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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...
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.
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....
That's when Crocop is laying unconscious under Fedor's massive fists ....
Put identity in the browser.
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/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.
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.
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".
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!
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
My dog resents that comparison, you insensitive clod!
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I've been running on Vista, and most programs I've tried (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Opera, WoW, Guild Wars, Trillian) run perfectly fine. Some I've had to run with admin access (WoW, utorrent), others just worked. The only program I've had trouble with is Nero. Nero 6.whatever doesn't load Nero Express, but the actual Nero Burning ROM program works. I tried installing the Nero 7 demo, but it won't run for some reason. I haven't tried MS WOrks.
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!
I never had any problem surfing porn with my Linux box, and it shouldn't be a threat for you...
"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!
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.
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
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.
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/
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
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.
First of all, with any other OS you can surf all the porn you want without problems like that. Second, you obviously know nothing about computing history. If the reason Windows has so many malware problems is solely due to it's popularity, where are all the Unix viruses? Unix existed decades before Windows and the entire internet is based around Unix. Until this year, Unix always outsold Windows as servers -- and all the *nix OSes combined still outsold Windows. If Unix was as vulnerable to malware as Windows there wouldn't be an internet; it would have been impossible to maintain because all of the servers would have been infected with loads of malware despite anitivirus. The reason that there aren't so many malware problems on *nix OSes isn't due to lack of popularity, it's because they are designed in such a way that it's very hard to write a program that can even infect them, let alone affect them. I see this "every other OS would be just as vulnerable as Windows if they were as popular" every other day. I wish to God people would learn a little something about what they're talking about before continuing to spout this ignorant nonsense.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
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
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.
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....
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
No, I don't work for Microsoft, and I have no documentation to show that this is the 'fix'. I simply work at a computer store, and always find computers whose owners have found new and exciting ways to break them. This was discovered simply with a comparison of the two associations for directories/folders between a broken machine and a functional system.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Network effects economics. It is a lot less useful to society if it is not used. Filesystems are important, but nobody will use an OS just because of the FS.