

Are file-systems on the way out? - whiskers
http://blogs.gnome.org/mccann/2011/06/08/new-pony/

======
dkarl
It's a silly question. Is he suggesting computers will not have filesystems?
No. He's saying users will not interact directly with files. Instead they will
interact with "documents, music, pictures, videos, and downloads" without
seeing them as files. Big deal. That's what desktop GUIs have been working
toward ever since they started hiding file extensions, and they've succeeded
to the point where many users don't understand that a song is probably a file
on disk somewhere. My mother, among other people, noticed the change from
consistent use of the word "file" to consistent use of the word "document" and
thought it meant there was an important difference between the two. I've had
to explain to her several times that even though Word calls her letter a
"document" it is still stored in a file that she can attach to an e-mail, burn
onto a CD, and do all the other things she knows how to do with a file.

When I helped my sister recover some corrupted email a few years ago, I
expected her to be confused by the fact that each file contained an entire
folder's worth of email, instead of a single email. She wasn't surprised. How
it was stored never crossed her mind. I think that's true of many email users
going all the way back to when everyone at my university read their mail using
Pine on Unix servers. I don't think most of the English majors and history
majors thought about how each email was represented on disk. Furthermore, web
mail showed years ago that users are already so disconnected from the question
of how their data is stored that they don't even blink when it moves from
their hard drive to the internet.

tl;dr The "Huh? What's a file?" train left the station a long, long time ago.

PS/Edit: Come to think of it, how will the UI designer of an email program
deal with the lack of a unifying concept for "documents, music, pictures,
videos, and downloads?" Will you see an "Attach a document, some music, a
picture, a video, or a download" button when you're writing an email? And will
users feel all :-/ because they wanted to attach an e-book and there's no
button for that?

~~~
wisty
Well, it's not just files. It's also folder hierarchies. Both have usability
issues.

It's likely that folder hierarchies will be shown the door first. Actually, a
lot of people already just save their documents to "My Documents". Then weep
when they realize that this is a local folder, and their hard drive crash
wiped out all their work, and IT support can only say "Next time put it on the
NAS". Some defaults are just stupid.

------
btilly
I couldn't get the article, and finally I went to
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blogs.g...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blogs.gnome.org/mccann/2011/06/08/new-
pony/&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=Md4&rls=org.mozilla:en-
US:official&biw=989&bih=703&strip=1) for Google's text-only cached version.

There is a very simple reason why this is true. Usability researchers have
known and repeatedly verified for at least 20 years that regular users simply
don't "get" directory trees. They don't understand the idea of directories
within directories within directories with files scattered at all levels, and
the same file possibly being in multiple places and each copy being
potentially different.

We're not talking illiterates. We're talking about college graduates who have
used computers for years but simply don't understand this basic concept. And
if you try to explain it to them you'll hit a blank wall.

You can know one of these for a long time without noticing this lack of
knowledge. They will successfully use files that are in a directory system.
But when you dig deeper you realize that they have memorized actions. "I click
on this icon, and search for my file." "Wouldn't it be nicer if you organized
your files into folders?" "You can _put_ folders into that icon???"

It is a surprise the first time you realize that someone you know, who is not
an obvious moron, really doesn't understand the idea of a directory structure.
And it is a surreal experience to try to explain it and fail. It is doubly
surreal because everyone who actually works with software has to understand
this point so you lose track of the fact that some don't. It can be hard to
believe that these people exist. But they do and they are in the majority.

This is a huge problem for anyone writing consumer software. It may make your
software more flexible, but as soon as you expose the filesystem to regular
users, your software is not going to be user friendly. Therefore popular
applications like iTunes go out of their way to hide the existence of the
filesystem from users.

(And since everyone does that, people have no reason to learn to understand
the filesystem, and the cycle repeats...)

~~~
chadgeidel
I agree. It's time we (as "computer people") stopped putting the onus on the
users to figure out "our way", and start taking some responsibility to build
solutions that work without a scientific or engineering degree to understand.

~~~
dman
I think that movement is well underway with the iphone, ipad, unity (ubuntu)
and gnome3.

------
bgruber
Files are important because they act as an interface (in the OO sense) to all
of the different things that the author of this article talks about. The
universality of that interface is, for now, key to interoperability.

I don't care how many times david pogue says otherwise, it's a lot easier to
drag the audio files i want on my mp3 player from one window to another than
to wrestle with itunes. Not only is it easier, but it's a skill I can apply
again and again and again to lots of different tasks. If you do want to
wrestle with some kind of crazy-ass music management system, the way that
seems to work best to make it so that we can all use whatever we want is to
have an underlying interface based on files.

Beyond interoperability, tech that's too specific to 'what people actually use
their computers for' tends to make it harder to do things that the developers
didn't think of; go far enough down that road and computers become about as
interesting as TVs.

~~~
scott_s
I find it a lot easier to hit "Sync" than to look at my podcasts and think "I
listened to that one, this one and that one, so I can delete them, and hey!
there's a new one, so I should transfer it..."

~~~
jerf
Nothing bgruber said contradicts that. But instead of a magic "Sync" button
that only works in one program on one type of file, the "sync" operation on
files can be used over and over again. I only "sync" too, because it's way
faster than literally copying things over... but I _rsync_. Granted, I'm a
power user doing this on the command line, but absolutely nothing stops you
from "Dropboxing" your music player. Potentially literally.

------
mahrain
Near the end the author asks a very pertinent question indeed: how should the
free software community respond to the cloud?

Stallman's response seems to be just not to use it, to keep your own data
locally and manage everything yourself, lest you forfeit control. Yet, Ubuntu
created their own version of cloud services branded Ubuntu One.

I feel that one vision might be to provide a very low power, high storage
always-on home server solution to users with all kinds of integration and
synced as a personal cloud. I'm opposed to keeping my computer running 24/7
due to the huge waste of energy (I'm in Europe, energy is expensive), but I
would happily use a couple of watts for a personal cloud device (or internet-
enabled NAS).

~~~
nikils
How about p2p cloud ? Where volunteers run p2p client on their desktop, which
contributes space to p2p cloud and users can store data on p2p cloud.

~~~
Yrlec
My startup is working on that. Sign-up at <http://degoo.com> and we'll let you
know when we have a beta ready. /Shameless plug.

I can e-mail you my Master's Thesis, which covers some of the theory behind it
(although, it's in Swedish).

~~~
jbooth
Might be worth writing a 2-5 pager in english summarizing some security
features.. I'd sign up if I read something that made me feel safe putting my
data on it.

~~~
pwpwp
AFAIU, <http://tahoe-lafs.org/> offers the most advanced security features
currently available.

------
forkandwait
This reminds me of the feeling some had in the mid 1990s that command line
interaction is on the way out, that _everything_ would be GUI based. The
answer is, um, no.

The link has a more interesting (and not so black and white) discussion about
files, abstraction, and the cloud.

~~~
ugh
CLI is out. A large majority of people do not use it.

You can still ride horses (and for good reasons!). Doesn’t mean that horses
are not out.

~~~
forkandwait
CLI is so not out. Perhaps among (l)users and Visual Studio types but not
among the thousands of people who keep the internet running.

~~~
ugh
Exactly, _thousands_ of people.

I don’t know how many users of computing devices there are in the world but
I’m fairly certain that you would use _billion_ in a description of them.

~~~
amalcon
In absolute terms, there are probably more command-line users today than there
were in the 1990's...

------
whiskers
I should qualify the question with a little more detail:

Are user-visible and user-manipulable file-systems on the way out?

------
CoffeeDregs
What's old is new again... I'm sure other filesystems reflected this no-
visible-filesystem OS mentality, but BFS of BeOS was the earliest one I recall
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_File_System>) that had metadata, indexing
and querying built into the filesystem itself. Apple seems to be making a push
to bury the view of the filesystem.

While the quick-search functionality of modern OSs is awesome, being able to
arrange things in a hierarchy in the filesystem is also very useful. I guess
the OS could go in the direction of tagging, but that seems pretty messy (I'm
frightened to think of what would happen to our consulting firm's neatly
organized and huge DropBox).

~~~
kabdib
Ditto, the Apple Newton. Didn't have a file system, just a tagged and indexed
object store.

I'm not sure how well it scales.

I do think that simple trees don't work well (and history argues for this:
even early versions of Unix had links). A multigraph would be nice, though
tough to delete from.

~~~
jerf
Multigraphs exacerbate the problem, not solve it. Now, not only can Mom not
understand directory hierarchies, your average computer programmer doesn't
_actually_ understand them either, even though he thinks he does. Most
programmers do not actually understand graphs, or know safe ways to deal with
them....

... and in fact in many ways we already have multigraphs on filesystems,
programmers already don't understand them nearly as well as they think they
do, they _are_ often nothing but trouble, and we don't see extensive use made
of them in very "graphy" ways as a result.

------
programminggeek
Filesystems are NOT on the way out. User-visible filesystems are. iOS has file
systems. iCloud will still store the files as files on your Mac/PC.

The point is to reduce complexity for the end user. Think about Google Docs
for a minute. I don't know if they are storing all my docs in a database or in
a filesystem and it doesn't matter. I can still get to them right? When I
download them on my Mac, they are on a filesystem that I can see.

End users (think parents, grandparents, etc.) should not have sysadmin their
own machines. Removing the whole user visible filesystem is a step in that
direction. Google gets this, Apple gets this, nerds don't.

People pay for convenience, not features. Dropping the user visible filesystem
is convenient for the majority and that will make Apple money.

~~~
grannyg00se
How can you eliminate even user-visible filesystems? At some point you're
going to have different types of data and you're going to want to organize it
in some way. I don't want my tax spreadsheets in the same grouping as my music
files. I want them in some kind of separate container. No matter how much GUI
you throw at this, that separate container is a file system that is visible to
me.

~~~
wisty
Tagging is often better than hierarchies. You can organize by project (i.e.
office fitout, web server upgrade) and other categories (i.e. budget related,
list of people involved, plans) to make things easier to find when you switch
contexts. Want to look at a single project, or all the budgets for the year?

~~~
sid0
Isn't that what Microsoft tried to do with Longhorn, and failed miserably at?

~~~
programminggeek
Microsoft tried to make the filesystem a database, as in, the filesystem was
literally SQL Server or something. It didn't work. That is a completely
different concept than simply changing the user-visible filesystem
abstraction.

~~~
wisty
I don't think it was really SQL Server. They could have made that work. I
think it was more like they heard the XML buzz (this was some time ago), and
tried to make a proprietary binary version of whatever it was XML was
promising.

------
wccrawford
Until there are ways to transmit documents from person to person, without a
middle man, with offline hardware in-between, file systems will continue to
exist.

------
redtwo
What people seem to forget while talking about how awesome iCloud is, is the
fact that iCloud is only offering 5G of storage for free. It is cool and hype
to have access to your data from everywhere, but this will unpersonnalize the
computer. Since all you care about is your data. Your data is your computer.
with iCloud, welcome to the era of the unpersonal computers, where a computer
has nothing to do with it's user, except being, well, like a cable to connect
to the cloud. An empty cable that a lot of people can use, but nobody really
owns it. What I think people should do, if they are against this path, is to
build a system where you can install a personal cloud, using an external hard
drive. And be able to sync, automatically, all your data with all your
devices. It is way cheaper to buy a hard drive than to buy storage on the
cloud. Build your own iCloud.

~~~
cdcarter
But, I like the idea of an unpersonal computer. Right now the only thing that
really makes my laptop different than my friend's laptop is the stickers on
the cover and some MS Office shortcuts I set. My data is mostly unimportant,
and already in Dropbox/Gmail so I can access it anywhere.

A majority of people are significantly helped by this strategy, not hurt.

~~~
redtwo
Good point, as long as you trust your 'hoster', you have a speedy internet
connection, and willing to buy online storage.

