Longhorn to be Released in 2006, Sans WinFS 440
skillio writes "Everyone's favorite OS maven, Bill Gates, announced a release date for Longhorn on Friday. He confirms what many had suspected - Microsoft will attempt to complete this release in calendar year 2006. The most notable element of this announcement was Gates' admission that WinFS, Microsoft's next-generation file system, would not be complete in time for this release - surprising, since this was the most hyped component of the next iteration of Windows."
Good deal for Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, it might be a blessing. The pressure on IT to roll out new versions puts a real burden on us. We just got XP and 2003 server rolled out everywhere and I have a feeling we are *way* ahead of most other places.
Re:Good deal for Microsoft (Score:5, Informative)
Many of the components in longhorn will be rolled out as individual services prior to the official release.
(Of course, Microsoft will package the official longhorn release with a few bells and whisltes to grab consumer interests.)
SP2 is a great example of this. The pop-up blocker and buffer overrun protection were all original longhorn ideas.
Re:Good deal for Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
If there's a 5 year gap between OS releases, the finance people might start to question our decision to "take the easy way out" and go for the annual fee, which is a killer btw...
Re:Good deal for Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
Windows XP SP3
If XP is going to get Longhorn Technologies [slashdot.org], and Longhorn isn't going to get the rest (best?) of the "Longhorn Technologies", then thats all it is. A new service pack, just like XP was.
Re:Good deal for Microsoft (Score:3, Informative)
Sure, if you'd abandoned the 9x consumer line and had been running 2k it wasn't that much of a change. But that wasn't the situation for most consumers.
Re:Good deal for Microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
This is yet another proof of how hard it has become for them to upgrage Internet Explorer. Adding just one feature requires an entire new operating system. Fortunatly, for SP2, Bill has outsourced the job. I'm sure 99% sure that the pop-up blocker in SP2 is stolen from Mozilla. Horray for open source!
(Just joking)
Re:Good deal for Microsoft (Score:2, Interesting)
(Just joking)
The idea of the popup blocker and the tabbed browsing were not their own idea. Competitors like opera and mozilla based browsers (mozilla, firefox and others) had those, so IE must have it to ke
Re:Good deal for Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Good deal for Microsoft (Score:4, Informative)
NX (No eXecute) bit for CPU has been around for a while (for Alpha, and Sun's SPARC, for instance), and is not an AMD invention. On the other hand, AMD should be given credit for introducing such a security featuer in their new CPU. Intel has steadfastly refuced to implement such security features on x86, until forced by AMD.
Re:Good deal for Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
Either that or my brain-calc is broken.
Cost Calculation:
Updates for XP - $0
Updates for your server - cost $0
You are happy that there's no new releases of software - so if you wouldn't buy that software cost would be $0
But you are happy that you are paying annual fee??? With that thinking in mind you'll soon be outsourced
We just got XP and 2003 server rolled out everywhere and I have a feeling we are *way* ahead of most other places.
I have all places still running Win2000 server (those few that still use Windows for server and all behind firewall), and it does it's job as it should. Tested version of 2003 didn't make enough progress to replace thing that worked for so long in such pleasurable manner. How do you define your *AHEAD*???
Assurance Plan's are a bad idea. (Score:5, Interesting)
The other hidden problem that few people think about is that if you drop off the plan, ever, you loose the license to use what you have
Going retail prevents this problem.. Yes it costs more, and you don't get their 'enterprise support', but at least you are in control.
Re:Good deal for Microsoft (Score:3, Informative)
Tell me about it. I work for a small/medium business, and we got burned on SQL Server 2000. The single CPU license with Software Assurance was like six grand, or 50% more than the license without SA.
Microsoft (or one of their contractors) called us and asked about renewing our various SA agreements. The droid was seriously confused that I didn't want to take advantage of such a good
the later the better (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if they will decide to use it to lock out any third party application providers they dont like.
Re:the later the better (Score:2)
(like
Re:the later the better (Score:5, Funny)
Re:the later the better (Score:5, Informative)
It's a set of technologies that allow you to store metadata in a SQL-like database, and query for that information.
Think of it as content indexing on steroids.
So you winamp album metadata could be put in WinFS and then winamp (or WMP, or Soniq, or iTunes) could build virtual playlists from that metadata.
Or your picture keywords could be put in and you'd be able to search that metadata using a single common API.
It's NOT a new filesystem.
Re:the later the better (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:the later the better (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the old bait and switch. Now that WinFS has served its purpose, it's being moved back to the _next_ version of Windows after Longhorn. But don't worry, Longhorn+1 will be the best version of Windows EVER! It has this revolutionary new filesystem, WinFS. It will also be faster, easier to use, more compatible and more secure! Why risk changing to another operating system when the next version of Windows will be everything you have ever wanted, AND MORE?
Re:the later the better (Score:3, Funny)
Dude, did you really just say that??
Re:the later the better (Score:4, Funny)
This has been Bill Gate's marketing approach since Day One at Microsoft.
Read the biographies of him. They say the exact same thing. Every time Microsoft customers get antsy, he comes out with "Stay the course! The next one will be dynamite!"
I think George Bush learned it from him. Iraq didn't turn out well? Well, relax, Iran will be much better! And wait until you see North Korea!
Re:the later the better (Score:5, Informative)
Re:NTFS 5 and 'everyone else' (Score:5, Informative)
It drives me up a freaking wall. I've forced Knoppix to mount an NTFS volume r/w, and made a change to boot.ini once, and I got off lucky.
you do realise knoppix includes a util called captive-ntfs, which allows you to mount ntfs partitions using certian windows files (which it gets from the ntfs partition) for full read/write access? I've used this quite a lot since i found out about it and never had any problems; I'd trust it a whole lot more than I trust the hack-job reverse engineered ntfs write support from the kernel.
Re:NTFS 5 and 'everyone else' (Score:3, Informative)
Lot's of effort has been put into it. It's just an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. The amount of effort to reverse engineer/document the internal structures to support read access must have been huge.
The reason NTFS write access is so difficult to develop is not because because of the NTFS structures themselves, but because the algorithms that the file system driver uses are unknown.
For example, the details of balancing/re-balancing the b+t
I am just curious... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I am just curious... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I am just curious... (Score:2)
Re:I am just curious... (Score:5, Informative)
A: They were "Odyssey," "Neptune," "Mars", and before that they were using city names "Chicago," "Detroit," "Memphis". But now they've turned to mountain names: Whistler and Blackcomb are popular ski resorts a few hours from Seattle, located in British Columbia.
Re:I am just curious... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I am just curious... (Score:3, Informative)
Whistler is a ski resort in BC.
Longhorn is a bar in Whistler, BC.
Popular with the execs on the project, apparently.
Re:I am just curious... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I am just curious... (Score:3, Funny)
Stepwise (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, they will package the new release with new bells and whistles to give people a reason to upgrade... but most function will be able to be obtained before the official "longhorn" release.
SP2, for example, contains several aspects of longhorn that were forced to the users sooner. Examples are the pop-up blocker and the protected memory to prevent buffer overruns.
Re:Stepwise (Score:2, Informative)
Anyway, to keep from wasting space... here is the original slashdot article about longhorn meeting XP [slashdot.org]
Here's an article discussing that several aspects of longhorn are actually in SP2. [winnetmag.com]
No Avalon either (Score:2, Funny)
Re:No Avalon either (Score:2, Informative)
"Longhorn will include new graphics technology, code-named Avalon, to present advanced graphics effects and three- dimensional images."
Re:No Avalon either (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No Avalon either (Score:2)
Re:No Avalon either (Score:2, Interesting)
A lot of these features were also announced to be part of that OS but were removed in the beta versions. Some did not even make it to any beta version. WinFS was even announces to be part of Win NT 4.0, so they should have a lot of time to complete it.
If all these stuff will be removed in longhorn, will it just be 'Windows XP Second Edition'?
Re:No Avalon either (Score:3, Interesting)
vapour, where? (Score:5, Funny)
DNF next? (Score:2, Funny)
Reminds me of several previous MS efforts (Score:5, Interesting)
My guess is that WinFS was turning out to be one of those grand and glorious ideas that was falling short of "doable" - at least any time short of 2041.
Re:Reminds me of several previous MS efforts (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Reminds me of several previous MS efforts (Score:4, Informative)
Cairo [microsoft.com] and Chicago [microsoft.com] both became mainstream products.
Neptune [windows-tweaks.info] (WinME successor, for consumers) and Odyssey (2000 successor, for business) were merged together to create Whistler, which wound up becoming Windows XP.
Touchy, Touchy, Touchy, Mon Capitan. (Score:3, Interesting)
Allchin: Don't call it 'Shorthorn' [com.com]
Well, now that you mention it. It seems like an apt moniker.
Have a Microsoft Night? (Score:5, Funny)
It got me thinking about a little project I think would be at the very least, ammusing.
Something like, a cordinated anti-MS day in about a year when LUGS all around the world get together on a certain day and destroy MS software as well as MS effigees to protest our discontent. I'm picturing piles of old win3.11 floppies and cds of 9x, NT, office, games, books, and hardware billowing thick tenticles of black smoke, smearing the sky with... I don't want to pollute the environment with smoke, especially with MS's taint, so make that piles of stuff to be blown up with demolitions and shattered with small arms fire.
Then we could build a huge effigee of Bill Gates and Steve Balmer bowing before the penguin. Then have the penguin announce in a booming voice that tyanny in the land of Microsoft has to end and that his cleansing fire clean MS of dishonesty, at which time the penguin effigee would belch a fire ball that consumes the Bill Gates and Steve Balmer effigee.
Heck, this could even be an annual event or a holiday comemerating a specific moment in history when man freed himself from one of the worst tyrranies this world has yet faced and to celebrate the general spirit of individuals who wish to free and those around them as well.
This suggestion is to be taken with a grain of salt, but in a lot of ways, I'm serious. At the very least, if one LUG were to host something like this ala Burning Man style, I'm sure there would be a huge draw with resulting publicity and maybe some eyeopening in Redmond. However, it's time for the people to take to it Microsoft instead of them doing it the other way around.
Re:Have a Microsoft Night? (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, I'm part of the ecologist nazis.
Re:Have a Microsoft Night? (Score:3, Funny)
"...and the Lord God said `thou shalt build no idols before me'..."
"...and the number of the beast shall be 666"
"...and I just saved a load of money on m
Count Me Out (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt it if they are going to be putting it out in 2 years. So this is basically going to be Windows XP with a new UI, Avalon the new DirectX, Indigo a program "to allow software and services to work across networks and different devices." and some new programming tool WinFX that supports both XP and Longhorns UI.
Nothing special.
-----
Yep another Free IPods Link [freeipods.com]
Be engineers better than MS's (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Be engineers better than MS's (Score:2)
Good point, but look where Be is today...
Re:Be engineers better than MS's (Score:5, Funny)
They have to worry about whether it would work for users. I don't think the Be engineers had to... :-)
2007? (Score:2, Interesting)
Damnit. (Score:5, Funny)
What's so tricky about WinFS? (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft has higher demands on it, and it's harder to develop it the first time, and presumably their implementation is optimized to within in an inch of its life, but I still don't see why a project they're working on now won't be ready for 2006.
Could it be that they want to adapt their applications to use the new features before they release it? That I could see taking forever, since everything from Word down to the format Spider Solitaire saves its games in would be affected. But I assume that they've implemented a Win32 filesystem API on top of it, and presumably with tolerable performance, so why not release it and adapt the apps later?
Re:What's so tricky about WinFS? (Score:5, Informative)
The goal is to make their hard disk search easier, handling all types of data. Another goal is to be like open source, by giving proprietary software more reason not to re-invent the wheel, because they can access the data through another application. They will use meta data to define everything so any application can use any data.
The problem is that 3rd parties all have to agree on a standard, and no doubt patents will be involved, licensing, preventing applications from working well with one another to gain an edge, viruses will have a MUCH easier time doing silly things with your data (this could make distributed data mining a reality if a worm spreads enough), who knows if it will work in practice as well as it should in theory.
This is why WinFS doesn't replace NTFS but cooperates with it, it's a layer of meta data. Needless to say MS have a huge task on their hands.
Re:What's so tricky about WinFS? (Score:4, Interesting)
I still don't get why it's so revolutionary or difficult. Apple did it under a year.
Re:What's so tricky about WinFS? (Score:3)
Re:What's so tricky about WinFS? (Score:2)
Re:What's so tricky about WinFS? (Score:2)
Re:What's so tricky about WinFS? (Score:4, Interesting)
Imagine that the next versions of SQL Server and Exchange both rely on WinFS. If people aren't using WinFS, they won't be using SQL Server and Exchange. That's a big, big problem. I mean, look at the open source world. How many apps are there which really take advantage of all the features present in XFS, JFS, and ReiserFS? Almost none. It's because they have a history of dubious reliability, so people (and hence distros) have been slow to adopt them. That's precisely what MS are afraid of. They can't roll out WinFS until they know it's reliable enough that people won't be afraid to take advantage of its new features.
And don't forget that this is not an evolution of NTFS or FAT, it's a completely new animal. Not just in the data structures that are stored on the disk, but in the whole concept of what a filesystem is and how it's to be used. The fact that it's all new code makes it hard to debug; the fact that it's a new paradigm (apologies) makes it almost impossible. How can you know the new features are bug-free if there are no programs which use the new features?
Re:What's so tricky about WinFS? (Score:3, Informative)
WinFS is NOT a file system. It is a way of describing and sharing meta data so applications can use ANY data format used on the hard drive that is supported by installed applications.
NTFS is still used, WinFS runs on top, providing the meta data. WinFS has absolutely nothing to do with data being corrupted on the ha
Re:What's so tricky about WinFS? (Score:3, Interesting)
To do this however comes at a co
Re:What's so tricky about WinFS? (Score:4, Informative)
Righto. And that's what CoreData in the 10.4 Preview allows.
What about Apollo program comparisons (Score:5, Interesting)
Granted a system like WinFS can be extremely complicated but it is not a "selling" point to me for Longhorn. I will compare it against other features it offers and decide to buy it or continue to use XP.
Re:What about Apollo program comparisons (Score:3, Insightful)
Would you want to fly into space on a shuttle that runs Windows?
"Uhhh Houston, what the hell is a pagefault in kernel32.386?"
Re:What about Apollo program comparisons (Score:3, Insightful)
More Uncompleteness (Score:2, Insightful)
gShares.net [gshares.net]
Complexity issues (Score:5, Funny)
vaporware? (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft has been doing this for too long for my taste now. Promising all remarkable and amazing things that keep us on our toes and when the product hits the shelves it's only ever so slightly different from its predecessor.
How is this 'interesting'? (Score:3, Informative)
WinFS Is A Prime Example Of Unneeded Bloat (Score:5, Interesting)
On paper, this sounds neat kind of in a thesis paper sort of way. But the practicality of it was way beyond what any desktop user would need. I had problems figuring out how to use it efficiently (after all you have to have meta data lined up). I couldn't even begin to figure out how to explain how WinFS would help grandma and grandpa.
I do see WinFS as an interesting tool for server applications but for a desktop it isn't feasible without a whole heck of a lot more tools. On a server I can see this being a powerful tool to help keep your web app file data sane because you can force metadata and relationships there. On a desktop it would have been a feature with cumbersome tools used once a month. This is the very definition of bloat. I am very glad it was shelved since the cost vs benifit of WinFS on the desktop was completely off.
Re:WinFS Is A Prime Example Of Unneeded Bloat (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:WinFS Is A Prime Example Of Unneeded Bloat (Score:5, Informative)
I could also see this being a boon for business. Often when I'm on the phone with someone, I like to pull up all of our email coorespondance. They could do a "spokewheel" implementation: each person would be an axle and various spokes would link to business contact info, personal information, photos of them, etc. Think calling a client, having it pop up and asking "Oh, how was your son's birthday last week?" Again, ideal implementation.
Easy Way to Add WinFS... (Score:4, Funny)
As usual... (Score:2)
Another article (Score:2, Informative)
New Windows Planned for 2006 [washingtonpost.com]
featuring the amusing subhead "Microsoft Dumping Features to Meet Deadline"
We Don't need WinFS Anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as I can tell, MS (and GNOME 2.6 it would seem), seem to envision a filesystem where every file is simply dumped to one / or c:\ directory and this uber search finds all the files I'll ever need for me? Is this a joke? In this senario, ~50% of all the metadata will be the same for every file. I made it, with my privilages, with my settings etc... . After a while, even the simplest of searches will bring back a dozen matches. I can't see this working.
The reason given for this is novice users, who don't know where to put their files. they rely on their default program settings and just dump their files anywhere and then complain when they cannot find them. Fair enough, they are novices, but essentially hey are keeping a messy hard disc. WinFS would help these people only in the initial stages. As soon as too many files named 'Picture of Aunt Tilly' are present, the system will fall on its ass.
Metadata/Search based filesystems are based on the assumption that users do not know where their files are. I do, you do and for those who don't, no amount of programming wizardry is going to help them in the long run. Ultimatly they will have to learn how to organise their files, just like they have to learn to type,use the mouse and browse the web. And in reality, most people do eventually learn how to organise their files, if they use computers enough. And if they don't, our regular searches will be of use to them with only minor improvements. It's tough, but consider the search results that 'Find my Accounts for Acme Corp. for the third quarter of last year' brings up on the shared drive for even a medium sized accounting department after only a year.
Give me nested directories 30 levels deep!! And no spatial browsing please!
I did wast an entry in my journal on this stuff. maybe now someone will read it?
Re:We Don't need WinFS Anyway (Score:2)
GJC
Re:We Don't need WinFS Anyway (Score:3, Insightful)
Same crud, extra layer.
Re:We Don't need WinFS Anyway (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe having to know where your files are is a concept that should be discarded. Remember when everything was on the command line and the only way to get anything done was to know all the commands ahead of time? Then the GUI came along, and it became possible to explore programs and figure out how they worked as you went along. Or when you had to know the IRQ or other bits of technical data about a
Don't know about WinFS but I know the dream (Score:3, Informative)
The dream i
Re:We Don't need WinFS Anyway (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree with you that putting everything in the same basket and rely just on metadata to extract info is quite stupid (probably we'll end with a "folder" and "subfolder" metadata anyways, so what's the point?). But relying exclusively on directory trees to classify data has definitively limits, in that a certain file may belong to at most one category (if you are thinking that symlinks and hardlinks solve that problem nicely, pleas
...and avalon/indigo will be available for xp/2k3 (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course WinFS was dropped (Score:2, Insightful)
You don't seriously think that Microsoft had any intention of shipping WinFS with Longhorn did you? That's one of their standard reasons why you shouldn't switch to an alternative operating system - because [x] fancy feature is coming out Real Soon Now. Once they've held onto you long enough to get over the hype surrounding their competitors, and once the release date looms nearer, they drop the pretense that they are going to ship with the fancy new feature. WinFS is vapourware [wikipedia.org].
"In other cases, vapo
As much as I don't like Microsoft... (Score:5, Insightful)
... I was actually interested to see what WinFS would be like. From what I understand, it is supposed to be different from the traditional heirarchical filesystem. If the filesystem worked like a database, then folders would be the equivalent of tables and SQL statement results, if it actually used folders.
I know that Apple's upcoming release of Spotlight [apple.com] with OS X "Tiger" is probably what WinFS would appear to be like from the GUI perspective, but its underlying filesystem is still heirarchical since they're not changing it. I presume it would work similar to the way iTunes displays libraries and playlists like a database, yet stores the actual files in a heirarchical arrangement only visible to a user who manually browses the filesystem. Data displayed from WinFS would be a direct representation, rather than indirect one of data stored heirarchically.
Macs and spokewheels (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with MS's implementation is that they want to tie SQL to it. Noble (it'd vastly improve performance) but unnecessary.
It still remains to be seen how well Apple pulls this off (my guess: ok, but not perfect). While the implementation is easy, getting it to work as expected will be hard.
I'd personally be satisfied with just a "spokewheel" system: have every person and event as the axle of a spokewheel and have the files branching off it (business contacts, vacation photos, etc). Not too complicated: just define a person schema in XML, make each person the top key and work off that. I think MS originally wanted to take that approach (based on the MS research projects) but overdeveloped its complexity.
I have a few questions about WinFS (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't all information potential file data? Is Microsoft really doing something different than has been done before?
The article also states "WinFS uses a direct acyclic graph of items (DAG)."
The math goes back to the 1970's, as referenced by MathWorld [wolfram.com] Old math can be used in new ways. Is his a new way when it's used in the FS that Microsoft is attempting?
The articles also says: " the WinFS data model provides the following concepts to describe data structures and organizations: * Types and subtypes. * Properties and fields. * Relationships. * Constraints. * Extensibility. "
Does the new Reiser4 file system [namesys.com] support any of these concepts? -- Is WinFS really as new and exciting as the marketing and media says it is?
Thanks.
Re:I have a few questions about WinFS (Score:4, Informative)
Not really, WinFS is a service that runs in the background to help in categorizing and searching for files that are stored in the good ol' NTFS file system. WinFS internally uses NTFS streams to store metadata. NTFS streams are already present and fully supported in both Windows 2000 and XP already, but not that widely used by these operating systems.
You can make some basic use of streams by right clicking on a file in Windows XP, selecting Properties, and then selecting the Summary tab. The information you type in there is associated with the file as streams. There's a program at Sysinternals.com to display and set any streams for any file.
Similarly, NTFS supports hard links, junctions (to mount drives as folders), sparse files and more "cool" stuff that the OS doesn't have graphical interfaces for. A bit funny.
Re:I have a few questions about WinFS (Score:4, Interesting)
ReiserFS and WinFS are two competing philosophies.
WinFS is a data store. It's a separate, monolithic database which stores meta-information about files on the traditional filing system.
ReiserFS is about extending existing filing system technology such that data becomes transparent and self describing allowing any kind of querying facility to be layered on top.
Let me try an explain. Let's say you have a hard disk of OpenOffice Writer documents, which you wish to query. This is hard, because the SXW format is a complex beast. To the operating system it's an opaque series of bytes. Let's see how you'd query photos embedded in these documents:
Firstly you need to locate and open the file using the POSIX fs apis. Next, use a zip library to navigate the compressed filing-system-within-a-file that zip files are, to locate one of the XML files contained within. Now load up an XML parser and navigate the XML to one of the image nodes. Unfortunately not all information is easily represented using XML: this is one such piece, so it's actually stored as a JPEG encoded binary file ... decode that, and now navigate the structures in memory to arrive at the data you want.
Word documents are not much better.
This is an extreme example, but hopefully you see my point. Look at how many APIs were required to get to the wanted information, yet they are all fundamentally the same. ZIP files are miniature filing systems which add a compression feature (and performance!). XML is a tree of nodes: hmm, kind of like a filing system. Binary structures in memory tend to be trees or graphs of information: a bit like a filing system that supports linking.
What if we could unify these APIs? What if the underlying operating systems filing system was powerful enough to be the superset of all the features these disparate APIs provided? ZIP files are used for compression, for fast access to the contents and because it makes it easy to send them via the internet and manipulate them with modern file managers. XML is used because it's an efficient way to represent a complex tree with many nodes. Binary structures are used because some stuff just can't be easily encoded as text.
But we have a problem - there are sound technical reasons why openoffice documents are not a sparse collection of files. For one, most filing systems are not fast enough: a file is an expensive thing, opening and reading them even moreso. You don't want a file for every cell in a spreadsheet, or every paragraph in a word processor document. The overhead is too high. There is another problem: files cannot be directories and vice-versa. Having each paragraph as a file may be convenient for search engines but it's not so convenient for users.
What if files could simultaneously be directories, and what if we used a filing system designed so that a 3 byte file is not an unacceptably inefficient design? What if we could decompose our elaborate file formats with our chunks and headers and streams and DIRENTs into a tree of files all accessed via the POSIX APIs: open(), read(), close() ?
No longer would the structure of an image embedded in a word processor document be a mysterious and opaque bytestream to other programs. Now it's trivial to trawl the content of files and index them.
You see, this is the genius of Hans Reiser. He realised that writing indexer plugins for every file format under the sun would never work, it'd never scale, it'd never give users consistently good results. The right way is to make the foundations powerful enough that the concept of file formats itself falls away: by minimizing primitives, by unifiying interfaces, the system becomes more powerful.
The technical challenges of such an approach are enormous, it can only be done because ReiserFS is not a "bet the company" move, as
big problems (Score:4, Interesting)
"Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence."
- Unix fortune teller
A new release strategy (Score:4, Interesting)
If you think of new paid MS desktop releases as whole number releases of Gnome/KDE (substantial changes, new environment), MS is in pickle trying to compete with the "minor" even numbered releases the Linux desktop teams are pushing out. Every six months, Gnome users get a little more - that's hard to fight when you only release new OS changes every 4 years.
Whenever people asked me why they should upgrade from Win2k to WinXP Pro, I always said "You'll get a new annoying cartoon interface and a couple nice internal things, but mainly, you go with XP because of the periodic updates that become available to it". I think if you look at XP that was released and compare that to the XP users have now (with journal tablet support, two new versions of the windows media framework, three revisions of built in wireless support, and now native bluetooth support all the other stuff tossed into SP2), I think that everyone has to agree (whether they like XP or not is a different story) that its a substantially changed product. This is ignoring the products that were pushed to all previous versions of windows (.NET Framework, IE and OE, DirectX 9, etc). Its also not just cosmetic features - The windows userland driver model is being deployed mid-XP release as opposed to in a new Windows version.
From the look of it, the changes keep coming - by the time Longhorn rolls out, XP users will also have the same major version of
It looks like WinFS follows the same strategy - don't buy Longhorn because its completely different from XP - buy it because its slightly different than XP at release, but also because you'll be eligible for a four years update cycle that will end with Longhorn being substantially different than XP's resting place.
Re:A new release strategy (Score:3, Insightful)
It's also somewhat similar to the way Apple rolls out OS X updates. (That has also caused consternation among a small vocal minority of OS X users that don't want to pay for upgrades but don't want to be "left behind".)
Red Hat, Sun, Covalent, and others are embracing subsc [itmanagersjournal.com]
For those that didn't RTFA's... (Score:4, Informative)
- No WinFS
- WinFX, the new API to replace Win32 will also be released for Windows 2000 and XP.
- Indigo [microsoft.com], the new communications infrastructure for Longhorn will be released for Windows 2000 and XP.
- Avalon [microsoft.com], the presentational subsystem in Longhorn will be released for Windows 2000 and XP.
So, in essence, it seems like the difference will be as great as that between Windows 2000 and XP -- a bit of polish and a new interface, maybe semi-3D this time. And that's when Microsoft is working hard? I have no idea why I should check out Longhorn as Windows XP will be far more mature at the time (and maturity plays a huge role in Microsoft's products), and Longhorn seemingly won't even bring any major new features.
I have no idea why they're backporting a lot of key features to XP and 2000 either. I would understand it better if they developed under an open source model, but this company should want profit from selling licenses! Huh?
By the way, WinFS was never a file system, it's supposed to be an extension to NTFS. So one of the links that say "more than a file system" is horribly incorrect.
Re:Ok... (Score:2, Funny)
But in a nutshell, yes. You get to pay MS to say "Hey look at me, I got that newfangled Winders! It's the Shoehorn version!"
Re:Longhorn a long ways away (Score:3, Insightful)
As for the OpenGL desktop (Score:3, Interesting)
HPFS (Score:3, Informative)
I used it for many years and never had any problems with loss of data or file system corruption.
Re:AAH! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE STOP CANCELING WINFS? (Score:3, Interesting)
FAT16
FAT32
NTFS
NTFS5
WINFS