4 ms·

This is all fun and games until you need to work with multiple hard drives, removable media, and network volumes. And backups of and onto such devices. Maybe o

by 0x0 14y ago

This is all fun and games until you need to work with multiple hard drives, removable media, and network volumes. And backups of and onto such devices. Maybe only "professionals" need that. But I'd imagine even amateur photographers will soon run out of space if they store all their holiday photos on the macbook SSD.

jiggy2011 14y ago
I guess the answer is to somehow handle this transparently, for example putting most commonly used files on the SSD. Think about the Unix way vs Windows. In Windows you have a C drive , D drive etc, all of these are seperate partitions and if you want to locate a file you need to know which partition it is on. In Unix you want your personal files , so you go to /home/username or programs are in /usr/bin etc. This is because the filesystem is providing a layer of abstraction over the physical disk. Of course this has a snag that if one of your disks fails you won't be quite sure what you lost because you don't know what was on that specific disk, but I guess anything important will be persisted to the cloud anyway. The filesystem is really a very limited way of organizing things. You have to choose one criteria to categorize on which means you end up in subfolder hell. The big problem is, how do you store your data in a way that means it can be accessed by multiple programs. For example you catagorise your music in iTunes but you want to move it into a different media player? The Apple answer to this seems to be to simply say no, you have one program for each type of data and that is it.
- johnchristopher 14y ago
  > Think about the Unix way vs Windows. In Windows you have a C drive , D drive etc, all of these are seperate partitions and if you want to locate a file you need to know which partition it is on. > In Unix you want your personal files , so you go to /home/username or programs are in /usr/bin etc. This is because the filesystem is providing a layer of abstraction over the physical disk. Hm. I have the opposite feeling. To me unix is using one less layer of abstraction than windows. I know hdd are really devices located in /dev/sd* or /dev/scsi or sthg and these acronyms relate more to the hardware wiring than the piece of metal that is a hdd. blkid, fstab would tell me which devices are mounted or their properties and I can "mount (or switch them on)" them to a "kind of virtual folder". In windows, two partitions located on the same hard drive appears as two distinct hard drives both in explorer and in a prompt and that is an additionnal layer. Specifically, with 2hdd with 4 partitions scattered on each drive you can't tell which partition is on which drive at first glance. > The Apple answer to this seems to be to simply say no, you have one program for each type of data and that is it. This boils down to "what is a computer to me? : a machine to run programs that manage data ? data that are supposed to be looked at and data that are supposed to be executed to look at another type of data ? Do I use word to write text or do I write text to a file via word ?" Personnaly, I believe the "everything is a file" moto to cover a lot of ground and to be a very good description of how computer/mobile works when I have to explain "computer" to beginners. It also frees you from paradigms imposed by the use of one and only one explanation ("yes, you can write text without MSWord and people will be able to read it!")
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    My point is more that the directory structure on Unix is seperated from the physical disks. For example, you have a computer with 1 HDD and you upgrade it so that there is now 2. On a Windows computer you are going to have to explain to the user that their "my documents" folder is now on the D drive whereas on Unix you just map the second disk to /home and they can be none the wiser. The next logical step is to have a system whereby you don't even need to wrangle fstab, you just throw hard disks and cloud storage at a computer and let the OS decide how to balance it all.
    - johnchristopher 14y ago
      I see your point and I mostly* agree. It's also true on Unix that you can use LVM but it's not (yet) for the non-technical user. *mostly because real-life scenarios aren't as straight forward.
endlessvoid94 14y ago
Apple does this pretty well with Aperture. If you just want to use aperture simply, you don't have to know about filesystems. But if you know you want to have separate libraries, you can open and close other libraries on the filesystem. I guess I'm saying I agree, but it's still possible to keep the filesystem as free from the UI as possible.
crazygringo 14y ago
That's when the amateur photographs turn into professional Mac users.

by 0x0 14y ago

jiggy2011 14y ago

I guess the answer is to somehow handle this transparently, for example putting most commonly used files on the SSD. Think about the Unix way vs Windows. In Windows you have a C drive , D drive etc, all of these are seperate partitions and if you want to locate a file you need to know which partition it is on. In Unix you want your personal files , so you go to /home/username or programs are in /usr/bin etc. This is because the filesystem is providing a layer of abstraction over the physical disk. Of course this has a snag that if one of your disks fails you won't be quite sure what you lost because you don't know what was on that specific disk, but I guess anything important will be persisted to the cloud anyway. The filesystem is really a very limited way of organizing things. You have to choose one criteria to categorize on which means you end up in subfolder hell. The big problem is, how do you store your data in a way that means it can be accessed by multiple programs. For example you catagorise your music in iTunes but you want to move it into a different media player? The Apple answer to this seems to be to simply say no, you have one program for each type of data and that is it.

johnchristopher 14y ago
> Think about the Unix way vs Windows. In Windows you have a C drive , D drive etc, all of these are seperate partitions and if you want to locate a file you need to know which partition it is on. > In Unix you want your personal files , so you go to /home/username or programs are in /usr/bin etc. This is because the filesystem is providing a layer of abstraction over the physical disk. Hm. I have the opposite feeling. To me unix is using one less layer of abstraction than windows. I know hdd are really devices located in /dev/sd* or /dev/scsi or sthg and these acronyms relate more to the hardware wiring than the piece of metal that is a hdd. blkid, fstab would tell me which devices are mounted or their properties and I can "mount (or switch them on)" them to a "kind of virtual folder". In windows, two partitions located on the same hard drive appears as two distinct hard drives both in explorer and in a prompt and that is an additionnal layer. Specifically, with 2hdd with 4 partitions scattered on each drive you can't tell which partition is on which drive at first glance. > The Apple answer to this seems to be to simply say no, you have one program for each type of data and that is it. This boils down to "what is a computer to me? : a machine to run programs that manage data ? data that are supposed to be looked at and data that are supposed to be executed to look at another type of data ? Do I use word to write text or do I write text to a file via word ?" Personnaly, I believe the "everything is a file" moto to cover a lot of ground and to be a very good description of how computer/mobile works when I have to explain "computer" to beginners. It also frees you from paradigms imposed by the use of one and only one explanation ("yes, you can write text without MSWord and people will be able to read it!")
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  My point is more that the directory structure on Unix is seperated from the physical disks. For example, you have a computer with 1 HDD and you upgrade it so that there is now 2. On a Windows computer you are going to have to explain to the user that their "my documents" folder is now on the D drive whereas on Unix you just map the second disk to /home and they can be none the wiser. The next logical step is to have a system whereby you don't even need to wrangle fstab, you just throw hard disks and cloud storage at a computer and let the OS decide how to balance it all.
  - johnchristopher 14y ago
    I see your point and I mostly* agree. It's also true on Unix that you can use LVM but it's not (yet) for the non-technical user. *mostly because real-life scenarios aren't as straight forward.

endlessvoid94 14y ago

Apple does this pretty well with Aperture. If you just want to use aperture simply, you don't have to know about filesystems. But if you know you want to have separate libraries, you can open and close other libraries on the filesystem. I guess I'm saying I agree, but it's still possible to keep the filesystem as free from the UI as possible.

crazygringo 14y ago

That's when the amateur photographs turn into professional Mac users.