I really can't agree with the hypothesis that this guy is putting forward. Why would anyone work directly with the filesystem for storing large amounts of data

I really can't agree with the hypothesis that this guy is putting forward. Why would anyone work directly with the filesystem for storing large amounts of data in this day? Examples from MacOSX include email, photos, or music. I have two ways of getting at this: 1) Use the program that manages the library - Mail, iPhoto or iTunes - these have very friendly interfaces for most of the common tasks that you may want to do with these document types. Of important note, they have special use cases - I want mail from this week, or from this person, or that mention a certain subject. I want photos taken on a certain date, or during a certain event, or I want to create an album which shows photos of my niece from any event. I want to organise a playlist for tonight's party, or for listening to on my iPhone, or I want to find all of my Pink Floyd albums. Application-centric access is great for this. 2) Spotlight. But what if I want to do something else. Say I want to put a copy of all my Battlestar Galactica episodes on my Media Centre. Not a problem, Spotlight will grab all of those files for me in less than a second in the Finder. Or if I don't want to make copies, I could do something a bit more geeky, and create a smart folder containing everything Battlestar Galactica, and then iterate through that folder using a script to create alias to each item. I could then share the aliases, without having to make copies of those large files. The days of handling the filesystem details of how one stores data are over. The computer can add so much more semantic information for us these days, allowing complex queries to retrieve the data that it would be silly to do the job manually. I don't try to read raw files out of an SQL database, I use queries - a userspace filesystem these days is much the same - don't worrying about ordering the data, just worry about being able to craft the right query to retrieve it...