Over the past year, Microsoft has managed to create a perfect smokescreen around its new WinFS file system. It has spent this time touting a new, database-supported filing system to replace NTFS and FAT. Compatibility doubts were not long in bubbling to the surface. During the PDC (Professional Developers Conference) held in Los Angeles at the end of October, we spoke with Microsoft brass to gain an exclusive insight into the planned technological advance. Read the article at Tom’s Hardware.
WinFS: Microsoft’s Data Management Vision
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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That’s an awful alot of assumption about how optional WinFS/NTFS is and what it can run on to extrapolate from the fact that WinFS sits atop of NTFS.
The rest of it reads like a bad Babelfish translation (apologies if the author is not a native English writer, but still) with gratutitous use of the thesaurus thrown in for flavor.
Much better overviews of WinFS can be found pretty much everywhere else.
Admittedly I’m not in a position to judge, but this sound an awful lot like the befs. Am I missing something here? If so what is the difference that can be seen between the two?
Compatibility with NTFS partition is already a difficult thing (at least for writing, reading seems to be stable on most alternative OS). Compatibility with WinFS is likely going to be a headache, it won’t be as easy as FAT32.
” WinFS is likely going to be a headache”, is that the point of doing it?
“is that the point of doing it?”
I don’t think so, but it sure will be one convenient
“collateral effect”
Yeah, I’ve been thinking this all along… this supposedly new and revolutionary innovation does sound an awful lot like BFS. The guts aren’t the same, I guess… but, arguably BFS had better guts (journalling etc)…
That said, it still sounds handy. I don’t use Windows these days but I should think it’ll make the lives of those who do a bit easier, once they’ve got used to it. ‘s all speculation, of course… we’ll have to wait quite a while before we see just what this thing really looks like..
For people who already know how to organize their files.
They said that about Directories too.
This will AID in organization, if used/implemented properly.
The above article refers to WinFS as a file system, it isn’t. WinFS is a services that runs on to of NTFS.
I have to agree with that comment, I will spend 2 or 3 hours with my longhorn install to decrapify it to work like win2k. Just like I do now with XP.
This article read like basically the same press release that have been avalible for months online. It doesn’t bring anything new to the table with their “exclusive” first look. Another bit of hot air blown out by Tomshardware. There’s a reason why most of the community ignores them these days.
Anyways, to all those who talk about the bloat that this will add I honestly don’t think it’ll bring that much in. Not only that, but in the time table that it comes out we should be into Serial-2 interfaces if not beyond let alone the processor and memory advances. The over-head should be pretty minimal.
For those of you who’re happily riding the “anti-Microsoft” bandwagon, allow me to bring you down off of your ignorant cloud.
Yes, WinFS does seem a lot like BeFS… except they’re really nothing alike. I’ve yet to see one really good, in-depth explanation of WinFS that people like some of you could understand… that time will come though. Why isn’t it here now, you ask? Please continue onward…
It’s quite hilarious to me how so many people judge Microsoft and its operating system. I mean, it’s gotten so bad that you people read one bad comment after another and you SOMEHOW believe that JUST BECAUSE it’s negative, it MUST be the truth. Because of this, you sit there and base your opinions on half-assed assumptions which equate to absolutely nothing. THAT’S why there’s not an idiot’s guide to what WinFS is… because most of you don’t even give it a chance in the first place! If you really want to learn about longhorn, go here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/longhorn
I mean… all the information is sitting RIGHT THERE!
It also amazes the FU** out of me how many people seem to forget that this OS still has a good 2+ years of development left. Why is that not taken into consideration? Oh, that’s right… the last meaningless “anti-Microsoft” comment you read didn’t say anything about it, so why would you even DREAM of potentially thinking of it yourself?
WinFS isn’t just some copy of BeFS. Compare it all you want but truth be known, WinFS is the realization of something Microsoft has had in mind since completing Windows 3.1. Any of you heard of “Cairo”? Long story short, WinFS is “Cairo” realized. Hell, y’all should recall the article that was right here on this very site regarding Cairo and LH… if you don’t and you frequent this board, it’s about time you quit wasting so much energy towards a false hatred of Microsoft as you sit there on your NT box.
To the guy who commented that WinFS isn’t a file system: The article did mention that WinFS will run over NTFS, read a little closer.
Jimbo: Why don’t you just use W2K still, then? You saying that you’ll “decrapify” longhorn shows that you have NO CLUE as to what LH is going to be, thus, you’ve managed to make yourself look extremely ignorant to the aforementioned.
To the guy who said winfs is a copied BeFS… you spoke for yourself there, pal. You and every other person who loves to say that Microsoft is stealing from this and stealing ideas from that… Jesus Christ, do you people who make these comparisons have NOTHING better to do!?
I’m glad Microsoft is the scapegoat for so many of you but
WinFS doesn’t equal BeFS and the AERO UX will look NOTHING LIKE anything Steve Jobs could ever dream up. I’ll be one of the many sitting here using LH, all the while laughing it up at everyone TRYING to find something negative to say about it or saying what ideas Microsoft stole… yadda, yadda, yadda.
The fact of the matter is… there will never be another OS to achieve what Windows has and will continue to achieve. I don’t care who thinks Jobs should’ve been the first to achieve this greatness… he was a day late and a dollar short. Thanks Mr. Cutler for your contributions and genious to the NT kernal.
I could go on and on but I won’t. My main objective with this post was to get all of you “anti-Microsoft” folks good ‘n pissed off so you’ll fill the rest of the world in on the things Microsoft is stealing and how great your alternate OS is! OH BOY, I can’t wait!!!! lol.
-ReflectiaX
Oh come off it. GNOME Storage already has working prototypes, and we’ve seen nothing from Microsoft except promises.
Umm, there was this little thing last October where MS put on a conference and handed out an early pre-alpha of Longhorn with WinFS on it. It isn’t complete but there is enough to get started learning how to program against it.
It looks like libstorage hasn’t been touched since September 2003, unless you count some Makefile dependecy tweaking. The natural language parser (Longhorn will have something akin to this too) looks like it got a little more attention near the beginning of December. I think Set is busy with his new job with Red Hat, and I don’t think that jobs is developing Storage.
Someone better hurry and take up the slack, as I’m sure MS has been hard at work finishing things up in Longhorn so they can start an extensive beta period later this year (according to plans). Developers will then be able to write against the Longhorn APIs for the next year or two and have new apps ready at launch time.
And Gnome will have nothing (or a flamewar will erupt about whether Storage should support multiple SQL backends as Linux is all about choice).
Or maybe there’s something to Miguel De Icaza’s mysterious allusions to Novell’s future iFolder 3.0 having all the same features as WinFS. Of course that’ll be written in Mono. I sense yet another flamewar over that.
Genious, my friend. I really enjoyed reading that. You made perfect sense out of something that people will unfortunately continue to bicker about, regardless. I suppose one statement sums all of this up:
To each his own.
Nothing MS has released has had any sort of functional WinFS in it.
ReflectiaX: Im glad you enjoy stereotypes, you seem to be full of them. This happens to be OSAlert, where alternative OSs rule. MOST of us dont pirate windows, we simply dont use it. I have been happily living without Windows for almost 2 years, and there are those have been done it much longer.
What can WindowsXP do that OSX cant? I’d venture to say very little. OSX is not just “pretty”, it IS functional, any person would admit that. Or is Notepad so special?
So what if MS has the market share, almost all of the really innovative things out there have come out of SMALL (often NONPROFIT) places like colleges.
// Neither is just being a webserver for Linux. //
Linux is not some “toy” anymore (to many), it has plenty of financial backing.
Its NOT content with the webserver, and is making its way onto the desktop, but I dont want to bring up my desktop linux rant again.
I realize MS isn’t just an OS company, but they have no motive to innovate.
//Companies are already developing upon the technologies in LH //
Haven’t seen one yet.
If windows is not good, then why will it sell? Even though linux is free, people still use windows. Why?
I use both windows and linux, but i can’t stand linux on my desktop, linux doesn’t detect my USB camera, it doesn’t have so many tools that i want to play with on desktop etc etc and i don’t like windows as my dev box, because windows doesn’t have command lines tool which make my life much easier while programming.
Personally i don’t think windows is bad, in fact i strongly feel its an excellent OS for desktop. Windows XP is mostly more stable than linux+KDE.
If you don’t like Windows, you are free to choose other OS. You shouldn’t just come and feel proud by cursing Microsoft. I mean look at KDE, i think they copied most of the design from windows.
Learn to appreciate good things in other OS and only then you can improve linux. You got to have accept the facts and hard realities buddies.
People always seem to compare WinFS with BeFS and Reiser4. However, they’re quite different. The “innovation” or the whole point of WinFS is to provide a relational (SQL) layer on top of the filesystem. I think we can make the same layer on top of Reiser4, BeFS, or even ext2/ext3 for that matter.
Dude, calm down… take some deep breaths… and relax
Not everyone here conforms to the stereotypes you seem to have formed. Some do, probably, but not most
I certainly hope my psot didn’t come across as anti-MS, it wasn’t intended to (I am fairly anti-MS, but not, I hope, in the annoying way that a minority of arrogant, xenophobic geeks can be!).
I assume the “guy who said winFS is a copied BFS” is me, or the guy I was replying to… in which case, I’d like to point out that neither of us said that. I realise the actual workings of the thing are different, it just seems to me that the user’s experience of it will be quite similar. I won’t pretend to be an expert on an OS that is 2 years away from release, of course.
P.S
I am intoxicated (2 year Anniversery with Girlfriend!) so excuse my inability to stay on one topic.
“P.S
I am intoxicated (2 year Anniversery with Girlfriend!) so excuse my inability to stay on one topic.”
What did she do, walk in and look over your shoulder, wondering where you were at and catch you typing about pimps and what not?
tis morning now, I just had to explain why I could not stay on one topic… I can get a bit scatter brained (even without alcohol)
p.p.s
What IS ms doing?
it is not making money on xbox
it office products are bug ridded
XP and server 2003 are not THAT good to lean back and sit on it’s haunches
the only things that it is TRULY good at are MICE and LIES
Let’s see what you are doing?
Being jealous of MS, they make money you don’t.
…It’s quite hilarious to me how so many people judge Microsoft and its operating system. I mean, it’s gotten so bad that you people read one bad comment after another and you SOMEHOW believe that JUST BECAUSE it’s negative, it MUST be the truth…
While I can’t speak for other people, these days I tend just to assume Microsoft will invaribly screw up a given feature is some way or another. 90% of the time, I’m right, and it leaves me time to get on with the rest of my life.
Re: Reflekt
By Anonymous (IP: 209.234.166.—) – Posted on 2004-02-01 02:15:28
Let’s see what you are doing?
Being jealous of MS, they make money you don’t.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
no actually, I just expect that when I BUY something that it WORKS as ADVERTISED
if I don’t BUY it then I am spared from COMPLAINING!
do you see… or are you too afraid to have a screen name?
“Compatibility with NTFS partition is already a difficult thing (at least for writing, reading seems to be stable on most alternative OS)”
Not hard. Just a lot of work. The Linux-NTFS people have all the resources online. Some due to MS opened these specs, some because of reverse engineering, etc. What they miss is just that: the resources, the manpower. This very question is answered in their FAQ btw.
>If windows is not good, then why will it sell? Even though linux is free, people still use windows. Why?
The Trabant factory in former Eastern Germany didn’t produce good cars, but still Estern german citizens would accept to stand in line for several years to buy one. Why?
So you see, the willingness of buying a product is not nessesarily related to the usefulnes or quality of the item for sale.In the case of Windows people buy it because they have lots of old data in file formats that can’t be read by any existing program in competing OSes. Or perhaps they have some digital camera that only comes with windows drivers.
Just look what happened when OpenOffice.org became available. Before that time nobody but the geeks that solved all their problems in “vi” would consider switching to Linux, now large organizatons like some German cities use or consider using Linux. The secret is that OpenOffice.org resonably well handles old information written in MS-Office.
As people that just use e-mail, office software and webbrowsing can switch to Linux without sacrificing backward compatibility we can expect a larger Linux user base. And as the user base grows it becomes more profitable to port programs to Linux and we can expect many companies to port their software. And as file formats becomes portable between OSes people will no longer be locked in by the wall of file formats. By then people will no longer accept bying the MS-trabant OS.
The Trabant factory in former Eastern Germany didn’t produce good cars, but still Estern german citizens would accept to stand in line for several years to buy one. Why?
You don’t think comparing an oppressive, communist society with a free market – even one dominated by a single player – is just a teensy-weensy bit outrageous ?
In the case of Windows people buy it because they have lots of old data in file formats that can’t be read by any existing program in competing OSes.
Perhaps, then they should have saved their data in a more portable format ? Or maybe other manufacturers should get their arses into gear and make software that can read Office file formats – apparently it would sell like hotcakes.
Or perhaps they have some digital camera that only comes with windows drivers.
Blame the camera manufacturer or, even better, vote with your wallet and don’t buy it.
I find it somewhat ironic you use an example of an oppressive government to make your point, yet you seem to be favouring a similar principle – forced people to act the way *you* want – as a solution.
Just look what happened when OpenOffice.org became available. Before that time nobody but the geeks that solved all their problems in “vi” would consider switching to Linux, now large organizatons like some German cities use or consider using Linux. The secret is that OpenOffice.org resonably well handles old information written in MS-Office.
No, the “secret” is that the whole Linux platform has evolved markedly since then, not to mention numerous other market forces. Openoffice is but a minor aspect of a very large picture – to try and suggest it played a pivotal role is optimistic at best.
As people that just use e-mail, office software and webbrowsing can switch to Linux without sacrificing backward compatibility we can expect a larger Linux user base.
We can expect a larger Linux user base once Linux provides a sufficiently better platform that Windows. If/when it becomes cheaper and easier to use in place of Windows, it will start to grow. Of course, it’s hardly a given that will ever happen.