3 ms·

The "death of the file" is a really mixed bag. The replacement is walled gardens with no privacy, control and perhaps even ownership of your data, questionable

by api 12y ago

The "death of the file" is a really mixed bag. The replacement is walled gardens with no privacy, control and perhaps even ownership of your data, questionable security, and the potential that your data could vanish if one is acquires or goes under.

jacquesm 12y ago
I don't see the death of the file, rather more of them than fewer of them. Underneath all that pretty eye candy it's still files. What I would love to see is the death of the walled garden, but then again that's probably a pipe dream. I don't care if I'll be the last guy on the planet to self host his stuff but I can't see moving my email, my files or anything else off into the cloud. Outsourcing responsibility over my digital storage seems like asking for trouble.
- vram22 12y ago
  >I don't see the death of the file, rather more of them than fewer of them. Yes, I don't either, unless some radical invention comes along - maybe memristor based PCs from HP as was in the news some time ago - google "hp memristor computer" - so that there is no separate RAM and disk, just one kind of storage. Even then, naming of data objects will be needed, so it may still be something like a file. Plus, there is a huge existing software investment in code to handle file names and file naming conventions - it must be something on the order of magnitude of the {m|b}illions of lines of COBOL code that still exist in production, maybe an order less ... But many of these big revolutionary announcements (e.g. memristor-based PC) turn out to be vaporware, though some of them do end up in at least some spinoff tech that is of use. Time will tell.
gaius 12y ago
I have a friend who had a Kodak camera that, you plugged it into your PC and it uploaded straight to Kodak's photo hosting (this was before we called such things "cloud storage"). If you wanted your own copies of your own photos you would need to go onto said site and right-click download them one at a time. One day Kodak decided they weren't going to run this site anymore, and just deleted the whole lot. She was heartbroken. And I look at all these guys selling similar solutions, and I got to wonder at what point did they knowingly cross the line to exploiting and victimising ordinary users?
- api 12y ago
  There's a whole raft of home automation devices, printers, etc. that will become bricks if certain cloud servers are turned off. Personally I think this fad will crash and burn, but it will take many rounds of consumer disappointment and flagrant disregard like you describe. Eventually "you control it" will become a selling point.
  - ghaff 12y ago
    For the most part, home automation is a horrible mess right now with incompatible proprietary systems that mostly don't even solve any particular problem. That said, there's a definite tradeoff between having devices that just work and maintaining control over all the information storage and information flows. In the case of the parent comment, automatically backing up photos is actually a great feature for a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't back them up at all. But it's not so good when the service shuts down or your account gets hacked (as in the celebrity photos this past year).
    - scholia 12y ago
      There's a difference between doing it out of self-interest (Kodak, Apple) and providing a user service. It would be perfectly possible to provide automatic backups of photos via the user's choice of cloud (Dropbox, OneDrive etc) with the cloud service copying them to the user's chosen personal storage (PC, NAS, whatever). That would work except for the people who don't and/or won't have any personal storage. However, if people won't look after their own data, I'm unlikely to be too sad when they lose it.
      - ghaff 12y ago
        >However, if people won't look after their own data, I'm unlikely to be too sad when they lose it. I'm going to disagree with you on that. This piece that John Gruber wrote after the celebrity iCloud account hack is spot on IMO: http://daringfireball.net/2014/09/security_tradeoffs http://daringfireball.net/2014/09/security_tradeoffs "Over the years I’ve received numerous emails from past and former Genius Bar support staff, telling similar stories of heartbreak. Customer comes in, their iPhone completely broken, or lost, or stolen, and they had precious photos and videos on it. The birth of a child. The last vacation they ever took with a beloved spouse who has since passed away. Did they ever back up their iPhone to a Mac or PC with iTunes? No. In many cases they don’t even know what “iTunes on a PC” even means. Or maybe they connected the iPhone to iTunes once, the day they bought it and needed to activate it, and then never again." For many people it honestly is a choice between an automated cloud service and going without a safety net at all. Do I personally depend on a cloud provider when I can avoid it? I try not to with anything I really care about. I use cloud providers but have plenty of my own backup systems as well. But I'm not the typical consumer.
vezzy-fnord 12y ago
As I stated in a previous post, there is no "death of the file". There is the obfuscation of the file, merely putting a splash screen on it and pretending it doesn't exist. Once we actually replace hierarchical file systems with a different paradigm (like persistent object stores), then we can talk. Right now we live in a world dominated by the hierarchical file system, and this likely won't change soon. Nor am I necessarily advocating one, as none of the alternatives have ever reached usages anywhere near as widespread. Trying to pretend that fundamental principles of your environment aren't real is an anti-pattern and a recipe for disaster.

by api 12y ago

jacquesm 12y ago

I don't see the death of the file, rather more of them than fewer of them. Underneath all that pretty eye candy it's still files. What I would love to see is the death of the walled garden, but then again that's probably a pipe dream. I don't care if I'll be the last guy on the planet to self host his stuff but I can't see moving my email, my files or anything else off into the cloud. Outsourcing responsibility over my digital storage seems like asking for trouble.

vram22 12y ago
>I don't see the death of the file, rather more of them than fewer of them. Yes, I don't either, unless some radical invention comes along - maybe memristor based PCs from HP as was in the news some time ago - google "hp memristor computer" - so that there is no separate RAM and disk, just one kind of storage. Even then, naming of data objects will be needed, so it may still be something like a file. Plus, there is a huge existing software investment in code to handle file names and file naming conventions - it must be something on the order of magnitude of the {m|b}illions of lines of COBOL code that still exist in production, maybe an order less ... But many of these big revolutionary announcements (e.g. memristor-based PC) turn out to be vaporware, though some of them do end up in at least some spinoff tech that is of use. Time will tell.

gaius 12y ago

I have a friend who had a Kodak camera that, you plugged it into your PC and it uploaded straight to Kodak's photo hosting (this was before we called such things "cloud storage"). If you wanted your own copies of your own photos you would need to go onto said site and right-click download them one at a time. One day Kodak decided they weren't going to run this site anymore, and just deleted the whole lot. She was heartbroken. And I look at all these guys selling similar solutions, and I got to wonder at what point did they knowingly cross the line to exploiting and victimising ordinary users?

api 12y ago
There's a whole raft of home automation devices, printers, etc. that will become bricks if certain cloud servers are turned off. Personally I think this fad will crash and burn, but it will take many rounds of consumer disappointment and flagrant disregard like you describe. Eventually "you control it" will become a selling point.
- ghaff 12y ago
  For the most part, home automation is a horrible mess right now with incompatible proprietary systems that mostly don't even solve any particular problem. That said, there's a definite tradeoff between having devices that just work and maintaining control over all the information storage and information flows. In the case of the parent comment, automatically backing up photos is actually a great feature for a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't back them up at all. But it's not so good when the service shuts down or your account gets hacked (as in the celebrity photos this past year).
  - scholia 12y ago
    There's a difference between doing it out of self-interest (Kodak, Apple) and providing a user service. It would be perfectly possible to provide automatic backups of photos via the user's choice of cloud (Dropbox, OneDrive etc) with the cloud service copying them to the user's chosen personal storage (PC, NAS, whatever). That would work except for the people who don't and/or won't have any personal storage. However, if people won't look after their own data, I'm unlikely to be too sad when they lose it.
    - ghaff 12y ago
      >However, if people won't look after their own data, I'm unlikely to be too sad when they lose it. I'm going to disagree with you on that. This piece that John Gruber wrote after the celebrity iCloud account hack is spot on IMO: http://daringfireball.net/2014/09/security_tradeoffs http://daringfireball.net/2014/09/security_tradeoffs "Over the years I’ve received numerous emails from past and former Genius Bar support staff, telling similar stories of heartbreak. Customer comes in, their iPhone completely broken, or lost, or stolen, and they had precious photos and videos on it. The birth of a child. The last vacation they ever took with a beloved spouse who has since passed away. Did they ever back up their iPhone to a Mac or PC with iTunes? No. In many cases they don’t even know what “iTunes on a PC” even means. Or maybe they connected the iPhone to iTunes once, the day they bought it and needed to activate it, and then never again." For many people it honestly is a choice between an automated cloud service and going without a safety net at all. Do I personally depend on a cloud provider when I can avoid it? I try not to with anything I really care about. I use cloud providers but have plenty of my own backup systems as well. But I'm not the typical consumer.

vezzy-fnord 12y ago

As I stated in a previous post, there is no "death of the file". There is the obfuscation of the file, merely putting a splash screen on it and pretending it doesn't exist. Once we actually replace hierarchical file systems with a different paradigm (like persistent object stores), then we can talk. Right now we live in a world dominated by the hierarchical file system, and this likely won't change soon. Nor am I necessarily advocating one, as none of the alternatives have ever reached usages anywhere near as widespread. Trying to pretend that fundamental principles of your environment aren't real is an anti-pattern and a recipe for disaster.