As Microsoft Corp. prepares to unleash new software over the next year, including the Windows .Net Server 2003 family, the next version of its Office productivity suite and three server infrastructure applications, Jim Allchin, group vice president for platforms at the Redmond, Wash., company, sat down with eWeek Senior Editor Peter Galli in San Jose, Calif., to discuss this next round of software releases.
Allchin’s Eye on Longhorn
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Looking at how he describes the new WinFS, it sounds supiciously like BFS. But there is a major difference: MSoft is using a database driven filesystem instead of having the file system be the database. There’s a major difference.
If you have to use an SQL server to access files in the database then you have no way of accessing those files outside of running Windows. If you run Linux on another partition I don’t see how it could access files on your Windows partition if they’re a part of a database that must be served by a locally-running Microsoft SQL server. They’ve just killed a major benefit of running dual-boot PC’s.
I’m thinking the next version of Windows directly targets dual-boot PC’s and is Microsoft’s way of forcing users to choose between Microsoft and everything else. I’m just sticking to Windows 2000, thank you.
>They’ve just killed a major benefit of running dual-boot PC’s.
Big Al, we have discussed already about this. Please check our archives.
The fact is that Ms is doing whatever they see fit to please their customers. They won’t waste any time to think if Linux of the 0.5% market share have support for their new filesystem or not. They don’t care and they should not care at this point. I would not care either, if I was Mr Microsoft.
I have heard some good things about Longhorn and they are preparing some really innovative stuff. And for that innovative stuff, they DO need a database.
I agree Eugenia – and I know this has been discussed before. I was one who brought it up.
I understand it from Microsoft’s position. But from the position of a web site that discusses alternative operating systems as much as the biggies, I’d be willing to bet that most of the OSNews viewership dual-boots. To them it might be an important item to note and bring up again. I dual- and triple-boot and find it very usefull to have the ability to read from my Windows drive. I’m assuming most others do that also.
Besides no one was replying so I thought I’d get some discussion going.
I just want the WinFS ASAP.
Just to toy around with it. Hopefully MS is going to implement my wish of a dynamic drive span.
tso:
What do you mean by a dynamic drive span?
Do you mean the ability to span dynamic disks?
of course this new dynamic filesystem will be integrated into linux…it may take a long ass time and be obsolete before it’s finished…but it can and will be done…it always is…remember how people bitched about NTFS being hard to access from Linux…they’ve almost got full support for it up…stable read-only support i believe is already in the kernel if i am not mistaken
sure we may not have an easy way to access all of the features from it…but there’s nothing technology wise preventing this from happening…just desire and effort on the part of volunteers
-bytes256
…every time ms announces of something innonative, it actually turns out to be a rip-off in disguise. I won’t get “excited” this time.
IIRC, the first BFS’s that were released, aka, prior to BeOS r4, were database style filesystems, however, if I recall correctly, the releases from r4 used a traditional journalling filesystem because the database file system, aka, BFS3 was becoming too complex.
The best comparision to Longhorn is ReiserFS 3.6 and the up coming 4.0 which should be released at the end of this year.
http://www.namesys.com/
Long-ass time is right. How long has it been since NTFS first showed up? 9 years? By the time “they” have WinFS cloned (assuming “they” can basically re-implement chunks of SQL server. better get going learning the source code to PostgreSQL or some such), MS will be on to the “next big thing” (or will have led everyone down a dead end).
And then try to get the Linux desktop developers to code for anything but the lowest common denominator in *nix file system features.
All I can hope is that someone like RedHat and/or Sun will force the issue by funding development of something more advanced and default to it in their future distros.
Except (at least from what I heard), the effort done with NTFS already saves a lot of time. Roughly (very roughly) speaking, WinFS is MTFS+SQL. Plus, I think with the effort done by OSS SQLs, making an implementation is isn’t that hard…
So I wonder what he means when he says that he’ll discuss with the “copyright people” about smarttags. I presume he means lawyers to see how far he can push this smarttag tech?
IIRC, Smarttags created some copyright issues because just say you typed in Cars For Sale Inc.. You when you hover over, with SmartTags enable, it you link you with MSN’s automotive site. This would create a lot of copyright issues.
Besides, using Office XP, I decided to try SmartTags for 2 months. Hated it, disable it like Clippy in Office 2000.
WinFS [Windows File System]
This is the kind of kludge you come up with if you don’t have the ability to write operating system software from scratch. Create-a-hook and pass it over to some other b.l.ob..
well, I am one of the ‘lucky’ folks who get to test that for free …. and frankly the only thing cool about it was the server utilities it came with… such ease of configuration… course I couldn’t tell if any of the server stuff worked b/c it didn’t like my ethernet card or something…..so I installed XP again and am about to look into downloading the newest copy of the RH Beta or something.
rajan: How can you not like the smart tags in OfficeXP? It’s the single greatest feature that has been put into Office for many years.
Didn’t like that auto-capitalization that Word just did, hover over the word and undo it with, you guessed it, smart tags…. there are a lot of GREAT things that have been in Office for awhile, and smart tags puts it right at your fingertips.
Smart Tags in IE are something completely different.
People who were complaining about copyrights really didn’t have a clue, in my opinion, as to what smart tags in IE did, or were complaining just because it’s Microsoft, and people love to attack Microsoft for no reason.
In smart tags for IE, if say, there was a company name on a website, and you didn’t know anything about the company, then, usually, you could click on the name of the company and it would bring up a smart tag that would lead you to info about that company…. and this was just the early beta version of it. People didn’t seem to listen (or didn’t care to, as, again, it’s Microsoft, and no one will ever admit when Microsoft is right) when Microsoft said that you can make your own smart tags, or disable smart tags on your webpage, etc….
And I’m done ranting, as I could go on forever about how much I dispise trolls (anti or for MS, or any other company).
Why is one a troll for criticizing or praising what a company does? Some people like myself may seem to bash MS a lot, and praise Apple a lot. So what? Others come in and point out things apple does that are bad and good things that MS did.
It seems like a troll is someone who is JUST trying to annoy, and does not even make an effort to provide support for their arguments. Also, somebody can be annoying and rude but still speak the truth (though maybe they should stop being rude).
You are a troll when you simply attack the company because it’s that company, or support a company because it’s that company.
So as long as I attack MS for something but give an arguably valid reason then I’m OK.
Or say Apple is great in doing something and give an arguably valid reason, I’m no troll.
I don’t think I ever called you a troll. If I did, I’m sorry. You aren’t a troll in my mind, more like an zealot. You completely don’t fit the “troll” category.
Besides, I also consider someone a troll is someone attacks a company or a product without providing any substantial argument.
—-
And to CPUGuy, I accindently wrote office, instead of IE. I have smart tags enable in Office XP. sorry, okay? 🙂 (I liked that feature so much that I send feature suggestions to both KOffice and OpenOffice.org. Never got a reply from OOo, but the KOffice developers said as soon they figure out how to do it, they would.)
🙂 Clippy was really annoying, glad it didn’t made it into IE. But that puppy in Windows Explorer is just as annoying.
rajan:
Yeah, I hate that stupid dog too…. looks like a remnant of MS Bob.
thanks.
zealot maybe. but I am here to discuss and test my views, however strongly held they may be.