Re: Comments Sought - Browser as launcher revisited... [going OT]
Re: Comments Sought - Browser as launcher revisited... [going OT]
- Subject: Re: Comments Sought - Browser as launcher revisited... [going OT]
- From: has <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 4 Jul 2002 18:16:53 +0100
Ric Phillips wrote:
>
I have my doubts that there is a stand-out model for file-system access that
>
offers easier useability than the others. [...]
Some fine analysis of the problems faced, Ric, although I'd debate your
conclusion that:
>
Within 5 to 10 years however, a combination of adaptable software agents,
>
and speech recognition will have buried the 'file tree' model, as deeply as
>
the the physical organisation of files on your hard drive is now buried
>
under that same logical tree.
I'm sure software agents will have their place, although I think the
"speech recognition" thing is a bit of a red herring (it's the underlying
information management system that really counts, and the interface[s] to
that are just the icing on the cake - I blame "Star Trek" for this "speech
recognition" will solve our ills thing). The big problem seems to be that
the current system is hopelessly underpowered/inflexible/dumb, so while you
could bury it under more and more abstraction layers, the proper solution
is probably to replace it with a smarter, more flexible system in the first
place, and then build your new interfaces on that.
As an example, Microsoft (in what appears to be an occasional fit of Doing
The Right Thing) plan on tossing out the traditional tree-based storage
model completely, and moving data storage to a much more flexible
relational DB based system. Not a new idea in itself; Xerox Parc, amongst
others, have experimented with such ideas years ago, but it'll doubtless
take an organisation with the weight and reach of MS to really make it
viable in the public space.
I think the real tricks will be coming up with worthwhile systems for
accumulating, managing and analysing the wide range and large quantities of
metadata that will be needed to make such systems Really Useful, and
building human-computer interfaces that will allow us poor, slow, dumb
squishy things to harness all that power in ways we can properly relate to.
But it does seem like the ground-up rebuild that this brave new world
deserves might finally be starting to happen.
Cheers,
has
--
http://www.barple.connectfree.co.uk/ -- The Little Page of Beta AppleScripts
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