Microsoft Uncertain About WinFS for XP

Ant writes "As a follow-up to WinFS to be available in WinXP story from a few days ago, BetaNews reports that Microsoft (MS) stopped short of confirming reports that it plans to back-port its next-generation WinFS file system architecture to Windows XP. MS tells BetaNews it is only evaluating the move while also acknowledging WinFS is still years off. "We are currently evaluating making the WinFS storage subsystem available on this platform and will make the decision based on what is best for customers." a Microsoft spokesperson told BetaNews."

WinFS

The term 'vaporware' comes to mind...

WinFS vs Tiger Spotlight?

I've seen many comparisons between Tiger's Spotlight, and MS's WinFS in features... and heard from people I know that have Tiger betas running as full time desktops who say the spotlight problems & updates seem to be where the most work is going into Tiger at the moment.

Does anyone know just what the differences are in concepts here? Is Spotlight going to offer much the same functionality from the point of view of a user? Is it really even the 'killer app' it's supposed to be?

I'm curious as I've heard so much mentioned about it these last few years (10 now with Windows).

Re:WinFS vs Tiger Spotlight?

Spotlight is like a desktop search engine, allowing searching for metadata in addition to "regular" actual file data, right?

In that case, that's about half of what WinFS is supposed to be. It will make greater use of metadata, probably through the already existing NTFS streams in e.g. Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Yes, you can already store and search true file system-level metadata in those operating systems, an almost as little known fact as that you can mount devices in Windows XP to "folders", similar to how it works in Linux. I can for example mount my DVD-ROM at E: to C:\Devices\DVD. Anyway, that combined with the WinFS service running on top of NTFS helping out with indexing to allow instant database-style searches, should offer something similar to Spotlight functionality, if I understand Spotlight right. :-)

However, there's more to it than fast database searches in WinFS. It also aims to change how we look on stored files altogether, taking away system-related concepts like "hard drives" and physical "folders" when navigating your stored data. Instead, your data will be organized into more abstract libraries of data. You'd for example store your games in your Game library, whose contents wouldn't be tied to one folder on one hard drive. You'd go to your Game library, and double-click on Doom III, instead of going to C:\Games\Doom III. Actually, C: wouldn't even be a concept seen by the user anymore.

It's even supposed to seamlessly work through network shares, however last thing I heard is that won't be in the initial release of WinFS.

So it's a new data model, and a new way to look at how you store data altogether.

All this is how it may look to the user. However, to Windows, it's a storage engine running as a service on top of NTFS.

Very early stages of WinFS could be found in the already released/leaked Longhorn alpha versions. Although you couldn't really say it was anything near functioning, you could see the concepts, and that was likely the intention at this early alpha stage.

Here are some quotes from Paul Thurrot's site:

"Microsoft is trying to make it easier for you to find your data on our ever-increasing hard drives. By adding relational database capabilities to the file system, it will take less time to find documents, email, and other data. After all, as one Microsoft executive asked me recently, "Why can we find anything we want on the Internet in seconds, but it takes so long to find our own data on our own PCs?" In addition to the underlying WinFS technology, Microsoft is also adding a new file system concept called Libraries, which will organize like collections of data in Longhorn, regardless of where they are physically stored in the system. For example, a Photos & Movies Library would collect links to every digital photo and digital video on your system.

"I should not care about location when I save," says Microsoft VP Chris Jones. "Why can't I just click on my computer and it shows me my documents? It is a computer. It should know what a document is, what I have edited and annotated, what I have searched for before, and what other places I have looked for documents. It is not just documents on my computer I am looking for. It is documents I care about."

------------

"NTFS will be the only supported file system in Longhorn, from a setup and deployment standpoint, though the OS will, of course, continue to support legacy file systems like FAT and FAT32 for dual-boot and upgrade purposes. The oft-misunderstood Windows Future Storage (WinFS), which will include technology from the "Yukon" release of SQL Server, is not a file system, Mark Myers told me. Instead, WinFS is a service that runs on top of--and requires--NTFS. "WinFS sits on top of NTFS," he said. "It sits on top of the file system. NTFS will be a requirement."

Interestingly, when WinFS is enabled, file letters are hidden from the end user, though t

Re:WinFS

The translation of MS's statement: We can't get the damn thing working, so fuck it.

Re:Not Vaporware

Not actually, no. But I'll walk you through it.
"Vaporware" is sarcasm. Microsoft has quite a marked history of big claims and late deliveries.
No surprises here, really :)

Hate to say it.

But I told you so http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=141645&cid=118 66750 [slashdot.org]

clearly

Its in consumer's best interests to force them to upgrade lest they be left behind and forgotten.

Best interests?

From the posting, my emphasis:

"We are currently evaluating making the WinFS storage subsystem available on this platform and [We, at Microsoft] will make the decision based on what is best for customers." a Microsoft spokesperson told BetaNews.

Thank you...

...and please order those Microsoft WinVoting units, I don't want to do any thinking come the begining of November anymore.

Re:Best interests?

In fact I do use FAT with XP. My second drive is partitioned into several FAT drives, one for "Temp", one for the pagefile, and one for the system catalog....

FAT needs to access the disk a quarter of the amount of times for each read/write operation. It only makes sense to take all of these "extra" I/O operations and off-load them onto another drive. After I learned about this little trick (which is centered around the original strategy of moving the swap off the main drive) I've been a Windows user again in fact. I've setup and forgot about two Win2K machines with this strategy because they _never_ crash. [Of course you've got to admit that people get click happy and say the PC is frozen when Windows enters "trashing" mode and they reboot that bad mo-fo..]

Can't customers make choices on their own? Make it available and if it sucks we won't use it, problem solved.

Re:clearly

Its in consumer's best interests to force them to upgrade lest they be left behind and forgotten.

Normally this is standard MS mentality but I disagree in this case. Here's why:

Hard drive space is friggin' cheap [newegg.com]. Look closely there. The 80GB unit is $55 while the 40GB unit is $48. Wow... For that kind of bang/buck, manufacturers might want to start bundling Linux with Windows in a dual-boot configuration. And coming soon, virtualization [google.com] - you'll be able to run Linux and Windows simultaneously on the same damn PC.

What better method of migrating people from Windows?

WinFS, however, throws a monkey wrench in that. While linux NTFS [sourceforge.net] is coming along nicely, Microsoft is fearing the loss of the proprietary-ness that has locked them in for so long.

Linux on the desktop is close (though ever so frustrating at this point). WinFS is Microsoft's last ditch at thwarting it for another couple years.

Re:clearly

How is this standard MS mentality to force people to upgrade? They just recently discontinued support for NT4. From 1994. XP is still freely patched since 2001. 2K too. Most new developments (IE, .net, ActiveX, etc) are often still available for older versions of their OS.

How is Linux support for Linux from 2001? Yeah, yeah, theoretically you could download all the source and compile from scratch, yadda yadda...but even Red Hat recently killed stuff that was less than a year old.

How is APPLE support for their products from 2001? Hell, most new programs require 2 or more paid upgrades for X to even function.

This is standard mentality for pretty much anyone but MS. They support and back-port things for free quite regularly. Say what you will about their other business practices or security, but they are far and away the best in the industry (of major OSes at least) at updating things for free.

Re:clearly

WinFs isn't really a file system - it's more of a indexing service and namespace. It still runs NTFS under the hood.

not cost-effective

They realized it's not cost effective. Nobody is going to spend extra money getting xp with winfs. They'd have to give it away free, and they probably realized it would cost them a pretty penny in developer time to get the thing to work, especially games.

Call Me Bill

Anyone else think this is Bill's white whale?

Re:Call Me Bill

Anyone else think this is Bill's white whale?

Steve?

Re:Call Me Bill

Hi Bill,

I heard recently that you might be after a 'white whale'. As it so happens I have a few harpoons from my last job at HP, I would be happy to sell them to you on the cheap.

Drop me a line if your interested.

Carly Fiorina

What they really want to say....

"We are currently evaluating making the WinFS storage subsystem available on this platform and will make the decision based on what is best for customers."

Which means in plain english: It don't work yet and when we do release it you will have to pay to upgrade!

Alternate meanings

By saying that they're not sure, they are safely leaving the escape route unblocked, in case they fall behind schedule again or whatnot.

MMhhhmmm sure

Microsoft has been working on this for ten years. It is never going to happen. This was supposed to have been in 'Cairo' and has been a listed feature in every development OS since then. It is never going to release.

Re:MMhhhmmm sure

They've been advertising hype for 10 years. Real development time is questionable.

Meanwhile, Google has a free app which is great at local searching and incredibly fast. And it doesn't take a new filesystem to use it.

You're point is strong though.

Why the push in the first place?

All of the information coming out seemed to show that WinFS was simply a metadata layer atop NTFS. It wouldn't add any actual data handling to the file system, it wouldn't speed up read/write, and it wouldn't make NTFS more accessible to other operating systems.

All it would do is make locating files easier, at least that's pretty much how they were shopping it around. You could do that without adding another layer to the HDD by simply having an element of the OS scan in the background efficiently.

Conversely, though, I wonder if the reason they're starting to back off of WinFS now is because including it would mean that all of those obscure file locations where companies like to hide setup files would be that much easier and faster for people to locate. I've lost count of the number of times I've needed to hunt through hidden folders to find some stupid file to edit or delete. And the search taking 30+ minutes didn't help.

Maybe instead of working on WinFS, they should focus on coming up with an alternative to the registry.

What they say?

"We are currently evaluating making the WinFS storage subsystem available on this platform and will make the decision based on what is best for customers. " a Microsoft spokesperson told BetaNews."

That never stopped them before!

I think this is more of a REALLY DUH!

If I was in microsoft, I would think that backporting a filesystem wrapper over NTFS is probably a bad idea.

It's hard enough to design this WinFS, much less change all the OS components to be compatible with this filesystem. I also think the learning curve/'WTF is this' factor is too great to drop onto Windows XP users. Let it ride on Longhorn, but make sure you give a really full explanation on how to use this meta-data FS well.

I certainly don't find a need for a DB-based FS, but I know that it helps. Will it help enough people enough to make it worth implementing?

Re:I think this is more of a REALLY DUH!

You don't understand Spotlight.

Index Server did just what it says: It indexed file contents. Every operating system can do that. The Mac, the platform with which I'm most familiar, has been doing that for at least five years now, and probably longer; I can't remember exactly.

It's not useful, and here's why: The days when most files were plain text are long gone. There are still plain text files out there, sure, but they're the vast minority. Most computer users probably don't create them at all, in fact.

Instead, people have e-mail messages (which are stored in plain-text files, but which are not plain text; they are in fact filled with what looks like gibberish to the casual reader), audio files, photographs, PDF documents, and application files. Most of your application files these days are being written in XML format which, like e-mail, is stored as plain text on the disk, but is filled with lots of stuff that's not related to the contents.

So merely indexing the contents of text files is not useful.

That's why Spotlight does things completely differently.

It's kind of hard to imagine that there's somebody out there who doesn't already know exactly how Spotlight works -- Apple's only been talking about it incessantly since last summer -- but I guess I have to concede the possibility. So let me explain it.

There's a program that runs in the background all the time. It's called "mds," for "metadata server." It's a system service; people don't interact with it directly. The purpose of mds is to store all the metadata on the computer and to respond to queries.

The mds program gets its metadata from another background task, mdimport, or "metadata import." The mdimport program reads files, extracts all the information from them it can, then passes that information off to the mds program.

The mdimport program is extensible through modules called metadata importers. Each metadata importer corresponds to a file type. When the mdimport program examines a file of a given type, it fires the relevant metadata importer module(s) to extract information from that file. Each metadata importer implements exactly one C function: GetMetadataForFile. This function receives a path to the file to be examined, a file type and a pointer to a key-value-pair data structure called a "dictionary."

GetMetadataForFile populates the dictionary with metadata stored as key-value pairs. When it returns, the mdimport program passes that information off to the mds program for storage.

The important idea here is that GetMetadataForFile can do anything to the file to extract metadata from it. A metadata importer might pull ID3 tags out of an M4A music file. Another one might extract EXIF metadata from a digital photograph. Another might parse a word-processing file in XML format, discard everything irrelevant, and return just the names of the fonts used in that file. Another might pull the date stamps out of a chat transcript and store them as start-time, end-time and duration metadata. Another might pull key frames from a QuickTime movie and store them as thumbnail data. Another might find e-mail messages with attachments and store the type and size of the attachment as metadata. The sky's the limit.

Spotlight is way more than just simple content indexing. It does content indexing, of course, using a new version of Search Kit, but that's just a part of it. (It's also not really that new. It's just a slightly optimized version of what's already in Mac OS X.)

As usual, the casual dismissal of something fairly revolutionary can be blamed on a high degree of ignorance on the part of the person doing the dismissing.

Re:I think this is more of a REALLY DUH!

What he said: iFilters [microsoft.com]

Who actually thought that this would happen?

Admittedly the feature was little more than a glorified hashtable, but still:

1. This is MS, the company that takes 15 years to realize viruses might be a problem.
2. If it wasn't going to make it in a new version of windows, which accounts for half of all their revenue, how were they going to give it away for free??

Y'all need to stop drinking that kool aid, or at least stop taking it rectally..

winfs is better because?

slap a B+Tree index on a journaling FS, and you have better performance than dealing a full transaction-oriented database-derived file system...

if conceptually WinFS is such a good idea (regardless of how MS implements it), open source FS would've already appeared for Linux or BSD....hmmm....

Best for customers?

That article contains a wonderful example of the difference between Microsoft and the OSS movement. Microsoft is developing a new filesystem that (one would hope) is vastly more advanced than the one they currently use. Yet they're hedging about making it available for older systems, because they have yet to decide what is "best for customers".

Now, if they were really interested in what's best for customers, you'd think they'd let the customer decide on a case-by-case basis. They could just release the filesystem for older systems via an extensive patch and see what the customers decide to do. Instead, Microsoft is going to determine what is best for all their customers.

The OSS folks would just release (and have released) new filesystems and let the bits fall where they may.

Central planning versus individual choices. Remind you of any 20th-century struggles?

Re:Best for customers?

To be perfectly honest, do you really think that the average consumer has the ability or the desire to decide what is "best" for themselves? People, as a whole, look at computers as an appliance that either works or doesn't; there's so much that we take for granted that they don't even know exists.

No offense meant, but I think that your post is "a wonderful example of the difference between Microsoft and the OSS movement". While I agree fully with the OSS movement in theory, there is a lot more to a computing experience than the sum of the components. There is the overall presentation to the user, THAT is what Microsoft gets right, and THAT is what the OSS movement needs before it can ever truly be mainstream.

In other news...

A Public Relations representitive from Microsoft was found dead today, apparently tossed from the third floor window at Microsoft Headquarters. According to bystanders, the words "see if this teaches you to leak our stuff!" were shouted after the person was thrown out the window. News at eleven.

customers?

>>what is best for customers... any time i hear a microsoft spoksmen say that, i laugh my ass off jordan

Huh?

Didn't Microsoft announce a few months ago that they were uncertain about including the WinFS architecture in the OS? Personally...I don't care, the less I have to rearchitecturize (word?) my HDD the more at piece I will be

The turtle and the wabbit

While MS is all on about how much better they are or going to be, the fact of the matter is that you'll get there, where YOU want to go, sooner by going more direct and without incompatable file formats, DRM type of constraints, etc..

How often does a company use a cracked version of some sofware package that they actually purchased, so to avoid the problems of the additional protection complexity?

Breathe the Vapor

Haha! It's still great vaporware [slashdot.org]. And a good test of whether someone will suck up any BS Microsoft spews.

I see a security hole...

Database FS's make things easier to search for... but that can be a bad thing too.

If someone found an exploit to run queries on that database, then you can surely find passwords, addresses, vital documents, etc. in a snap!

At least when you obfuscate your folders, you make it harder for both you and intruders to find your info.

Re:I see a security hole...

"At least when you obfuscate your folders, you make it harder for both you and intruders to find your info."

So, by making your computer less useful, it becomes more secure. I'd say "that explains a lot", but I fear mod retaliation.

Problems with this...

Am I the only one that thinks that journalism is going to the shitter. BetaNews posted an UNCONFIRMED story. As in, didn't research it fully.

God it's good to find good news these days. Especially with government "regulations" (aka. Filtering)

2 Alternatives That Work Now

If you want a better way to find your files now, just use Google's free desktop search tool, or do a better job of keeping your files organized. I prefer the latter.

Re:2 Alternatives That Work Now

You know, it's pretty hard to keep 'your' files organized on shared systems; say a lab or business share. Even harder when they aren't 'your' files; system files, program files, etc.

This makes a common network drive so much more accessible; imagine 20 users with 30 shared folders and 30 personal folders all on a network storage unit.

The OTHER point of view to yours:
I want the computer to do the stuff it's good at (organization and storage) and I want to do the stuff I'm good at (creation, manipulation, modification).

So if the computer can do a better job of keeping my files organized than I can, I say, let it.

Yes...

Yes but if i reformat my harddrive, will it be compatible with Duke Nukem Forever? Whoa... slashdot cliches... i feel so dirty. I gotta go take a shower y'all.

Got a Question...

At risk of sounding completely stupid, could someone explain what the intricacy is that makes developing a file system such as WinFS such a consuming task? I have limited experience in terms of in terms of developing suite-style applications, but can't comprehend what would make the development cycle for something like this take so long.

Is the coding that difficult? Is getting the standards correct? Testing perhaps? I have no idea.

Somewhere deep in the bowels of Redmond.

Bill: Is it ready yet?

Henchman #1: No, not ye--

Bill: HURRY IT UP DAMN YOU!

Henchman #1 and #2: Yes sir.

Bill: Damnit how long does it take to download the Tiger beta!?

*Bill scowls while looking over Apple's website*

Bill: We must hurry, it will take us surely a year to figure out how to create WinFS.

Still years off?

"MS tells BetaNews it is only evaluating the move while also acknowledging WinFS is still years off."

Isn't Longhorn (with WinFS) supposed to ship next year or so? With WinFS still years off, does it means that Longhorn (and WinFS) is still in vaporware status?

WinFS is what makes longhorn worthwhile...

"We are currently evaluating making the WinFS storage subsystem available on this platform and will make the decision based on what is best for customers."

Usually whats best for customers is the same as what's best for business, but not in every case. It's bad business to give away to XP users the only thing that makes longhorn worthwhile...

What will be our reason to buy longhorn? And wasn't it announced on here a while back that they scraped winFS for longhorn? Why yes it was... [slashdot.org]

64-bit XP

If Microsoft back-ports WinFS to 64-bit XP, it could hurt or help them. In one way, it could get more people to go for 64-bit systems. Those same people could make an easy transition to Longhorn because they would already have 64-bit systems.
But in another way, if they go to XP64, they might not have as much of an incentive to go to Longhorn. There would already be one 64-bit OS with WinFS. People might feel that Longhorn is unnecessary.

Is Longhorn the new Copland?

With all the delays for Longhorn, I wonder if Microsoft fans don't feel like Apple fans during the late 90's, eternally waiting for Copland. During the wait for Copland, Microsoft was basically ahead of Apple, since it already had a true preemptively multitasking OS and Apple fans had to put up with cooperative multitasking and frequent crashes. Now, while Apple is poised to ship OS 10.4 Tiger with Spotlight (aka all the functionality of WinFS) and CoreImage (aka all the functionality of Avalon) before July, Microsoft faces delay after delay. Of course, Microsoft OSes are frequently late (who can forget the many delays of Windows 95?), but though the release came fast and furious for 98, ME, 2000, and XP, Microsoft has been stagnating since then. Even a simple service pack has turned into a huge production for MS to produce and ship.

I think all of these signs point to MS's code base being too big and unwieldy. I don't think anyone doubts that IE is too bloated to fix. Just compare the time between the release of 5 and the release 6 to the time between the release of 6 and now. If Microsoft could implement full CSS selector support and non-broken PNG display, I'm sure they would have by now, but IE is just too tangled to fix quickly anymore.

So, if MS is wandering in a Copland-esque desert, what's to be done? As unbelievable as a suggestion as it may seem, maybe they should take the OS X route and just buy a competitor and cut their loses. Starting over from (not quite) scratch will give Windows a shot in the arm. WINE has already proven that backwards compatibility with Windows applications doesn't have to be dependent on using their existing OS code. They should just buy out Be (a good choice since they already have a metadata filesystem) or someone else with a Unix-like underpinning, and rewrite Windows the right way. It will take another 3 or 4 years, but at this rate, they're going to need that much time anyway. Spinning their wheels on Longhorn won't get MS anywhere. If MS wants to innovate (and that's a reasonable question), it's time to take a chance, kill Copland, and try something new.

Re:Is Longhorn the new Copland?

I don't know a lot about Avalon, but I don't think it does what you think it does. Or maybe it's Core Image that you've been misled about. Whichever. Let me see if I can help.

Core Image is a set of modular, hardware-accelerated image processing routines. It does things like scaling, color-correcting, blurring or sharpening and compositing raster image data. The modules, called Image Units, are written in a C-like language called CIKernel that's derived from the OpenGL Shading Language. Image Units are hardware-agnostic, meaning they can either run on the CPU or an available GPU, depending on what hardware is available. Core Image is smart enough to know whether the GPU or the CPU is faster, so if you have a fast CPU and an entry-level GPU, Core Image will pull the Image Units back into the CPU so they'll run faster. That kind of thing. It's a lot like SGI's ImageVision, according to this blogger who seems to have a clue [shapeofdays.com].

Avalon, as I understand it, is more like a 3D version of Quartz 2D. I've heard it described as Direct X gone way out of control.

According to a not-for-attribution conversation I had with an Apple employee some months ago, Apple hasn't invested any money in developing a 3D version of Quartz 2D because there's simply no demand for it. People who want to do actual 3D programming are already using OpenGL and it's working spectacularly. Quartz 2D is for the other 99% of developers who draw 2-dimensional things to the screen, and those guys don't give a flip about 3D.

Re:Is Longhorn the new Copland?

I don't see the situations as comparable at all -- In the "Copeland" case, Apple desperately needed an new OS and faced huge technical challenges in getting there.

Microsoft really doesn't need Longhorn at all, the core OS is in decent shape, the monopoly is chugging along, and they call add incremental features as downloads or service packs. Yeah, the next version of OS X will have more flash, but nobody has ever bought Windows because it's flashy. (Whereas Apple needs that consumer upgrade revenue.)

Avalon is already in Beta for XP and they've pretty much admitted that nobody was working on IE for the last few years.

The big news about really isn't WinFS or Avalon. It's the rewrite of the core APIs to support .NET. This is somewhat similar to Steve Jobs' NeXTStep project -- It's designed to make the whole thing more programmer-friendly, but may not provide any direct benefit to end users until years later.

Beat them at their own game?

Any plans to port ReiserFS to Windows? There are 3rd party tools like Paragon's Mount Everything that allow read/write to ext2 partitions, so it seems Windows can be extended in this way.

The vapourware reason

I suppose that there is the usual chaos at Microsoft in the marketing department where a makreting person says something that is meant as the usual Microsoft vapourware in order to gather customer interest but where it is so obviously out of sync with actual developments that someone else has to clarify things a few days later.

I presume that marketing also realised that too much talk about Longhorn features being backported to XP could significantly harm sales of Longhorn when it eventually does come out as people will obviously then simply use those features in XP instead of upgrading, thereby making the usual Windows version chaos (some 15% of all Windows users are still using Win98) even worse and pulling down MS' revenues.

On the other hand, MS knows that it needs to have some way to get the new stuff (XAML, .Net by default, Avalon, Indigo, WinFS) to be used by a critical mass of developers and users or else it could very possibly fail as badly as MS Passport did.

Damned if they do and damned if they don't. Strangely, I feel no pity with them whatsoever, as it was their own predatory monopoly practices, where they would kill their foes with beneath the belt tactics in order to get that very last 3% of users that they didn't already have, i.e. they were never prepared to sacrifice anything in order to have a cleaner and more unified user base.

But will it support more than 640 files?

Count me out for being a guinea pig and upgrading...

What I love about Microsoft

"...will make the decision based on what is best for customers."

That's why I love 'em. Always thinking of what's best for their customers.

Fragmentation?

How about creating a Windows file system that is resistent to fragmentation?

Hell, Novell managed to do it ages ago, with the file system that they created for NetWare... 'way back when NetWare 286 was state of the art for Network Operating Systems...

Later, it just got better, with sub-block allocation, as an example.

NTFS is up to, what, version 5? And, Microsoft still hasn't managed to make it efficient... file system fragmentation over time pretty much creates the "need" to replace computers: The defragger that comes with Windows XP, for example, is woefully inefficient... and the users don't run it anyway.

So, over time the perception is that "the computer is too slow"... or, "the server is slow"... when the reality is that, barring hardware malfunction, the processor will run at its rated speed forever.. as will memory... the slowdown comes from filesystem access, which, using NTFS, will degrade over time, if the filesystem is not defragmented.

And,if you use the Windows defrag utility, it won't fully defragment the filesystem: It is a subset of Executive Software's Diskeeper, and so, it's in the latter's best interest to be sure that it doesn't.

As one example: It cannot defragment NTFS' Master File Table (MFT). Another: It requires multiple passes to come close to anything approaching what the purchased version does, and again, who's going to do that?

I wonder how many computer hardware upgrades have been driven by this over the years... more importantly, Windows Server upgrades?

The Longhorn/Copeland comparision

More and more it looks right.

I picture Gates in a cape and tights running endlessly from group to group giving 'genius' guidance to move things along. He finishes and leaves and the people gather and shake their heads.

Ya, right...

...and will make the decision based on what is best for customers.

HAHAHA! If I had just a penny for every time I heard that from any coorperation, I'd be a millionare! OTOH, if I lost a penny for every time it wasn't best for me, I'd be broke!

The rest of the article...

A Microsoft spokesperson also proudly announced that WinFS would be the underlying filesystem for Infinium Labs Phantom Gaming Console. "It's a great opportunity", he stated. "With the optimizations we've added to WinFS, Duke Nukem Forever will absolutely scream on the Phantom."

Isn't the concept flawed anyway?

If you have enough technical know-how you should be able to manage where your files are on the system, at least to the degree that you can get things done. Has anyone considered the possibility that this feature may not be very practical from a user standpoint? What is this really but a faux scheme that allows you to pretend your files are "where you want them"? I can imagine this new implementation to be exploited quite expediently by virus writers and other malicious attackers. Soon, no one will know where there files are on a Windows machine. This may seem skeptical, but I have a feeling that this is just another feature that will be "turned off", if possible, by people who know what they are doing.

Yeah, right, as if...

Based on what is best for customers, my butt.

They will make the decision based on what's best for Microsoft. I don't think the customer has mattered to Microsoft much since about Windows 95. In fact, 10 years later, I'd argue that customer welfare is near the bottom of their priority list.

Offhand, I can't think of a single move they've made in the last 10 years that really and truly had customers in mind. Being in a monopoly position, their mindset has shifted away from 'what services can we offer in exchange for money' to 'how many feathers can we pluck from the goose with the minimum amount of squawking'.

They've always been nasty, hardball competitors, but at one time they shipped some pretty kickass software, too. Word for Windows was particularly good. Even that horrible flop, Bob, was at least well-intended. But now that they are in a position of real power... if you'll notice, they never, ever ship anything that's really disruptive of or threatening to their main monopoly.

Most likely, their internal studies will be focused around how much money they can make and how much customer lock-in they can manage. Will giving it away free give them enough power to be worth losing the cash from selling it? Should they sell it at a low price, to generate some cash but get it into fairly widespread circulation? Should they sell it at a high price to corporations, to gather lots of cash but gain little leverage over filesystem standards? Should they bundle it only into Longhorn to help 'encourage' upgrades? You can rest assured, thoughts like "Is this technology something that every Microsoft customer should be able to use?" will never even occur to them.

Whatever their actual thought process ends up being, actual customer welfare will not enter into it.

Uh...

"and will make the decision based on what is best for customers"

Uh, don't the customers get to decide what is best for themselves any more?

From the Microsoft Testing Labs: why it's late

Programmer: Hi Cindy, did you test my WinFS? Cindy: Little glitch, WinFS needs SQL, which wouldnt install cause I only have 3GB free on C: and it won't install anywhere else. Also the SQLinstaller needs Java 1.3b, I have 1.3c. And you can't backup a patch level. Then the Java installer thinks my new 300GB disk has -133GB of free space. Then the SQL script that makes the default database wants to make a 40GB rollback partition on C:. Then SQL can't find MFC70.DLL. Then SQL complains that my OS doesnt let it open up listeners on ports 4331, 7334, 4337, 7443 and 4773. Then SQL starts up and promptly dies,something about it can't find the authorization service running. Which it doesnt tell me what the name of it is, or how or why it isnt running. The help page doesnt tell you how to get it running, but does have a link to an animation of a cute doggy pawing through a book. It also triggers a 2GB expansion of my VM file, and dumps a 512MB core file. --- Programmer: Oh yeah, that's the hash table. MOVE OVER, let me drive.

(Hour later: Okay, it's up now) Cindy: Why is my computer so slow and the disk light on all the time? Programmer: It's indexing every file. Which requires unzipping every zip file and cab archive and calling upon special document translators to extract the text therefrom. It all goes into a big hash table in RAM or VM more likely. Cindy: Why is it really slow for about a day after I install this other app? Programmer: Well, it had to index all the installed files, including all the help files that are already indexed by the help file system. But don't worry, you can set a checkbox for "low priority indexing". Cindy: So this gloabl index of everything may be hours of days out of date? Programmer: Wellllll, yep. Cindy: Hmm, maybe it's not quite ready for the average Joe yet?

Why don't they just use ReiserFS v4

It will be faster, allow plugins, and is available right now.

Dangling a carrot?

Somehow, this seems like Microsoft is dangling a carrot in front of us all, then when we get exicted about it it moves out of reach again. (Oh, look! WinFS, the "next-generation" filesystem is coming to the "embattled" os Windows XP...) Yeah, Linux is looking better after this game.

Who needs that crap, anyway?

Dear Bill:

What we need is a SECURE, STABLE OS that protects users from malware (by DESIGN). No more activex crap, no more "browser included!" bloats. Stop adding new features and give us a "WinXP done right".

WinXP would work pretty well without all these spyware/malware/viruses stuff. Bill, go ask Linus, he knows the secret.

(And please, Bill, stop this "world domination" idea you got. It's not healthy)

Why not?

After all, they back-ported FAT32 to Win95a, didn't they?

Oh, wait, what's the reason we divide things into 95a and 95b again?

Forget it, Microsoft wants to tax us again and there's little reason to believe that they won't use every trick up their sleeves to get us to buy into yet another iterative, evolutionary "upgrade." NTFS may not be all that great, but compared to spending another $300, it's pretty damned good.

Open Source WinFS possible?

If enough of the API specifications and functional description for WinFS are published, some young folks with lots of time on their hands could probably write a WinFS work-alike and have it ready before Microsoft.
Wouldn't it be insane if Linux supported WinFS before Longhorn or XP?

I had a copy of the WinFS source code

It's on my hard drive somewhere... if only I could find it... crap...

Re:But why bother backporting?

What if they include a converter, sorta like they did with Windows 98 and FAT32?

Re:But why bother backporting?

WinFS runs on top of NTFS. Get your information straight.

Re:But why bother backporting?

I would.

WinFS runs on top of NTFS anyway, so you probably wouldn't need to format.

And if I could get the database features to find and catalogue all my documents, pictures, music etc. then I would consider it worth it. Finding things even when organised can be a real pain after a period of time.

Re:But why bother backporting?

redundant score here I come!

It has been said a zillion times and I'll say it again because some still ignore the difference between these levels of abstractions.

Look at WinFF [wikipedia.org] on wiki as they say what many have said in the previous slashdot article:
The system is loosely based on a combination of the next version of Microsoft SQL Server 2005, codenamed Yukon, and an underlying NTFS filesystem

Re:Yeh Right

Just like every other product Micro$oft puts out, this one will be put off for another two years. Mark my words, we will not be seeing WinFs for a while.

MS release schedule == plan to maximize share value

Re:Which came first...

Both : DNF will be shipped as a bonus game with WinFS.

Re:But why bother backporting?

Insightbull. FAT or NTFS. No FAT32. FAT32 is not an option.

Re:But why bother backporting?

"How many people with WinXP with FAT32 or NTFS would actually format their drives to get the cool new filesystem?"

How many people formatted/converted to Fat32/NTFS to use larger hard drives? My point? It depends on how attractive the benefits are. How many people are going to format their machines to switch to Linux? Same equation. If WinFS isn't interesting, it won't be well adopted. Mod me up.

Re:But why bother backporting?

Nobody, it sits ontop of NTFS, so you wouldn't need to format anything.

Re:Tiger Vs Longhorn

What make you think they'll still be selling Office in 5 years?