WinFS Gets the Axe 610
commander salamander writes "Over at the WinFS Team Blog, Quentin Clark states that Microsoft no longer plans to ship WinFS as a standalone software component. Instead, portions of the underlying technology will be included with the next release of SQL Server (codename Katmai) and ADO.NET. Does this spell the end for the true relational storage paradigm that Microsoft has been promising since Windows 95?"
an amazing promise (Score:5, Interesting)
How long has the promise of WinFS been on the table? Microsoft has dragged this teaser on 10-lb test in front of drooling long-time loyalists as the newest and amazingly innovative piece of their "best OS ever". Aside from the fact it really wasn't amazingly innovative (well, in vernacular maybe it was), now they're close to closing the door on this. I wonder how many sales they've pulled off with these lies?
HINT: Here's a snippet from an October 2003 PC World article [pcworld.com]:
Microsoft may not have thought they were lying at the time but they must have had an idea they not only weren't on target but they weren't even close! It's amazing a company can get away with this -- call it genius marketing, I call it deception at all costs to keep their customer base intact.
Sometimes these outcomes seem to say more about the Microsoft loyalists than Microsoft.
Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes. As Mini-Microsoft puts it [blogspot.com]:
WinFS now joins a series of other broken promises from Microsoft. Interesting that just two weeks ago, they were demoing WinFS at TechEd. At this point, I'm really surprised customers don't treat this as flat-out lying on the part of Microsoft. Overpromise and never deliver. This company is a sinking ship.
FS contruction is extremely complicatied (Score:0, Interesting)
Smart Move (Score:1, Interesting)
Keep the base file system lean and mean.
There are better ways to add "database functionality" to Windows than add it to the file system.
Re:Carry on.... (Score:5, Interesting)
HFS++ looking pretty sharp now eh? (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, one can point to ext3 or ReiderFS and say, hey these have cool features too. But the reality is this, windows could not get these into NTFS without junking the whole FS and it killed them Likewsie ext3 and reiser are both clean sheet re-dos an FS so they naturally can have whatever feaatures they wanted. Thus the miracle of HFS+ is that is got all those nifty features without having to toss out the old FS and invent a new one. it was upgradable.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:an amazing promise (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't forget the DRM, or the dollars added to the price.
Giving up a decade late (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Carry on.... (Score:3, Interesting)
What Microsoft uses, FAT32 and NTFS, are ages behind file systems like ResierFS (especially reiserfs v4) and even Ext3, both of which are OSS projects and have been in use for years now.
Microsoft and/or Windows have hit the wall? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not that I'm blaming them -- all software designs have limits, past which they can't be stretched any further and still be made to work. But perhaps Microsoft should be looking at starting over with a fresh new OS design (with backwards compatibility provided via virtual machine emulation only, a la MacOS Classic running in MacOS/X)?
Re:What reason to buy? (Score:4, Interesting)
I was really wondering exactly how they had implemented that. It looked rather ugly, since it (by looking at the path) appeared to go to a specially named SMB share at localhost (and I'm not very surprised either -- Microsoft doing something in an ugly manner? No way!), but even so, it definitely was there. I've been looking for details about it, but found none. Does anyone know how it is implemented?
But Trees Suck (Score:3, Interesting)
Every file server more than 5 years old is usually a tangled mess, and I've seen many. However, it takes time to get used to a relational file system such that people may not want to change. They want to stick with the devil they know.
Re:FS contruction is extremely complicatied (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Be (Score:3, Interesting)
the system managed to remain snappy and do blazingly fast searches even on my 132mhz system with 112MB of ram in it running off a zip disk and playing half a dozen mpegs simultaneously on a 3d cube, rotating in real time.
i'm seriously upset that their style of process management and file system has still not been implemented properly in any other OS. why is it that no vendors have managed to pull that off even on machines that are 30x faster?
and, as a side note... the devs had a real sense of humor. I've never seen a system function called is_computer_on_fire() in any API, ever, aside from BeOS.
Re:Smart Move - NOT! (Score:5, Interesting)
Put it this way, your computer stores hundreds of thousands of files, the current paradigm of treating them as files stored in a folder tree is absolutely antiquated and ridiculous.
I should be able to ask my operating system, "Show me all my picture files", and it simply can list ALL the image files on my computer, regardless of how or where they are stored. Features like Spotlight in OS X or Google Desktop are "nice" ways of trying to deal with this problem in a folder tree, but they are just an expensive to generate index file and it takes way too much time to return a result. Spotlight not only has to return if the index entry for a file matches, but it also has to verify if the file still exists on disk. I could take minutes for spotlight or Google desktop to return ALL image files on your computer. You will also notice that these systems often display something like (and 5000 more) link, this means that in order to have the search return results quick enough, it didn't REALLY find all 5000 files, it just says that according to its index file, there appears to be 5000 more image files, when you click on the link, it take more time to finally list all these files. Indexing a folder based tree structure is a solution, but its not an ideal solution. It is limited by the limitations of an antiquated file tree structure.
In a relational file system, if I ask for all image files stored on my computer, the result should be instantaneous, or near to it, as the fact that the file exists as a database entry means the file exists in reality. The time required for the results is simply the time required to build a query and return a result from a database.
Also, why do we even have to name files? Why do we have to give them a file extension. These are all antiquated file system concepts which are completely meaningless for a modern OS. A relational file system stores more then just a file name and a file type, I should be able to search for a file by date, description, keyword in the file, etc, etc, etc. I should not only be allowed to name the file, but provide any meta tags I want to help me locating that file quickly. An extension was a cheap way to get the OS to launch or open a file related to a specific program, but it would be completely unnecessary if the file itself embedded its type or had an entry in a database record. The name of a file would purely be a description and only one of many ways to identify a file.
Ultimately, a relational file system will allow such concepts as "Show me the letter about taxes I wrote to Bob Smith last week." and it will return the email or document you wrote, period. You don't care what the file name is. You don't care what type of file it may be, whether it was an email or text document. A file system should know that a file exists on your computer that is a texted based document, including keywords taxes and Bob that was generated within a week of the current date. This is a sorely needed concept in ANY OS, no OS to date has anything near that powerful a concept. There is no reason for a file system not to be able to handle these requests, and if we EVER want something like what we have seen in Star Trek, where people can ask a computer real language queries, we NEED a relational file system.
Relational files systems will bring a whole new level of superior storage capability to computers that will eventually start storing millions of files. We can't just keep a "lean and mean" tree based folder structure, that paradigm was never intended to manage millions of files.
I applaud Microsoft for at least trying, because unlike Google or Apple, they realize that the future is in a database driving relational file system and not stop gap pseudo-solutions like indexing. Its obviously a difficult concept to implement, but once anyone is able to implement the idea, it will be a VERY welcomed concept and improve the functionality and usability of an operating system. I for one would switch to and swear by ANY OS that implements this idea properly, whether its Linux, OS X, or yes, even Windows.
Re:Stronger Copland Simile (Score:4, Interesting)
I hate this analogy because it's completely free of any context to the business situation. When Apple was talking up Copland, they were getting their profits killed by Windows 95 systems, and they badly needed an OS with basic modern features like Preemptive Multitasking and Memory Protection [both of which you left off your list].
Windows XP needs a fair amount of refinement, but it doesn't really need a Copland/OSX style major upgrade. [What you call a "real solution"
Anyway, nobody called Apple's Quartz "a cosmetic upgrade" when it came out, and Vista still has the more advanced Avalon imaging model, so perhaps you should pull back on the hyperbole.
Re:Carry on.... (Score:3, Interesting)
The Linux (and other OSS) filesystems exist. That's more than you can say for Microsoft. There may very well be applications that leverage these features, but I can't think of any ATM. But even if there aren't...that's beside the point.
The point is, the WinFS filesystem was supposed to be in Windows 95 over 10 years ago!
It's still not available, and it's been essentially cancelled. Windows currently, and for the forseeable future, has no option to leverage an RDBMS filesystem, because there is currently nothing like that for Windows, and there is now nothing even on the horizon.
Open source has this type of filesystem now , which means application developers can use it if they see it as an advantage for their application.
Re:Rehash of XP (Score:3, Interesting)
In conclusion, Vista isn't all that bad and if you don't already have a modern operating system (i.e. if your only operating system is XP) and you're in the market for a new PC any way, then it's worth waiting the half year to a year for Vista to come out and buying it then.
For a my more complete analysis of Vista, click the link in my sig as I just did a write up on it (I also have a write up on Symphony OS there and in a week or two I'll do a write up on OS X).
Re:an amazing promise (Score:4, Interesting)
You've got to be joking if you're counting this as a major new feature. Wow, it's a Windows logo now and it has a search field ala Spotlight.
Aero Glass isn't "3D-based," it's still a 2D interface but is hardware-accelerated ala OS X circa 2002. Sleep mode and non-admin privileges aren't exactly new features for non-Windows users. In fact, Vista introduces a kludgy hack to get pre-Vista apps to work that expect admin privileges, by emulating a virtual filesystem in the background.
Which won't be included by default.
You mean Calendar, Photo Gallery, and other OS X clones?
Ala OS X.
A performance stats page. That sure requires an entire OS update to get.
This is just not true, and it's MSDN marketing crap. Windows Vista is the same old Windows (based off Server 2003 code) with a visually updated shell (more plastic highlights!), some new APIs, and some internal changes to security, drivers, etc.. Windows 95 was a major update that removed DOS from the user experience and introduced a new Windows interface. The transition from Windows 98 to XP was the biggest transition of all. For users, Vista is just XP with plastic highlights and security changes.
Or you could get a Mac and have everything Vista will claim to have, today (some of it dating back to OS X circa 2001).
Microsoft has to face reality (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually Microsoft might have better luck with EXT2/EXT3/JFS etc file system support that is superior to NTFS/FAT16/FAT32 and the standards are already well published and should be easier for Microsoft to adopt than the WinFS system. Microsoft should look out because ReactOS is planning for EXT2/EXT3/JFS file system support and it is starting to run some Windows applications without problems (most Windows programs have issues, but ReactOS is slowly improving) and while ReactOS is not ready for Prime-Time, in a few years, who knows? Once it adds Windows driver support, DirectX support, sound card support, and other features, possibly by a 1.0 release (now in 0.30 RC1 release) it might steal some thunder from Microsoft Windows and Vista, if it runs on systems that Vista won't run on.
Vista is a resource hog anyway, it needs 512M of RAM just to run, and still the swap file keeps growing. You will find many effects will be disabled by some systems just to get a decent performance out of Vista. I think the public release Beta ISO was like almost 4 gigs in size, showing how huge Vista really is. I figure it is like Microsoft stuffing 15 pounds of manure into a 5 pound bag.
Me I am going to stick with Windows XP and ignore Vista until the service packs fix Vista to be stable enough on hardware I can afford to run it on. I'll use Linux until then as well. I am keeping my eye on ReactOS to see if it reaches XP level success, and then I might switch over to it.
Re:Rehash of XP (Score:1, Interesting)
bwahahahahahahha
I can HARDLY wait. A secure operating system from the developers of an OS that has zero day exploits reported at least once a month? Riiiiiggght.
BTW, Vista isn't "freely available". Sure, the beta, in a sense, is. But the final, "polished", OS will be expensive as hell.
Quit making excuses for Microsoft. They already have a very expensive PR dept for that sort of thing.
Sigh.
SB
WinFS is not relational (Score:3, Interesting)
There are some fishy things here.
One is that WinFS was not promised for now: it was promised for, say, 15 years ago. MS Access was said by Microsoft to be a first step towards a totally relational OS really soon then. Just as Cairo (MS Windows NT 4) was supposed to be totally OO, and now we are told native code will still be with us for several years yet.
But the worst thing is that they don't understand what they intend to ship. WinFS is not relational [dbdebunk.com], not it can ever be, since being based on (a bastardised version of) ISO SQL it violates the basic fundaments of the relational model. Incidentally, this non-relationalness makes it much larger, less performant, more complex, less powerful than it should be. Coincidence?
Re:an amazing promise (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is that nobody can really see what Microsoft is doing to "better the user experience." It's the same old Windows with plastic highlights. OS X does everything Vista will claim to do but on much less powerful hardware. Add to the fact Microsoft's own employees think the Windows codebase is bloated and broken, and you begin to realize Windows is a slow, complicated hodge-podge of new and old code going back decades.
Besides, I don't see who's complaining about PCs being overpowered. And if I have all that power, I don't want Microsoft hogging it to display their transparent windows.
when will people learn? (Score:4, Interesting)
Where it does work is some niche areas of business computing. Integrating WinFS into SQL Server makes sense. Of course, other database vendors have had equivalent technology for a long time.
All in all, with WinFS and SQL Server, Microsoft has retraced the evolution of the industry--only a few decades late. So, it's business as usual.
Re:Microsoft and/or Windows have hit the wall? (Score:5, Interesting)
In retrospect, it's remarkable how smart Apple was to go the route they did with OS X, leveraging open source technology so that they didn't have to develop the whole operating system themselves and could concentrate on constructing a user experience on top of what was already well-tested code. It's a clean, elegant solution that's allowed them to outpace Microsoft at an incredible rate.
Re:Rehash of XP (Score:3, Interesting)
If those are so great then everybody ought to just get the actual "iTools" that are available now and be done with it, 'cause the "and then some" does not -- and probably will not -- exist!
Aww, how cute. A Windows user is discovering all the things I've been using in Linux and Mac OS X for years.
Do you have any idea how much more functionality a Linux distribution manages to fit in that same 3.4 gigs?!
You should see a psychiatrist -- get some medication for those delusions, you know? Well, either that or you're astroturfing, anyway...
It's truly amazing what [bad] management can [fail to] accomplish.
Re:Carry on.... (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems to me that you've started with your conclusion - that ReiserFS is not innovative - and used that to draw the conclusion that it must therefore suffer from the same problems as other filesystems. This is backwards logic. Please reverse your logic - look at its actual features [namesys.com] and use that to decide whether or not it is innovative.
In particular, you seem focus on the need for application support. The whole philosophy behind ReiserFS is that separate namespaces for files and metadata is a bad idea, and that metadata should be exposed in the existing namespace - as files and directories.
The consequence of this is that applications don't need special support for ReiserFS's metadata. If, for example, you wrote an MP3 plugin that exposed the ID3 metadata, you would be able to search this with grep and locate, and edit it with vi and EMACS, without any changes whatsoever to grep, locate, vi or EMACS. Since the filesystem is exposing this metadata as files and directories, anything that supports files and directories will be able to access the metadata.
So the problem of metadata might mean that other filesystems require special application support, but it's precisely because ReiserFS is innovative that this isn't a problem for it. Which other filesystems are tackling metadata in this way? Are there any?
Re:an amazing promise (Score:4, Interesting)
This doesn't even beging to talk about Network Access Protection, which on the surface sounds like a really good idea. Although, I have my doubts as to Microsofts ability to properly implement it and the relative "foolproofness" of the technology. (It could end up being another registry debacle, for all I know.)
I don't currently have any documentation to link to for backup purposes, but a simple Google search for "Vista Active Directory" should provide plenty of information for the curious.
Re:What reason to buy? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yep, we use it on our Win2003 file server at work. It has numerous limitations. See if I can remember the salient points (apologies for inaccuracies but it's been a year since we configured it):
- You have to schedule when the snapshots occur. Because you're versioning the entire file system. We schedule ours for 7am and noon.
- Have to use a WinXP (maybe Win2000) machine to get to the older revisions. Win9x or non-MS O/Ss need not apply.
- There's a limit of 64 shadow copies at any point in time, even if you would've had disk space to allow for more. So with 2 snaps per day, you get 32 days of history... more if you don't snapshot on the weekends.
All that being said, we've turned it on. Figure it might save us from loading the backup tapes and restoring if the user screws up an individual file. It doesn't seem to cause enough of a load (for our office) but I don't know that we've ever used it either to recover files.
Re:sound like a bogon? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hard Problems and Large Corporations (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember that they were going to put it all into the filesystem? Then they put it into a layer above the FS. Bet you a bitflip that they found performance problems resulting from mixing large files and small files in the same filesystem. It is very easy to have such problems, you have to get quite clever to avoid them, and expend a lot of effort on it. Rather than take the extra time, they pulled the enhanced semantics out of the filesystem. That was the wrong thing. Then, look at the descriptions of how some of the queries they supported took too long. It is really easy to design things in that area wrong, and get unacceptable performance impacts. Rather than solving the deeply challenging problems, they punted and put the stuff into SQL server. Why? Because people who don't want things to be slow can just not use the feature until they figure out how to make it not cost performance. Of course, that means no OS integration but..... it is so nice to not be designing Reiser4 by committee.
I see Microsoft responding to difficult technical problems not by solving them, but by running from them, and that explains the entire trajectory of WinFS.
Another consideration you can see between the lines is that they don't want to lose the revenue from SQL Server by doing everything that it does in the OS and doing it better. Marketers will do things like make the first release of something only available at a higher price. They do that a lot. They'll do it even if it robs Vista of most of its excitement to do it.
Large corporations often have real problems handling tough research projects.
Reiser4 [namesys.com] took 5 years to get into working at all (v3), and 10 years of sustained development to get right (reiser4), and it is just the storage layer. You can't do that in a large corporation.
In a large corporation you are thinking that you need 3 years to do a project that is a paradigm change, and you go talk to management, and you sense that they have patience for 9-18 months, and you really want to do the project, so you tell them you can do it in 9-18 months.
18 months go by, and you are 1/2 of the way through the first version (you think you are 90% of the way through), and the first version is going to suck badly and take years to be well optimized. Now, if your product is the first in its market, you can make it even though it sucks, and get the money for the version 2. If you are going into a mature market, well, things are tough. Very tough. WinFS is going into a mature market.
Now, into this reality throw corporate managers. They think that if they intimidate the programmers a lot, products ship sooner. So, technical shortcuts get taken. Only problem is, in a product like WinFS, going into a mature market, taking technical shortcuts kills things. Especially since for a product like WinFS the technical shortcuts affect DEEP decisions that you will never be able to reverse out of. Like, whether the enhanced semantics are in the FS layer. Or whether the whole OS is designed around using the enhanced semantics in every component. Then, managers feel the need to prove they are tough about schedules, and they cancel for being late projects that everyone should have known were going to take a long long time because they were hard. There is some very interesting recent research suggesting that if you want an accurate project length forecast, you don't ask for an estimate, you create a betting pool.
The sad thing is, since everyone copies Microsoft, now there will be more people saying that Reiser4 shouldn't do what WinFS backed away from. We can do it. We solved the hard storage layer design problems, our stuff works. Now we can finally go after the enhanced semantics. It took 10 years, but we got the storage layer into the shape we want it in, and one plugin at a time the enha
Re:an amazing promise (Score:3, Interesting)
I totally "get" all the comments here. I'm someone who has been a computer administrator since the time of Windows 3.1, and I've been personally waiting for this Cairo feature for the 10 years Microsoft has dangled that particular carrot. I find the situation... laughable. I made the switch to Linux on the desktop about 7 years ago. While it's taken some time to get there, I find that I don't need Windows to do ANYTHING any longer...
Except play games.
I've tried many different versions of Wine and Cedega. While the engine works even better than Windows on some games, I'm having trouble getting the ones I want to play to work. (For instance, Cedega doesn't -- and won't -- support PunkBuster for playing Battlefield 2 online.) So I keep a Windows partition for games, and this is where Microsoft is going to screw me. The one "innovation" that (so far as I'm reading in the comments) no one has addressed is that Microsoft is going to upgrade DirectX to 10, and this will only be available in Vista.
Well, you know what? That's fine by me, because I'm done with the following the stupid paradigm of video gaming on a PC. The enormous hassle it's gotten to be, what with hardware upgrades, software upgrades, patch after patch on Windows (mostly just to phone home and report my activities), the patches for the games, the driver problems and, certainly not least, the crashes! You can have it. I'm not changing anything about my setup at this point. If I can't play a game on this computer right now, I'm not upgrading. I really want to play Crysis, but I'm sure it won't play on this box, and I'm not going to buy a new computer to run it. (Well, it might play, but I'll have to "dumb down" the game so much, it won't look any better than Far Cry.)
So the people making Crysis need to make sure it'll run on a Wii, because, when I buy new hardware to play video games, it's not going to be 1) Microsoft or 2) cost enough to buy a new computer anyway (Sony). On top of all the other hassles I've already stated, I've got two young kids now, and they want to play video games too. Getting them up and running on a PC is a hassle. Consoles are much easier to just pop in a game and play. So, yeah, I'm looking to buy a Wii.
And, Microsoft, you can blame yourselves.
Re:Carry on.... (Score:1, Interesting)
For another thing, MS has plenty of filesystem innovation. The big feature of ZFS is that it allows persistent mounts so that a directory can point to another whole filesystem (possibly on another disk). This feature has been in NTFS since 1999. All that ZFS adds is the ability to automatically enlarge or shrink the filesystem. Most of what I've been reading about Reiser4 is that it's a reimplementation of Microsoft's OFS, which never shipped, for many of the same reasons that I expect Reiser4 will not become the standard Linux filesystem on any major distro, and some of the same reasons that WinFS is being repurposed. For example, all that metadata needs to be accessed by applications designed to use it, meaning that those apps are going to be filesystem specific. Who wants an app that requires formatting a new partition on their disk? Then you have the problem of accessing the metadata over the network. How do you transport the Reiser4() system call over to the fileserver? What happens to that metadata when you use tar, cp, or ftp?
For some real innovation, look at NTFS. Sure, it has plugins (used for implementing copy-on-write files, hierarchical storage, and persistent mount points, among other things), per-file encryption and compression, object tracking (so links to files can be automatically updated when a file is moved to another directory or even another server), and a change journal (so you can get a list of all files changed since a certain time so you know what needs to be reindexed). But even though your filesystem doesn't have all of those, NTFS has had those features for years, so it's not really innovative.
So what's new for Vista? Transactions. Not transactions like Reiser4, where just individual write operations are transactions. That's a nice feature, but it's only really useful in the case of sudden power failure. It doesn't make sure that all users have a consistent view of configuration files, or that your backup won't occur between write() calls on an important file, or make sure that doing an mv across filesystems won't fail in the middle and leave you with half a directory on one filesystem and half on another.
Vista has real ACID (atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable) distributed transactions, just like real databases. Once you start a transaction, any filesystem operation you do (change a byte, copy a file, or install a program) isn't seen by any other process (unless it's also enrolled in the transaction) until you commit. And transactions automatically distribute to NTFS, the registry, and any other fileserver (just Longhorn Server for now) running transactional NTFS (called TxF or TxNTFS). In fact, you can combine filesystem and registry transactions with anything else, like a message queue or Oracle server transaction. So how do you use these great features without having to write code? Just make a batch file, like this:
TRANSACTION
If you want to use Win32, the only new APIs you need to learn are CreateTransaction(), SetCurrentTransaction(), and CommitTransaction(). With
Transactions are clearly nothing new, and I don't know much about systems like OS/400 or VMS, so there have probably been database filesystems that have supported transactions. However, nothing has made transactional support so widespread and easy to use before. It's like have a Preview or Undo button for filesystem operations.
dom
Re:Rehash of XP (Score:2, Interesting)
The point that everyone seems to be missing is that win 95 did not actually represent a major change. The changes to do with makeing memory management a 32 process and actually making the most of hardware it was running on were gradually added to win95 after it had shipped. This gave us win95 SR2 and SR2.5. From what I remember it was win95 sr2 that actually added the decent bits.
This always seems to be how MS work anyway. They dont mind releasing service packs that will rewrite the core OS from the ground up, thus causing loads of previous stable programs to stop working (Nero and WinXP SP2).
Can anyone out there remember why win 3.11 was released? (not windows for workgroups 3.11)
From what I recall it was specifically to break OS2 warp compatibility.
Re:This is Slashdot, right? (Score:3, Interesting)
And, of course, no x86 processor has ever been 8-bit. Except in the external bus, which AFAIK doesn't matter to applications in any way except execution speed.
True, but even the new 64-bit processors start in 16-bit mode - does anyone here run DOS on Athlon64 ?-)
That's because it's an easy target. A grammar nazi wants to feel important, but doesn't have the skills to back that ambition; so he lurks here, combing through one message after another, until he finds some that contains spelling or grammar errors. Then he replies to it, feeling his little ego swelling from having - at least in his own mind - one-upped someone smarter than he is.
Of course some of the grammar nazis are simply neurotic enough to toss and turn restlessly in their bed thinking that someone might possibly break the ironclad and eternal rules of grammar or spelling, until they have to rise from their beds and head for Slashdot to herd in those heretics who dare spell it as "rediculous".
And finally there are the incompetent trolls, who just can't think of anything else to troll with.
Re:I find this a real disapointment myself (Score:3, Interesting)
NTFS can already do that. Almost nobody uses this feature. This shows well that the feature is not wanted.
Vista -- Office (Score:2, Interesting)
Same works for intel. The local computer guy ensured my dads company, that you might have problems with AMD, it is still a clone... So they buy intel, nothing about it.
OTOH, the implementation of such a FileSystem would get the unix world to work on a new (database) filesystem level too. There is just no way that MS has a better ::something:: than unix, right?
--- Above all the frustration, I still feel bad about it
Re:Rehash of XP (Score:5, Interesting)
It's bad enough that you can't uninstall bundled crap like outlook express, media player and internet explorer, but when you try to delete them by hand they get copied right back!
Not to mention the amount of malware that registers itself with the self-healing system, so windows considers the malware to be critical files and copies it back when you delete it.
I remember when 2000 came out touting this feature, and sun did a comparison with solaris...
the windows idea was to let you break things, and then try to fix them, ofcourse this only works to a limited degree, because you can still break something critical to the self-healing process itself.
The solaris approach, was to make you an unprivileged user so you CANT break things.
Just forcing users to run without admin privileges would cut out a majority of instances where an end user breaks something.
And the self healing is pretty much useless anyway, it's great at preventing you from removing malware or unnecessary junk like media player, but it won't stop you trashing the bootloader or deleting the kernel.
Re:Rehash of XP (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Rehash of XP (Score:5, Interesting)
For example?
Re:Rehash of XP (Score:5, Interesting)
As far as NFS/SMB on OSX, as another poster pointed out, the NFS troubles are generally either a config change requirement on the remote side, or a procedure problem on the local side. They both result from the same issue of unpriviledges ports. SMB still is working fine; you do sometimes see problems with 2003 domains, due to changes on Microsoft's part. Samba had the same problems, especially when 2003 SP1 came out. There is an easy fix on the MS side to resolve this, or you can manually upgrade Samba on OSX, or patch the system.
The performance with Aero was as bad as I think. The system gets noticably slower on my Athlon64 3000+ with a GeForce 6600GT and 1GB RAM with Aero on vs. Aero off. It's also harder to get any work done with that UI in the way. I generally have 20-30 things running on my machine. Under WinXP, this is not a problem, but under Vista it is slower... under Vista w/ Aero, it is enough slower to actually bother me.
I don't see how I was illustrating anything by complaining about WinXP's "self-healing" annoyance. It doesn't work well there, and it doesn't work well on Vista. It still gets in the way, does things that I don't want, and generally makes the platform more annoying. It's a hack to try to work around a deficiency in the platform, rather than fixing the problem. The "self-optimization" is nice, in theory, except it's not really doing much useful, other than wasting electricity.
You brought up even more useless cruft, too. The speech recognition is a waste. People don't want to talk to their computer. This stuff has been around for decades, and it's annoying. The only way to be sure that the computer responds only to voice commands directed at it, is to be sitting at the computer already. This negates the purpose of voice command. Direct speech to text also is more annoying and typing. Many people type faster than they can clearly speak to a computer. It's horrid to have to go back and fix things because the computer doesn't understand context. Spell checks won't save you there. It won't be used.
The new driver model is already proving to be a problem. It's the third driver model in the NT line, and the fifth if you count releases since 3.0. It introduces piles of DRM, and the signed driver requirement. It will let you do *less* with your computer. Goodbye to things like Daemon Tools, the KX audio driver platform, legacy hardware support, etc.
The new security model has been covered ad nauseum. It would've been a nice way to fix the problems that MS created. As it stands now, it's useless. It is too intrusive, and there isn't good ways to work around all the flaws that it creates for legacy apps. You end up having to do the same annoying hacks as you do under 2000 and XP. This is because LUA is still broken, it's just less broken than under 2k/XP.
Performance reporting is not important. Users will never touch this. Most admins will never touch this. Some devs will make use of it, but they largely already have an app suite to do the same thing. It's cute, but that is all.
I know full well what Media Center is. Most people still don't use it. It's more cumbersome than just clicking My Documents. It's very pretty, though, and would be very nice if you weren't already right there at the computer, with a keyboard and mouse. It's nice that *you* use it, but in the many dozens of support calls that I've done to people's houses, not one even
Re:Hard Problems and Large Corporations (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Rehash of XP (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, as a slashdotter, that makes me the standard linux fanboy - but wait - my mom had the chance to take an internet course at work, and she chose an intro to linux - why? Because she's sick of how much a pain it is to make MS work. She's sick of dealing with AV and spyware suites. She doesn't understand why she has to reboot after installing digital camera software, and she wants to know why it seems so trouble free and fast when she uses my systems.
When I tell her it's free and available for everyone to work on/dig into/modify, she's amazed. There are at least a few end-users in the world who really are getting tired of the standard MS way of doing business, and who don't care. Hell, my mom doesn't understand why my grandparents went with XP, when Win2k seems to do 95% of the same stuff. She actually complained that their new Dell seems slower and less useful than her Win2k system.
The problem is is that I don't know how many disillusioned people it will take to make a significant enough shift that the major players (MS, Dell) sit up and take notice. But whatever....I have linux and tequilla, so all is well....
Re:Rehash of XP (Score:2, Interesting)