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Comment by vytis | Hacker News Reader

I guess the next one in line should be getting rid of file as a concept. Not much point knowing where exactly the song you want to listen or a movie you want to play is stored.

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Depends what you mean by "where". With respect to finding it amongst other files, making it available on portable devices, sharing it (or NOT sharing it) with others, "where" is very important to the user.

What we really want is the user's concept of a file decoupled from the system's concept, and then cleansed of various baggage from the prior coupling. That's very different than making it a system concept exclusively.

I meant from a user's perspective. You shouldn't care if the song is stored in /foo/bar or in a remote database somewhere in the cloud. You access it through some obvious interface e.g. iTunes. Having 'file' as a central concept of accessing data doesn't have much connection to the actual way it is used. My vim config file doesn't have much in common with a song I've just downloaded. It is stored the same way, but that's about it.

Most aspects of the file concept are indispensable to the user. A generic data container is what allows us to have standardized document formats not coupled to applications or platforms and generalized organizing, packaging, sharing, storage, and search. These are user concepts that can't be abstracted away without sacrificing enormous amounts of utility.

The aspects that the user can do without are related to sharing the file system with software that uses it as a backend store.

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