
Has the notion of "files" outlived its usefulness? - smarx
http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2012/06/30/HasTheNotionOfFilesOutlivedItsUsefulness.aspx
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dreamdu5t
Someone who doesn't understand what he's talking about telling everyone that
we don't need X because the future is the cloud and the cloud is just so
different.

Yup... another day on HN.

~~~
smarx
Who are you talking about?

The article posted here is about why we _do_ need files, as is the article
this is a reaction to (the filepicker.io post).

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wwweston
Money quote:

"Have files outlived their usefulness? Only if you think reusing data across
multiple applications has."

~~~
Tloewald
Won't the applications be files anyway?

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crabasa
If files could package and pass around metadata in the same way they pass
around data, I might agree with Dare's conclusion. However, for me, metadata
is becoming too important and has destroyed the utility of files (and pure
data) being truly useful.

Example: Photos. The file is the photo. However, think of all the things
besides that: face tags, text tags, album, ratings, etc. If you've ever tried
to import 5GB of photos from iPhoto to Picasa (or vice-versa) you'll
understand what I mean.

This is why "stuff in the cloud" is so useful: API support is there from day 1
so that you always know what CAN be exported and how.

~~~
jerf
"If files could package and pass around metadata in the same way they pass
around data"

They can. It's all just bits. If your files don't and your API does, it is
simply because your files don't and your API does, not because files can't and
APIs can. Files can have metadata and APIs can be written that treat things as
blobs.

There is a distinction, but it's not API vs. file, it's what semantic context
you're in. Your MP3 player reads out the ID3 tags, because it's in a music
player context. Your backing cloud store (like Dropbox) just sees blobs.
Interoperability is less about agreeing on file formats than agreeing on
semantic contexts. (Yes, file formats are important but they come later, and
most arguments about them are actually arguments about semantic contexts.)

~~~
crabasa
Saying "it's all bits" is too simplistic a view of file formats vs. APIs. I'm
thrilled that MP3 files have ID3 tags, unfortunately that's an unacceptably
small subset of the meta-data that I care about.

File formats evolve at a glacial pace and suffer from immense historical
baggage. No one benefits from pretending that file formats are as accessible,
agile or powerful as proper web APIs.

~~~
gjs278
What are you even talking about? You'd rather use a fucking web API than your
local pc when dealing with FILES?!

You are everything that is wrong with modern computing. A web API is always
inferior to what you can do natively.

~~~
jasomill
Strike the trendy "web" qualifier, and I'd argue we still have a problem,
namely that "data" tends to outlive "behavior" by many, many years, and this
fact is important and useful in both computing and civilization at large. This
is why, in theory at least, relational data stores are more promising "trans-
filesystem" candidates than either method-based object systems or "APIs".
Hierarchy is inessential; data storage is not.

To say nothing of the fact that "APIs", Web or otherwise, _aren't actually a
means of storing data_ ; at least in the context of things like "pictures" and
"music", we obviously can never have "turtles all the way down."

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Lagged2Death
It seems to me that any system or API you imagine or make up that associates a
particular stream of bits with some sort of identifier is pretty much a file
system.

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nnnnni
No.

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dr42
Files will never go away. It all depends on the abstraction level that you
view the term 'file'. Humans are files, a self contained unit of information
(with built in copy semantics!) they have meta data (hair color, eye color,
height, age etc). My point is that there will always be a container object of
a sequence of bytes of data. Whether that's an mp3 file or a hummingbird, they
are still files.

A more meaningful question might be to challenge the notion of a hierarchical
file system. The web has managed fine without one, so possibly search across a
flat collection is a better metaphor. There are numerous others.

There are, however, interesting possibilities that make files less
conspicuous, apple are experimenting with this, where there are pipes between
apps, I open a photo, send it to snapseed, pipe it on to tumblr. At no point
am I confronted with a file save dialog. Obviously it's a file under the
covers, but that's just an abstraction. Files themselves are abstractions.
There's really no such thing as an mp3 file, it's just a sequence of bytes we
can interpret as one.

