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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'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/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
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
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
Sadly, it is the final person who is filling the bulk of the positions.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
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.
Yeah, they should write a new system - let's call it the NT kernel and Win32 subsystem, and then give the applications written for the old OS an emulation/thunking layer - let's call it Wowexec, for instance, and then the old applications written for the old crufty OS could gradually be phased out.
But I guess we'll never see that.
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.
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