Re: Mac OS X 10.1 File Name Extension Guidelines
Re: Mac OS X 10.1 File Name Extension Guidelines
- Subject: Re: Mac OS X 10.1 File Name Extension Guidelines
- From: Mark Munz <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 09 Sep 2001 08:13:00 -0600
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Having to send files through a conversion airlock on the way in
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or out is an anachronistic throwback to the days of ZTerm and
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BBSes, and has no place in an operating system that makes
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'sending files' transparent: the /Network folder.
Wait, isn't putting the definition of what type of document I'm dealing with
a throwback to the early years when disk space was expensive and in short
supply, when saving 4 bytes was crucial, when we used .txt to define a text
file and such. Apparently we haven't come very far.
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In such cases, the files are on your computer in RAM only. There's
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no way of knowing what OS the fileserver is running. It could be
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a Mac running OS X with HFS+ disks. It could be a Linux box running
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NFS. It could be a big high-performance Auspex server. As such,
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there is no 'airlock' process where the OS can know that it's
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transferring a file to another OS and needs to do the conversion.
Actually, this is untrue. The OS knows what volumes are connected and their
format. The OS is the one reading and writing from the network drive. It
knows what format it is writing to, even if is based on the protocol used.
Truthfully, unless someone stands up and fights against it - we'll have
computers 30 years from now that are 100,000 times faster but still require
us to use .txt to indicate the file is a text document.
Apple has previously support mechanisms that allowed metadata for files to
exist on foreign systems including FAT volumes. Perhaps it was not the most
elegant, but it worked fairly well.
If we continue going with the lowest common denominator for all decisions in
the name of compatibility, what is there that distinguishes Mac OS X?
Virtually nothing, certainly not enough to make it worthwhile to pay any
premium.
Why doesn't NFS support more metadata? If we want to advance the computing
world, let's bring people up to a more advanced system rather than dumb down
an OS in the name of compatibility. Let's stop looking to the past and look
to the future to make things better. Isn't that how we got a GUI-based OS in
the first place?
Mark Munz