WinFS' Demise Not a Bang Or a Whimper

Shadowruni writes "The Seattle-PI confirms with Mircosoft what MS bloggers and pundits have been saying all along. WinFS simply isn't going to happen. Some of its features have been 'merged' with other projects." From the article: "WinFS was dropped from Vista in what company executives described at the time as a trade-off to get the operating system completed in a timely manner. The release of Vista has since been delayed again and is now scheduled for November for large customers and January 2007 for the general public, though some observers say it may be out even later." Final confirmation of a story from last month.

Stable version even w/o WinFS ?

I would lay even money on Spring 2008. How long did Win2k take to stabilize? Granted XP went a little quicker, but the explosion of mal-ware made this an almost impossible, and some say unachievable task. I am sorry, but 10+ million lines of code just do not strike me as reasonably predictable and thus stable. At some point, the combinatorily explosion even might give the code sentinence...

 

Re:Mod parent up

I've been running on Vista, and most programs I've tried (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Opera, WoW, Guild Wars, Trillian) run perfectly fine. Some I've had to run with admin access (WoW, utorrent), others just worked. The only program I've had trouble with is Nero. Nero 6.whatever doesn't load Nero Express, but the actual Nero Burning ROM program works. I tried installing the Nero 7 demo, but it won't run for some reason. I haven't tried MS WOrks.

Re:Stable version even w/o WinFS ?

What's VISTA an acronym for?

I thought everybody knew this by now.

Viruses, Infections, Spyware, Trojans and Adware.

a shame

really this could have been an inovation worth looking at from microsoft. to bad it's not coming.

Linux having more manpower devoted to it than MS?

With more and more announcements like these, does anyone else think it is inevitable that Linux will overtake Microsoft on all bases one day? I mean, it's starting to show Microsoft is only one company devoting a portion, large but just a portion, of it's resources to its OS while Linux is an entire industry with a bunch of diverse people working on small parts seperately.

I wonder if the Vista's voyage is any kind of vindication to the Linux side, who was always ballyhooed as having "too many distros" earlier, but at least we could depend on someone, somewhere releasing some small update with some type of progress (small but frequent steps) rather than the monolothic approach of large but infrequent steps.

Re:Linux having more manpower devoted to it than M

Overtaking Microsoft is not enough to become the dominant OS, for example see OSX.

Not a Bang or a Whimper?

How about a Poot?

MS not now how to engineer software?

The release of Vista has since been delayed again and is now scheduled for November for large customers and January 2007 for the general public, though some observers say it may be out even later.

So MS has was founded just over 31 years ago. Wouldn't a company that has spanned that many decades have a better understanding of software engineering and have a better grasp at making deadlines? I just don't get it. I'm not a fan of MS, but I'm trying to look past that: I just don't get how they can keep underestimating Vista the way they are.

It's not the software engineering that's the probl

My theory is that it's not the software engineering that's the problem - it's marketing. So some of Microsoft's competition has full file indexing and document management. One set of marketing people say "Hey - we should do that! Can we do that? Make it a part of the OS, too? Of course we can - We're Mircosoft"

Meanwhile, other marketing people are looking at the feature set of distributed link tracking.... And another set of marketing weasels are looking at DRM respect... and attributes for near-line storage management... and (name any competitor's advantage, and expect Marketing to want to add it to the feature set).

The failure isn't in Engineering - it's in Management. Someone promised too much complexity.

Given a year or two per feature set, done incrementally, with product releases that allow the code to be tested and refined, WinFS probably could be engineered into a fine solution.

But the deadline is too close now. They need to cut their losses and bug-check what they have, now, so that the file system that does ship is stable, and not a huge disaster.

Interestingly, the open source solution of file systems is far better at trying out new ideas and making progress. It may take longer to make the features integrated - but that integration hasn't been a defining requirement for success or failure.

Re:MS not now how to engineer software?

Large commercial companies, like MS, do not hire the best coders. Actually, let me rephrase that. They do not retain them. The problem is that MS has ppl at the top that tell the coders what they will do. Many of these are solutions to the marketing problem of how do we retain our monopoly. MS has very little inovative work. That does not mean that they have not hired inovative ppl. But these folks simply move on. What you are left with are several types

1. The engineer who has been there since the 70's/early 80's and are worth millions themselves and now wish to keep accumulating.
2. New engineers who are being worked to death and will go elsewhere for their inovative work.
3. Finally, the grunt who really can not go elsewhere. They are stuck there.

Sadly, it is the final person who is filling the bulk of the positions.

Re:MS not now how to engineer software?

Ha! No-one knows how to develop software. No-one has ever known how to develop software.

Where is the latest & greatest in OS developme

I would love to see an OS released for the market that combines all of the research done within the past 10-15 years in kernels, file systems, HCI, application development, programming languages and APIs, virtual machines and virtualization, etc. However, look where we are at now. We're still using (for the most part) monolithic kernels, old file systems, old development tools, etc. There hasn't been any radical improvements in commerical OSes for quite some time. (One could say that OS X is a dramatic improvement, but much of OS X is based off NeXTSTEP, which had existed for quite some time before Apple bought them out).

I would like to see a new NeXTSTEP (technologically, not in terms of business success). NeXT was able to look at all of the current CS research of the time and integrate that into their operating system. NeXTSTEP was far ahead of its competition and, if it weren't for hardware support and the need for modern software, I'd probably run it as an everyday OS. Mac OS X is still ahead of its competition because of its NeXTSTEP roots, as well as Apple's improvements to the OS since 1997. Imagine if there was a new OS that took advantage of all of today's CS research, was very easy to use, and was compatible with existing software. I'd be the first person in line to buy it.

Until then, I can dream about my ultra-secure, exokernel OS with a database file system, flexible yet safe programming language, very easy to use UI, "boxes" to run Windows and *nix software....

Re:Where is the latest & greatest in OS develo

So what you want to see is an compilation of immature academic technologies into a mature stable production system. Why not just wish for a gold house?

Re:Where is the latest & greatest in OS develo

That OS already exists. There is so much cutting edge work going into Linux that Windows seems archaic in comparison. Yeah, the kernel is monolithic, that's because research over the past 10-15 years shows that microkernels are slooooow. File systems ... pick one, they ALL exist for Linux. HCI ... XGL anyone? Application development ... there are more IDEs and toolkits on Linux than one could learn in a lifetime. Programming languages ... all there. APIs ... broad question ... but anything that's not MS (and even some that are ... WINEAPI) are there. Virutal machines ... Bochs, VMWare, Win4LinPro, etc. Virutalization ... KML and XEN.

You can lock down Linux as tight as you want, use the Oracle IFS db based file system, use Ruby, KDE, VMWare ... I think you get the point. Now, having spewed all that, my impression is that you're waiting to see that "OS" from MS, nobody else, so you have to expect to be waiting a very long time, if ever for it. The fact is, if you want to be on the cutting edge, drop the past and use Linux. If you want to play games ... stay on Windows, it's DESIGNED for people who want something familiar, doesn't obselete any software compiled 15 years ago, and isn't so revolutionary as to scare grandma or the receptionist.

Re:Where is the latest & greatest in OS develo

Linux does have a ton of research-level development on it. You can do amazing things that you can't do anywhere else. Unfortunately the history of UNIX weighs in very heavily in almost all OS development. The fact is that the problems with UNIX are obscured by how horrendous Windows is. Think how much we could really move forward if we were to take some fresh ideas like Plan9 [bell-labs.com]. Unfortunately the software economy is too mature for a cutting-edge research OS to be able to get a critical mass of developers. No one wants to write software for a new OS when there's already so much open source out there for Linux/UNIX. If you could get paid to do pure research it would be pretty fun though.

Re:Where is the latest & greatest in OS develo

Actually I disagree that OSX is ahead of its competition. In some areas you might be right but in general I think that KDE is a lot more advanced. The IOSlave system and the kparts are both highly integrated into the rest of the system and used to great effect.

Anywhere in kde that you want to use a file you can use an IOSlave. This gives you url transparency for reading and writing in every app very easily. For example you can send a file in kmail and then use sftp to load an attachment from a remote server and hit send. It will grab the file and attach it just fine. You can go to a form on a webpage that expects a file say for uploading an image and give it an http, ftp, sftp, etc url to an image and just hit submit to upload it. These IOSlaves are integral to the system and I would say on average they save me several hours per week.

The other major thing is the kpart system. Other systems seem to just pay lipservice to reusing components. In kde there is one address book system, one spellchecking system, one terminal window system, one proxy configuration system etc. I can configure those things in just one palce and they are reused everywhere. Actually for text editors there is a good example of this take kate. Kate actually is two pieces one is an application called kate and the other is the actual kpart called kate. By default the kate text editor, kwrite, kdevelop3, embedded text views etc all use kate. So you can configure syntax highlighting for example and no matter where you look at the code it will be shown the same way. I have not seen anything remotely close to this in any other system.

For what I do kde is more advanced then pretty much any other gui system out there and it saves a lot more time them osx, windows etc do.

Also as a note you can write kde apps in python and ruby. Those are definitely flexible yet safe programming langauges and you can get apps up and running very quickly with those.

Gee, what a surprise!

I'd like to know how many /. readers predicted this a long time ago. But seriously, this just shows the troubles that MS is having maintaing the beast that is Windows. You can only sustain a rotten code base for so long until disaster strikes. And this disaster is Vista. If Microsoft is going to survive in the future they will have to innovate and restructure the way they create software.

http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]

Dun. Dun. Dun.

Another chair bites the dust.

Road Map

So I suppose the purpose of having a road map [pbs.org] is so that we can see where we didn't go.

Xix.

Next one huh?

From the article:

Thomas said it's too early to discuss whether WinFS would make an appearance in future versions of Windows.

And how often have we heard rumours of WinFS appearing in the next Windows OS?

Re:Next one huh?

> And how often have we heard rumours of WinFS appearing in the next Windows OS?

Ever since Jim Allchin Microsoft announced Project Cairo in 1991. It was scheduled for release in 1994, and it was to include an object oriented file system similar to what is now referred to as WinFS. Now, 15 years later, these capabilities are STILL missing in action. Here's a chart showing Microsoft scheduled and actual ship dates [mcpmag.com].

Of course, in the mean time Microsoft has been chasing other innovations and their ever expanding appetites ever since that announcement...Internet connectivity and its related clients (www, mail, ftp, nntp...), security, improving stability, not to mention all the kinds of new hardware devices that had to be supported. Many of them were first supported by Windows.

Nonetheless, WinFS is one of the most obvious cases of Microsoft having "dropped the ball."

Chickens finally coming home to roost

The house of cards that is Windows is finally unmanageable and on the verge of collapse. We've known it was coming all along, as they kept bolting stuff on and attempting to patch a crufty old OS in the interest of backwards compatibility. Their inability to integrate a new filesystem into it is a sign that their 2 decades worth of nasty spaghetti code has finally reached critical mass and simply can't be futzed with anymore.

They're just going to have to bite the bullet sooner or later and do what Apple did-- drop the old OS in favor of a new one, and ease the transition to it by allowing the old one to run as an application.

The billion dollar question is, will they be able to manage such a huge transition? Based on how terribly their OS projects are mismanaged, it's extremely doubtful.

Hmm...there may be a few invalid assumptions...

1) While the filesystem architecture is pretty horrible, there have been successes there by other companies.

There's are file system interfaces to NFS, FTP, EXT2, UDF, and a probably a few more that I can't think of right now. This has nothing to do with the previously badly written code.

The problem with WinFS is WinFS. It's got features in it that would make it unacceptably slow and easily corrupted. That won't fly. I think they thought that they could overcome these obvious problems through genius. Apparently its still hard.

2) Like every OS trailing back almost to the invention of the compiler, Windows is modular. And by that I don't mean "it has modules, or even dlls" I mean that the ideas within it are divided into real (and occasionally conceptual) pieces.

Some of the pieces are new and shiny and well written. Some are old and spaghetti-like. There's no reason to throw out everything to get one new piece. The fundamental design of the Windows kernel is neat even if the registry isn't. The network stack works pretty well even if the filesystem interface doesn't.

Along those lines,
I think they should stop selling windows as one thing. I'd like to know what new thing it is I'm getting in the latest version of Windows. Because they do occasionally throw out the old and replace it with something new and fresh that works great. But sometimes they only sell things that are exactly the same as the old, but with things I don't care about at all, or sell me lots of things I don't care about and only one that I do.

Good news

At least NTFS is somewhat understood now and drivers (although imperfect) exist and are being improved.

I understand that WinFS was going to have NTFS as the backend but this avoids the necessity to reverse engineer another closed and obfusicated layer of almost-compliant-with-the-spec-which-you-cant-see- anyway rubbish in order to function as well as Microsoft's own offerings.

In other words...

Microsoft has not yet finalised plans to make the most commercial success out of WinFS. Making it part of a highly pirated OS doesn't make commercial sense. Lack of features in a rebranded OS doesn't imply loss of sales / profits either. Improved features doesn't imply more profits from the OS business as well.

And so, until MS dcides whether to package WinFS as part of SQL or .Net or Active Directory or the Aero interface or BSOD... we'll have to wait and see.

Nov for corporate and Jan 2007 for the public?

I call BS. What "large customers" are clamoring for all the great updates that Vista will bring? Every major corpration that I've ever seen is bent on stability and steady IT deployments. NOT shoot from the hip, let's jump on this tech because it's "the latest per our IT department". Executives care about the bottom line, not the latest software release - unless it's MSeBaysoft(with the Paypal module).

I'd love to see one large customer named.

Vista will lose its name before it's released

Even when Vista does come out, no one will want it. Most PC users today use XP, and they are probably either perfectly happy with the way it is, or are so frustrated with its usage that they will be scared to upgrade. Just look at how little hype Microsoft has managed to generate so far. The removal of an originally "key feature" won't help either. The only people who will actually use Vista will be employees of Microsoft, and even they will only do it because they're forced to by their employers.

New computers

Just like XP, very few people will rush out and actually buy Vista. They will get it when they buy a new computer. I'm already seeing new computers that come with XP, but have a sticker on them that says they're Vista Compatible.

Just for the hell of it I got a DVD of Vista Beta 2 and loaded it on an XP box at home. It blue screened whenever I tried to browse the file system (thanks a bunch Trend Micro!) and the Control Panel evaporates whenever I try to launch it. The computer (3 GHz P4 with 1 GB RAM) is working fairly hard to run Vista.

Thanks, Microsoft.

Sigh.

...laura

Why WinFS failed to deliver...

Why WinFS failed to deliver...

When the concepts of relational database FS were being thrown around back in the mid 90s, there was a need for this technology. WinFS was to be the next progression of this work, but in its new form a non-structure, non-relational database FS technology.

WinFS was designed to sit on NTFS, never to replace it. In fact none of the proposed MS FS technologies were ever to replace NTFS.

WinFS did develop several inroads in database technology to move past relational and object oriented database storage concepts; however, this was not enough for it to succeed, but rather for its technology to be used in database and data access technologies like MSSQL and the ADO models.

There are two big reasons WinFS was stopped before ever seeing the light of day.

1) Efficiency over functionality
2) Business & Networked File Systems

The first is probably the biggest nail in the coffin, but yet also the hardest one to get through to people.

In current computing environments, adding in a good indexing technology, you can provide 99.9% of the functionality of WinFS and the overhead in doing so turns out to be less than if a full WinFS was implemented.

For example, it is easier and more efficient to have a database indexing backend that references the standard FS and FS contents than it is to put the FS contents into a database. This can be witnessed in products like MS Desktop Search, the Vista Desktop Search, and Apple's Desktop Search as well. (Although the Apple incarnation at this point is a bit more poky than it should be.)

The second part of this is the added functionality. One of the promises of WinFS was the ability to tag and relationally add content to files and file listings. Again, this does not offer 'enough' of an edge compared to the current FS technologies. Most of these features are already supported in NTFS, so you can add tagging, and additional fields of information to the files stored on an NTFS volume, basically providing the same features as adding new fields as a database FS would offer.

The only portion that is somewhat left behind in current technology that WinFS would have provided is the 'relational' nature of items in the FS. But again, the database indexing engine that is used for searching can also provide a certain level of these relational aspects to the file and contents.

So when you look at just these basic issues, you can see why in the end MS pulled WinFS as it exists today, and instead has put the functionality of WinFS in the current technologies, as you find in Vista already. (Fast search, relations between files and file contents, tagging using NTFS, etc.)

It may not be the best PR move for Microsoft in the long run, as people here will have a field day with WinFS being abandoned in its current form as an add-on to NTFS. But if you were Microsoft and could provide 99% of the functionality of WinFS with the database indexing services in Vista (and XP) and do it faster than having to add on a new WinFS layer to NTFS, they why would you progress with a product that isn't going to offer what they can already offer with the current technologies.

If computing power was on par with 1995, then something like WinFS would have more viability as Hard Drives and Processors could more efficiently do all that Vista is doing in a Database structured storage. However today, the overhead of doing this outside a database store is fairly non-existent.

On to the second reason, which is business. Implementing localized database stores for files and documents and keeping these in sync with corporate stores is a rather big hurdle when you consider that businesses are not average Joe users and have tons of applications and infrastructure to coordinate Files spread across networks that are outside of existing MS technologies. WinFS would break many business tools and models rather badly.

As for WinFS and Database FS concepts being 'vaporware' or dead, simply is a myth for the MS haters

Tagged...

Tagged as dukenukemforever. I could've told you this long ago...

Meanwhile, Hans Reiser is doing some real filesystem innovation [namesys.com]...

Old news

http://blogs.msdn.com/winfs/archive/2006/06/23/644 706.aspx [msdn.com]

sheesh zonk get some sleep already :)

*Sigh* if only they'd worked with Be

Be knew how to do an OS. Small updates sold frequently at low prices. If Microsoft released a new version of Windows every year to two years with incremental updates for say... $25 for a home upgrade, they'd have a steadier flow of cash and less expectations placed on them to make radical new things. Vista might actually already be here if Microsoft had sold successors to XP code named NT 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, etc. that added small improvements. They could then sell NT 6.0 featuring Aero for $50 for an upgrade or something. Seems to me their problem is biting off more than even they can chew.

Huh?

"WinFS was dropped from Vista in what company executives described at the time as a trade-off to get the operating system completed in a timely manner."

Oops... Too late for that don't you think?!

naming

At least now Microsoft is smart amd don't name their operating system after a specific year anymore.

I suspect WinFS failed because it was hard to do

After 10 years working to create a suitable storage layer for implementing semi-structured data queries in the FS for Linux, I gotta tell you, this stuff is harder than I ever thought it would be. :-/

(See Reiser4 [namesys.com] for our storage layer, and our Future Vision paper [namesys.com] for what semantics we are going to add.)

5 years to do the first draft (ReiserFS V3), and then another 5 years to get it finally right (Reiser4).

To do enhanced semantics cleanly, you want keywords to be just another kind of file (see our Future Vision paper [namesys.com] for why. That means you need to store files that contain phone number sized objects and keywords reasonably efficiently. Because of network effect economics creating a barrier to entry, you have to at the same time make traditional file system usage patterns at least as fast. That is hard. How hard? Oracle tried to do it without deeply changing their tree algorithms, amd implemented an FS on top of their database engine, and found that it was half the speed of a traditional filesystem. Others also found it hard. I tried to do it with V3, and found that for files in the 0-10k size range, I had many of the performance problems that FFS had when they created fragments. Thing was, I never knew they had performance problems, because it was not in their paper.... The problem was that when you combined fragments from multiple files, you add seeks, and one added seek is deadly to performance. The approach used in most databases, BLOBS, suffers from the same problem as FFS combining fragments, and yet more, because BLOBs unbalance the tree (see our website for details and nice diagrams). The usual transaction technology employed for databases, it is just wrong for filesystems, what you need in an FS is to fuse multiple transactions together into batches. And more....

There are so many different areas where if you take a wrong step, performance goes through the floor. You cannot imagine how depressing it is to work on a project where the performance is terrible until the very end, after 5% to rarely 20% at a time you've dragged it into something decent over years of time. I look back on it, and I see that we were incredibly lucky, because all the mistakes I made, were mistakes that took days or weeks to fix, and except for one thing (BLOBs), all the major things that would take years to fix, I got right. There is no reason for this other than luck. And BLOBS cost us years.

So we have for Linux the storage layer that MS could not develop because they quit before 10 years had passed, and perhaps weren't lucky enough at. Now, with technology working, and balance trees that can emulate file system semantics at twice the speed of the real thing (see our benchmarks ), sigh, if only we can overcome the politics. Yup, the WinFS team had to deal with corporate managers that quit before 10 years are past, but we have to deal with..... better unfinished as a sentence.

The only consolation in this field is that everyone else seems to find it just as hard. Probably that includes even the politics.

Re:I suspect WinFS failed because it was hard to d

Yay - it's refreshing to see someone working for 'the other side' (for want of a better term) who reacts to this story in a realistic and honest way, without feeling the need to bash MS for their WinFS problems ("Ha ha! M$ are teh suck!", etc).

Perhaps, I don't know, it's because you've spent years working on this problem, and know the difficulties involved, rather than the average slashdot MS basher who read a magazine article about writing file systems once and can't see what's so hard about them, or, come to that, like some of the other posters here, who can't see what's so hard about managing one of the largest software projects on the planet.

Re:I suspect WinFS failed because it was hard to d

It was probably recoverable, if you had contacted [e-mail], and if it was not an extensive hardware error. Most ReiserFS V3 corruptions (and most ext3 and XFS corruptions) occur due to hardware errors. The ones that cause only a block or two to be bad are usually recoverable. The ones that lose the whole drive, well, no FS will save you from that....

Why Can't They Dump DRM?

Lots of reports of features falling out of the Vista - but there is one (anti-)feature that never gets that kind of press - "Trusted Computing," aka support for Defective Recorded Media (DRM).

It is like it is more important to microsoft that they cater to the MAFIAA [mafiaa.org] than it is for them to provide features that their paying customers might actually want.

I sure wish I had a couple of bazillion dollars to piss it away on developing stuff that nobody wants to pay for. Except I'd spend it on designing and building the world's best yacht - with the largest capacity of nubile beauty pagent winners.

large customers

"The release of Vista has since been delayed again and is now scheduled for November for large customers and January 2007 for the general public, though some observers say it may be out even later." how large is a large customer? 300 lbs?

Hey Microsoft, the solution is pretty easy:

Dear Microsoft,

the solution to your problem regarding WinFS is pretty easy. Here it goes:

1) bundle a database of yours with the next version of Windows for free.

2) modify your File Dialog window to use the database as the primary storage, leaving the classic filesystem as a 2nd option.

3) modify Explorer and Office to utilize the database.

Suddently all of your customers will use the database for storage, searching will be pretty easy, indexing will be provided by the db, the user will be able to put queries and maintain views, and you'll get the extra functionality you desire without botching the filesystem.

Oh, by the way, the solution is also for open source software (in case open source developers are reading this).

Just Curious...

Doesnt delaying vista make it better for customers? As a user, I am on the side of making it better. I have seen 2 groups of people complaining that its delayed. Investors and people that want MS to fail. For the average user, I think it is to their benefit for the OS to work well, instead of be released early and buggy. If it released before its ready, wont that make for a backlash against MS and potentially send more people to Linux and Apple? Wont this actually hurt investors more than a delay? Maybe I am simple in my thinking but Im not sure I understand business. I think in the long run, Vista will make more money by actually showing that MS is capable of releasing an OS that is actually stable, and secure.

Forget Microsoft, Linux, Its time for LCARS

FORGET THE Microsoft WINFS look at LCARS (an acronym for Library Computer Access and Retrieval System) as used in Star Trek. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCARS [wikipedia.org] Err however, Contemporary technology revolves around isolinear optical chips and newer bioneural gelpacks, which can be enhanced in large-scale systems through the application of subspace fields. I dont think Intel or AMD see these yet?

Re:What the hell

That's when Crocop is laying unconscious under Fedor's massive fists ....

Re:While on the subject

Filesystems are for posers. Just write one big tar file to /dev/hda.

Re:While on the subject

If NTFS was even mildly documented that'd be an option.

Re:The longer the better

If you're comparing it to a steaming pile of canine fecal matter...

My dog resents that comparison, you insensitive clod!

Re:The longer the better

I never had any problem surfing porn with my Linux box, and it shouldn't be a threat for you...

In all fairness...

"Windows has the most problems simply because it is the most popular, and the biggest target for malware."

In all fairness there is more to it than that. The basic design kind of sucks from a security point of view. ActiveX is a security nightmare and there are many other problems as well. Not the least of which is the result of Microsoft s decision to integrate IE so even if you're not using it you're well.... using it...

Security has been Microsoft's top priority for how long now? They simply can't secure their OS.

I agree that no OS is completely secure. There is little protection for users who install questionable software but let's be honest, Windows has had MORE than its fair share of security problems.

Re:What the hell

The "mirror" of a "microsoft". Like in star trek.
Excepting the one in our universe has the beards
and the pain devices.

Re:The longer the better

First of all, with any other OS you can surf all the porn you want without problems like that. Second, you obviously know nothing about computing history. If the reason Windows has so many malware problems is solely due to it's popularity, where are all the Unix viruses? Unix existed decades before Windows and the entire internet is based around Unix. Until this year, Unix always outsold Windows as servers -- and all the *nix OSes combined still outsold Windows. If Unix was as vulnerable to malware as Windows there wouldn't be an internet; it would have been impossible to maintain because all of the servers would have been infected with loads of malware despite anitivirus. The reason that there aren't so many malware problems on *nix OSes isn't due to lack of popularity, it's because they are designed in such a way that it's very hard to write a program that can even infect them, let alone affect them. I see this "every other OS would be just as vulnerable as Windows if they were as popular" every other day. I wish to God people would learn a little something about what they're talking about before continuing to spout this ignorant nonsense.

Re:The longer the better

O rly?

How many spyware-laden applications are developed for Linux users? Stuff like Morpheus, Kazaa, and Comet Cursor? My guess would be: not many. And if there were any, the average Linux user knows better than to install that crap.

Most spyware comes from "free" applications and IE exploits. The former is avoidable with a measure of prudence, and the latter is avoidable by using a safer browser.

And lest I be accused of forgetting the notorious Windows worms, I'll simply note that a firewall would have stopped them all. Even the minimalist Windows Firewall would have been sufficient, nevermind Kerio, Tiny, Zone Alarm, or any of the other free personal firewalls.

If unauthorized hosts are able to communicate with your kernel or daemons/services, you're at risk of being hosed no matter what OS you run. Retarded default packages like IIS and IE are a problem for ignorant users, but they can both be replaced (by FOSS, even). While the MS security model is boneheaded, it is workable when the system is configured properly. Ultimately, the user is responsible for system configuration, and when most of them don't know what root or administrator rights are in the first place, there isn't a way for then to choose the appropriate ease-of-use vs security tradeoff for their needs.

The vast majority of Windows users prefer to remain ignorant of their operating system, Microsoft picks what it thinks is the most desirable balance between security and functionality, and this is the result.

Imagine a population of drivers that doesn't understand basic car maintenance. No oil changing, no tire inflation, no gas refills (not until they get stuck on the highway once or twice anyway). Would you expect a car to run well with that level of attention? That's the perfect representation of the typical Windows user. Apathy and ignorance on their part is the ultimate cause of this mess. Microsoft is partially to blame for catering to them, but I've witnessed the unflinching refusal of users to dedicate even the slightest shred of effort toward learning anything about a PC firsthand, time and time again. I spent my time in technician's purgatory serving the masses, and I can guarantee that most of them know far more about the details of their favorite football team or their soap opera than they ever will about computers.

Am I blaming the users for the security problems we see today? Yes, I am. And they probably deserve worse.

Re:While on the subject

reiser FS is just unstable.

I've never noticed that, and I use Reiser FS.

Re:While on the subject

Are you completely mad? ReiserFS is utterly stable and has the advantage of being fully documented. There is NOBODY at Microsoft any longer who fully understands NTFS, and it was never formally documented. As usual at MS, it's real spaghetti code, and there's not a hope in hell of ever sorting it out.