Gates Explains Longhorn Delay, Diet 619
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has set late 2006 as the deadline for shipping Longhorn, but to make that date, it had to delay the full implementation of WinFS, an ambitious file system geared at letting users search through all of their files at once. In this interview with Bill Gates, he provides a summary of why Microsoft decided to drop WinFS, saying: "WinFS, I'd be the first to say, is very ambitious. Nobody has ever brought together the world of documents, media and structured information in giving you one simple set of verbs that lets you richly find, move around and replicate those things." Meanwhile, MS Watch has published Longhorn head-honcho Jim Allchin's memo on why some Longhorn features had to be axed."
Nobody? (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe Bill considered them nobodies... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Is there a word... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:So, still NTFS??? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Is there a word... (Score:5, Informative)
Don't be silly. What they're looking at is something like GNOME Storage [gnome.org] where you can type in some search terms and semantically find the files.
Something like 1960s music or e-mails to Bruce, I'd guess. WinFS ties up all your documents, media, mails etc. into one database for indexing and searching, and beats the hell out of DIR C: /s/a.
Tiger Anyone (Score:5, Informative)
Come on Bill....Steve can pull this off and he doesn't have 50 billion in the bank.
Re:BeOS? (Score:2, Informative)
Yes. Dominic Giampalo, one of the creators of the BeFS, now works for Apple.
Re:You mean like.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Via babelfish (Score:5, Informative)
* The highest quality OS we have ever shipped
* New information management tools to improve productivity, including fast desktop search and new, intuitive ways to organize files
* Major security advances that build on Windows XP SP2, such as new technologies to make clients more resilient to attack, viruses and malware
* Flexible and powerful tools to reduce deployment costs for enterprise customers, including technologies for image creation, editing and installation; and much simpler upgrades for consumers
* Significant improvements in reliability, including a robust diagnostic infrastructure to detect, analyze and fix problems quickly, and new backup tools to keep data safe
* A platform that creates Developer excitement with the availability of rich APIs [application programming interfaces]
Feel the developer excitement yet? Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!
Wow. Sorry. I didn't realize that Allchin's memo was so hypnotic. I started channeling some fat, sweaty monkey man there for a moment.
Re:Tiger Anyone (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, it's a lot like this. Apple hired Dominic Giampalo, one of the BeFS's creators, to work on their new file system. While it certainly won't be exactly the same, I'm sure a resemblance will be apparent, due to their common progenitor.
El Reg Interview link (Score:5, Informative)
The Register interviewed Dominic and Benoit Schillings a couple of years ago [theregister.co.uk] and is a very good read.
Re:Is there a word... (Score:5, Informative)
Other useful examples might be "films starring Tom Hanks" or "music by The Red Hot Chilli Peppers"...
You don't get it. (Score:1, Informative)
The GNU find command is slow.
Problem with meta-tags (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with meta-tags is that they have to get populated somehow. Only the anal fill in meta-data, everyone else either blows it off or takes the defaults.
The real breakthrough happens when the system can decode and parse the file accurately to provide "automagic" meta-data. Otherwise meta-tags are a nice academic exercise that is either ignored or misused in practice.
Re:Arg, I'm blind! (Score:3, Informative)
I was going to post a draggable link, but it seems that slashdot filter does not allow javascript hrefs, so it will have to be done manually.
Create a bookmark with this location. Next time you are offended by the it color scheme, just click.
Pretty much untested, and has no failsafes (as in it will ruin other sites), for that open source look and feel.
In the next version I plan to add ability to remove any slashdot section as I think the apple theme is a bit overdone as well....
Re:Free Ads / Free Betas (Score:4, Informative)
~phil
Re:Microsoft's Copland? (Score:2, Informative)
Except for Microsoft themselves. They've already dumped PowerPC, MIPS and Alpha support to release solely on x86.
Re:Microsoft's Copland? (Score:3, Informative)
Proper vector graphics would be cool though ... X has cairo (roughly display PDF) and gtk and qt are planning to switch. SVG for icon rendering is available now.
Re:iTunes-like? (Score:3, Informative)
For me, a kind of "iTunes for files", including smart queries, would be fairly enough. And it doesn't require a brand new file system and its instability risks...
Here, watch this video [apple.com]. OS X has this in their developer previews right now, and is scheduled to be released to all users in either the first of second quarter of 2005.
winfs (Score:3, Informative)
c:\year\case\client\outcome
Now you want to search these according to:
c:\client\year\case\outcome
This is not currently possible with directories without a huge PITA and this is one area where winFS can shine.
BeFS (Score:5, Informative)
I have not used ReiserFS 4, but it sounds a lot more ambitious than BeFS. At any rate, the Linux BeFS driver is really a compatibility option that does not provide the same features as using BeFS natively under BeOS. fwiw, I would really love to see someone implement BeOS-like queries for Linux using one of the new metadata-enabled FSes.
Re:Free Ads / Free Betas (Score:2, Informative)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/04/01/Av
I think this is coming with Whidbey... But I haven't played with it yet - not sure.
Re:catch-up? (Score:1, Informative)
We have a sidebar that has significant more functionality than what MS intends to have two years from now. And our sidebar isn't vaporware: Dashboard [nat.org]
Lonhorn is going to have multiple desktops, tell MS not to copy Linux.
.Net is Java reincarnated, tell MS to give it back to Sun.
BeOS had BeFS in 1996, its everything that WinFS was going to be and then some, tell MS to not use WinFS.
While we are at it, The new windows versions are a bit like VMS, make sure you tell MS to scrap it all and start from scratch. Oh and this time also make sure you tell them not to include any BSD code again. I'll stop now, I wouldn't want to embarass you anymore.
Regards,
Steve
Re:Microsoft's Copland? (Score:3, Informative)
Chances are that the reason WinFS is delayed is that, while it works great, it breaks half of MS's applications and all of everybody else's, because MS doesn't have a set of specifications which they are following, so they don't know what behavior people are depending on. Sure, they don't have to fight with people who don't want to change anything internally, but they do have to contend with legacy applications which depend on undocumented behavior (because important things weren't documented) and are all that are tying many users to Windows.
Re:Free Ads / Free Betas (Score:4, Informative)
Go ahead, remove all the libraries that make up Internet Explorer, change the shell to cmd.exe and nothing outside of the shell will break. Delete shell32.dll, msi.dll, netshell.dll, shdocvw.dll, browseui.dll, explorer.exe, userenv.dll, urlmon.dll, shlwapi.dll, webcheck.dll, mshtml.dll and anything else you find that implements IE; nothing server-side will break.
Re:Problem with meta-tags (Score:2, Informative)