For the end user, Vista is just a pretty XP, and in classic skin mode, Vista looks even more like its predecessor. This is because the way you use the computer hasn’t changed much, there are no radical changes. The same applies to Apple’s Leopard: there have been a lot more functions added to it, a lot more prettiness, but nothing radically different. EnterWinFS!
Windows Future Storage (WinFS) was a filesystem originally slated to be shipped with Vista(then Longhorn). Development schedules for other products, specifically Visual Studio 2008, pushed WinFS into the background. Currently microsoft is developing the new version of Windows, Windows 7, as it is called. If the development of WinFS is complete within the release date of Windows 7, we might well see WinFS in action pretty soon.
Enough of a history lesson—it’s time to understand why I'm harping on about WinFS; what radical changes does it promise? FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS store all your files as a contiguous and continuous stream of bytes. This means an MP3 is stored as a chunk of data on some part of your hard drive. The OS is quite dumb to what that MP3 is, and basically doesn’t care. All the OS needs to know is that it should use a media player to open files called “MP3.”
Now WinFS is less of a filesystem, and more of a relationship builder. It still sits on top of an NTFS filesystem, and stores its own data on an NTFS drive, but you cease to see your drive as
files and folders. Think of how you get online and find information—you search, right? Why should items on your PC be found in any other manner?
“Now where did I store that PDF?” You remember that it’s about your company’s finances. Unfortunately, there’s also 250 GB of files there that you’re not in the mood to sift through.
A regular Windows search reveals nothing, or too many PDF files, because the file is named something like 2006-07TRSD.pdf. You can’t even search for text inside the document because it was passwordprotected. “Was it in a folder or in my e-mail?” You waste precious minutes (even hours) looking for it. Why? Because you cannot search for “A PDF file with transactions that was sent to me between April and June this year by someone, which I last viewed sometime this month.” With WinFS, you will be able to. Another example is trying to find “contact information of that guy I met on my vacation to Nepal, clicked pictures with, and e-mailed once last year.” How can this be made possible?
If only your e-mail client, picture viewer and search utility could talk to each other, they’d collaborate, eliminate false positives from your search—and give you exact results, and fast. WinFS achieves this by understanding each type of data, each file if you will, generating a report about its contents, the type of file, and all related and relevant information. So when you store picture, which you receive in your e-mail client from Suresh, with the subject “Pics of our vacation to Nepal,” WinFS stores the file in a database as type picture (regardless of JPG, GIF, TIFF, etc.), relates it to your contact Suresh, uses the keywords “Vacation” and “Nepal”, and associates it with the date it was received. It can make more associations as well, such as the content of the e-mail, if you set it to do so. Now, when you forward that mail to another friend, say Ramesh, WinFS stores his information as a relationship to that picture. It also does more, like identify a relationship between Ramesh and Suresh and keywords such as “vacation”, and so on. When you search now, you will find the picture, because WinFS actually had a basic understanding of that file. The same applies to any file, even files that
Windows does not natively recognise. A good example would be a Photoshop PSD file. Let’s
say you created a PSD file, using the same vacation pictures of Nepal, and added some text
layers. Because WinFS requires software vendors to prepare a schema for the way their software creates and manages data, it cannatively read into those files. It also means that
you get to see the PSD as a derivative of the Nepalvacation, even though it’s called “Untitled-1.psd”.
Another great feature is that because all data has relationships, you can theoretically forget about having to synchronise or update information. Another scenario: you have contacts in your e-mail address book. Suresh has changed his mobile number and office address, and sends you an e-mail to inform you. You make the change in your Outlook contacts.
Unfortunately, you also have a third-party software that prints labels for your newsletters. You have an Excel file that contains mobile numbers of your friends, a mobile phone manager software that also stores these numbers, a computer on the network where billing addresses are stored, etc. Now you’re going to have to go about finding everything with Suresh in it and update it... not! WinFS, if set to do so, will have already updated the changes everywhere, thanks to its relationship building and database storage.
There’s so much more to WinFS, that cannot be covered in small discussions. It would take entire books to truly make one understand what gone on inside WinFS!! It’s the perfect example of how the OS might be revolutionised by just adding a different method of dealing with data. It brings us to the conclusion that that WinFS, or other, similar filesystems, are our way into the future.
There once was a popular rumour circulating that Google was working on GoogleOS. This would be an OS that ran from the Net and offered you all the functionality you needed online. Some still insist that Google is ultimately working towards this, and is still developing GoogleOS. Knowing Google, this is quite possible—they’ve surprised us so much in the past with innovations, we now believe anything is possible. But is the idea of an Internet OS really far-fetched?
What’s to stop someone from making a Web-based OS? The Net is nothing more than a rather humungous LAN. Using a Live CD, USB drive, or even network booting, those with broadband connections could conceivably boot off the Net. Of course, broadband connections need to be omnipresent, and there has to be some way of making sure people can still use their computers when their ISP goes down. But these are not really unsolvable problems. Look out for something like a GoogleOS—it may be closer than you think.
As mobile devices go, we’ve already seen Apple integrate OS X into the iPhone—a lighter version, no doubt. Windows CE also brings the familiarity of the Microsoft OS to mobile devices, and enables you to do things you normally cannot on regular mobiles. As the hardware gets more powerful, we see mobile software keeping pace. In five years you might perhaps be able to load Windows XP on your mobile phone. Still speculation, but not completely
improbable.
With OSes, changeis expected a lot, and radically. If the computer is ever going to be more powerful than it already is, it needs a makeover, it needs smarter software.
