loxal DEV

Windows 7 will continue to use the good old and especially slow NTFS but how about the next release of Windows? WinFS which was originally planed and drafted for Windows Vista but disappeared from Microsoft's product pipeline soon as it was not ready . But Microsoft kept its Data Platform Vision which was the main goal for WinFS: Your Data, Any Place, Any Time . However many WinFS achievements were merged to Microsoft SQL 2008.

Investigating if there will be a new file system in the upcoming Windows operating system, I have found two interesting articles describing the main goals to be reached in Windows 7. But firstly: No, I have not found anything about a new file system in Windows 7. Apparently Microsoft will continue to use its archaic NTFS file system in the upcoming Windows release -- no WinFS at all... And secondly the articles: In this article a MS employee blogs about Microsoft's approaches to increase the performance of Windows 7 and make it even faster than Windows Vista. Also there is an article where the philosophy of Windows' component configuration/setup is explained .

Actually there are three major Windows Server 2008 versions which are considerable to be used as a desktop operating system on a notebook/laptop or PC: Web, Standard, Enterprise , and the Datacenter edition. If you intend to use one of these server operating systems on your workstation resp. desktop, you should choose the Enterprise edition as it offers all Enterprise features but still can be slimmed down to a Standard/Web edition feature set as you may not need many Enterprise Server features (and server features in general). But in the case you may wish to try them, you will still have the opportunity to add them to your current setup. Under no circumstances you should install the Datacenter edition as it is optimized for server virtualization. Therefore it has a corresponding kernel which is optimized for this kind of tasks. But this kernel will definitely not fit the needs of any notebook/laptop as they have no corresponding hardware (hardware virtualization enabled CPU) charac...

Macromedia´s Flash technology revolutionized the web and this was obviously one of the reasons why Adobe has acquired Macromedia. Flash facilitated browsers to play multimedia content and allowed users to interact with this content. The shady sides of Flash are: The technology base is quite old It is written in C or C++ which is good for performance but horrible for code maintenance and platform independence efforts. High level languages like Java or C# is much better suitable for such kind of applications today. There is still no 64 bit version of Flash. This is especially on x64 Linux machines a problem because you have either to run a x86 browser or a flash wrapper. However both consume much CPU time because Flash occasionally was treated very stepmotherly as it was ported to Linux . Flash content cannot be read by search engine crawlers because the content is stored in binary form. In the times of the semantic Web 2.0 such binary content producing technologies are not appreciated...

Also Microsoft has discovered the advantages of OSS driven software development and released an own OSI approved OSS license called Ms-PL which is also used for MSDN Code Gallery . Unlike the GPL, the Ms-PL is a permissive software license that allows make closed source derivatives from existing project licensed under this license. Therefore the Ms-PL is comparable to the MIT/X11 or the BSD license . There is a nice overview about software licenses offered by Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative which currently consists out of three licenses. Aside from the Ms-Pl there is also the Ms-RL and the Microsoft Reference License . Thereby the Ms-RL is Microsoft's most restrictive shared source license that allows licensees to view source code in order to gain a deeper understanding of the inner workings of a given technology . This license is primarily used for development libraries that behavior under certain circumstance cannot be explained by natural language well. The Micro...