From today's INSYNC, this is just part of it
SMART FILES: THINK FLUID
In the real world information flows.ÿ It comes in the daily
stream of work and in the bursts of acquisition when you
install the next program.ÿ Just as some information flows
in, other information flows out into obsolescence. By its
nature, information flow cares little for fixed boundaries.
In the PC world, information is generally treated as a fixed
object.ÿ Files have fixed locations.ÿ These files are then
stored on media of fixed size and usually of fixed location.ÿÿ
Further, they usually remain in the same place regardless of
time. PCs storage systems were not designed with information
flow in mind.
What are the effects of this informational Fixed/Fluid
duality? We have all heard of Murphy's corollary, "Disk
space usage always expands to disk capacity".
When one considers informational flow on fixed drives,
errors generated when running into boundaries are a natural
consequence. The common solution to this is to get a
bigger hard drive, manually delete, or run an
uninstaller-type program. However, all of these solutions
are stop-gap in that they don't solve the core problem of
fixed file systems in a world of information flow.
The BigDisk product was the first product on the PC market
to attack this problem from the perspective of information
flow.ÿ With BigDisk you can add information to a drive and
the files will automatically flow to where there is
available space while maintaining the illusion of a fixed
file system. It demonstrates that the problem of information
flow on fixed file systems can be solved in an elegant and
stable way.
However, BigDisk 1.0 is only a first step towards a complete
solution and we can expect to see rapid evolution of the
technology.ÿ The developers promise to soon release a free
patch that will add support for using network drives.
Further, there still remain issues of migrating files based
on obsolescence and improved support for removable media.
Stay tuned to INSYNC where we will be reporting ongoing
coverage of this evolution in smart file systems.
As always, in this series on a vision of "smart files" we
invite your feedback to the question, "What if files were
smart?". Please send you thoughts, comments or questions
to visionary@syncronys.com and join in on this exciting
frontier of technology.
Mark Skiba
Chief Technology Officer
Syncronys Softcorp |
