Shuttleworth On Redefining File Systems 414
moteyalpha writes "Mark Shuttleworth described the beginnings of what could a great step forward in making file systems more usable. I've personally had the experience of trying to find a file for a customer who had just finished editing a critical report, saved it, and then couldn't locate it to deliver to their client. Quoting: 'My biggest concern on this front is that it be done in a way that every desktop environment can embrace. We need a consistent experience across GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice and Firefox so that content can flow from app to app in a seamless fashion and the user's expectations can be met no matter which app or environment they happen to use. If someone sends a file to me over Empathy, and I want to open it in Amarok, then I shouldn't have to work with two completely different mental models of content storage.'"
Re:This would be easy (Score:5, Insightful)
or search by last modified time.
Re:This would be easy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This would be easy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This would be easy (Score:4, Insightful)
- Or look in My Recent Documents (works with most applications)
- Or look in Recent Files in the application of choice's file menu (most applications)
- Or go to File > Save, eye the file browser that probably opens the last location you saved to
Or, you know, grow short-term memory capacity.
Honestly, "I just saved a file and now I don't know where I put it" is more indicative of the human operating the computer, than it is of the computer apparently lacking facilities to find the files.
That said
- Google Desktop
- etc.
Will all index files in ways that you can easily retrieve them beyond that base Windows will do. OS X and *nix systems do this even better and in an easier to use (completely transparent) way, too.
Re:This would be easy (Score:4, Insightful)
They can search for files by typing in words to search for and pressing enter.
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, there are some people who can't find Pacific Ocean on the map. I dont see map makers running around in panic, thinking how to make their maps more accessible to the general population...
Re:This would be easy (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't get it.
My grandmother could use spotlight. She won't be able to use find, locate and grep.
And that is the target audience of Shuttleworth's point: the Computer Illiterates.
Re:This would be easy (Score:4, Insightful)
Spotlight is faster. Very much faster...
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
I think he failed to identify the problem (Score:2, Insightful)
So the user decides not to pay attention to where the file was saved (I mean, you do get to choose where it goes, it does not just happen) and later has difficulty locating it. Yes, that is unpleasant, but is additional complexity in the file system really the best solution? I am honestly not sure how I feel about that. At the same time I agree that there are "user error" type of problems that better technology can either prevent or mitigate, I also feel like some of the proposed solutions I have heard are borderline ridiculous, that at some point there needs to be a minimum expectation of competence on the part of the user.
Is it really too much to ask of a user that they understand that it is a machine, an inanimate object, and it generally does only what they tell it to do (insert Windows jokes here), and that if they tell it to do something by mistake (like saving a file in an unintended location), the mistake is theirs and not the machine's? If that is too much to ask, then what is a more reasonable standard? How far should we go to accommodate users who, to put it bluntly, refuse to take responsibility for their actions?
It's like that Unix saying, (paraphrase) "Unix doesn't try to stop you from doing something stupid, because that would also stop you from doing something clever". I like that, not because I think it's witty but because in my opinion, it reveals a design philosophy that assumes that maybe this is new to you and you don't understand everything right now, but one day you do wish to understand how the system works and you do wish to achieve a degree of mastery over it. I really believe that just about anyone who really wants to understand something can do so, that gradually getting better and better at something over time is the most natural thing in the world unless you keep telling yourself that it's too hard. That's why I really don't understand these "permanent newbies", the people who can use a system for five years without grasping the basics. They claim that they are not interested in understanding, but it seems like they are strongly interested in not understanding. Is there something to be gained by accommodating this?
Re:This would be easy (Score:4, Insightful)
So merge Reiser4 already (Score:2, Insightful)
What's wrong with directories? (Score:5, Insightful)
...had the experience of trying to find a file for a customer who had just finished editing a critical report, saved it, and then couldn't locate it...
None of this would be an issue if folks were competent and created directories themselves, and Word (or whatever) asked where to save stuff, as opposed to just assuming (or insisting on) some default system provided directory.
Am I the only person who hates those "My Documents" folders? Or on a Mac iTunes insisting on putting music in a certain weird place? I want to create my own folders, and maintain why own directory structure, and know exactly where stuff is because I put it there---not because Microsoft/Apple/Ubuntu think that's where I should keep stuff.
For the most part, maintaining my own folders for stuff works out just fine (easy backup, easy moving among environments, etc.), except when some program assumes it knows better, and saves a file "somewhere"; really hate it when that happens.
ie: The problem is caused by Microsoft/Apple (and Linux following) to cater to stupid users who just want to create a document and not care where it is saved. Those same users probably wouldn't be able to locate the file (for copy/backup, etc) unless they use the same program they used to create the file.
Re:This would be easy (Score:3, Insightful)
It's reasonable to call for everyone to do it in the same way, to be interoperable.
Re:This would be easy (Score:5, Insightful)
Next I suppose you're going to say that rsync is the same thing as Time Machine, when in reality while they may be in vaguely the same arena of functionality, they are orders of magnitude different in utility. Instant searches of both local and remotely accessible drives tied to various easy filtering and categorization functions makes Spotlight a game-changer. Just like always on, incremental, and back-through-time searches and intra-file record retrieval (ie. 1 address book entry, photo, song, etc) make Time Machine a game-changer.
Re:Expansive syntax, and the work required.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Every old idea will be... (Score:3, Insightful)
We need a consistent experience across GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice and Firefox so that content can flow from app to app in a seamless fashion and the user's expectations can be met no matter which app or environment they happen to use.
In Windows we have survived several such attempts. e.g. "Recent File" or "Documents" in Start menu; or the useless location buttons in open/save file dialogs.
Let's just hope I would be still able to open a file at random location. Because the statement makes me feel that eventually I would be able to find all possible files - system thinks I may need to find, but not the files I actually need.
I've personally had the experience of trying to find a file for a customer who had just finished editing a critical report, saved it, and then couldn't locate it to deliver to their client.
Orienting future development on full idiots worked well in past... Or not? Well, GNOME full of it already and another drop of inusability into the mix will not hurt much its rabid fans.
As they say, give man a fish...
P.S. rfc1925, ch 11.
Re:Expansive syntax, and the work required.... (Score:5, Insightful)
To do even this simple thing with Linux, all of our applications would have to be re-written to enable a new file specification syntax,
Why? Hans Reiser demonstrated that files can be directories too, without breaking the VFS layer.
Say we bake versioning into the file system. You want the old versions of /home/user/shopping-list.txt; you go look in /home/user/shopping-list.txt/old/1. If you want the one from yesterday you go for /home/user/shopping-list.txt/old/bytime/2008-10-24.00:00:00, and the file system figures out which of the old versions was present at that time.
Same old syntax. The name resolution is handled differently, but that's all in the file system. You could probably even write a fuse file system that adds a layer of versioning on top of another file system. No need to ever touch the apps.
If you want the duct tape solution: write a shell script that checks whether anything changed every n minutes, then commit your home directory to subversion/git/....
Do you have any numbers on how much space was used on extra versions for a "typical" distribution of files and usage patterns? TANSTAAFL and all that ;)
Re:This would be easy (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't get it.
My grandmother could use spotlight. She won't be able to use find, locate and grep.
And that is the target audience of Shuttleworth's point: the Computer Illiterates.
I agree, everyone on here acts like linux is way better because it's had this stuff for ages but i STILL can't use most of it because it requires spending hours online searching for answers (and when you're trying to get the internet working in linux on a dual boot machine, it's hell... you have to reboot to something else, search for answers, reboot to linux, try it, forget what you had to do, reboot...)
I don't really need to try hard to make the argument because you guys either already know what i mean or you pretend like it's easy ("duh just type ~rf - m" or something something, because yeah, a menu to do that would kill someone).
Anyway, yeah, spotlight is probably nice. Google desktop is also awesome. I especially like being able to just double tap control to bring up the search, type what i want, it's right there.
Anyway, now that i've pissed off everyone...
*hides*
-Taylor
Simple solution (Score:5, Insightful)
If someone sends a file to me over Empathy, and I want to open it in Amarok, then I shouldn't have to work with two completely different mental models of content storage.
And you wouldn't have to, if every app would just show the frigging directory tree as it exists, instead of trying to fool the user with a random bunch of stupid fake roots in every GUI.
In other words ... (Score:3, Insightful)
If someone sends a file to me over Empathy, and I want to open it in Amarok, then I shouldn't have to work with two completely different mental models of content storage.
Yet another abstraction layer.
Re:This would be easy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What's wrong with directories? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know that you're not really looking for a solution - but that behaviour in iTunes is optional. You can turn it off, and then iTunes will use whatever folder structure you've already got.
The thing is that 99% of iTunes users don't know, and don't want to know, exactly where in the filesystem their music is stored, they just want to click on iTunes and see it. So that option is on by default.
Re:This would be easy (Score:3, Insightful)
....How many binary file formats can you search that way....
How many grandmas do you know or think you might know or imagine, who want to search a binary file? How many would even know what a binary file is for? OK, this is /. and how many grandmas visit here? You're excused!
recent experience with a new Linux user (Score:5, Insightful)
My mother in law in upstate NY had a Windows box that she used for exactly two purposes: email, and playing online Scrabble. Her Windows machine got full of malware, to the point where it wouldn't even boot. While she was visiting us in California this summer, I set up a machine with Ubuntu for her to use, and she got fairly comfortable with GNOME and Firefox. I sent an Ubuntu install CD home with her on the plane, and she went ahead and installed it with virtually no problems. I only had to talk her through a couple of issues on the phone, the main one being non-Linux-related: her BIOS wasn't set to boot from a CD.
She got going with email, and then it was time to get her set up for scrabble. The one she plays isn't the famous facebook one, it's a java program that accesses a club's server in Romania. Well, I think I spent about an hour with her on the phone, and we still don't have it working. One thing that took us a heck of a long time was that when she downloaded the jar file for the scrabble app, neither of us could figure out where the file had gone. Probably if I'd been in the same room with her it would have only taken me thirty seconds to locate the file, but over the phone, it was more like I was experiencing it from her point of view, and it was completely confusing. She was clicking around in the Firefox download manager, in the GNOME file manager, all with no luck. It seriously took her about 20 minutes, *with my help*, to find the file. It probably didn't help that I use fluxbox myself, and am not familiar with GNOME or its file manager. (Now we're almost there, except that apparently she's got a completely dysfunctional version of the java runtime installed. You click on the widgets in the program's UI, and it doesn't respond.)
Anyway, what kind of indictment is it of Firefox/GNOME's usability when it's easier to install Linux than to find the file you just downloaded?
Of course now I have to slap a steel helmet on my head to withstand the inevitable onslaught of know-it-all slashdotters telling me what an idiot I am, and how I could have easily found the file. Of course that's always how it is with usability. To the person who already knows how to use the software, it seems painfully obvious.
Re:We need a tag based filesystem (Score:5, Insightful)
You think it's going to be any better for people who can't find things they saved?
They can't find it because they didn't care at the time of saving to attach enough information to the file to be able to find it later. Instead, they saved it under a name like "letter5", or even worse, "asdf", and possibly left it in a random directory as well.
Tags won't be just as bad, they'll be worse. They require a considerable effort to tag consistently. You also have to think of all the possible tags that could be related to the file. Is it "friends", "acquaintances", "buddies", etc? Is it singular or plural? Will "birthdays" be enough, or you also have to file it under "parties", "celebrations" and "events" in case you remember the file you need was related to some sort of celebration but you can't remember which?
What happens with categories that are diffuse, change meaning, or their contents? For instance, take emails from Alice, that initially get tagged with "acquaintances", then progresses to "friends", then "significant other", then "ex". If you search for something that was mentioned in a friend's email, are Alice's emails tagged as they were initially (in which case after the upgrade from acquaintances to friends her previous mail needs an extra keyword to find), or have they all been updated to "ex", in which case the search might fail since she was a friend back then?
Coming up with a good keywords system is something that only geeks and secretaries are going to do. Your average person will at best pick a couple keywords, then complain they can't find stuff because they didn't use the right keywords, or that every single document comes up because all the mail is tagged as "email" and nothing else.
Re:This would be easy (Score:4, Insightful)
Um, doc files? ppt? xls?
identify the wrong problem get the wrong solution (Score:4, Insightful)
From the headline I thought this was going to be about lost/cross-linked clusters not idiotic users forgetting where something is saved. You can improve the problem in this story by implementing better and more intuitive search features through to overhalling the traditional file-browser window implimented on all OS's that I see.
These changes are independent on the underlying file system which could be anything from fat16 through to reiser ... heck it could even be PICK or a relational DB. Of course - some FS's naturally lend themselves to a particular style of search/browsing - but that simply makes it easer/harder for the interface developer. They are still very seperate things.
Changing the file system will NOT solve this problem
Re:What's wrong with directories? (Score:3, Insightful)
The "My Documents" folder is not a weird place, is the only one that can be accessed in a sane way from the Save and Load dialogs. Normal user data is tied to the applications they use (the filesystem *is* the weird place to put data), so it's just natural that their mental model of storage is mediated by the application storage functions.
Re:I think he failed to identify the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course the user paid attention to where the file was saved: it was saved in Word, inside the Save As... dialog. But when she tried to recover the file using the Open..., the file was no longer there. That's what Shuttleworth means when he says there are two completely different mental models of content storage: one is tied to functionality in applications, the other is a tree of folders and files.
Users understand perfectly that it is a machine that should do only what they tell it to do. They get upset when the machine *doesn't* do what they told them, because the machine changed their data to a different level of abstraction that they don't know about. To someone without a complete mental model of the inner workings of a computer, those different abstraction levels are a source of utter confusion.
You geeks only see the last one, and typical users only see the first one - and when they are required to jump the gap between the two completely unrelated abstractions, they are lost. At least the "My Documents" kind of folders tries to simplify the model so that users don't have to learn the two models.
So don't blame the users of something that is fault of the software designer [wikipedia.org] because of their insufficient research about the human API. Throwing layers upon layers of abstraction is a good way to tell programmers how the machine works, but it's not good for everybody else. If you designed a machine that only required one abstraction layer to be used efficiently [wikipedia.org], users would love to learn it to the highest proficiency.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but most users don't create the pacific ocean, save it in the default location, and then have no idea whatsoever where that default location is, because it's not a fixed location across all apps, it never says it anywhere except the Save dialog, and it's not a sensible, obvious default.
That's the problem we're trying to solve here - not 'clueless users lose things', but 'regular users get confused when every program saves somewhere different by default'.
Re:I think he failed to identify the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
That's because cars only have one level of user interface. If they were sometimes required to directly push the levers to turn right, cut the ignition wire to stop the car, or remove and disassemble the motor (and then rebuild it) to recharge fuel, they would all use taxis.
Re:Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This would be easy (Score:3, Insightful)
I bet she can use "open recent"
Re:This would be easy (Score:5, Insightful)
If you (not *you* you, the generic "other" you) don't care where you are storing your files, then I don't care if you find it hard to find them. Removing the usefulness for ad hoc organisation, and improving search functionality is tantamount to just doing away with the hierarchical file-system altogether. Welcome to the 60s - enjoy your stay. This "it shouldn't require me to think" attitude is the attitude which gets people driving cars off river embankments because of their reliance on their GPS system.
Yes, this patronising and pure, unadulterated, snobbery; I won't pretend otherwise. No need to flame me for it; I already know.
Re:This would be easy (Score:4, Insightful)
Who cares?
Clearly Mark Shuttleworth cares. He wants to make money off Ubuntu.
Re:Stop blaming the users (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't like #1, at all. Users already fear that they're going to break something. This would make it a certainty. Under this sort of paradigm, the user will accidentally delete the content or reformat it with some horrible font, and will find that even drastically uplugging the box doesn't prevent their changes from being saved.
So you introduce an undo history, now the file grows huge, plus anybody who gets the document now gets to see all the embarrassing mistakes made during the document's creation. Who wants their boss to see they spent an hour fiddling with fonts?
You also lose the distinction between good content and temporary content. Saving can be used to indicate that what is saved is good, your way will contain whatever was last there, including half done reorganizations and the cat walking on the keyboard.
Don't like #2. How do you identify a photo by content? By looking at a grid of 5000 photos and trying to find the right one? What if you're editing and made slight changes like size, cropping, red eye reduction, format changes that are hard to see on a thumbnail?
Don't like #3 either. In any office you'll end up with several screens worth of documents soon enough.
#4 partly implemented in KDE. Usefulness is limited for anything besides images or documents with very distinctive appearance on the first page
#6 already exists in multiple forms
Re:This would be easy (Score:3, Insightful)
Are people really so insecure about their OS that they worry about whether a senile old grandmother can use the same one?
Re:Expansive syntax, and the work required.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I used VMS for years, and I don't think I'd want to go back to its versioning system. It was actually kind of annoying. You kept on having to do the purge command to get rid of all the old versions of files that were cluttering up your account and using up your disk space.
For my day-to-day activities on Linux, I get along just fine without that kind of automatic versioning. Emacs makes ~ files, which gives me versioning one level deep, and that's almost always all I ever need. I also use Unison to mirror and synchronize my files among several different machines, and that means that when I have a real "Oh, shit!" moment because I deleted an important file or made a really bad change, I can always get the old version back off the mirror right away. For longer time scales, I have backups on CDs.
The problem with richer filesystems and metadata is that they create hassles on the internet. Back in the MacOS <=9 days, all the mac metadata was a total hassle. You had to go through conniptions with .hqx files just to hand files back and forth over the net. I'm sure Apple thought it over very carefully before they finally made the decision to move away from metadata with MacOS X, and I agree with their decision.