Mountain Lion's new file system • Hacker News Board

Re: Mountain Lion's new file system

#41

Post by stcredzero » Wed, Jul 25, 2012, 10:46 PM UTC

johncoltrane wrote: post #37

stcredzero wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hierarchical file systems weren't invented because it was ancient times and they were the easiest thing to produce. Correct. They were invented because it was just past the middle of the 20th century, and they were the best organization mechanism for the resources available. They're also very robust, versatile, and wonderful in innumerable ways, especially for the audience at the time. Unfortunately, they're not th…

Search is the opposite of an organization tool. It's a tool that allow users to avoid being organized.

Or, it's a tool that allows users to have organization, without needing to implement it themselves. (After all, the indexes of the search mechanism clearly have a high degree of organization.)

Re: Mountain Lion's new file system

#42

Post by akshaykarthik » Wed, Jul 25, 2012, 11:29 PM UTC

Lewisham wrote: post #14

amitparikh wrote: post #10

Windows did it first... My Documents / My Downloads / My Movies / My Music / My Pictures. The author makes it seem like Mac's "default content folder" scheme was a novel idea.

[citation needed] I'm fairly sure that Mac OS X was here first, and it was copied to XP. IIRC, I was running Windows ME at the time of Mac OS X, and ME did not have those default folders.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Documents

Windows has had a "My Documents" folder since win98.

Re: Mountain Lion's new file system

#43

Post by 1234567bob » Thu, Jul 26, 2012, 1:22 AM UTC

Nothing to do with file systems, got bout half way before I realised this was just some tool talking about how hard it is to keep his shit organised.

Re: Mountain Lion's new file system

#44

Post by snowwrestler » Thu, Jul 26, 2012, 1:55 AM UTC

DannoHung wrote: post #2

When is someone in charge of such things for an OS vendor going to realize that for any of "my" documents, what I really want is to tag them?

IIRC, this was one of the elements of the WinFS project that Microsoft worked on as part of their Longhorn project. In the end they could not get it to work, dropped WinFS, and Longhorn came out as Vista.

Re: Mountain Lion's new file system

#45

Post by shock3naw » Thu, Jul 26, 2012, 8:49 AM UTC

Lewisham wrote: post #16

revelation wrote: post #6

Coming from Linux, you would think "new file system" would mean that: a new file system. But its just the same smoke and mirrors Microsoft did when they scrapped WinFS: add magic folders, terrible ideas (translated folder names?) and missing hard features (links) in a limited fashion. Thats sad, because the file system could certainly do with a complete makeover: metadata, builtin sync with the cloud, backup and encr…

My feeling is that Microsoft is much closer to a post-files world than Apple is. Apple thinks files should stay within the app, which is exactly the opposite of why we had consumer-viewable file systems in the first place. We want/need to be able to edit files in different programs. Windows 8's Contracts, combined with system-wide Share, and storing everything on Skydrive (so when you log in to another Windows 8 mach…

And once uploaded, Microsoft will inspect your files and ban/suspend you from SkyDrive, Hotmail, Xbox Live, and the Marketplace if they don't like something. [http://wmpoweruser.com/watch-what-you-store-on-skydriveyou-m...]

Re: Mountain Lion's new file system

#46

Post by justincormack » Thu, Jul 26, 2012, 12:13 PM UTC

simcop2387 wrote: post #29

justincormack wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are some Linux solutions for this using extended attributes (which are by the way pretty easy to use).

And one that doesn't, and is AFAIK incompatible with others. Nepomuk from KDE does this with a separate database, I believe this is mostly to allow it to work when xattr isn't available (say for some network filesystems). I've not actually used it much myself, (there's far too many files for me to even begin doing it.)

Most Linux distros do not enable xattr support at all by default, which is where the database thing came from. Very annoying.

Re: Mountain Lion's new file system

#47

Post by justincormack » Thu, Jul 26, 2012, 12:14 PM UTC

simcop2387 wrote: post #29

justincormack wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are some Linux solutions for this using extended attributes (which are by the way pretty easy to use).

And one that doesn't, and is AFAIK incompatible with others. Nepomuk from KDE does this with a separate database, I believe this is mostly to allow it to work when xattr isn't available (say for some network filesystems). I've not actually used it much myself, (there's far too many files for me to even begin doing it.)

Most Linux distros do not enable xattr support at all by default, which is where the database thing came from. Very annoying.

Re: Mountain Lion's new file system

#48

Post by awongh » Thu, Jul 26, 2012, 11:10 PM UTC

iandanforth wrote: post #19

Information architecture from a neuroscience point of view. Concept building: A bottom up hierarchy Everything you know was learned in the context of prior knowledge. You combined prior experiences, refined them, and over time solidified them into new constructs which you then used to repeat the process for higher level concepts. Visual light and dark blobs become coherent shapes which get associated with meaning and…

this. OP should keep in mind that any user interface is built upon learned, flexible metaphors for the data it represents... files and folders are a metaphor that break down for some use cases and work well for others...

I always have a hard time taking anyone seriously who thinks that these metaphors can be fundamentally improved. A metaphor that's intuitive for one person could be completely confusing and out of context for someone else.