Comment by kvdveer
3 years ago
In a way, this is already happening. Documents are moving to the cloud, where they exist mostly in a database-like structure. End-user computers are becoming more and more a just an interface for documents that are in an online database, or (if the app supports offline) local sqlite databases.
The endgame is a machine with only an OS. The OS is where all the hard edge cases are, which prevented the db-as-fs idea from succeeding in the first place.
> The endgame is a machine with only an OS.
This was tried multiple times already, and in each case, it turned out that the ability to easily store and organise data locally was both desired and required among the wider audience. Cloud storage is a nice feature to complement local storage, but will not replace it any time soon.
Typically this has been because file sizes have either caused network issues or storage cost issues on the server side. We are approaching (or are already there) the place where the biggest consumer file formats (videos) don’t have this constraint. At my house already it is very nebulous what is stored locally and what is stored on a remote server.
I’m sure there is some consumer technology coming around the bend that will make local storage again compelling but I think we are on the cusp of another server centric file storage era not the reverse.n
I can easily see a db file system being the default in for remote resources in consumer devices while traditional local file systems are reserved for specialized use cases.
Why is local storage not compelling anymore for you?
It's faster, cheaper and often more reliable than someone else's computer.
> Typically this has been because file sizes have either caused network issues or storage cost issues on the server side
And because of privacy concerns. And because people want to use their computers even when they cannot connect to the internet. And because people want the security of being sure they can access their files even if a company goes bankrupt/has an outage.
And because, no matter how fast networks get; I somewhat doubt that it will be faster to load a 2GiB 4k video file or a 7GiB pytorch checkpoint from cloud storage, than via the SATA or PCIe bus.
Speed of light is a hard physical limit. Local storage will always have a major edge for this reason alone.
That said I'm now in this weird mid-life confusion about the fact that my new WAN (3gbps fiber connection) is now faster than any reasonable home LAN I can set up. Needed to move some movies from one machine to another the other day and it was way faster to just bittorrent them again from upstream than actually copy, since even USB removable media was slower than my WAN. So I think we might be at least temporarily in an awkward situation where cloud storage outcompetes LAN storage.
But truly local storage (nVME etc) has an extreme edge over anything networked, and always will.
This doesn't make any sense to me, I must be missing something. If your WAN is 3Gb/s, and you LAN is less than that, how does pulling things to a local machine, presumably on the LAN and therefore limited to the LAN speed, end up being faster?
The machine doing the torrenting is tied directly to the access point, everything else is over wifi.
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>But truly local storage (nVME etc) has an extreme edge over anything networked, and always will.
Sure, for specific usecases that don't much resemble what most people spend their time doing.
The recent popularity of Obsidian and similar knowledge management software is part of the same trend. They're databases in their own way, localized but better organized like a graph you can run queries against than a bunch of text files.
The endgame is a machine with only an OS.
What does this mean?
In the context, it appears to intend "the strict set of what constitutes a terminal to access external storage".
But of course, even in the context of the cloud a DB does not (necessarily?) replace a FS, and, more fundamentally, that which the poster presented looks more like a sociologistic presentation of trends (or, "big ideas" for the salesforce), oblivious of the absiological ground that "progress is not in decreased freedom", while the presented model is that of crippled machine (wanting to store locally is a basicmost demand).
Terminal + mainframe. Everything new is well forgotten old)
Perhaps a browser(i.e Chrome)
Something like Chrome OS, I would imagine.
Probably referring to a dumb client.