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This immediately made me nostalgic for BeOS's BeFS or Windows Longhorn's WinFS database filesystems, and how this kind of thing would have fit them perfect. So
by pseudosavant 1y ago
This immediately made me nostalgic for BeOS's BeFS or Windows Longhorn's WinFS database filesystems, and how this kind of thing would have fit them perfect. So much cool stuff you could do with vectors for everything. Smart folders that include files for a project based on a description of the project. Show me all of my config files for appXYZ. Images of a black dog at the beach. At the OS-level for any other app to easily tap into.
I'd be surprised if cloud storage services like OneDrive don't already do some kind of vector for every file you store. But an online web service isn't the same as being built into the core of the OS.
- perone 1y agoI share the same feeling, I think filesystems will have to reinvent themselves given the pace of how useful ML models became in the past years.
- didgetmaster 1y agoI built a local object store that was designed to replace file systems. You can create hundreds of millions of objects (e.g. files) and attach a variety of metadata tags to each one. A tag could be a number, string, or other data type (including vector info). Searches for objects with certain tags is exceptionally fast. I invented it because I found searching conventional file systems that support extended attributes to be unbearably slow.
- tugdual 1y agoGot a demo ?
- didgetmaster 1y agoTons of demo videos on my YouTube channel. Free beta available for download on my website. Links in my profile.
- p_ing 1y agoWinFS wasn't a file system laid down on hardware, it was just a SQL database that stored arbitrary data.
- didgetmaster 1y agoI think that is one of the main reason it failed to launch. It was just too easy for the metadata stored in the separate database to become out of sync with the actual file data. Microsoft saw the tech support nightmare this could generate, and abandoned the project.
- pseudosavant 1y agoThey just weren't able to pull it off for whatever reason. I actually ran BeOS as my daily driver for quite a while (way) back in the day. BeFS was genuinely amazing, and not something I've seen replicated elsewhere yet. There hasn't really been anything interesting done in filesystems used by users on devices in a really long time.
- aforwardslash 1y agoBeOS was mostly a single-user system, and filesystem was optimized for that use case. Having to consider that an opened file for reading may be modified by a remote system running with a different user complicates things, so while I do agree that BeFS was quite ahead of his time, it focused on a somewhat specific use case; At the time, you wouldn't expect that you could eg. correctly backup your email client data without shutting down the application.
- p_ing 1y agoIt was abandoned due to The Cloud. There was no need for WinFS as a tech when you could store everything in The Cloud. It was also complex, ran poorly, and would have required developers to integrate their applications. Microsoft had long solved the problem of blobs and metadata in ESE and SharePoint's use of MS SQL for binary + metadata storage.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]