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.
What I need is a program like Google Desktop Search, but to be able to limit it to only the folders I choose. I don’t have a need to index everything, just a few hundred gigs of specific folders.
you’ll get SQL-in-your-FS and prolly more ^_^
Yeah, only the pr0n directories 😉
You mean something more or less exactly like Beagle only for Windows?
Both: Copernic and MSN Desktop Search allow you to finetune directories to search.
But, imho MSN Search is better – I can use the (tiny) search field applet as a command prompt (ex: “exec notepad” or “google pr0n free”) with self-assigned shortcuts.
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)
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.
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.
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).
MS is backporting vast amounts of vista to XP.. I guess XP will be around a LOOOONG time…
Yeah,, and Vista won’t show up for a long time :p
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.
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.
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.
is available for download on msdn effective today. for use on xp home and pro.
Patent the term and method of “back porting” before the beast does! =)
“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?
Well it was possible, with the old SDK’s for windows longhorn pre-beta1
I don’t think anyone ACTUALLY thought they did shelve it completely. Maybe wishful thinking so that MS would look bad though.
It’s also funny how some people keep comparing it to Beagle (horrible) or Spotlight, even though no one really knows what it’s composed of yet.
They never said shelve it completely. They clearly said it won’t _SHIP_ with Vista, but will be there in the first SP.
And, yeah I agree about the second part. Well, what else are kids bitch about when there’s not a comparable product?
No. People were and are still calling it vapourware. That’s what I’m talking about.
WinFS is NOT a filesystem. How many times does this need to be pointed out?
WinFS is not a filesystem any more. It was originally intended to be one, and all of the early marketing materials said id was one. This is why the fact that it is not a filesystem needs to be pointed out repeatedly – it was originally intended to be one.
AFAIK (and I could be wrong) the filesystem behind WinFS was always NTFS (v3.1?).
WinFS is a file/object hybrid store. It uses NTFS (but is not tied to it) for storing file-backed items but also stores objects that have no associated file like Contacts.
In addition, it uses a RDBMS type store behind the scenes based on the SQL Server engine.
GDS 2 api is the responses to winfs vapourware.
it works is free and behind there’s Google.
instead on the linux side there a funny tool called beagle that for me is a crappy piece of s**t
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.
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).
I think the biggest boost in usabillity won’t be the abillity to do indexed searches. I think the possibillity of getting rid of file names alltogether is a HUGE leap.
Imagine never agin having to browse a “Save as…” dialog!
Another closed source offering from M$. Gee, what a surprise.
I THINK I JUST THREW UP IN MY MOUTH A LITTLE
Don’t feed the beast
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.
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.
Channel 9 demo: [url]http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=106356%5B/url]
WinFS blog: [url]http://blogs.msdn.com/winfs/%5B/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.
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 :-).
I do now know what the fuss is all about with the desktop search tools, windows had an indexing service since win2k was released if not before.
Have anyone tried to use it? It does a good job, and you can define exactly which folders do you want to index too.
Meant; “I do not know”
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).
I think whoever downed the score on your first post, exactly like this one (and I wonder why you repost the same exact message), is because you have no proof of what you write (I mean, as far as the future goes).
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!