WinFS Beta 1 Released Early 582
Mouldy Punk writes "Infoworld is reporting that WinFS Beta 1 has been released. The new relational file system for Windows is posted on MSDN Subscriber Downloads. This release is designed to offer developers a preview of WinFS capabilities. WinFS will be in beta when Windows Vista ships and will RTM afterwords. WinFS, when it ships, will be available for download for Windows Vista and possible support for Windows XP is being considered. The distribution mechanism for WinFS will be through an add-on download much like the .NET framework is today. Tom Rizzo also notes that there is a new blog dedicated to Win FS."
GNOME Storage? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm just wondering if any progress has been made on GNOME Storage or if it's just completely stagnated (a Seth project stagnating? Why I never!). My guess is all he did was some special natural language interface (which should have been an add-on later) and did no real work on a relational file system.
I wish that guy would finish something for once.
Not to sound too offtopic, but... (Score:4, Informative)
However, the only thing I can saw I was pleased about was its performance. On a 2.4 ghz celeron with 512 mb of ram, it ran fine, just as fast as XP on the same system.
What did impress me about a week later was when I took that spare HD I used for vista and loaded OSX on it. Now that looked beautiful, ran fast, ran native OSX apps fine, and my conclusion from that week of OS experimentation was that if OSX ever made it to whitebox computers legally (let's not start this discussion again) it would knock Microsoft out of the water.
Let's face it, few home users will switch to Vista legally. Most will get it with a new computer. My school uses Windows 2000 and probably won't switch to even XP for a while. So go figure.
No. (Score:1, Informative)
Check your facts please: the last thing people need is more FUD about what is and isn't DRM.
WinFS Is *Not* A Filesystem (Score:5, Informative)
WinFS is not a separate filesystem. It uses NTFS as the filesystem, but then stores metadata on top of that (the same way other filesystems like HFS+ have for years).
You don't need to reform to WinFS, it's not a filesystem, but a relational database that carries metadata about existing files on an NTFS partition.
Umm (Score:4, Informative)
WinFS [wikipedia.org]
Re:Is this really a file system? (Score:5, Informative)
for more information.
Basically, it sounds like the files are stored at the low level as ntfs files, with a relational database wrapping around them, allowing you to treat them as
Don't forget DRM. (Score:3, Informative)
There's a reason Vista took so long to develop and it wasn't the end user interface [corante.com]
Re:What exactly is it? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Is this really a file system? (Score:5, Informative)
Trivia bit: Before NT4, you couldn't install NT on an NTFS partition. FAT was the only way to go. The install WOULD immediately convert the partition to NTFS on first boot, but it wouldn't actually install as NTFS.
Re:NTFS? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Is this really a file system? (Score:5, Informative)
It's more than a file indexer for a developer, but just that for the enduser. Right now, it seems Microsoft really just wants feedback on the API's. If any real innovation for endusers is going to come from this, Microsoft seems to hope developers will figure it out.
ext3 was essentially an add-on for ext2. Point being, some of the better improvements don't take reinventing everything.
Re:Is this really a file system? (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, by default the NT installer program would create a FAT partition and then convert it to NTFS. That was the order set up in the installer app.
If, however, you formatted the drive first in another NT machine as NTFS, you could then install directly to the NTFS partition.
Ever been to Cairo? (Score:5, Informative)
In 2003? Jesus Christ!
I seem to remember that in 1994, Cairo [wikipedia.org] was all the rage. Hell, it has been an idea since 1991. If I did not toss them out before I moved into my current house, I'd have scans of each individual article in Windows Magazine about Cairo from 1994, 1995, and 1997.
WinFS is not even close to being called "new."
Re:GNOME Storage? (Score:3, Informative)
The sytsem worked off the idea of installing a CORBA orb in the kernel to communicate back to userspace, where the query utility was located. This has advantages, but the enormous, gigantic disadvantage of having to have a CORBA orb inside of the kernel, and being dependent on this orb to keep up with the kernel's development. This of course, didn't happen, and development stagnated on this particular project.
After a while of working, I decided it wasn't worth my time to implement a database file system simply because Apple's Spotlight was almost exactly the system I figured would work best; a scanning indexer that would find all of the file information and put it inside of a database, leaving the files around the disk where they were located in the first place. This would require less hacking, less re-developing of the whoe UNIX virtual filesystem, etc. etc.
To be truthful, I really wouldn't mind developing the filesystem, but the Linux kernel makes it a pain really; it's a very fast moving target to aim at, so many other filesystems depend on the virtual filesystem staying the way that it is currently. But additions like inotify will definitely help in this area, but it'd still be a lot of work.
Re:Give it a rest, OK? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Is this really a file system? (Score:1, Informative)
Why is this modded funny? (Score:5, Informative)
I for one would like to know what Hans has to say on this fs.
Re:Not to sound too offtopic, but... (Score:3, Informative)
it's been my experience that upgrading your os is not always in your best interest. sometimes certain configurations end up worse after the upgrade. programs stop working, peripherals go haywire etc.
it's a good thing most updates allow an uninstall.
Re:Sounds like an AS/400 to me (Score:4, Informative)
You can read more about it at the relevant Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] article.
RTM? WTF? (Score:2, Informative)
RTM = Release To Manufacturer.
Took me a while to find out. *sigh*