Which is why they are working on making NTFS transactional. If the database transaction doesn't go through then any filesystem operations can be rolled back as well. There shouldn't be any need to run a process to resynch the filesystem with the database since all operations should modify both consistently or not at all.
Yes you need a database, which is why WinFS has preinstalled schemas for People, Organisations, Places, Events, Tasks, etc. Windows already has a built in address book WAB, or you could use Outlook or some other program. With WinFS the contact database is unified and accessible from all applications, things that people would need outlook for today can be done through the shell. So either import your old contact database, or start up an IM client and have it fetch your contacts from the server, or receive an email from someone and add their address, and you will quickly build up a set of contacts to link your documents to.
This screenshot shows the integrated contact history prototype. It combines together all the past emails, IMs, SMS messages, Phone Calls etc from or to a particular person. I'm sure someone will come up with an IRC client that integrates with it as well.
But why do people think WinFS is all about using keywords?
You don't just put "Joe" you link to Joe's contact item. You don't put in "Network Security" as text but save the file to a prexisting virtual folder of all network security reports through the save dialog or the shell.
If you are the first person in your organisation to produce a network security report you might have to decide on a name for the relationship, but everyone else can just link to yours. If you decide you don't like the name you can change it later and all the relationships remain intact.
Well maybe you'll go at it the other way around. Don't have people create isolated documents and then supply metadata, get them to specify the document in terms of the related item.
So you start up the "Contacts" virtual folder, choose "Joe" and then press "Write a letter".
The user will have been thinking about who they were going to write to before they started writing anyway, so just make it a natural part of the process.
Yeah very clever, but it's not quite the same thing. NTFS has that too, though it's more difficult to get at. So how to you get person<->organisation<->project<->event<->document <->communication(email) so you can find all the related things given anyone bit of information.
It is to preload the DB, and place the modified DB information back in the file so it can be moved to a non WinFS system, and to update the DB when the file is modified by a non WinFS aware application. So if you started editing your ID3 tags with Winamp2 it would catch the file apis and call on the file property handler to keep the DB in sync.
Re:Good description - I back Spotlight because...
on
Database File System
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· Score: 1
WinFS also has metadata extraction, they call it Promotion/Demotion, MS plans to support the major file formats out of the box, Office, PDF, JPEG EXIF, ID3, etc, but it will be fairly easy to implement your own metadata handler for your custom file formats.
Why don't people get it? It isn't about entering arbitrary keywords as file properties, it's about forming relationships between items. You shedule a meeting, you create a new meeting item and link in the attendee items, location items etc. You take some notes at the meeting, you link the notes to the meeting item. You link the meeting item to the project you are involved in. Now you can locate the notes by filetype, time/date, project, meeting, people, location, without entering any text by hand, just linking one or two critical bits of information per new item.
WinFS is up and running in test mode. Just install one of the Longhorn Alpha Previews. It runs really slowly, uses up tons of resources but it's there and it works. It's going to be a long time coming, but it's way more than just theoretical.
How does it blow away the WinFS idea? It basically is the WinFS idea. It stores metadata and file relationships in a database with a reference to the file location in the traditional hierachy.
WinFS does all that and more with automatic metadata promotion/demotion, synchronisation, and queries generated by virtual paths for legacy applications.
Wasn't this the sort of thing that douglas tried to do with Starship Titanic. IIRC it had a much more complicated natural language parser that was supposed to let you converse with the NPCs until you got the answers you were looking for.
I never actually played it so I don't know how sucessful it was, but it sounded interesting at the time.
Yes the directory structure would look much the same, except they would all be virtual folders. So \\computer\files\pictures\holidays\snowtrees.jpg is the same as \\computer\files\family\chirstmas\2002\snowtrees.j pg
these folders don't exist except as a way of performing queries on your files. This will allow old win32 applications to be used to access files stored in WinFS without having to be rewritten.
Of course it depends how much you use WinFS, but it will already contain other concepts like people, places and events. So if you made an entry on your calender, "I will be on holiday in italy date1 to date2", and then you come back and attach a digital camera with lots of photos with EXIF creation date times during that period, its not hard to see that the computer can put 2 and 2 together and work out where the photos were taken.
So it copies the photos to your hard disc and create relationships to the entities "Place:Italy", "Event:Holiday", and the people you were on holiday with. Thus free text queries become workable with a minimum of effort.
The more data you put into WinFS the more it can help you. It combines the formerly proprietory data stores from all your applications and makes these joined-up operations possible. They were even talking about including face recognition software in Longhorn, so you won't have to manually tell it who is in each photo.
Adding metadata is not about typing text strings in each files properties, its about combining existing knowledge and easy-to-use UI features like stacks and smart folders to make forming relationships between item pretty much automatic.
Also by the time WinFS is available GPS recievers might be standard in digital cameras so it would know where the photo was taken that way.
I'd like to believe you but I don't think it works this way. Suppose we can specify a software product to be produced. UML models, use cases etc. Now we can give that to a programmer and they can produce the actual product. The programmer doesn't need to know much about the actual business issues, just follow the spec, so we can get the cheapest programmer from the other side of the world who is capable of following the spec.
So there are fewer low level programming jobs in the US, great lets all become software architects, we are freed from the low level work and have higher valued jobs, Yippee a promotion.
Except you realise that you don't actually need as many software architects a you had programmers, and not all programmers are capable of becoming software architects, so we keep the best few and drop the rest.
A problem arises in a few years, where do you find good software architects. Usually you might start out as a programmer and after a few years experience on the job you can understand all the issues to take on the greater challenge. Well how do you get those years of experience if all the low level jobs have been shipped overseas?
The only people qualified to be software architects are the supposed low level programmers you outsourced the work to. Except now they have enough money to set up their own development shops and can undercut your business in providing software development services.
This has already happened with Clothing and Electronics, it could easily happen with software too.
The only jobs that remain here are those that require an on-site presence, cleaning, maintenance, services, shopping and the management who sent the jobs abroad.
I agree, it really put me off reading any more Asimov. He seemed to be saying "I'm so clever, look how I can fit all this together", when the psychohistory story of the last 5 books had never had anything whatsoever to do with robots. Just keep your universes seperate please.
That might have been my one. Bugcheck 0x8E_nt!MiGetProtoPteAddressExtended+12
This is the bug track response from Microsoft for this bug report.
Update on 4/28/2004 10:45:54 AM by Microsoft: moving to developement database for investigation
Update on 4/29/2004 8:35:35 AM by Microsoft: Thanks for the report. This issue is currently under investigation. Is there any way we would be able to obtain a full dump of this issue? The minidumps are helpful, but there just isn't enough information in them to determine cause. Let me know either way if this is a possibility, thank you.
Update on 4/29/2004 5:04:22 PM by Microsoft: Thanks for the assistance. As it turns out there was a bug here that has shipped in every version of NT we've ever released. With your help we've been able to implement a change that will affect all versions of NT from w2k, xp, server 2003 and beyond. Pretty cool.
Sounds like it was a problem in the memory manager. It seems to be fixed now in SP2, I can't reproduce it as easily as before anyway.
I'd like to know a bit more about it. It's quite nice to know I've had some impact on the core kernel code for NT.
VNC just shoves screenshots over the network, RDP works at a higher level. It sends GDI drawing commands over the network much like X. RDP works fine over 802.11b for basic desktop graphics.
The issues with Mira/Smart Displays were. 1. Too expensive.
The prices were $1000 to $1500, for that much you might as well buy a Tablet pc. 2. Not enough bandwidth for watching DVDs, playing games. 3. Difficult to set up. You only get RDP with XP Pro, so some smart displays shipped with an upgrade from Home to Pro, its rather a lot to expect someone to reinstall their operating system just to use an extra bit of hardware. It was tricky to use as a dockable monitor where the RDP connection had to take over automatically when the screen was undocked. 4. Licensing restrictions meant you couldn't have someone using the desktop machine at the same time even though its technically perfectly capable of it. 5. Dockable monitor version was too large/heavy to carry around. Slate version too useless outside of wireless range.
Personally I think there would be a market for a smart display that at least functioned as a Browser/Media Player/Ebook Reader with WiFi and/or Bluetooth when outside the range of the base computer. The version of internet explorer shipped with Windows CE 4.1 (not the pocket pc one) ought to be good enough.
With Avalon the intention seems to be to raise network transparency level even higher and send the display scene graph over the wire to be rendered by an Avalon stack on the client. Videos would be sent in compressed form and rendered by appropriate codecs on the client. Its a good idea to reduce the bandwidth requirement but an Avalon level smart display would not be possible on a low power arm chip.
Now I must be going, I have an spam folder of over >1000 messages about Viagra, Cialis, Vicodin, Valium, Xanax, Phentamine, Penis Enlargements, Cheap Software, Mortgages, Loans, Pornography, Email Marketing services, Home Businesses, PHDs, MBAs, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is why they are working on making NTFS transactional. If the database transaction doesn't go through then any filesystem operations can be rolled back as well.
There shouldn't be any need to run a process to resynch the filesystem with the database since all operations should modify both consistently or not at all.
Yes you need a database, which is why WinFS has preinstalled schemas for People, Organisations, Places, Events, Tasks, etc.
Windows already has a built in address book WAB, or you could use Outlook or some other program. With WinFS the contact database is unified and accessible from all applications, things that people would need outlook for today can be done through the shell.
So either import your old contact database, or start up an IM client and have it fetch your contacts from the server, or receive an email from someone and add their address, and you will quickly build up a set of contacts to link your documents to.
This screenshot shows the integrated contact history prototype. It combines together all the past emails, IMs, SMS messages, Phone Calls etc from or to a particular person. I'm sure someone will come up with an IRC client that integrates with it as well.
But why do people think WinFS is all about using keywords?
You don't just put "Joe" you link to Joe's contact item. You don't put in "Network Security" as text but save the file to a prexisting virtual folder of all network security reports through the save dialog or the shell.
If you are the first person in your organisation to produce a network security report you might have to decide on a name for the relationship, but everyone else can just link to yours. If you decide you don't like the name you can change it later and all the relationships remain intact.
Well maybe you'll go at it the other way around. Don't have people create isolated documents and then supply metadata, get them to specify the document in terms of the related item.
So you start up the "Contacts" virtual folder, choose "Joe" and then press "Write a letter".
The user will have been thinking about who they were going to write to before they started writing anyway, so just make it a natural part of the process.
Yeah very clever, but it's not quite the same thing. NTFS has that too, though it's more difficult to get at. So how to you get person<->organisation<->project<->event<->document <->communication(email) so you can find all the related things given anyone bit of information.
Link works fine for me with Firefox.
It contains links to the other information you wanted
C# Code for a Sample File Promoter
Registering a File Property Handler in "WinFS"
It is to preload the DB, and place the modified DB information back in the file so it can be moved to a non WinFS system, and to update the DB when the file is modified by a non WinFS aware application.
So if you started editing your ID3 tags with Winamp2 it would catch the file apis and call on the file property handler to keep the DB in sync.
WinFS also has metadata extraction, they call it Promotion/Demotion, MS plans to support the major file formats out of the box, Office, PDF, JPEG EXIF, ID3, etc, but it will be fairly easy to implement your own metadata handler for your custom file formats.
File property handler API
As far as meta-meta goes data there are classes in WinFX for facial recognition not just water and sky.
So install it in VMWare or Virtual PC or something. If you don't like it just wipe the disk image.
Why don't people get it? It isn't about entering arbitrary keywords as file properties, it's about forming relationships between items. You shedule a meeting, you create a new meeting item and link in the attendee items, location items etc. You take some notes at the meeting, you link the notes to the meeting item. You link the meeting item to the project you are involved in.
Now you can locate the notes by filetype, time/date, project, meeting, people, location, without entering any text by hand, just linking one or two critical bits of information per new item.
WinFS is up and running in test mode. Just install one of the Longhorn Alpha Previews.
It runs really slowly, uses up tons of resources but it's there and it works. It's going to be a long time coming, but it's way more than just theoretical.
How does it blow away the WinFS idea? It basically is the WinFS idea. It stores metadata and file relationships in a database with a reference to the file location in the traditional hierachy.
WinFS does all that and more with automatic metadata promotion/demotion, synchronisation, and queries generated by virtual paths for legacy applications.
Wasn't this the sort of thing that douglas tried to do with Starship Titanic. IIRC it had a much more complicated natural language parser that was supposed to let you converse with the NPCs until you got the answers you were looking for.
I never actually played it so I don't know how sucessful it was, but it sounded interesting at the time.
Yes the directory structure would look much the same, except they would all be virtual folders.j pg
So \\computer\files\pictures\holidays\snowtrees.jpg is the same as \\computer\files\family\chirstmas\2002\snowtrees.
these folders don't exist except as a way of performing queries on your files. This will allow old win32 applications to be used to access files stored in WinFS without having to be rewritten.
Of course it depends how much you use WinFS, but it will already contain other concepts like people, places and events. So if you made an entry on your calender, "I will be on holiday in italy date1 to date2", and then you come back and attach a digital camera with lots of photos with EXIF creation date times during that period, its not hard to see that the computer can put 2 and 2 together and work out where the photos were taken.
So it copies the photos to your hard disc and create relationships to the entities "Place:Italy", "Event:Holiday", and the people you were on holiday with. Thus free text queries become workable with a minimum of effort.
The more data you put into WinFS the more it can help you. It combines the formerly proprietory data stores from all your applications and makes these joined-up operations possible.
They were even talking about including face recognition software in Longhorn, so you won't have to manually tell it who is in each photo.
Adding metadata is not about typing text strings in each files properties, its about combining existing knowledge and easy-to-use UI features like stacks and smart folders to make forming relationships between item pretty much automatic.
Also by the time WinFS is available GPS recievers might be standard in digital cameras so it would know where the photo was taken that way.
I'd like to believe you but I don't think it works this way.
Suppose we can specify a software product to be produced. UML models, use cases etc. Now we can give that to a programmer and they can produce the actual product. The programmer doesn't need to know much about the actual business issues, just follow the spec, so we can get the cheapest programmer from the other side of the world who is capable of following the spec.
So there are fewer low level programming jobs in the US, great lets all become software architects, we are freed from the low level work and have higher valued jobs, Yippee a promotion.
Except you realise that you don't actually need as many software architects a you had programmers, and not all programmers are capable of becoming software architects, so we keep the best few and drop the rest.
A problem arises in a few years, where do you find good software architects. Usually you might start out as a programmer and after a few years experience on the job you can understand all the issues to take on the greater challenge. Well how do you get those years of experience if all the low level jobs have been shipped overseas?
The only people qualified to be software architects are the supposed low level programmers you outsourced the work to. Except now they have enough money to set up their own development shops and can undercut your business in providing software development services.
This has already happened with Clothing and Electronics, it could easily happen with software too.
The only jobs that remain here are those that require an on-site presence, cleaning, maintenance, services, shopping and the management who sent the jobs abroad.
Native 64 bit support?
No need to wait for longhorn for that
XAML? Or that
There never was a Longhorn kernel. It was always going to be NT6.0.
It will still be NT6.0, but with less userspace stuff on top.
I agree, it really put me off reading any more Asimov. He seemed to be saying "I'm so clever, look how I can fit all this together", when the psychohistory story of the last 5 books had never had anything whatsoever to do with robots. Just keep your universes seperate please.
Word XP and 2003 already include voice recognition.
The first thing I did with Nibbles was change it so when you went off the map you came back on the other side.
That and a speed modification, score changes and a few extra levels.
That might have been my one.
Bugcheck 0x8E_nt!MiGetProtoPteAddressExtended+12
This is the bug track response from Microsoft for this bug report.
Update on 4/28/2004 10:45:54 AM by Microsoft:
moving to developement database for investigation
Update on 4/29/2004 8:35:35 AM by Microsoft:
Thanks for the report. This issue is currently under investigation. Is there any way we would be able to obtain a full dump of this issue? The minidumps are helpful, but there just isn't enough information in them to determine cause. Let me know either way if this is a possibility, thank you.
Update on 4/29/2004 5:04:22 PM by Microsoft:
Thanks for the assistance. As it turns out there was a bug here that has shipped in every version of NT we've ever released. With your help we've been able to implement a change that will affect all versions of NT from w2k, xp, server 2003 and beyond. Pretty cool.
Sounds like it was a problem in the memory manager. It seems to be fixed now in SP2, I can't reproduce it as easily as before anyway.
I'd like to know a bit more about it. It's quite nice to know I've had some impact on the core kernel code for NT.
He didn't say 10% less as in 9/10 he said 10% of, as in 1/10 as much. Big difference.
Still that would mean by your figures that a US autoworker only works 5 hours a week. So it still doesn't quite add up.
VNC just shoves screenshots over the network, RDP works at a higher level. It sends GDI drawing commands over the network much like X. RDP works fine over 802.11b for basic desktop graphics.
The issues with Mira/Smart Displays were.
1. Too expensive.
The prices were $1000 to $1500, for that much you might as well buy a Tablet pc.
2. Not enough bandwidth for watching DVDs, playing games.
3. Difficult to set up. You only get RDP with XP Pro, so some smart displays shipped with an upgrade from Home to Pro, its rather a lot to expect someone to reinstall their operating system just to use an extra bit of hardware. It was tricky to use as a dockable monitor where the RDP connection had to take over automatically when the screen was undocked.
4. Licensing restrictions meant you couldn't have someone using the desktop machine at the same time even though its technically perfectly capable of it.
5. Dockable monitor version was too large/heavy to carry around. Slate version too useless outside of wireless range.
Personally I think there would be a market for a smart display that at least functioned as a Browser/Media Player/Ebook Reader with WiFi and/or Bluetooth when outside the range of the base computer. The version of internet explorer shipped with Windows CE 4.1 (not the pocket pc one) ought to be good enough.
With Avalon the intention seems to be to raise network transparency level even higher and send the display scene graph over the wire to be rendered by an Avalon stack on the client. Videos would be sent in compressed form and rendered by appropriate codecs on the client.
Its a good idea to reduce the bandwidth requirement but an Avalon level smart display would not be possible on a low power arm chip.
Well Said
Now I must be going, I have an spam folder of over >1000 messages about Viagra, Cialis, Vicodin, Valium, Xanax, Phentamine, Penis Enlargements, Cheap Software, Mortgages, Loans, Pornography, Email Marketing services, Home Businesses, PHDs, MBAs, etc.
Frankly I'm getting very fed up with it.
So why don't you download the latest version from Microsoft