[IAEP] [Fwd: 0.84 goals]

[Albert Cahalan]

Benjamin M. Schwartz writes:
> forster at ozonline.com.au wrote:

>> I remain unconvinced that a journal, even with enhanced
>> tagging and searching, is the best solution.
>
> I am pretty well convinced.

You're using it exclusively, right...? (no bash, no MacOS, etc.)

If it's not good enough for you, then it's definitely not good
enough to be forced on other people.

> Both tags and hierarchies provide a combinatorial explosion of
> labels for objects.  In fact, unless you have directories like
> /foo/bar/baz AND /bar/baz/foo, tags are just as good as directories
> for uniquely identifying objects.

Could those tags at least be usable via the folder metaphor?

At top level, show tags and anti-tags (absence of tag) as folders.
Sort them by how evenly they split the files into two groups,
with the most evenly splitting ones first.

>> I have found the concealment of the underlying directory
>> structure from the user quite frustrating when working
>> with email attachments.
>
> It would be good to hear your specific frustration in this use case.

It appears that you are not a Journal user. :-(

Here is an example: pretend you are a kid who wants to learn about
his computer by exploring the filesystem. You want to look in /dev,
look in /etc, and so on. Using only Sugar, can you do it?

>> The journal rapidly fills with rubbish, I could not turn off
>> the autosave.
>
> As you may have noted, the new Journal designs
> (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Designs/Journal) provide a "Star"
> column to identify important entries.  A single click then
> shows only the starred entries.  New objects, such as e-mail
> attachments, will not generally be starred on creation.

How exactly does this "Star" deal with the fundamental problem?
As he says, "The journal rapidly fills with rubbish".

The user's work is lost in a sea of spam. No matter how you make
the default (starred or unstarred), spam will have the same state
as everything else. It is completely unreasonable to expect users
to wade through a sea of spam to star/unstar some of the entries.
Deletion is also unreasonable.

>> The journal is OK but should it be the only tool available to the user?
>> Isn't the best file system the one which most empowers the user?
>
> How does the Journal fail to empower the user?  With tagging and
> versioning, the Journal design empowers the user to organize their
> objects, find their objects by organization scheme or by content, and
> never lose something because they forgot to save it.  That seems like
> plenty of power to me.

Clearly you are not a Journal user. You may have played with it,
and you may have even written some code for it... but clearly you
do not really use it.

What happens:

1. spam builds up
2. user gives up on finding anything in the mess
3. system becomes slow
4. system fails (out of space) or user does "rm -rf" on journal
5. user blames his problems on Linux, then installs XP

At step 2, the user's work is effectivly lost forever.

Oddly enough, XP makes it possible to use traditional UNIX tools
on the user's files. Desktop files reside in the filesystem under
normal names. With cygwin or SFU, you can operate on them. Suger
users are unable to do likewise, despite being on Linux. All the
power has been taken away.