According to TechNewsWorld Microsoft is trimming back the proposed feature set of their upcoming operating system (codenamed “Longhorn”).
Recently, Longhorn’s release date was pushed up from the 2007 to early 2006, apparently, after timelines have already slipped to a late-2006 release, Microsoft has had to trim down Longhorn’s list of proposed features to meet the release date. Most notably, the most advanced and forward thiking portion of the new OS, an updated file system called “WinFS” (based around a relational database) was trimmed back to work only on local stores (not across networks), and now has been cut entirely.
While this isn’t crippling (worst case would be to have an NTFS or FAT32, which is what we’re using now), it was one of the two coolest items of the new operating system. I could go into detail about what it was, but suffice it to say, it’s a great loss.
yeah I thought the whole database structure of files in the future OS would have been pretty cool. but can you imagine the specs for the hardware to run that?
Dave
Apple’s Newton used a “Soup” method for storing data bits (“files” if you could call them that in Newton’s Soup). Newton only had a 161.9MHz processor (granted it was a RISC processor, but it was the predesessor to the Palm and Pocket PC devices). Sure, since it’s Microsoft, it’ll probably be bloated, but even with the additional overhead needed to keep a relational database style file allocation system current (near real-time), the benefits in speed getting to your files (and other objects such as contacts, email, appointments, tasks, etc.) should justify it… by version 2 anyhow…
Just my two bits.