

Two basic ways how to work on computer - bootload
http://www.baum.com.au/petr/blog/01194140580

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demallien
I really can't agree with the hypothesis that this guy is putting forward. Why
would anyone work directly with the filesystem for storing large amounts of
data in this day? Examples from MacOSX include email, photos, or music. I have
two ways of getting at this: 1) Use the program that manages the library -
Mail, iPhoto or iTunes - these have very friendly interfaces for most of the
common tasks that you may want to do with these document types. Of important
note, they _have_ special use cases - I want mail from this week, or from this
person, or that mention a certain subject. I want photos taken on a certain
date, or during a certain event, or I want to create an album which shows
photos of my niece from any event. I want to organise a playlist for tonight's
party, or for listening to on my iPhone, or I want to find all of my Pink
Floyd albums. Application-centric access is great for this.

2) Spotlight. But what if I want to do something else. Say I want to put a
copy of all my Battlestar Galactica episodes on my Media Centre. Not a
problem, Spotlight will grab all of those files for me in less than a second
in the Finder. Or if I don't want to make copies, I could do something a bit
more geeky, and create a smart folder containing everything Battlestar
Galactica, and then iterate through that folder using a script to create alias
to each item. I could then share the aliases, without having to make copies of
those large files.

The days of handling the filesystem details of how one stores data are over.
The computer can add so much more semantic information for us these days,
allowing complex queries to retrieve the data that it would be silly to do the
job manually. I don't try to read raw files out of an SQL database, I use
queries - a userspace filesystem these days is much the same - don't worrying
about ordering the data, just worry about being able to craft the right query
to retrieve it...

