What’s wrong with how things are?

No more files and folders?!

What if you just hit “save”?

• …and consider filename/foldername just optional (legacy) metadata?
• …and rather use other annotation methods?

It’s insane! And dangerous!

Did you know? Before 1995, filenames were limited to 8.3 ASCII-only characters (in DOS):

Your data never was…

• …a “file” in the first place.
• …ever stored “in” an actual folder.

These were just thought-concepts, paradigms - an idea to help us imagine and handle “data”.

All our data actually just is…

• A bunch of bits/bytes.
• Stored and allocated in “blocks”
• Retrieved by IDs.

That’s what a ‘filesystem’ does.

21st Century Tech: Stepping up.

• simply “save” your data?
• simply “tag/annotate” your data sufficiently to find/use it later?
• right-click-edit-metadata on any data-object in any format, at any time?
• keep meta+data reliably together. Sufficiently.
• have versioning, multi-tiering, geo-distribution, network-scaling, failover handling, etc. all included by default. As option. With sane defaults.

Big Data was “big” in 2003.

• Hit paradigm limits earlier than “us”.
• We are now where “they” were back then.

We can borrow/use the following tech already:

• Storing files without “a folder”.
• Using IDs instead of filenames.
• Using metadata + relationships to find things.
• Schema evolution, versioning, etc.

So let’s go to the future.

Think “Bookmarks”

Extended File Attributes

• Metadata (key/value) on any file/folder.
• Unicode / bit-proof.
• Official POSIX standard (since 2002)

Why the lazy adoption rate and bad support?