5 ms·

I'm not quite sure what you're trying to argue for. You seem to want an integrated way of accessing remote resources (a la SMB but for extremely remote resource

I'm not quite sure what you're trying to argue for. You seem to want an integrated way of accessing remote resources (a la SMB but for extremely remote resources), but then you seem to be arguing in favour of hiding the directory hierarchy entirely (forgive me if I'm mistaken here). In regards to remote resources, currently there are various FUSE plugins which can present remote resources in the filesystem (e.g. flickrfs). These are of course issues with the abstraction (how do we represent tags in a hierarchy?), but the use of these plugins is mostly transparent to the user (ignoring performance). It's certainly possible to build a layer atop of these that would integrate better with the system (e.g. add a Facebook selection to the open dialog). You also seem to want to conflate applications with the data they manage. For a large number of users this is fine (iTunes is already their music, IE is the internet, etc), but for many others this is problematic (how do you manage moving data between these applications without a common intermediary. consider scanning an image, touching it up, then including it in a document - where do the original and altered versions live, how are they accessed by applications?).

jiggy2011 14y ago
FUSE plugins such as the ones you mentioned could be a fine enabling technology for this or at least a stepping stone. As you suggested, tags might not cleanly fit into the hierachical system, so perhaps a simple tree hierarchy is not the way to go for organisation of data at all. How we actually map things into the file system is a difficult question since there will need to be some common interface at some level. This could be a relational system or key/value store or something more like a graph perhaps. Conflating data with applications is an interesting issue. On the one hand I feel that there may be a move towards this, for example it would be advantageous to (say) Apple for every photo you took on your iphone to be tied into the iCloud ecosystem never to escape. On the other hand , storage is such a commodity that there's no reason that you couldn't hold your data where you want but hook into the functionality of a particular application to organise it. For example maybe you use gmail to look through your archives of old emails that you had from a previous provider that are stored on your HDD. Spotify already does something like this with it's local music functionality.

jiggy2011 14y ago

FUSE plugins such as the ones you mentioned could be a fine enabling technology for this or at least a stepping stone. As you suggested, tags might not cleanly fit into the hierachical system, so perhaps a simple tree hierarchy is not the way to go for organisation of data at all. How we actually map things into the file system is a difficult question since there will need to be some common interface at some level. This could be a relational system or key/value store or something more like a graph perhaps. Conflating data with applications is an interesting issue. On the one hand I feel that there may be a move towards this, for example it would be advantageous to (say) Apple for every photo you took on your iphone to be tied into the iCloud ecosystem never to escape. On the other hand , storage is such a commodity that there's no reason that you couldn't hold your data where you want but hook into the functionality of a particular application to organise it. For example maybe you use gmail to look through your archives of old emails that you had from a previous provider that are stored on your HDD. Spotify already does something like this with it's local music functionality.