualization, etc. However, look where we are at now. We're still using (for the most part) monolithic kernels, old file systems, old development tools, etc. There hasn't been any radical improvements in commerical OSes for quite some time. (One could say that OS X is a dramatic improvement, but much of OS X is based off NeXTSTEP, which had existed for quite some time before Apple bought them out).
I would like to see a new NeXTSTEP (technologically, not in terms of business success). NeXT was able to look at all of the current CS research of the time and integrate that into their operating system. NeXTSTEP was far ahead of its competition and, if it weren't for hardware support and the need for modern software, I'd probably run it as an everyday OS. Mac OS X is still ahead of its competition because of its NeXTSTEP roots, as well as Apple's improvements to the OS since 1997. Imagine if there was a new OS that took advantage of all of today's CS research, was very easy to use, and was compatible with existing software. I'd be the first person in line to buy it.
Until then, I can dream about my ultra-secure, exokernel OS with a database file system, flexible yet safe programming language, very easy to use UI, "boxes" to run Windows and *nix software....
I'd like to know how many /. readers predicted this a long time ago. But seriously, this just shows the troubles that MS is having maintaing the beast that is Windows. You can only sustain a rotten code base for so long until disaster strikes. And this disaster is Vista. If Microsoft is going to survive in the future they will have to innovate and restructure the way they create software.
http://religiousfreaks.com/Another chair bites the dust.
So I suppose the purpose of having a road map is so that we can see where we didn't go.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
From the article:
Thomas said it's too early to discuss whether WinFS would make an appearance in future versions of Windows.
And how often have we heard rumours of WinFS appearing in the next Windows OS?
The house of cards that is Windows is finally unmanageable and on the verge of collapse. We've known it was coming all along, as they kept bolting stuff on and attempting to patch a crufty old OS in the interest of backwards compatibility. Their inability to integrate a new filesystem into it is a sign that their 2 decades worth of nasty spaghetti code has finally reached critical mass and simply can't be futzed with anymore.
They're just going to have to bite the bullet sooner or later and do what Apple did-- drop the old OS in favor of a new one, and ease the transition to it by allowing the old one to run as an application.
The billion dollar question is, will they be able to manage such a huge transition? Based on how terribly their OS projects are mismanaged, it's extremely doubtful.
I'm not seeing too many other database filesystems, about the only one that I recall shipping was the one for BeOS.
My own theory is that WinFS was to an extent a windmill to be mistaken for a dreagon. How much time has been wasted by people trying to build Gonkulators of their own?
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Overtaking Microsoft is not enough to become the dominant OS, for example see OSX.
Philosophy.
At least NTFS is somewhat understood now and drivers (although imperfect) exist and are being improved.
- anyway rubbish in order to function as well as Microsoft's own offerings.
I understand that WinFS was going to have NTFS as the backend but this avoids the necessity to reverse engineer another closed and obfusicated layer of almost-compliant-with-the-spec-which-you-cant-see
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
Microsoft has not yet finalised plans to make the most commercial success out of WinFS. Making it part of a highly pirated OS doesn't make commercial sense. Lack of features in a rebranded OS doesn't imply loss of sales / profits either. Improved features doesn't imply more profits from the OS business as well.
.Net or Active Directory or the Aero interface or BSOD... we'll have to wait and see.
And so, until MS dcides whether to package WinFS as part of SQL or
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I hope you realize that actually writing software takes TIME, with an exponential relationship with complexity. An OS takes a LOT of time to write because it has a LOT of hardware to support, a lot of usage scenarios to take into account. Cobble together that's "new and cutting edge" like NeXT STEP would only yield yet another spectacular business failure, because there would be no time to build, test, and secure such a large chunk of code. As nice as OSX is, it's not end-all be-all in any way shape or form. IMHO, Linux does most jobs much better - opensource drivers and modules allow me to program my own drivers if I need to. Now that OSX closed Darwin source, where do I turn if I have an obscure piece of hardware to plug in?
I understand what you mean, but overtaking (technically) in this fashion would also mean making it as easy or easier to move to linux than stick with the current or next Windows version people are on. This obviously has external factors, such as companies porting software over, but could be accomplished in the community via Wine/other.
For example, people who only use the company to browse the web and write stuff could move to Linux completely almost without exception (though there are those annoying websites that refuse to work with anything but Windows for no good reason besides lazy developers).
Mac OSX may be wonderful technically, shares similiar adoption problems with linux, but it's small marketshare also stems from the fact that it's hardware is only sold by one provider. Linux does not have this problem.
With more and more announcements like these, does anyone else think it is inevitable that Linux will overtake Microsoft on all bases one day?
Technically - yes. In fact there are very few areas where this is not already the case technically, with only the interface features left to catch up.
While this is not a small problem (in fact it's a huge problem) it's also the case that now the big nuts have been cracked, so to speak, the UI problems are recieving so much attention that they are being dealt with rapidly.
Firefox is one example of such an improvement (vs Mozilla) however I'd say that the single best example is the gnome wifi applet. This is an example of what *used* to be required to set up WPA. On X86 it's now virtually a two-step point and click process using nm-applet which supports roaming and multiple networks and autoswitching between available connections.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
Filesystems are for posers. Just write one big tar file to /dev/hda.
So what you want to see is an compilation of immature academic technologies into a mature stable production system. Why not just wish for a gold house?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Meanwhile, other marketing people are looking at the feature set of distributed link tracking.... And another set of marketing weasels are looking at DRM respect... and attributes for near-line storage management... and (name any competitor's advantage, and expect Marketing to want to add it to the feature set).
The failure isn't in Engineering - it's in Management. Someone promised too much complexity.
Given a year or two per feature set, done incrementally, with product releases that allow the code to be tested and refined, WinFS probably could be engineered into a fine solution.
But the deadline is too close now. They need to cut their losses and bug-check what they have, now, so that the file system that does ship is stable, and not a huge disaster.
Interestingly, the open source solution of file systems is far better at trying out new ideas and making progress. It may take longer to make the features integrated - but that integration hasn't been a defining requirement for success or failure.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
I call BS. What "large customers" are clamoring for all the great updates that Vista will bring? Every major corpration that I've ever seen is bent on stability and steady IT deployments. NOT shoot from the hip, let's jump on this tech because it's "the latest per our IT department". Executives care about the bottom line, not the latest software release - unless it's MSeBaysoft(with the Paypal module).
I'd love to see one large customer named.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
Everyone always talks about how great OS X is. Run it in a performance-critical environment and see what kind of numbers you get.
p =8
See also http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436&
That OS already exists. There is so much cutting edge work going into Linux that Windows seems archaic in comparison. Yeah, the kernel is monolithic, that's because research over the past 10-15 years shows that microkernels are slooooow. File systems ... pick one, they ALL exist for Linux. HCI ... XGL anyone? Application development ... there are more IDEs and toolkits on Linux than one could learn in a lifetime. Programming languages ... all there. APIs ... broad question ... but anything that's not MS (and even some that are ... WINEAPI) are there. Virutal machines ... Bochs, VMWare, Win4LinPro, etc. Virutalization ... KML and XEN.
... I think you get the point. Now, having spewed all that, my impression is that you're waiting to see that "OS" from MS, nobody else, so you have to expect to be waiting a very long time, if ever for it. The fact is, if you want to be on the cutting edge, drop the past and use Linux. If you want to play games ... stay on Windows, it's DESIGNED for people who want something familiar, doesn't obselete any software compiled 15 years ago, and isn't so revolutionary as to scare grandma or the receptionist.
You can lock down Linux as tight as you want, use the Oracle IFS db based file system, use Ruby, KDE, VMWare
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Linux announces LinFS to be released before Windows Vista. When asked why, Linus Torvalds responds "Just to prove that we can".
If NTFS was even mildly documented that'd be an option.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Agreed. Now that I thought about it for a few minutes, the only OS that was a radical change from its previous OS yet still supported most PC hardware was Windows NT. The transition from DOS and Windows 9x to Windows NT and its derivatives took a while, but it gone by smoothly. I don't know of any other companies creating a general purpose OS; the companies either control the hardware (Apple, Be, Amiga, NeXT [for the first so many years]) or have a very restricted subset of hardware (NeXTSTEP for Intel comes to mind). Linux and BSD are exceptions, but they aren't companies, and nearly all of their driver support comes from the FOSS community.
Taligent and Copland comes to mind. NeXTSTEP didn't fail because it was cobbled together (in fact, its technologies were quite coherent), it was because the PC and the Mac were already well established at the time, and the window to introduce a new platform was closing quickly in 1989. (NeXT also took a few early missteps that might have cost them, such as releasing very expensive ($10,000) machines and the whole magneto-optical drive fiascal; had their initial offerings been their NeXTSTATION instead of the Cube, then they might have done much better).
You bring up some good points which help explain why we don't have radical changes in OSes. There is a lot of backwards compatibility and hardware support to worry about. All of these new OS features doesn't mean a hill of beans if it doesn't support their hardware. It would be even more difficult for a start-up company, since they don't already have a stockpile of hardware driver source code.
Very simply, the people with the inclination and skill to tinker with new operating systems think that Unix, X11, xterms, vi and C are the be-all and end-all of computing. Oddly, they seem to think that Kernighan, Ritchie and the others would want them to have that mentality.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Ah, what web sites (besides the obvious Windows Update) refuse to work with anything other than Windows? Just using Firefox on Windows there's plenty out there that only work with MS-IE. :(
Even when Vista does come out, no one will want it. Most PC users today use XP, and they are probably either perfectly happy with the way it is, or are so frustrated with its usage that they will be scared to upgrade. Just look at how little hype Microsoft has managed to generate so far. The removal of an originally "key feature" won't help either. The only people who will actually use Vista will be employees of Microsoft, and even they will only do it because they're forced to by their employers.
1) While the filesystem architecture is pretty horrible, there have been successes there by other companies.
There's are file system interfaces to NFS, FTP, EXT2, UDF, and a probably a few more that I can't think of right now. This has nothing to do with the previously badly written code.
The problem with WinFS is WinFS. It's got features in it that would make it unacceptably slow and easily corrupted. That won't fly. I think they thought that they could overcome these obvious problems through genius. Apparently its still hard.
2) Like every OS trailing back almost to the invention of the compiler, Windows is modular. And by that I don't mean "it has modules, or even dlls" I mean that the ideas within it are divided into real (and occasionally conceptual) pieces.
Some of the pieces are new and shiny and well written. Some are old and spaghetti-like. There's no reason to throw out everything to get one new piece. The fundamental design of the Windows kernel is neat even if the registry isn't. The network stack works pretty well even if the filesystem interface doesn't.
Along those lines,
I think they should stop selling windows as one thing. I'd like to know what new thing it is I'm getting in the latest version of Windows. Because they do occasionally throw out the old and replace it with something new and fresh that works great. But sometimes they only sell things that are exactly the same as the old, but with things I don't care about at all, or sell me lots of things I don't care about and only one that I do.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
You sound remarkably like an Apple "shill". Your post includes no fewer than 4 perfectly capitalized "NeXTSTEP" words; it sounds very provocatuer considering Apple's history with Next, and the poor spelling typically found in emotional slashdot replies (except for mine, because I'm better than everyone).
That said, OS X does completely rock my world (as my desktop of choice). I can't wait to see what Leopard/Cheetah will bring...
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
The problem is that they set release date targets based on what the marketing folks want without consideration of what is left to be done in the development. If they would simply say "it'll be out when we're done", they would gain a huge amount of credibility.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Why WinFS failed to deliver...
When the concepts of relational database FS were being thrown around back in the mid 90s, there was a need for this technology. WinFS was to be the next progression of this work, but in its new form a non-structure, non-relational database FS technology.
WinFS was designed to sit on NTFS, never to replace it. In fact none of the proposed MS FS technologies were ever to replace NTFS.
WinFS did develop several inroads in database technology to move past relational and object oriented database storage concepts; however, this was not enough for it to succeed, but rather for its technology to be used in database and data access technologies like MSSQL and the ADO models.
There are two big reasons WinFS was stopped before ever seeing the light of day.
1) Efficiency over functionality
2) Business & Networked File Systems
The first is probably the biggest nail in the coffin, but yet also the hardest one to get through to people.
In current computing environments, adding in a good indexing technology, you can provide 99.9% of the functionality of WinFS and the overhead in doing so turns out to be less than if a full WinFS was implemented.
For example, it is easier and more efficient to have a database indexing backend that references the standard FS and FS contents than it is to put the FS contents into a database. This can be witnessed in products like MS Desktop Search, the Vista Desktop Search, and Apple's Desktop Search as well. (Although the Apple incarnation at this point is a bit more poky than it should be.)
The second part of this is the added functionality. One of the promises of WinFS was the ability to tag and relationally add content to files and file listings. Again, this does not offer 'enough' of an edge compared to the current FS technologies. Most of these features are already supported in NTFS, so you can add tagging, and additional fields of information to the files stored on an NTFS volume, basically providing the same features as adding new fields as a database FS would offer.
The only portion that is somewhat left behind in current technology that WinFS would have provided is the 'relational' nature of items in the FS. But again, the database indexing engine that is used for searching can also provide a certain level of these relational aspects to the file and contents.
So when you look at just these basic issues, you can see why in the end MS pulled WinFS as it exists today, and instead has put the functionality of WinFS in the current technologies, as you find in Vista already. (Fast search, relations between files and file contents, tagging using NTFS, etc.)
It may not be the best PR move for Microsoft in the long run, as people here will have a field day with WinFS being abandoned in its current form as an add-on to NTFS. But if you were Microsoft and could provide 99% of the functionality of WinFS with the database indexing services in Vista (and XP) and do it faster than having to add on a new WinFS layer to NTFS, they why would you progress with a product that isn't going to offer what they can already offer with the current technologies.
If computing power was on par with 1995, then something like WinFS would have more viability as Hard Drives and Processors could more efficiently do all that Vista is doing in a Database structured storage. However today, the overhead of doing this outside a database store is fairly non-existent.
On to the second reason, which is business. Implementing localized database stores for files and documents and keeping these in sync with corporate stores is a rather big hurdle when you consider that businesses are not average Joe users and have tons of applications and infrastructure to coordinate Files spread across networks that are outside of existing MS technologies. WinFS would break many business tools and models rather badly.
As for WinFS and Database FS concepts being 'vaporware' or dead, simply is a myth for the MS haters
I'm not an Apple shill; I just used Apple's history as an example. The original Windows NT architecture also fits the bill, and I can name a few more OSes that I can use as examples (BeOS and Plan 9 comes to mind).
Well, we're at Mac OS 10.4.7, and we get updates about every 90 days...
Users of the world: We're here to help you, but help us help you. (your IT dept)
the OSes out of microsoft have only been getting better. Well, 95 may not have been better than DOS, depending on who you're talking to, and ME was awful (but let's face it, it was just a service pack for '98), but 95->98->XP and NT->2k->XP was a steady progression of stabler, more compatible, friendlier OSes.
Will Vista be awful? I dunno, maybe, I guess we'll see. But saying that everything is ready to fall apart because of a rotten codebase when the products have only been getting better seems sort of weird.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Tagged as dukenukemforever. I could've told you this long ago...
Meanwhile, Hans Reiser is doing some real filesystem innovation...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
You're confused. Linux is a kernel. Microsoft is an international multibillion corporation. What was your question?
http://blogs.msdn.com/winfs/archive/2006/06/23/644 706.aspx
:)
sheesh zonk get some sleep already
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
No.
Be knew how to do an OS. Small updates sold frequently at low prices. If Microsoft released a new version of Windows every year to two years with incremental updates for say... $25 for a home upgrade, they'd have a steadier flow of cash and less expectations placed on them to make radical new things. Vista might actually already be here if Microsoft had sold successors to XP code named NT 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, etc. that added small improvements. They could then sell NT 6.0 featuring Aero for $50 for an upgrade or something. Seems to me their problem is biting off more than even they can chew.
Ideally, I would pick the first two. However, all new and successful OSes has a compatibility layer. Windows NT-based OSes have compatibility with DOS and 16-bit Windows apps. Mac OS X (on PPC) has Classic for older Mac OS applications. Linux is source compatible with any Unix program written in the past 35 years.
I was just dreaming with my original post. The probability of an OS like this coming out is very slim because there is just too much work to do to build it, as well as the required work involved in compatibility, hardware support, and other similar issues.
Having done the switch from 9 to X I know it has been painful (and expensive) at parts, and there is a lot of "Well that program doesn't work anymore and there is no similar OS X version - but the switch is a good thing, really!" Microsoft will have to win over the 90%ish of thier market that the switch from XP to Vista is also really a aood thing even though grandma's, son's, or mom's favorite programs doesn't work with it (or as well) anymore.
Anyone know how Microsoft Works does with Vista? Most of the people I know use that at home instead of Office (Office is way too expensivve for the average Joe or Jane).
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Right, but compatibility between completely different architectures is a very different thing indeed. The best you can hope for is for some sort of merged VM system such that it appears like the windows are actually on your desktop while really running in a simulated win32/*nix environment. But they'll never feel native and never run at native speed. Wine is a mess, Windows POSIX compatibility is negligible, and Rosetta is reportedly very slow. Natively reproducing entire unique architectures is seriously non-trivial.
I do. Ubuntu is certainly making impact even with good Windows fans. Also they like the free (as in beer) part, and wonder when it will overthrow Windows as popular OS.
I am interested to setup Ubuntu support operations in India. Any leads will be very helpful.
Linux does have a ton of research-level development on it. You can do amazing things that you can't do anywhere else. Unfortunately the history of UNIX weighs in very heavily in almost all OS development. The fact is that the problems with UNIX are obscured by how horrendous Windows is. Think how much we could really move forward if we were to take some fresh ideas like Plan9. Unfortunately the software economy is too mature for a cutting-edge research OS to be able to get a critical mass of developers. No one wants to write software for a new OS when there's already so much open source out there for Linux/UNIX. If you could get paid to do pure research it would be pretty fun though.
"WinFS was dropped from Vista in what company executives described at the time as a trade-off to get the operating system completed in a timely manner."
Oops... Too late for that don't you think?!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
"Windows has the most problems simply because it is the most popular, and the biggest target for malware."
In all fairness there is more to it than that. The basic design kind of sucks from a security point of view. ActiveX is a security nightmare and there are many other problems as well. Not the least of which is the result of Microsoft s decision to integrate IE so even if you're not using it you're well.... using it...
Security has been Microsoft's top priority for how long now? They simply can't secure their OS.
I agree that no OS is completely secure. There is little protection for users who install questionable software but let's be honest, Windows has had MORE than its fair share of security problems.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Well, you've explained why WinFS won't be in Vista, but not why it's been pretty much killed (or folded into other projects) entirely. I find it strange that conflicting marketing directives could kill such a substantial and long promised technology in its entirety. I'm very curious to know what really happened; if it was a management screw up, exactly how did management screw it up? Unfortunately, we probably will not know for at the very least a few years.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
...and found it very stable. The community is great too!
The only problem that I have had is that in some areas it does lag behind distros like Suse. This may not be completely bad as I suspect that it is one reason that it is so stable. However, I like Open Office 2 and I think Umbuntu has a problem with it because it uses Java and they want to keep all propritary software out.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Really, rather than an a whole new file system, I'd rather have native support for EXT3.
Yeah, I know about ext2ifs. But I'd really rather install windows on an EXT3 partition, rather than being stuck with NTFS or a FAT32 partition arbitrarily limited to 32 GB. All this makes multibooting a PITA.
(Or they can open up the NTFS spec so I can read/write in linux, but we all know it'll be a cold day in hell before that happens.)
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
A slashdotter capable of considering two opposing viewpoints at the same time.. What is this world comming to?!
I'm a windows developer and I like linux just fine. I build all of our webstuff w/ PHP on Ubuntu. I personally think that Windows is superior to Linux in the ways people actually care about, but linux is still a good product, especially for web servers.
I get that linux is more secure then windows. ESPECIALLY if you're just a Joe-User: It's so difficult to install and configure that he'd eventually just forget-it and leave the PC half-baked and useless. I've seen this happen to more then one coworker.
I did,but sometimes you get what you ask for. Ever tried using gold toiliet paper before? How about a golden shower?
"My theory is that it's not the software engineering that's the problem - it's marketing. "
I disagree. Having been subjected to innumerable vague and meaningless error messages from MS products I think the engineering staff is lazy or stupid or both. I am positive it was not the marketing dept that decided that "overlfow!" was a sufficient error message to throw at you when you were trying to import a 300,000 like file into a SQL server table. Other faves? "Multiple step error" and of course the ever favorite "there is no error message for this error".
Those were all the fault of engineers.
evil is as evil does
Maybe a better term would be imputus and the vision stays the same. A vision not to be the better operating system on technical grounds but to be the market leader in all significant markets.
When the purpose, imputus or vision is to be the market leader in all significant markets then feature driven progress of the operating system is driven by the markets which is constantly in flux.
As the operating system bloats with the baggage of a hundred market driven concepts, some failed, some depreciated, some current and some futuristic, the code base simply becomes unmanagable in the time frames dictated by the markets. In essence it takes years for Microsoft to develop and incorporate any significant change to the OS and by the time they get even part way through the process, those hot opportunities or market driven factors that existed in the beginning are long gone. Either failed, no longer considered important or matured enough in scope to obsolece Microsofts initial design criteria.
To help bolster, protect and in large degree justify their monopoly status Microsoft long ago began to incorporate features into the operating system that argueably didn't belong there. Should Internet Explorer be integral to the OS or simply a separate application that rides on top? Should Media Player be integral to the OS or simply another software application? And so on.
The debate rages from time to time and the lines of distinction are not clear but it can be generally agreed that Microsoft has certainly stretched the definition of Operating System to unprecedented proportions while blurring any line of distinction between Operating System and Applications to utterly fantastic degree.
Microsoft long ago lost agility and is now found simply imprisoned in it's own fat. A giant octopus that will consume everything within flailing tentacles reach yet anchored to the same spot on the seabed. But for it's enormity, Microsoft forced its competitors to literally change the competitive environment to one that Microsoft finds difficult and increasingly impossible to compete in. No wonder Microsoft acts scared and runs paranoid most of the time, for the risk is being waylaid by late delivery of an inclusive feature set designed on the basis of a passing fad found years out of date.
While on one hand Microsoft cannot keep pace with change, their buggy, bloated, almost unmaintainable code base was found ripe for exploitation and exploited it was. This forced the company to divert precious resources from product development to bug fixs, patches and baseline security else lose mindshare. They took a midshare hit as it was and was forced to push back Vista and rethink the feature set. The latest decision was to keep the DRM encapsulation which is core, keep the improved security model which is necessary and keep the gui modifications/eye candy since the marketing department needs something for the box shot. If left to simply DRM and better security the result would be XP service pack three not the New Microsoft Vista.
Another limiting factor for the company is due to their size and monopolization of so many markets. You would think that MS would be full steam ahead on such technology as the recent upsurge in VOIP yet they can't really for the Telco's would be screaming anti-trust like hell wouldn't have it. I'm actually surprised the company has gotten as far as it has without being disassembled.
Microsoft has outgrown it's goldfish bowl. It can no longer keep pace with innovation in technology markets and does not have enough time to reinvent it's core products so it could. Therefore Microsoft is simply playing out the string for as long as it lasts which may not be that much longer. Especially if they don't put out product that people are willing to pay for and maintain performance that comforts investors.
What Microsoft desperately needs to avoid is turning out another Windows ME, for this time around they do not have an XP waiting in the wings.
The problem is most likely that they couldn't figure out exactly what the product would do or who would use it. I think it's sort of like "That's great, but what do we do with it?" kinds of things. It started out as mostly a way to index content and metadata, but then you have the problem of how to get data into it. So it's better to make it an object store; since it knows about the objects and they have schemata, it's easy to understand the data and index it. But then you have the problem of how to access the objects.
By now, it has sort of evolved into a object-relational manager, which doesn't really belong as a separate product now. It makes more sense to integrate it into a database engine and/or data access frontends.
If you look at ADO.NET 3.0 it actually makes some sense. The LINQ features of the next C#/VB allow you to write queries directly in your language (instead of as strings containing SQL or XPath or whatever), and get objects as results. Right now, though, you can only get regular datatypes (string, int, etc.) from relational or XML data stores; only in-memory data structures like arrays and hash tables can actually return objects. The next version of ADO.NET (3.0) can return actual objects.
What's needed now is some sort of data storage engine that stores objects in a native form that can be returned by LINQ queries. Well, it turns out that WinFS is more-or-less the perfect thing to use here.
Now it starts to make sense that WinFS doesn't really belong as a stand-alone product, but as parts of other products like ADO.NET and SQL Server.
And look at Reiser4, for example. It's got great ways to store data, but any application that uses it is only going to work on that filesystem and any files created by that applicaton can't be moved to any other filesystem or even over standard network protocols. Additionally, it requires kernel integration, so is only available for Linux. While there are certainly uses for it, and application that requires Reiser4 is going to only work on Linux machines with users who have Reiser4 filesystems, and aren't using remote data. No application with those requirements is ever going to become very popular.
I mean, it would be cool to have all of my data in some advanced database-like storage thingy, but ultimately I don't want to have to reformat my drive for a new filesystem and I want to be able to access my files with FTP or send them as email attachments. This means that any application that uses something fancy like WinFS has to use it just as a data store, so it makes sense that it would ship with data access technologies.
dom
At least now Microsoft is smart amd don't name their operating system after a specific year anymore.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
Or management, who de-prioritized it as a "nobody will ever do that" feature.
On the other hand, considering Microsoft's idea of what constitutes an "engineer", it wouldn't surprise me that it's the "engineers'" fault.
http://outcampaign.org/
After 10 years working to create a suitable storage layer for implementing semi-structured data queries in the FS for Linux, I gotta tell you, this stuff is harder than I ever thought it would be. :-/
(See Reiser4 for our storage layer, and our Future Vision paper for what semantics we are going to add.)
5 years to do the first draft (ReiserFS V3), and then another 5 years to get it finally right (Reiser4).
To do enhanced semantics cleanly, you want keywords to be just another kind of file (see our Future Vision paper for why. That means you need to store files that contain phone number sized objects and keywords reasonably efficiently. Because of network effect economics creating a barrier to entry, you have to at the same time make traditional file system usage patterns at least as fast. That is hard. How hard? Oracle tried to do it without deeply changing their tree algorithms, amd implemented an FS on top of their database engine, and found that it was half the speed of a traditional filesystem. Others also found it hard. I tried to do it with V3, and found that for files in the 0-10k size range, I had many of the performance problems that FFS had when they created fragments. Thing was, I never knew they had performance problems, because it was not in their paper.... The problem was that when you combined fragments from multiple files, you add seeks, and one added seek is deadly to performance. The approach used in most databases, BLOBS, suffers from the same problem as FFS combining fragments, and yet more, because BLOBs unbalance the tree (see our website for details and nice diagrams). The usual transaction technology employed for databases, it is just wrong for filesystems, what you need in an FS is to fuse multiple transactions together into batches. And more....
There are so many different areas where if you take a wrong step, performance goes through the floor. You cannot imagine how depressing it is to work on a project where the performance is terrible until the very end, after 5% to rarely 20% at a time you've dragged it into something decent over years of time. I look back on it, and I see that we were incredibly lucky, because all the mistakes I made, were mistakes that took days or weeks to fix, and except for one thing (BLOBs), all the major things that would take years to fix, I got right. There is no reason for this other than luck. And BLOBS cost us years.
So we have for Linux the storage layer that MS could not develop because they quit before 10 years had passed, and perhaps weren't lucky enough at. Now, with technology working, and balance trees that can emulate file system semantics at twice the speed of the real thing (see our benchmarks ), sigh, if only we can overcome the politics. Yup, the WinFS team had to deal with corporate managers that quit before 10 years are past, but we have to deal with..... better unfinished as a sentence.
The only consolation in this field is that everyone else seems to find it just as hard. Probably that includes even the politics.
I am reasonably handy and so I prefer a car that I can tinker with myself. Sure sure modern cars are a lot more comfortable but they are a black box. Fine when everything works but when it doesn't you got a ton of scrap iron until some guy comes along with a laptop and charges you a fortune for replacing a part rather then fixing it.
It is not that my linux desktop runs better but rather that when something goes wrong I can fix it. Recently my fileserver after a much delayed upgrade from 2.4 to 2.6 (finally got rid of a promise software raid card that is unsupported in 2.6) I had a huge problem with reading some partitions. It stumped me for about a day of trying everything. In hindsight I think what happened was that extended attributes had been enabled without full support making all the files and directories on some partitions take bad values marking them as unreadable/mountable. In the end the fix was simple, set all the extended attributes to nothing with reiserfs tools.
This wasn't however easy to figure out. On several forums nobody knew what the problem was and I had to figure it out myself in the end although there were hints. Each time I was stumped there was still a tool to try, a parameter to look at, something to list so I could google it. Over the day I got more and more details out of the affected partition until I finally realized that the partitions that did not work had these exteneded attributes and then figuring that this was the cause.
A 8+ hour problem but solved.
Now my windows machine, one other task I use it for is reading fan-translated manga. cDisplay is a good tool for this (since been replaced by qcomicbook on linux) and I wanted it to appear in the right click context for directories so I could use it to also browse manga that is not zipped/rarred. Easy enough except it totally upset windows so I deleted it again and now windows opens a search window instead of opening the directory in explorer.
I no longer can edit the file associations and windows has been borked like this for months. I can't examine anything, there is no logging. Google returns nothing.
The problem is far more trivial. I can still right click to explore and by now I gotten used to it. The linux problem meant I could not mount several HD's causing me to fear I had lost close to a terrabyte of data.
But the linux problem I could fix, the windows problem I can not.
Why? Because windows is easier to use then Linux. Yes this sounds contradictive but think of it like this. A car with a handcrank is far less userfriendly then a car with an electric starter. But the handcrank won't be drained by leaving the lights on.
If linux becomes more userfriendly it will also loose that what makes it linux.
Take the constant complaint about linux using clear text configurtion files. These are indeed for the novice a bitch to maintain BUT they are what makes it possible to boot your corrupted system from a floppy and then just hand edit the system back into working order. Even the boot system (lilo) adds complexity for power. Am I the only one who sometimes forgets to replace hda with sda on their one machine with scsi causing lilo to be unable to find the root partition? The solution, give it as a boot parameter.
But this doesn't fit with a nice simple graphical screen with a nice animation showing that activity is going on. Hell on windows you would not even be informed that a critical drive can't be found. Windows just hangs. Easier when it works, useless when it doesn't.
Linux can be technically superior to windows. Some would already claim it is. It can never beat windows in userfriendlyness because if it did so it would no longer be linux but just a windows clone with all the problems that windows has. Lets not forget that a fair amount of windows famed insecurity
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
That's a often-debunked myth. Research over the past 10-15 years shows that Mach is slow because it's bloated. Newer microkernels are much smaller (for example, L4 can apparently fit entirely inside your CPU cache), and don't incur anywhere near as much of a performance hit.
Instead of drawing conclusions based on an old flamewar, go read some of what Andrew S. Tanenbaum and others have written on the subject.
http://outcampaign.org/
Overtaking Microsoft is not enough to become the dominant OS, for example see OSX.
But even that trend it not yet played out. It takes a long time for a market to unwind itslef from an entrenched position. It will take more time for ODF to catch on, for people to understand how important open document formats are to the long-term health of a governement or a company. But the beenfits are there.
The OP is right, basically right now Microsoft is fighting many battles and on each front a lot more people are working against Microsoft rather than for them. If Microsoft were "working smarter not harder" I might question them having problems but I see little smart in things they are doing. Even the new Office UI is a double-edged sword - the UI may be well received but wil users really want to switch? Will companies want to train users to switch? If so, why not to something with better native support of ODF...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is only a problem for software that doesn't come with source code.
http://outcampaign.org/
I think that calling Windows users scared grandmas and receptionists is completely missing the point. Most people fall into the same category as "scared grandmas and receptionists", whether they'd like to admit it or not. Hell, I think *I* fall into that category. I like things that are consistent, even if they offer me a little less in terms of customization. Every Linux distribution is different. They all have different default window managers. Different single/double-click behavior for a variety of tasks. Different file managers. Different help systems. Different installation procedures. Different methods for managing administrative tasks. Different bundled libraries. Different bundled applications. Different ways to change the desktop resolution. Different support for different hardware. I could go on, but I think you get my point.
I will be switching off Windows when XP becomes obsolete enough to be a hassle. Perhaps by then Linux will be in better shape as a whole. For now, I will just keep using Linux for my file servers since I think that's the only role it fills well right now.
-William Brendel
Lots of reports of features falling out of the Vista - but there is one (anti-)feature that never gets that kind of press - "Trusted Computing," aka support for Defective Recorded Media (DRM).
It is like it is more important to microsoft that they cater to the MAFIAA than it is for them to provide features that their paying customers might actually want.
I sure wish I had a couple of bazillion dollars to piss it away on developing stuff that nobody wants to pay for. Except I'd spend it on designing and building the world's best yacht - with the largest capacity of nubile beauty pagent winners.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Yay - it's refreshing to see someone working for 'the other side' (for want of a better term) who reacts to this story in a realistic and honest way, without feeling the need to bash MS for their WinFS problems ("Ha ha! M$ are teh suck!", etc).
Perhaps, I don't know, it's because you've spent years working on this problem, and know the difficulties involved, rather than the average slashdot MS basher who read a magazine article about writing file systems once and can't see what's so hard about them, or, come to that, like some of the other posters here, who can't see what's so hard about managing one of the largest software projects on the planet.
Most software doesn't come with source code. Even if the source was once available, it was likely not kept and is no longer available. Lots of businesses have mission-critical functions performed by software written in-house but for which the source is lost. Lots of software just doesn't compile anymore because it requires an old version of the compiler or libraries, or because there are enough differences between the old system and the new one that getting it to work is impractical. Heck, there's software that was written in assembly language -- a disassembly will give you back your original source code, just without the comments!
dom
Amen. Until I started playing with Plan 9 I never realized how silly some aspects of modern Unix systems really are. If you want to see a manpage you use "man", but because it has to run in a terminal emulator it needs a full-featured pager, and IIRC on some systems it even re-generates the pages from *roff source. The hideous complexity of autoconf. X11.
I just started using Plan 9 about a week ago on an occasional basis. Though I can adjust to the system, and admire the elegance that allows, for example, rio to be run within rio, ideas like process-specific file heirarchies and the lack of cruft, you have to realize that the developers of Plan 9 have it easy: they get to make a system for people that will learn to use it.
I wouldn't mind seeing how well Plan 9 would deal with having the system adjust to the user a bit. My first idea is to adapt vi to Plan 9; my goal would be not a straight port, but something that incorporates the familiar commands and modal nature of vi with the text-editing support that Plan 9 gives for free to graphical programs. Sam and Acme are fine editors, but I want to find out if a totally different editor can be written in a reasonable way on the system. Actually, I think a Plan 9 implementation should be cleaner than a Unix one, simply because terminal emulators are so damn wierd to interface with. But that may fall apart when I actually learn how to code on the system.
Another similar issue is in window management: you can use nested rio instances to elegantly get similar functionality to Unix-style multiple desktops (and you can do so much more, too), but it's just not as quick to switch between them using the desktop menus in rio as it is with a simple keystroke in fvwm. The basic question is, could you combine the adaptability of Unix (and particularly Linux) with the elegance of Plan 9? That would be a great environment to study *and* use.
Actually I disagree that OSX is ahead of its competition. In some areas you might be right but in general I think that KDE is a lot more advanced. The IOSlave system and the kparts are both highly integrated into the rest of the system and used to great effect.
Anywhere in kde that you want to use a file you can use an IOSlave. This gives you url transparency for reading and writing in every app very easily. For example you can send a file in kmail and then use sftp to load an attachment from a remote server and hit send. It will grab the file and attach it just fine. You can go to a form on a webpage that expects a file say for uploading an image and give it an http, ftp, sftp, etc url to an image and just hit submit to upload it. These IOSlaves are integral to the system and I would say on average they save me several hours per week.
The other major thing is the kpart system. Other systems seem to just pay lipservice to reusing components. In kde there is one address book system, one spellchecking system, one terminal window system, one proxy configuration system etc. I can configure those things in just one palce and they are reused everywhere. Actually for text editors there is a good example of this take kate. Kate actually is two pieces one is an application called kate and the other is the actual kpart called kate. By default the kate text editor, kwrite, kdevelop3, embedded text views etc all use kate. So you can configure syntax highlighting for example and no matter where you look at the code it will be shown the same way. I have not seen anything remotely close to this in any other system.
For what I do kde is more advanced then pretty much any other gui system out there and it saves a lot more time them osx, windows etc do.
Also as a note you can write kde apps in python and ruby. Those are definitely flexible yet safe programming langauges and you can get apps up and running very quickly with those.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
"Or management, who de-prioritized it as a "nobody will ever do that" feature."
So let me get this straight.
There you are coding the bulk importing tool for SQL server. You have written all this code to try and determine data types, matching the columns to commas, etc. You wrote the loop that iterates through the file. And then the manager came along and told you not to add any eception handling to the code inside the loop? I don't think so.
Instead I think you are stupid and lazy coder who decided not add any exception handling to the loop instead letting the exception bubble somewhere up the chain where it pops up as "overflow" instead of "unable to convert 05/05/206 into a date on line 129,456".
BTW here is a helpful hint for all SQL server DBAs. When you are trying to import very large CSV files import them first into postgres, that way if there is an error postgres will tell you exactly what line the error occured in and what field. You can then open up the file in emacs or vi and fix it (don't use notepad your windows will crash with a file that big).
evil is as evil does
You write a driver. You don't need kernel source to write drivers if the interfaces are sufficiently documented and don't change every second release. We (that is myself and collegues at a number of companies that are sizeable enough that is quite likely you own devices we made) write drivers for years (decades even) without kernel sources, and we still do. Yes its nice to have other drivers to crib off and closed source kernel people often give you such things to demonstrate certain techniques. And yes its nice to have kernel source for debug purpose and to work around the holds in the docs but it isn't essential.
Yeah, here's another one of his insightful comments. I would really love to know the reason why ReiserFS isn't in the kernel by now, stability surely isn't the problem from my point of view. Looks like I'm gonna be googling away to find out. Anyway, I've loved this guy ever since I learned he's a crx owner. I know it's like loving Linus for his taste in clothes, but hey... that machine is amazingly efficient, so is ReiserFS...
The manager would have said, "good enough, now drop everything and do this super-urgent project before the deadline next month".
Whether or not you are willing to accept it, I suspect there are as many bad managers out there as there are lazy programmers.
http://outcampaign.org/
To add insult to injury once I installed xfs I copied some of the data back from a Win2K box that never lost a byte in the 5 years it's been running 24/7.
I am saddened to say it but it's going to be a very long time before I use Reiser fs again. I'd rather spend more money on faster hardware if I want more speed rather than have to deal with data loss.
The people that are reading this kind of news items are probably already aware of that MS is not the only alternative - i mean your average citizen wont be informed by by the windows installer or something:
"Windows, fun to use even without the WinFS that we promised years ago."
Sorry I still don't buy it. It takes less then ten minutes to add a try catch block around a set of code.
evil is as evil does
Overtaking Microsoft is not enough to become the dominant OS, for example see OSX.
You coparison is irrelevant since OSX is not a [supported] IBM-PC or compatible operating system.
IMHO, this is the time when RedHat, Suse and Mandriva should use to make "the jump", even Linsipire (I think this one has had some success in Mexico).
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
It was probably recoverable, if you had contacted support@namesys.com, and if it was not an extensive hardware error. Most ReiserFS V3 corruptions (and most ext3 and XFS corruptions) occur due to hardware errors. The ones that cause only a block or two to be bad are usually recoverable. The ones that lose the whole drive, well, no FS will save you from that....
For what it's worth, I've been running your beautiful filesystem for quite some time now, and I'm eagerly awaiting the day when people will look past their xenophobia and embrace it as the new Unix way. Meta files inside of files was a brilliant idea, and it makes it ten thousand times easier to work with files without needing a million system calls. "Everything is a file" becomes so much more true with your system.
Politics are stupid, yet somehow necessary; don't let them get you down. Please keep working on this technology (not as though anyone can stop you) so that when the rest of the community panics that they've got nothing to counter Apple or some eventual WinFS future bastard child, you'll be there to save the day.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
But for an individual user or business differences between distros are irrelevant. Use the one you're familar with, and it's the same distro!
Vendor lockin aside (i.e. exising proprietary-formatted files, Windows-only apps and hardware), Linux is there now. You're looking at it and just giving up. As a desktop, I ind that it's already surpassed Windows in ease of use .--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
Before rebooting the only anomaly I could see was that I could not delete a certain empty directory. I could not find a way to repair without unmounting so I had to reboot. Past that point I could not get any distro to see my raid configuration.
I am not sure how active or passive a file system is but could I suggest a self-check, self-repair, alert the user function?I always thought of ReiserFS as a good candidate for storage in today's document management systems (obstacle's bugs in blob support will likely outlive most of us) but there the number one rule is data integrity.
Not much chance. Once Vista/Lamehorn is released it will be the only O/S installed on new machines in very short order. Most Windows users (Corporations included) might as well be MS's slaves anyway, and they will take whatever MS dishes out, because they can't imagine defying their master. Fear is MS's ally for now. Ultimately, most people don't handle fear very well, and it is transformed to anger, resentment, and hatred.
... look out. I'd guess that MS will go to any length to prevent such an outcome.
Master MS needs to make the uptake to look good, too. Win98 & ME were EOL'd ahead of schedule, expect XP's EOL to be hyper-accelerated, perhaps assisted by WGA false-positives to provide a little more thrust. MS needs this desparately, as the best thing anyone can say about their stock is that it has been stagnant for the last five years or so. If Vista/Lamehorn tanks, and the market starts to look too closely
However, matters may be beyond their control. The situation is very murky and almost any outcome is possible.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
Since you're reading, why not just have a new kernel/OS to go with that filesystem? As I understand the difficulty, your filesystem requires it's own VFS that replicates most of what Linux' VFS already does. The kernel devs don't want a duplicate VFS, they seem to want to update the in-place VFS and adapt the rest of the filesystem code to it. If this is indeed the case, I can see their point. I understand that Reiser4 is YOUR baby but Linux is THEIRS. You aren't the first and probably won't be the last developer they insist follow certain styles and conventions. It isn't entirely unreasonable. If you think the Linux kernel devs have been difficult, pitch Reiser4 to Theo DeRaadt. And yes I understand there are other issues besides the VFS one. Reiser4 has genuinely new ideas but new ideas break old assumptions....and some of them could reach clear down to userland software.
If Reiser4 is unable to be adapted to the requirements of the projects you propose to put it in then why not a new OS to go with it? Or maybe an existing project would be a better fit. There are various attempts to create an opensource BeOS and Reiser4 seems a natural fit.
The parent poster was wondering why Microsoft failed the engineering; really I was just trying to say that probably the thing was doomed from the start as being too ambitious / too prone to scope creep.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
I tend to agree. If Windows was backed by an industry of programmers then they could choose what "small parts" to include in there distro and when. They could also have their programmers concentrate on the "small parts" they felt were most important to them.
Geez, this sounds familiar.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
That's not a reasonable comparison. Anyone can install linux from a free download or even a free CD. That's not the case for OSX.
With more and more announcements like these, does anyone else think it is inevitable that Linux will overtake Microsoft on all bases one day?
Eventually, but it will take much time because of the unwillingness to change by many. Ousting the incumbent is hard, as they are known quantity. But Microsoft is loosing market share in some big markets like China. And in the appliance market it is more likely to have a Linux or BSD variant inside. Take for example any common wireless router, it probably runs Linux.
Time is against Microsoft dominance for two reasons. People drive OSes and the more people that know the OS the more viable it becomes. As more people know Linux, the less edge Microsoft has. Second, in places in the world with large populations Microsoft will not get $1000 per desktop so they either pirate it or use Linux. This also adds to popularity but also drives the cost of software down and down. The Microsoft model for software is ever increasing costs, which is against the industry norm. A collision with reality is inevitable for Microsoft. The question should be how long will this take? Microsoft BS of market share are best taken in the context of the USA and not the world.
Take for example any common wireless router, it probably runs Linu
i thought ones that were known to run linux (i bet there are also a lot of GPL violators keeping quiet though) were the exception not the rule, even linksys (famous for linux based wireless routers) ultimately decided that the licensing costs of vxworks were made up for by hardware savings.
not that this is really relavent to linux vs ms anyway as ms never had that market in the first place.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Unfortunately technology has little to do with it. Basically the domain of computer users has in the recent years been rapidly expanding into the domain of people who don't know the first thing about computer technology. Having a technologically superior product doesn't mean at all as much being able to sell your product to the great masses.
For an illustration, look at this Google Trends graph . This doesn't mean that less people are interested in Linux but that a smaller percentage of internet users (computer users) are. You can compare it for instance to something that the average non-technical computer user might search for.
The bottom line is that a commercial success lies in appealing to the huge uninformed and uneducated masses ("Now with 25% more PONIES!"). Microsoft has economic resources for marketing that will for sure work better than the technological arguments from semi-fanatical Linux followers. At this point I only think Apple has some form of chance as they have been successful at mainstream branding (mostly thanks to the iPod).
reiser FS is just unstable.
I've never noticed that, and I use Reiser FS.
the only OS that was a radical change from its previous OS yet still supported most PC hardware was Windows NT.
i'm sure in the early days of NT you had to specifically look for hardware that was NT compatible just like you do with linux today.
Even with MS behind it and strong statements that it was the only future of windows MS had to backtrack twice and release maintinace releases for 9x before they finally had the market ready (running mostly win32 apps on mostly NT compatible hardware) to drop 9x.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Not IBM PC compatible? Neither is Windows XP! Besides, PowerPC was based on an IBM architecture and IBM manufactured many of the chips used in Apple Personal Computers. Why, Apple has always made PCs, and OS X has always been IBM compatible! When it came to switching to Intel, Apple went out their way trying to make sure Intel hackers couldn't install Tiger.
Of course, Linux also has the problem of not having this advantage. So much work is put into porting Linux distros to different systems and adding driver support, attention is often diverted from the real factors in making PC converts: user interface and ease of use. I love Ubuntu (even with no K or X), but GNOME has problems no amount of theme-tweaking or big-friendly-icon-drawing can fix. Currently, KDE is actually easier for the average ex-Windows user to grasp (but lacks GNOME's wide language and accessibility support).
Never used NEXTSTEP? Version 3 was the best OS I've ever used to this day. I prefer it to the modern OSX incarnations. The amount of detail has never been seen in any OS since. Open source software can be good, but its almost never polished. Gnome developers are stuck on changing their api every five minutes. I should haven't to recompile firefox because a new 2.x release comes out. gtk should be stable aside from bug fixes (binary compatible) during a 2.x release cycle of gnome. Tinker in a seperate branch like the BSDs do. KDE is a little better, but not much. Most of their problems stem from g++ changes as C++ "evolves". Obviously desktop environments aren't operating systems, but people often include them in the linux camp. Linux is just a kernel though.
10.5 will just be a stability release for apple just as 10.3 and 10.1 were. Odd numbers are the stable releases. Even Microsoft seems to go through that cycle. WFW 3.11/DOS 6.22 stable, Windows 95 not so much, Windows 98 stable, 98SE buggy on some hardware (VIA chipsets, sis, anything with amd or cyrix on top), Windows 2000 stable, Windows ME unstable, Windows XP stable. I did skip NT4 as it doesn't fit in very well. It started out as a POS and because quite usable around service pack 3.
Saying that you love OSX and insulting someone else for liking OSX heritage makes little sense. I personally figure apple's going to almost go out of business in the next 3 years. They're starting to get numbers back and this is when the fumble historically. I already see a lack of quality in a few of their products. When people realize that Apple and Microsoft share the same faults they'll just still with the 90 percent camp. I'll get ridiculed for my iBook again and that will be that.
To everyone wanting a cutting edge OS, build one! Thats what open source is for. If you like micro kernels (tantenbaum camp.. sorry if I spelled that wrong), there are several newer projects with potential. Google it. If you like linux, help improve it or add the things you think are missing from modern operating systems. Like almost every point in computing, this is an exciting time. Get involved. There are even hybrid approaches. For instance, DragonFly BSD is using message passing instead of fine grain locking in every little corner of the kernel. They are seperating code quite nicely. Its almost an in between kernel design long term (my interpretation). FreeBSD 5.x+ and MidnightBSD (plug) both use fine grain locking code. NetBSD and OpenBSD have stuck with the old school BSD design for SMP. On 2 cores they seem fast in benchmarks.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
> If NTFS was even mildly documented that'd be an option. NTFS isn't actually documented at Microsoft!! The guys who wrote it have left the company long ago, and nobody there has a real clue about it!
Are you completely mad? ReiserFS is utterly stable and has the advantage of being fully documented. There is NOBODY at Microsoft any longer who fully understands NTFS, and it was never formally documented. As usual at MS, it's real spaghetti code, and there's not a hope in hell of ever sorting it out.
I believe QDOS means, quick+dirty OS, and the background story justifies the name. Add about a quarter-century worth of "just add this feature and get it working 100% later" while trying to maximize backwards-compatibility. (I believe that they added the DOS line of compatibility with NT 5.x (w2k, xp, etc.)
I wouldn't want to have to program that mess.
Engineering wise, I think a reboot + emulator would be a good idea. But the problem is, if they make a clean and easy to maintain, split-up system, then it will be emulated easier on other OSes [Linux]. So, the best technical solution would probably result in a mess of a different [monitary] kind. And who does ms really care about, the user or their bottom-line?
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
I think it has more to do with the segregation of components in Linux than in Windows. In Windows things depend on each other unnecessarily with no clear standardized API. In Linux, someone can make a new scheduler, add 2 more filesystems and know almost nothing about drivers. Yet it'll work and work well. In Windows, make a new filesystem and 12 other things will break because they depended on the quirks of the previous filesystem. At least many apps out there will break because their developers had to depend on those quirks because there is no clear complete standardized API.
Not burdened with binary compatibility, Linux (and BSD et al) cleaned up their design at the cost of not being compatible with previous apps. Now it doesnt run libc5 apps, most dont run a.out binaries and they dont care if kernel version 1.3.27 drivers dont work in version 2.6.45. So they can make a clean new design each time. Windows is still supposed to support DOS apps, win16 binaries and win32 binaries with quirks from circa windows 95. And they know the day they try to have a clean start and ignore their binary codebase, Linux and BSD will have an edge.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
It's not like you can try OSX with a free live CD on your Pentium or something.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
To use your analogy of a car with crank or not...you know you can make some circuit that ckecks on the speed of the car, and time it out the headlight...for example. Yes most linux distribution have been rough and the reason is because the people that did develop stuff did not (or want) work on feel and look that much Try ubuntu for example ...you'll be surprised what can be done when some little thought is put to ease the use and work on look and feel.
Just like XP, very few people will rush out and actually buy Vista. They will get it when they buy a new computer. I'm already seeing new computers that come with XP, but have a sticker on them that says they're Vista Compatible.
Just for the hell of it I got a DVD of Vista Beta 2 and loaded it on an XP box at home. It blue screened whenever I tried to browse the file system (thanks a bunch Trend Micro!) and the Control Panel evaporates whenever I try to launch it. The computer (3 GHz P4 with 1 GB RAM) is working fairly hard to run Vista.
Thanks, Microsoft.
Sigh.
...laura
welcome our new Emergent Bloat overlords!
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
"The release of Vista has since been delayed again and is now scheduled for November for large customers and January 2007 for the general public, though some observers say it may be out even later." how large is a large customer? 300 lbs?
"What's VISTA an acronym for?
I thought everybody knew this by now.
Viruses, Infections, Spyware, Trojans and Adware.
Given that four of your examples are specific forms of "Infections", I must conclude that you couldn't find a better choice for "I". Unfortunately that degrades the overall humorous effect. It is no longer "clever", and thus becomes just another failed attempt, filed along "Windoze" and 'Micro$oft".
Strive to improve!
Windows, Icons, Meeses, and Pull-down menus.
Post more!
With all the stuff MS has been pulling out of Vista over time, what's left to make it a new OS other than eye candy? Why don't they just call it "Windows XP: Second Edition" and be done with it?
Dear Microsoft,
the solution to your problem regarding WinFS is pretty easy. Here it goes:
1) bundle a database of yours with the next version of Windows for free.
2) modify your File Dialog window to use the database as the primary storage, leaving the classic filesystem as a 2nd option.
3) modify Explorer and Office to utilize the database.
Suddently all of your customers will use the database for storage, searching will be pretty easy, indexing will be provided by the db, the user will be able to put queries and maintain views, and you'll get the extra functionality you desire without botching the filesystem.
Oh, by the way, the solution is also for open source software (in case open source developers are reading this).
what you're talking about is the much discussed M$ monoculture. yes, i agree. The limits of the monoculture will limit the success of M$ projects. In the mean time, Linux will keep progressing and eventually be way more successful/respected than Winders.
Power to the Penguin!
Can anyone join in?
hmmm... viruses, something-beginning-with-I, spyware, trojans, adware... How about: instability, inanity, insanity, inexcusable, inexhaustable, indefensable, incompatibility, ignoble, irritation, idiotic, indefensible, imitative, imbecillic, inconvenient, illegitimate, immanent, immature, immoral and inevtiably illogical.
Pick any one that tickles your funny bone :)
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
When the root filesystem is corrupt, you often have to fix it by rebooting using a DVD and running fsck. There is nothing unique to ReiserFS in this..... and if by chance you were playing with the partitioning or dd or.... then full effects of the corruption will often be seen by you when you reboot, because that is when it looks at the disk and not in the RAM cache. One of the most common things is for users to incorrectly repartition, and it all still works, and then they reboot and....
If this is true, then I can see where a Microsoft programmer might start out planning that his/her program code will reign supreme, but after a harsh dose of reality, they settle for 'excel'
<rimshot>
(Taking a pot-shot at a spreadsheet that couldn't add right. Now was that fair? YES - we paid good money for that stupid thing. Dolts.)
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
Are you crazy? Microsoft release OS updates all the time. The only thing that doesn't change often is the logo.
Doesnt delaying vista make it better for customers? As a user, I am on the side of making it better. I have seen 2 groups of people complaining that its delayed. Investors and people that want MS to fail. For the average user, I think it is to their benefit for the OS to work well, instead of be released early and buggy. If it released before its ready, wont that make for a backlash against MS and potentially send more people to Linux and Apple? Wont this actually hurt investors more than a delay? Maybe I am simple in my thinking but Im not sure I understand business. I think in the long run, Vista will make more money by actually showing that MS is capable of releasing an OS that is actually stable, and secure.
It got killed more due to marketing plans than any technical limitation. Resiser is probably a better file system than WinFS (meaning for streams of all size, and performance) but WinFS was a better object system (for structured data intended to be manipulated by an object-orieted programming layer), in my opinion.
ReiserFS shares the same problems, I imagine. How many people using Resier use it as a simple file system? I'd be truly interested in any stats you could produce that a large number of users of the system actually use the 'keyword' features and structured storage, and I'd be pleased if you could name any major app that builds on ResierFS as anything other than a typical filestream storage bucket with hierarchical naming (e.g. that doesn't treat it like any other file system).
There is not 'killer app' yet for ReiserFS or the WinFS systems, that I know of. I admire you for your dedication and hope that you find that application (and share it with us).
Funny, googling on KDE en OSX gives this link as hit #2: Nine things KDE should learn from Mac OS X
FORGET THE Microsoft WINFS look at LCARS (an acronym for Library Computer Access and Retrieval System) as used in Star Trek. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCARS Err however, Contemporary technology revolves around isolinear optical chips and newer bioneural gelpacks, which can be enhanced in large-scale systems through the application of subspace fields. I dont think Intel or AMD see these yet?
That's the thing about not knowing what you're talking about: everything seems really easy to you.
And another helpful hint: Just leave it there, use postgres and get rid of SQL server.
As far as I'm concerned, the main goal should be to stop any OS becoming dominant to that level. When web designers, software houses, etc. can't just say "We write for <OS> only coz that's what the huge majority of people use," then they'll have to start considering cross-platform standards instead. And we all win: OS X users like me, Linux users like lots of you here, and yes, arguably Windows users too.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
I agree completely. As a Windows, Mac, and Linux user I would happily like to see the death of Windows though I wouldn't like to see one OS take over completely. While we are mostly safe with Linux as there are many distros and it's limited in some regards I still like the idea of cross platform and people being able to choose. After all that is why I use and love Linux over Windows and even Mac: The User Chooses.
I ate your fish.
Oh, come on, of course it's a whimper. It goes from YES to yeah to probably to maybe to no, I guess not. Leave aside the question of whether it really *was* the greatest thing since sliced bits, it's definitely done the Cosmic Wimpout.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Better for the customers ....... I really and honestly hope so. But "better for the customers" can mean a lot of things, from it being a stable and secure OS, to working for a short time between BSOD's, to only working in the minds of people who have really powerful imaginations. Sure it's "better for the customers" if it isn't released until it's ready. But, if we remember the beginnings of Windows 98 and Windows XP (there are ladies on /., so don't let's mention Windows ME), we have to ask ourselves what "ready" might mean.
Don't get me wrong - I intend to give Vista a try. But I'll hang on to my dual-boot of Windows XP Pro (SP2) and Linux until they bring out SP2 for Vista and until I've read about the results. If all seems well, I'll then make a careful complete backup and put Vista down in place of XP Pro. If all goes well then OK. If I get into some kind of sado-maso wrestling match then its back to XP Pro. I have a business to run and my experiences with W98, XP (before the SP's; it works fine now), and the unmentionable ME have taught me to be careful. If Microsoft should stop the support of XP without (or before) making Vista into a working alternative then my little business will become an all Linux shop, as will numerous others.
That there be a delay announced after the due date is nothing extraordinary, that there be a succession of delays announced is a worry, that they give the impression that they don't know when the job will be finished is a source of near panic. And what's with the two dates? One for enterprises and one for the general public ! I don't get that - or maybe I do, being a cynical SOB with salaries to pay
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
Man, you have the thing down. All you need to do now is DO IT . If you err... have any difficulty...., you do have an alternative ; you could try to SHUT IT .
Oh, by the way, this second solution is usable by any type of nitwit who develops software with their mouth (in case there are nitwits out there, reading this, and thinking of opening their mouths)
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
Management just listened to their own hype too long. Their own software cannot overcome organizational problems and sheer complexity. Even detailed planning with their project software cannot make a bad idea turn into a good idea. Vista is too complicated by a factor of 10, and the fact that they didn't know how long it would take within a specific year is a sign that they don't even understand their own problem.
Technical people think everything has a technical solution. This is the same for the open source projects as it is for MS. Only Apple really have a vision and knows how to execute on a monthly basis, at least in the OS world.
This worked perfectly. Will make organising my manga a lot easier. Thanks for the help.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.