When Microsoft announced a year ago that it had decided to rip the next-generation Windows File System from Longhorn, many company watchers wrote off the feature as little more than vaporware. But it seems Microsoft didn't simply shelve WinFS. According to sources close to the company, Microsoft just last week put the finishing touches on the first beta release of WinFS. And the company is moving ahead with plans to back-port the WinFS technology to Windows XP.
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2005-07-06
locate and grep fits my needs thankyouverymuch; other than that googledesktop has already helped me out one or two times, e.g. when I was searching for ~2 years old data in some long forgotten named excel file or when I was searching for specific keywords in my pdf article collection (the latter is a pretty nice feature, if they'd provide nothing more, I'd still use it)
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2005-06-29
I have all my ancient crap on my iBook running Tiger; Spotlight finds whatever I need to have.
The only problem with all these search things is that you really need to know at least part of the filename; if not, it can still be a very painstaking task to find the correct file.
Member since:2005-07-06
You can use boolean logic in Spotlight to narrow things down. For example, foo|bar will find either foo OR bar. Searching for foo(-bar) will find all foos but NOT bars. Google around for the rest of them. There's some interesting syntax and nested logic you can throw into Spotlight's UI directly.
Member since:2005-07-06
I think that was his point exactly 
Correct me if I'm wrong but what he meant was metadata. Searching for a landscape should be possible by searching for "landscape" not something like IMG_001.jpg.
In the future, things like Spotlight, MSN search,... will take a major part in our PC life as the storage gets bigger and number of files get larger therefor file naming becomes more complex. In 10 years or (hopefully) soon I wish desktop searching will take a large step forward in simplifying searching and organizing. With all the computing power available today and even more in the future I should be able to type "picture of a landscape in Norway", or something along those lines, to find the picture I'm searching. I think WinFS is the first big step towards that goal, with SQL on top of it many possibilities are open (and possible).
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And people will spin this somehow to be bad. This is a good thing. It's essentially exetnding the life of XP, making it easier for all XP users to keep using it and transition when they decide to.
I think they just want to make sure their Office and other products with WinFS features will be compatible with versions of (older) Windows which dont requre supercomputer to run. (As in "Check Vista's sys req's")
Simple business.
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That's just common sense. Microsoft knows that most companies don't upgrade as often as they would like. There are still lots of Win2000 machines out there. Even Win98/95 in some cases.
If they didn't backport WinFS, they would risk that the users install the desktop search engines from Yahoo or Google.
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2005-06-29
"Microsoft described WinFS as a revolutionary storage platform that would include schemas for everything..."
I'd be interested to know whether these schemas could be built by the user, or if WinFS can only work with file formats specified by Microsoft.
Would formats have to be 'Microsoft Certified', and if so, how would that affect Open Source applications and the file formats they use?
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GDS, MSN Desktop search, and Copernic are not the same thing as WinFS at all, you need to read sites *OTHER* than slashdot if you want to pretend you know something.
The internet's only sucess is in making 1039483092843094 computer nerds who think they're smart and like to run off their mouth, when they really don't know anything then what another nerd on slashdot said. Brilliant.
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2005-07-06
You simply can not compare WinFS to Spotlight. The search features that are already available in even beta 1 of Vista are the same exact features of Spotlight. WinFS is more for corporate enviroments, stuff accross the network, etc... stuff Spotlight can not do as of yet(and I doubt it is even planned to before WinFS comes out in final).
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2005-08-12
I'm not sure why this is such news. MS never said that it would be shelved, just that it would be delayed. Perhaps to 2009. So the fact that the will be coming out with a beta is not a shock. It's surprising that it's out soon.
Perhaps they left some functionality out of it. They may be rushing it because of Sporlight and the fact that Leopard will no doubt expand on Spotlights abilities.
Backporting it to XP is a strange move though. If it's true.
Member since:2005-07-06
WinFS and spotlight/beagle/whatever have next to nothing in common besides what they are attempting to accomplish. The underlying implementation is apples to oranges...for example, a Mac can access a WinFS "file store" just as easily as it could a Windows file share and would see the exact same structure as someone on the Windows machine itself.
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2005-07-06
Channel 9 demo: [url]http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=106356[/url]
WinFS blog: [url]http://blogs.msdn.com/winfs/[/url]
This is very much beyond what other offerings are out there at the moment. By no means is this "vaporware"...I for one am pretty impressed, and this should drive other products in the same direction IMO (using a relational model as opposed to the very flat file system model). From a developer's standpoint, the opportunities with WinFS are pretty damn amazing.
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2005-07-06
Links are:
http://blogs.msdn.com/winfs/
http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=106356
Hard to keep up w/ which forums support bbcode these days :-).
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2005-07-13
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2005-07-13
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2005-07-06
You simply can not compare WinFS to Spotlight. The search features that are already available in even beta 1 of Vista are the same exact features of Spotlight. WinFS is more for corporate enviroments, stuff accross the network, etc... stuff Spotlight can not do as of yet(and I doubt it is even planned to before WinFS comes out in final).
Member since:2005-07-06
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2005-07-06
Sorry, I just had to throw that in because it irritates so many people. 
I hope y'all forgive me.
I for one am looking forward to whatever bits and pieces Microsoft will throw our way. I STILL think (as I have said before) that they are trying to pull a little bit of wool over everyone's eyes and come out with more than they are saying for Longhorn.
Microsoft may be put down a lot, but they also do a lot to drive accepted technology in the computer industry (or at least the USER industry) since they own the desktop market.
On the other hand, I will stick with my Macs for now. Very excited for Leopard and also for the new Mactel mini's to come out so I can retire this mini (one I am on now) to my son or daughter and get me a new dual core mini!
