Jon Udell looks into the promise of Longhorn (any symbolism to this being the name of a type of cheese, and a bland one at that?), with an eye to looking into WinFS. I’ve groused about this[1] before[2]: I looked forward to reading Jon’s piece. I still don’t quite see if the data in the data store can be accessed without being in a Longhorn-based or WinFS-based system. To put it another way, right now I can take a disk out of damn near anything and read it on a linux or FreeBSD system. [3] If I take a disk out of a WinFS system, can I read the data? Or do I need to “install” it into another WinFS system and allow it’s database/filesystem internals to mount the disk or otherwise access that data?
I can think of a few places where needing to “install” the disk as if it were part of a RAID cluster might make life difficult, one of which was alluded to in a piece by a former MSFT product manager.
Seattle Weekly: News: Microsoft’s Sacred Cash Cow by Jeff Reifman: [ . . . ] Jim Allchin, Microsoft group vice president of platforms, didn’t realize that many users don’t buy new computers because of how hard it is to move all their data and applications. “He was totally oblivious to this,” [columnist and Bill Gates biographer Paul] Andrews says. “It’s a couple-day process. His head was in the clouds.”
(Well, of course: he’s got a herd of young MCSEs at his beck and call.) Imagine a relatively simple process like that with the user’s files and application preferences stored in a database that will insist on authenticating the user’s privileges with each operation. (Recall that Windows XP is tied into this new authentication/activation model where that new PC seems to be as much a possession of MSFT as it is yours.) If WinFS is just going to be an indexed datastore with an openly accessible backing store (good old-fashioned FAT or NTFS), it sounds like a win. But if this is, as Udell suggests, more of a lock-in move than a benefit to the consumer, I would run screaming from it. fn1. /movabletype/archives/2004/03/15/owning_your_own_datainformation.html fn2. /movabletype/archives/2004/03/04/be_careful_what_you_ask_for.html fn3. There are the various mount options, not all of which are tied to filesystems, but there are a few there: [/usr/home/paul]:: mount[tab] mount mount_fdesc mount_mfs mount_ntfs mount_portal mount_std mountd mount_cd9660 mount_kernfs mount_msdos mount_null mount_procfs mount_umap mount_ext2fs mount_linprocfs mount_nfs mount_nwfs mount_smbfs mount_union My point is that I can take a disk with partitions in any of those filesystem types and read the data in a different machine than where it was created/modified. Any _improvement_ that removes this capability is seriously flawed. I wonder if the various data recovery services that pull data from failed drives will be able to cope with this?