Comments

Orbit86 wrote:

I still don't know why you would need XPS when you have Word and PDF..

but yet again this is Microsoft's way of not letting you choose other people's software

I don't see anything here prohibiting you from using Word and PDF now or in the future.

Now MS pretending PDF doesn't exist I can see (it was kind of funny to listen to this video describing Metro as if nothing like this has ever been done before, right down to the amazing printer driver that creates a document!).

Then again, I couldn't see MS integrating PDF creation like Apple and the Linux desktops do without being slapped with a long and hard lawsuit from Adobe for unfairly crushing their Acrobat Elements OEM business.

I'd like to see this and Live Communications Server get included into Small Business Server. LCS used to be in there but was removed for SBS 2003.

You did notice that he was running those demos from 3 Virtual PCs and a mainframe emulator didn't you?

Beer28 wrote:

When people go to circuit city or another store to buy a pc, and they've made a selection, the sales person doesn't then ask, "so sir, or mam, what operating system would you like on that new machine?". I think linux distros don't need a lab to figure out why people happen to end up using windows instead of linux for home use, where it dominates.

Well, that's certainly an ignorant way to look at it.

This series of videos has me wondering, do the major Linux distros have labs full of machines running various versions of Windows? Should they?

If you look at how WinFS is (to be) implemented, you can see how this would work.

First off, WinFS is built on top of NTFS. Legacy files formats and things you would want to keep as files such as streaming video are store as NTFS files. Certain folders on that NTFS are designated as WinFS stores, and the system watches those folders very closely and keeps the metadata for those files synchronized with its own database, kept somehwere else. WinFS items could also exist in that database without any representation on NTFS (like SQL records in a table).

If one had to install Longhorn 2006 from the orginal install disks onto a NTFS drive that once had WinFS stores, I could see the following happening. The database for those stores would be a file or files somewhere in the NTFS laying dormant. Legacy files and such would still be there in the directories. The metadata might get out of sync if you started editing those files, but this is unlikely as you would probably want to apply all the SP and whatever to get your WinFS functionality back. At that point, WinFS could pick up your old databases, resynch the metadata if needed, and you'd be back in business.

Also note that WinFS stores are meant for user data. OS and application files would not be in WinFS stores. The OS would run fine before the WinFS SP was applied.

Think about it this way. If you put a bunch of stuff in SQL server or MSDE, and had to reinstall the OS, you'd lose all of your data, until your reinstalled SQL server (or MSDE).

At least that's the way I look at it.