Channel 9 Team - Welcome to our new design

Last week Shishir invited us over to have a chat with the WinFS team. Imagine our suprise when Quentin Clark, director of program management on the WinFS team, started the interview by handing interviewer Robert Scoble a CD with beta 1 on it.
We then spent an hour with the team getting up to date on what they've been doing. Also seen is Samuel Druker, development manager.
One thing that's real exciting? WinFS will be released on not just Windows Vista (the demos here are seen on Windows XP).
Sorry about the focus problems, our camera is starting to freak out.
There are already two threads started about the WinFS release today, by the way:
Looks like WinFS is back on track and
WinFS Beta 1 Released.
The demo starts at about 11:00. Don't miss that!
itprochris wrote:Am I correct that this is the 500th video?
Better video quality = bigger bandwidth requirements. And then other Channel 9 users would be bitching about how long it takes to download, or how it won't stream smoothly over their connection. So it's a compromise.
To get best quality use the "Download" link. That's a 500kbps file. It's already more than 200MB. How much bigger do you want me to make these files? At some point someone will ask me why our videos are sucking up all available bandwidth coming out of Redmond.
scobleizer wrote:Unfortunately there is a limit to what we can distribute out.
Orbit86 wrote:the same thing einstein, don't try to post something just to up one me..
scobleizer wrote:
I have a new HDTV camcorder that I'm playing around with.
Maybe we could do stills of those parts of the video?
Orbit86 wrote:hmm you know your HDTV cam won't mean anything if you don't have a HDTV capable program (Premiere) and if users don't have HDTV monitors..
Orbit86 wrote:what do you mean by video stills?
Beer28 wrote:I bet WinFS is doing the IO twice, once from the ntfs driver to the DMA to the disk, and again from WinFS to the ntfs disk device.
I don't have proof, but I bet that's what they're doing.
Why didn't they just wipe out NTFS completely and do a new FS with a SQL theme instead with the raw blocks?
If it's how I described it, you're doubling your IO for nothing, it would be bloat.
Just like when you mount an iso on ext3 on the loopback device.
samdruk wrote:
We don't provide decoders for every kind of metadata you could think of but a developer can build custom ones and add them to the system (similar to IFilters or IPropertyStores).
rjdohnert wrote:Great job Scoble, I like the videos the way they are. It takes enough time to download them as it is. I have one question tho, if you guys keep offering Windows Vista features for Windows XP, whats the incentive to upgrade to Windows Vista? Dont get me wrong, Im happy about you guys backporting.
samdruk wrote:Also, in response to your earlier posts about stream data: we have a metadata handling infrastructure that enables these kinds of things that you talk about. We don't provide decoders for every kind of metadata you could think of but a developer can build custom ones and add them to the system (similar to IFilters or IPropertyStores).
He looks like a Quentin.
BA DUM PSHH!
Beer28 wrote:
I believe that the WinFS is virtual filesystem that stores indexing data, and provides SQLD services.
I may be wrong here, (no doubt someone will correct me if I am) but I believe WinFS is a Virtual Object Store, that provides SQLD and filesystem services.
The difference?
scobleizer wrote:The download links now are encoded at 500kbps. The "play" links are encoded for 300kbps/100kbps/43kbps streaming. So, using the download link will give you noticeably better quality. I'm also playing around with the encoder. We're also playing with some new cameras.
Finally WinFS is released, never thought this would happen.
I have some questions that I would appreciate if someone could answer:
1) How and where are all the relations, keywords etc saved? I couldn´t get that into my head while watching the video.
2) How do the WinFS get all the mails and stuff? Do I have to copy every mail ino the WinFS Store? Sounds a little bit complicated..
3) Do I have to set all the relations manually? How does WinFS know which document is created by which user?
4) Do I have to create all profiles by my own, or are they created automatically when I get a document/mail/image/another file by someone?
5) Is it possible to share the profiles so if I update my own profile, everyone who uses it will get the latest information?
Thanks,
Mikael Söderström
It was great to see WinFS in action. Thanks for the video, C9!
IMHO, calling it a "file system" is really doing it a disservice even if ultimately becoming Windows' next file system is its most important near-term future goal.
Yes, I know its current incarnation is as a layer on top of NTFS, but in the future, that may not be the case. From the comments they made about WinFS in the video, they chose NTFS because it was easier to use a robust, mature file system like NTFS to build
the "file system" bits of WinFS than to build a new one from scratch.
Likewise, SQL Server 2005 may not be the database engine that drives WinFS in the future; one of Hans Reiser's beefs about WinFS is that it uses a relational model, which he feels isn't appropriate for a filesystem. Personally, I think Reiser's right but for
a different reason than he thinks. I'm less concerned about the suitability of the relational model for modeling filesystem data and more concerned about the "impedance mismatch" of object-oriented and relational database models, something that has been a
thorn in the side of O/R and OODB models for a very long time. MS has a lot of very bright people in their employ; maybe they'll figure out something.
Anyway, as with NTFS, MS is using SQL Server 2005 because it was easier to use a robust, mature database like SQL Server than to build a new object-relational or object-oriented database from scratch. The flip side is that the next generations of WinFS will
have to support legacy artifacts of having its first generation be an NTFS-based, SQL Server-based file system, but I guess they figured they'd rather cross that bridge when they get to it than to release something in the early-mid 2010's.
It'll be interesting to see what the open source guys come up with after WinFS comes out, though I wonder if they will be as hamstrung by their UNIX legacy as Microsoft is by their NT/SQL Server legacies. Reiser's comments about his file system's UNIX dependencies
suggests that it will be hampered by that legacy... but not forever. What MS is trying to do with WinFS could be bigger and more powerful than UNIX, NT, and SQL Server.
Let's not forget Google, who's coming at this from their own angle (the power of search; the Internet as the filesystem).
NeoTOM wrote:He looks like a Quentin.
BA DUM PSHH!
rjdohnert wrote:if you guys keep offering Windows Vista features for Windows XP, whats the incentive to upgrade to Windows Vista?
ankurbulsara wrote:Is it possible to just go line-in into the monitor and edit the movie such that it switches view when appropriate?
Beer28 wrote:
That's actually not true. BSD and Linux actually keep the config files in folders prefixed with a . in the user's local dir ~/.config
Beer28 wrote:
As is the case with the .so's not facing dll hell due to the version being in the file name. The low tech solution on unix systems is actually much more elegant.
scobleizer wrote:
Better security.
bundyum wrote:
samdruk,
i would be interested to hear your response to what hans reiser said about win fs on slashdot:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=160472&cid=13433454
Beer28 wrote:Neville, the sql object provider layer is nice, but it's just a layer right?
You could provide the same sql object provider with MySQL and mono or with C++ on linux.
Beer28 wrote:What interests me most is that it's just a virtual file system that points to data on the ntfs volume. So WinFS, isn't really a FS at all.
Beer28 wrote:The whole directory structure is filled from sql data. And all those relationships they showed in the video are just different row and column joins from the file metadata in SQL presented through the virtual file system driver for WinFS. That's how I understand it, and I may be wrong.
On linux you can also provide "fake" directory listings and file listings to a client of the fs driver, so you could do the same thing.
amg55nj wrote:How do I download the video? I don't see a download link anywhere? Thanks.