6 ms·

This again? Nonsense like this comes up every so often and it's always based on a myopic and naive view of computing, and of the general public's use of comput

by ebbv 13y ago

This again? Nonsense like this comes up every so often and it's always based on a myopic and naive view of computing, and of the general public's use of computers. File systems are necessary because files need to move between applications and devices. File systems are already an abstraction, and they will continue to be useful until someone comes up with a better one. Which, at this point, seems unlikely. Yes, your exposure to the file system on an iPad is much lower than on a MacBook Air. But it's still present. Try saving an image from the web, an email attachment, or using the Drop Box App. You may not be at a command prompt but you're dealing with the file system. The more complicated things you want to do with a tablet, the more you're going to have to interact with the file system. A better abstraction does not yet exist, so the file system persists. Declaring its death prior to the appearance of a better abstraction is silly.

kunai 13y ago
Exactly. Who the hell writes this? I'm 15 years old, possibly part of the "generation" this author is referring to, and I do not want my information stored on remote servers that I have to access with high-latency and low-throughput connections. I do not want to launch an app to find one file I can get to easily with search. I do not want a curated application experience. All these things should be reserved for auxiliary machines like tablets. On a general-purpose computing device such as a laptop or desktop PC, I do think that file hierarchies will be deprecated, but they won't die completely. Search will be king on the desktop, and eventually will integrate both locally and remotely on the Web. Cloud computing's uptake upshoot is ephemeral. Once it's gained as much ground as it has to, the growth rate will stagnate and the cloud will plateau. I don't see SaaS being successful much either.
- dclusin 13y ago
  It seems like there is still hope for the younger generations. Says the 28 year old.
- zanny 13y ago
  Of note, even if you store your information remotely, it still makes more sense to organize it in a file system. That photo app is best done with folders and hierarchies, you organize your email in the same way, discrete information is best organized in groups, and that is all a filesystem is.
  - JamisonM 13y ago
    I emphatically disagree on the photo app example. The only folders I use for my photos is by date and the only reason I do so is because of the limitations of the design of the computer on which those files are stored. Photos do not particularly lend themselves to hierarchies - one person's "Family and Friends" grouping might be arbitrary to someone else, that's why tags came along - they add information instead of putting items in silos.
    - andrewflnr 13y ago
      I hope what makes the traditional filesystem obsolete is something with better support for non-treeish data, including tags.
      - ori_b 13y ago
        A tag based file systems are equivalent to a hierarchy with symlinks (or directory hard links). If you don't allow tagging of tags, it's equivalent to restricting your hierarchy to one level. Tags and directory DAGs are the same.
        andrewflnr 13y ago
        True. Maybe we just need better interfaces for managing multiply-referenced files.
macspoofing 13y ago
>File systems are already an abstraction, and they will continue to be useful until someone comes up with a better one That's the entire point of the article, The author argues the File System metaphor is going away. It doesn't mean the File System itself will cease to exist, or that it won't be ever-present in every major operating system. What the author means is that it just won't be exposed to the end-user. And good riddance. The File System is by far the most confusing aspect of computing to newcomers and even those that have been working with computers for a while. Understanding directory structure and the way it is organized in any given operating system seems to be a big problem for people.
- jarrett 13y ago
  > The File System is by far the most confusing aspect of computing My experience has been the complete opposite. I find the file system, far, far more intuitive than all the ad-hoc ways various applications attempt to manage my "content" for me. With these apps that abstract away the filesystem, you can never really be sure you have the right mental model of your data. The way apps like iTunes store your data is just so opaque. Indeed, iTunes is the perfect example of this problem. I can't count how many people have come to me utterly confused about how syncing between your hard drive, iOS, the iTunes store, and iCloud works. They can't understand it because Apple imposes an ever-shifting system of abstractions onto your music storage. You don't have music files anymore. You have songs stored in certain libraries, and those libraries can be "synced" with each other in ways that often result in strange error messages and loss of data. Imagine instead that things worked like the old days: You just have MP3 files, and you can put them in folders. The iPhone, when connected to the computer, can be accessed like any other filesystem. You move files in and out of a folder called iPhone/Music. In this alternate reality, you'd understand exactly what you're doing. You wouldn't have to guess at how "syncing" is going to change the state of your data.
  - altcognito 13y ago
    I think this is the best argument against ditching the file system metaphor. Having a generic, well-understood resource like a file-system is the power of general purpose computers. If Apple (or Google) can blur the concept of portable data, they can argue that data is "just too nebulous and complicated" to be useful to you mere mortals.
noonespecial 13y ago
File systems are necessary, but not necessary for users. They are needed for computers, os's and applications but users could do fine with tags (the primary of which is the application that handles the file, traditionally the extension) File systems will fade into a protocol like HTML and slip from users minds, but will remain the hard core tools of the makers and admins of systems.
- GhotiFish 13y ago
  I made a presentation on that subject actually. Tag based file systems. There's alot of ways you could make it more effective than the hierarchical structure we use right now.
  - ctdonath 13y ago
    And a major feature of the latest OS X incarnation is...file tags.
  - dharmatech 13y ago
    I've used Tabbles on Windows for file tagging. What other systems are there? http://tabbles.net/ http://tabbles.net/
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
sthommes 13y ago
A better abstraction will happen. It is inevitable. And my impression of Jan is that he is neither myopic nor naive. Files are an old, ugly metaphor born of the file cabinet. Remember when you had to label a file and then figure out where to file it: alphabetically, client name, recency, importance, by project, etc. You even used different color labels: green meant go, red meant it's hit the fan, etc. What seems unlikely is that the following WILL NOT happen in the next 5 years: A way to effortlessly tag any content, anywhere and on any device in a predictive and n-dimensional way so that content is broken down to its most granular, atomic and consumable unit- a quote of a book, a lyric of a song, a smirk or a smile in a photo, a highlight clip of a video, the exact anniversary gift you intend to buy- each having its own 'GPS coordinate' on the Web, or in some emergent meta-layer fabric that hovers above and interweaves our now-Web This much-faster way to navigate is a hyper-jump teleport to discrete coordinates, probably crowd-sourced like Waze. With combinations of tags parallax-sextant-triangulating there way more efficiently than today’s ubiquitous search query paradigm, another antiquated metaphor falls. A metaphor, no matter how popular today, I imagine not playing a major role in the future Internet What is this next new thing? My 10 year old would say he already has it: Minecraft
- marcosdumay 13y ago
  Yeah, I first heard that by the earlier 90's. Except that the timeframe was 10 years, not 5. Most of the time, people don't want to bother with several ortogonal tag sets. That's because most of the time, just one hierarchical set is enough, and when it's not people simply put lots of data inside a single file, and use application specific tools for dealing with it. AI will probably change that. But untill then, no, people won't organise their data in an n-dimensional space.
adventured 13y ago
Conceptually it's the same mentality that leads smart people to think HTML5 style apps will win out against native apps. A significant misunderstanding of average users, what they want, and why.

by ebbv 13y ago

kunai 13y ago

Exactly. Who the hell writes this? I'm 15 years old, possibly part of the "generation" this author is referring to, and I do not want my information stored on remote servers that I have to access with high-latency and low-throughput connections. I do not want to launch an app to find one file I can get to easily with search. I do not want a curated application experience. All these things should be reserved for auxiliary machines like tablets. On a general-purpose computing device such as a laptop or desktop PC, I do think that file hierarchies will be deprecated, but they won't die completely. Search will be king on the desktop, and eventually will integrate both locally and remotely on the Web. Cloud computing's uptake upshoot is ephemeral. Once it's gained as much ground as it has to, the growth rate will stagnate and the cloud will plateau. I don't see SaaS being successful much either.

dclusin 13y ago
It seems like there is still hope for the younger generations. Says the 28 year old.
zanny 13y ago
Of note, even if you store your information remotely, it still makes more sense to organize it in a file system. That photo app is best done with folders and hierarchies, you organize your email in the same way, discrete information is best organized in groups, and that is all a filesystem is.
- JamisonM 13y ago
  I emphatically disagree on the photo app example. The only folders I use for my photos is by date and the only reason I do so is because of the limitations of the design of the computer on which those files are stored. Photos do not particularly lend themselves to hierarchies - one person's "Family and Friends" grouping might be arbitrary to someone else, that's why tags came along - they add information instead of putting items in silos.
  - andrewflnr 13y ago
    I hope what makes the traditional filesystem obsolete is something with better support for non-treeish data, including tags.
    - ori_b 13y ago
      A tag based file systems are equivalent to a hierarchy with symlinks (or directory hard links). If you don't allow tagging of tags, it's equivalent to restricting your hierarchy to one level. Tags and directory DAGs are the same.
      - andrewflnr 13y ago
        True. Maybe we just need better interfaces for managing multiply-referenced files.

macspoofing 13y ago

>File systems are already an abstraction, and they will continue to be useful until someone comes up with a better one That's the entire point of the article, The author argues the File System metaphor is going away. It doesn't mean the File System itself will cease to exist, or that it won't be ever-present in every major operating system. What the author means is that it just won't be exposed to the end-user. And good riddance. The File System is by far the most confusing aspect of computing to newcomers and even those that have been working with computers for a while. Understanding directory structure and the way it is organized in any given operating system seems to be a big problem for people.

jarrett 13y ago
> The File System is by far the most confusing aspect of computing My experience has been the complete opposite. I find the file system, far, far more intuitive than all the ad-hoc ways various applications attempt to manage my "content" for me. With these apps that abstract away the filesystem, you can never really be sure you have the right mental model of your data. The way apps like iTunes store your data is just so opaque. Indeed, iTunes is the perfect example of this problem. I can't count how many people have come to me utterly confused about how syncing between your hard drive, iOS, the iTunes store, and iCloud works. They can't understand it because Apple imposes an ever-shifting system of abstractions onto your music storage. You don't have music files anymore. You have songs stored in certain libraries, and those libraries can be "synced" with each other in ways that often result in strange error messages and loss of data. Imagine instead that things worked like the old days: You just have MP3 files, and you can put them in folders. The iPhone, when connected to the computer, can be accessed like any other filesystem. You move files in and out of a folder called iPhone/Music. In this alternate reality, you'd understand exactly what you're doing. You wouldn't have to guess at how "syncing" is going to change the state of your data.
- altcognito 13y ago
  I think this is the best argument against ditching the file system metaphor. Having a generic, well-understood resource like a file-system is the power of general purpose computers. If Apple (or Google) can blur the concept of portable data, they can argue that data is "just too nebulous and complicated" to be useful to you mere mortals.

noonespecial 13y ago

File systems are necessary, but not necessary for users. They are needed for computers, os's and applications but users could do fine with tags (the primary of which is the application that handles the file, traditionally the extension) File systems will fade into a protocol like HTML and slip from users minds, but will remain the hard core tools of the makers and admins of systems.

GhotiFish 13y ago
I made a presentation on that subject actually. Tag based file systems. There's alot of ways you could make it more effective than the hierarchical structure we use right now.
- ctdonath 13y ago
  And a major feature of the latest OS X incarnation is...file tags.
- dharmatech 13y ago
  I've used Tabbles on Windows for file tagging. What other systems are there? http://tabbles.net/ http://tabbles.net/
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

sthommes 13y ago

A better abstraction will happen. It is inevitable. And my impression of Jan is that he is neither myopic nor naive. Files are an old, ugly metaphor born of the file cabinet. Remember when you had to label a file and then figure out where to file it: alphabetically, client name, recency, importance, by project, etc. You even used different color labels: green meant go, red meant it's hit the fan, etc. What seems unlikely is that the following WILL NOT happen in the next 5 years: A way to effortlessly tag any content, anywhere and on any device in a predictive and n-dimensional way so that content is broken down to its most granular, atomic and consumable unit- a quote of a book, a lyric of a song, a smirk or a smile in a photo, a highlight clip of a video, the exact anniversary gift you intend to buy- each having its own 'GPS coordinate' on the Web, or in some emergent meta-layer fabric that hovers above and interweaves our now-Web This much-faster way to navigate is a hyper-jump teleport to discrete coordinates, probably crowd-sourced like Waze. With combinations of tags parallax-sextant-triangulating there way more efficiently than today’s ubiquitous search query paradigm, another antiquated metaphor falls. A metaphor, no matter how popular today, I imagine not playing a major role in the future Internet What is this next new thing? My 10 year old would say he already has it: Minecraft

marcosdumay 13y ago
Yeah, I first heard that by the earlier 90's. Except that the timeframe was 10 years, not 5. Most of the time, people don't want to bother with several ortogonal tag sets. That's because most of the time, just one hierarchical set is enough, and when it's not people simply put lots of data inside a single file, and use application specific tools for dealing with it. AI will probably change that. But untill then, no, people won't organise their data in an n-dimensional space.

adventured 13y ago

Conceptually it's the same mentality that leads smart people to think HTML5 style apps will win out against native apps. A significant misunderstanding of average users, what they want, and why.