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Computer Files Are Going Extinct

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Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#381

Post by thawaway1837 »

nostrademons wrote: post #96
unqueued wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a very similar anecdote. I had a long conversation with a friend who is a high school science teacher. She told me that computer literacy has plummeted in the last ten years. She has her students go into the field and collect data in the form of photos, spreadsheets, and typed reports. She wants students to bundle these files in zip files, and email them to her. Students have no idea how to do this. Some of th…

I'm curious if this is actually computer literacy plummeting or if it's a wider population of students being expected to understand computers. When I was in high school the vast majority of my peers understood how to bundle up a bunch of photos, documents, etc. into a zip file and e-mail them. This is because my peers were nerds, and we were excited about this new computer technology and eager to learn everything we…

I think part of it is that mobile OSes have trained people to treat their computers like appliances. The way you do something is by getting an app that is tailor made to do that thing. There is no such thing as data, that can then be acted upon by different apps and services (I.e. files). What you have, instead, is Instagram, for taking pictures and sharing them with filters, and Pinterest for sharing random places on the internet, Notes for keeping documents, etc.

I think 1 striking manifestation of the loss of the concept of files is that if someone wants to share a Note from their iOS device, the most common way for them to do it is for them to likely take a screenshot of it and share that image.

Since conceptually a note is not a thing of its own, but rather a part of the Notes app, people rightly believe you cannot share it on its own, and so need to go with the all catching screenshot fallback.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#382

Post by pasabagi »

l_t wrote: post #266
pasabagi wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I frequently write to my grandma, who is fairly well-educated, and her writing is technically good. It is, however, bad writing. It's a pattern I've noticed quite a lot with older people. They write perfectly-formed garbage. I think the amount of time people spend writing today is greater than at any time in history, and I think it shows. That's my intuition. But I'd also note, your points (1, 3 for example) contradi…

Thanks, I appreciate your perspective on that. I don't believe that my points contradict each other. So I'm going to address that part of your post, to avoid any confusion. But I think the rest of your argument is great, I just want to explain myself a bit better. For starters, simpler writing can indeed be more unclear (because it's less precise, as discussed). So "simpler, but unclear" isn't contradictory in that s…

I see where you're coming from, but I think one way in which we diverge is in our ideas about what is valuable in language. I quite like inaccurate, loose formulations because they're playful - and I think writing is a form of play, as much as it's a tool to communicate with. In its place, evocative vagueness can be better than sharp clarity.

My feeling as to what distinguish good writing from bad is more that good writers say what they want. Bad writers say stuff they didn't mean to, say stuff that other people want (cliches), or say nothing at all (obscurity). So in my eyes, there's no distinguishing textual characteristic of good writing. For instance, while I generally agree with you on jargon, David Foster Wallace uses jargon in a way I really like, and think is pretty central to what makes his writing good.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#383

Post by thawaway1837 »

derefr wrote: post #361
pdonis wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer to "why do you want files as an abstraction" is that files are the units of ownership of data. If you don't control the files that represent your data, you don't own it. You might think you do, but you don't, because someone else ultimately decides the fate of those files.

My point was that there don't need to be files anywhere to represent data at all. Computers can work entirely without files. For example, your whole hard drive could consist of an RDBMS, where you'd not "download" files, but rather "download" streams of tables, which would import directly as tables into the RDBMS. "Files" are a very specific abstraction; thinking they're the only way to transfer chunks of data around…

They are not the only way to transfer chunks of data.

They are the most successful and versatile mass way to transfer chunks of data and define ownership in the history of computing.

I’m sure an RDBMS or a graph DB can do those things as well. But no one has succeeded in doing it even close to as effectively as files managed to. And many have tried. In fact, probably the greatest computer software failure of all time, Windows Longhorn, was largely a failure in trying to replace a file based system with a graph DB based system.

People very much can imagine alternatives. There are no shortage of imaginable alternatives. There is a huge shortage of successful in use alternatives that are as versatile or effective as files.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#384

Post by beerandt »

pasabagi wrote: post #380
beerandt wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure it's not just generational misunderstanding? A lot of people describe dialogue from early movies in a similar way, just because it's difficult to understand. Especially the early noir stuff. They're speaking perfect English, but it might as well be a foreign language to most English speakers today.

Pretty sure. I read a lot, a lot of which is old. I enjoy a wide variety of writing styles.

Yes, but reading old books doesn't usually capture the old vernacular well. Even if written (professionally) with that intent (Mice and Men, Flowers for Algernon) movies and audio were generally more accurate, (even if exaggerated) in that they're not subject to interpretation.

The writing of an un-edited grandparent might be a more accurate account of this.

Or not.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#385

Post by derefr »

thawaway1837 wrote: post #383
derefr wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was that there don't need to be files anywhere to represent data at all. Computers can work entirely without files. For example, your whole hard drive could consist of an RDBMS, where you'd not "download" files, but rather "download" streams of tables, which would import directly as tables into the RDBMS. "Files" are a very specific abstraction; thinking they're the only way to transfer chunks of data around…

They are not the only way to transfer chunks of data. They are the most successful and versatile mass way to transfer chunks of data and define ownership in the history of computing. I’m sure an RDBMS or a graph DB can do those things as well. But no one has succeeded in doing it even close to as effectively as files managed to. And many have tried. In fact, probably the greatest computer software failure of all time…

You're focusing on "files" as they compare to things very different from them. But imagine for a moment what an OS with an object store in place of a filesystem, would be like. Pretty much exactly the same, except that the scratch buffers backing temp files and databases wouldn't hang off the object-store "tree", but rather would either be anonymous (from mmap(2)), or would be represented by a device node (i.e. a logical volume) rather than being objects themselves. All the freestanding read-only asset bundles, executables, documents, etc. would stay the same, since these were always objects being emulated under a filesystem to begin with.

And downloads would also be objects. Because, when you think about it, at least over HTTP, downloads and uploads already are of objects—the source doesn't get allocated a scratch buffer on the destination that it can then freely seek(2) around and write(2) into; instead, the source just streams a representation to the dest, that gets buffered until it's complete, and then a new object is constructed on the dest from that full local stream-buffered copy. (WebDAV introduces some file semantics into HTTP's representational object semantics, but it doesn't actually go all the way to enabling you to mount a DBMS over WebDAV.) Other protocols are similar (e.g. FTP; SMTP.) Even BitTorrent is working with objects, once you realize that it's the pieces of your files that are the objects. Rsync is the only weird protocol, that would really need to be reimplemented in terms of syscalls to allocate explicit durable scratch buffers. (That and SMB/NFS/AFP/etc., but those are protocols with the explicit goal of exposing a share on a remote host as something with filesystem semantics, so you'd kind of expect them to need filesystem support on the local machine.)

Now, want to know something interesting? We already have this. Any inherently copy-on-write filesystem, like APFS or btrfs, is actually an object store masquerading as a filesystem. You get filesystem semantics, but they're layered on on top of object-storage semantics, and it's more efficient when you strip them away and use the object storage semantics directly (like when using btrfs send/receive, or when telling APFS to directly clone a container.) And these filesystems also have exactly what I mentioned above: special syscalls (or in this case, file attributes) to allocate scratch buffers that bypass Copy-on-Write, for things like databases.

There's no reason that a modern ground-up OS (e.g. Google's Fuchsia) would need to use a filesystem rather than an object store. A constructive proof's already there that it can be done, just obscured a bit behind a need for legacy compatibility; a need that wouldn't be there in a ground-up OS design.

(Or, you can take as a constructive proof any "cloud native" unikernel design that just uses IaaS object/KV/tuple/document-storage service requests as its "syscalls", and has no local persistent storage whatsoever, never even bothering to understand block devices attached to it by its hypervisor.)

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#386

Post by johnminter »

pasabagi wrote: post #382
l_t wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, I appreciate your perspective on that. I don't believe that my points contradict each other. So I'm going to address that part of your post, to avoid any confusion. But I think the rest of your argument is great, I just want to explain myself a bit better. For starters, simpler writing can indeed be more unclear (because it's less precise, as discussed). So "simpler, but unclear" isn't contradictory in that s…

I see where you're coming from, but I think one way in which we diverge is in our ideas about what is valuable in language. I quite like inaccurate, loose formulations because they're playful - and I think writing is a form of play, as much as it's a tool to communicate with. In its place, evocative vagueness can be better than sharp clarity. My feeling as to what distinguish good writing from bad is more that good w…

Genre is important here. One's choice of language when playfully communicating with friends will be different than the language used to communicate in a legal brief or a scientific paper. We adapt our language to our audience and the occasion to communicate our ideas. Being thoughtful and considerate to our audience is important on all occasions.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#387

Post by anderspitman »

seabird wrote: post #364
anderspitman wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry I was on mobile and wasn't very clear. I meant in terms of services like Google Drive or Dropbox, what about the sharing functionality doesn't work for you?

From a legal standpoint, there is way more to cover with those services. All sorts of hoops (NDA, compliance, etc.) would have to be jumped through. At my current employer, those services not being on our property under our complete control makes our lawyers nervous; counterfeits of our product are an existential threat to us, and keeping tight control over the software and electrical implementation details is paramo…

Makes sense, thanks for the detailed response!

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#388

Post by slededit »

userbinator wrote: post #284
slededit wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teslas do this, they show battery charge in terms of miles or kilometers which is obviously not the correct unit. It's more abstract and often wrong but closer to what the person wants to know. Oddly enough the iPhone doesn't do this, it will happily tell you how many GB you have left when what the user really wants to know is "How many more songs or photos can I store?".

when what the user really wants to know is "How many more songs or photos can I store?" That depends on how large they are, and that can vary widely , which is why abstracting away files (or more specifically, file size) is such a bad idea.

How many KM remaining depends on the terrain, traffic, driving technique, weather and a host of other factors. Nobody is expecting 100% accuracy just a rough estimate. They are already mentally doing the conversion anyways.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#389

Post by eecc »

bcyn wrote: post #222
eecc wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, we’ve been fantasizing of moving away from the file-system-as-tree abstraction since forever, wanting to embrace a metadata rich database approach. Can’t happen soon enough imho

> a metadata rich database approach Can you ELI5 what this means? Very curious to understand ideas on alternatives to the traditional file-system abstraction.

Have a look here: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/the-b...

Basically the idea is that the OS identifies and indexes all data on disk providing primitives to access content by query rather than only by a hierarchical path.

This applies to user content but also object code, libraries (providing versioning, compatibility, integrity, whatever criteria.)

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#390

Post by pdonis »

derefr wrote: post #361
pdonis wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer to "why do you want files as an abstraction" is that files are the units of ownership of data. If you don't control the files that represent your data, you don't own it. You might think you do, but you don't, because someone else ultimately decides the fate of those files.

My point was that there don't need to be files anywhere to represent data at all. Computers can work entirely without files. For example, your whole hard drive could consist of an RDBMS, where you'd not "download" files, but rather "download" streams of tables, which would import directly as tables into the RDBMS. "Files" are a very specific abstraction; thinking they're the only way to transfer chunks of data around…

> "Files" are a very specific abstraction; thinking they're the only way to transfer chunks of data around is a symptom of lack of imagination.

I didn't say they were the only way to transfer chunks of data around. I said they were the units of ownership of data. If your data is somewhere in a huge RDBMS mixed together with lots of other people's data, you don't own it, because you don't control its fate; whoever owns and manages the RDBMS does. The same goes for all the other object control and storage systems you mention: individual people who have personal data don't own any of those things.

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