> I think we are still a long way from understanding what really happens inside our brains.
Agreed 100% - I'm in no way saying that it's easy or will be done in our lifetime or the next 10 lifetimes - just that it's not impossible because we're not magic and we do it every damn day.
> About telling a computer what to do: They don't 'do' anything. They run programs. (Free after Weizenbaum)
What I want is (to reference an example in another comment) to go to a command line and type "Copy the report to the share" and (if I'm on a linux box) have my computer translate that to "cp /path/to/report.pdf /path/to/share/" without my ever having to know what it's doing behind the scenes.
Whatever categorical bucket someone wants to put that in doesn't matter to me whatsoever - all I'm saying is that's what I want to see, and that's what I think we should work toward.
What'd help get there is, an object store instead of a file system. We continue to hang files on the ceremonial file tree like xmas ornaments and call it an OS feature. But nearly zero real apps are happy with that. Everybody implements an object store inside a file, and keeps all their crap organized in there (email folders; docx files; project databases and on and on).
When will we get an OS that lets me persist my objects, uniquely identify them with a uuid plus arbitrary attributes (print date??? give me a break), migrate and cache them anywhere and sign them for authenticity? That would be a real OS feature.
Sure all that can be cobbled together on one machine with different libraries. But to be an OS feature, I need servers that understand and respect all that. Object browsers that let me create a relation to view pertinent objects. Security managers that limit access to apps with digital authority etc. All on the network.
The biggest show stopper here is, how do you email your objects to some client after you are done with them? Do you use a different representation? If so, why don't you just use the network representation all the time?
It's not a new idea, nobody ever was able to make that kind of storage work.
Strange claim. Network representation is always different than local, don't know what that could mean.
As for making it work, there's no obstacle. Implementation is straightforward. And since any current file system API is trivially implementable on top of it (create a relation using parentDir, filename, {dates}) there should be little integration issue.
Agreed 100% - I'm in no way saying that it's easy or will be done in our lifetime or the next 10 lifetimes - just that it's not impossible because we're not magic and we do it every damn day.
> About telling a computer what to do: They don't 'do' anything. They run programs. (Free after Weizenbaum)
What I want is (to reference an example in another comment) to go to a command line and type "Copy the report to the share" and (if I'm on a linux box) have my computer translate that to "cp /path/to/report.pdf /path/to/share/" without my ever having to know what it's doing behind the scenes.
Whatever categorical bucket someone wants to put that in doesn't matter to me whatsoever - all I'm saying is that's what I want to see, and that's what I think we should work toward.