::scr Ramblings of a Classic Refugee or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love OS X

[Chris Devers]

On Tue, 5 Feb 2002, Matt Webb wrote:

> On Tuesday, February 5, 2002, at 02:40 PM, Simon Wistow wrote:
> 
> > 1. performance -
> > FS access would be *slow*. But memory is cheap and I've got clock cycles
> > to burn so we'll let Mr Moore take care of that for us.
> 
> I don't know much about BeOS, but I think I've read something that 
> claimed they'd fixed this problem? Maybe. I can't remember.

The original idea was for the filesystem to be a full fledged relational
database, but this proved difficult to implement as planned, so they
scaled it back to something a bit more traditional -- a hierarchical
system with arbitrarily definable properties for each file or folder. It's
still a step in the right direction -- you can fire off SQL-esque queries
at the system, and it uses MIME types to set reasonable default parameters
for files and for setting up file associations ("no installed application
claims to be able to open file $foo (text/wacky), but maybe you can try
one of these instead..."). 




--
Chris Devers

"Okay, Gene... so, -1 x -1 should equal what?" "A South American!"    
[....] "no human can understand the Timecube" and Gene responded
 without missing a beat "Yeah.  I'm not human."