The Upspin manifesto: On the ownership and sharing of data (2014)
commandcenter.blogspot.com
commandcenter.blogspot.com
He's a baby boomer. I'd assume this is only more common now with peoples' main interactions with computing being in an app-focused, hidden-filesystem world.
Now you may be tempted to think, "people do that?!". Of course they do. If you can imagine it, someone is doing it.
I like the proposal of making caching a central design element to work around today's bandwidth limitations. I work with large-ish (a few TB) scientific datasets, and it isn't pleasant to have to choose between (a) storing everything on network storage and suffering slow IO or (b) storing everything locally on every workstation and suffering the need to synchronize data.
That's a solved problem, which depending on the workload could involve a compute farm with a clustered or distributed file system, a copy data management solution, or cachefs, for example. The are also solutions for shared storage between containers across multiple nodes.
Thank you for suggesting some potential solutions to my data management problems. From googling them, I get the impression that you are thinking primarily of enterprise scale data management (i.e., organizations with server farms and an IT department), whereas I'm primarily thinking of organizations with < 30 employees (who mostly use desktop software) and a single file server. My particular situation is an academic lab. However, I think these solutions can can still work with a little adaptation:
Copy data management seems to be the use of block level data deduplication or virtual disks on a server in order to decrease the disk utilization per VM or per container. I'm not completely sure; I found mostly marketing documents, and there's no wikipedia entry. This, as well as clustered/distributed file systems, would apply if we turned the file server into a VM server and had each employee work on a VM via remote desktop. In principle, this could work, and would let temporary employees (e.g., summer students and visiting scholars) get started quickly with a standard OS environment. I will experiment with this when our last batch of desktop PCs hit end of life.
CacheFS looks useful if we start using NFS to connect to our file server instead of Samba. It looks like Windows 10 (Enterprise) supports NFS caching too (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc976862.aspx). I will try this.
Or am I missing some key point here?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENLWEfi0Tkg
It's a fascinating talk. I really enjoyed it. I hope you do too!
Motivation: There are 100s of initiatives trying to solve similar problems, and they could be solved relatively quickly if engineers deigned to work together on a solution instead of splintering off into hundreds of fractured groups.
> The main difference I see is that Camlistore can model POSIX filesystems for backup and FUSE, but that's not its preferred view of the world.
This makes me want to throw things. I'm actually mentally discounting both projects now on the charge that core authors seem to care more about bickering over technical details than implementing working solutions to these society-breaking problems.
Thank you again for the info/backstory, though. I am just a naysayer who has sat through 1000 pitches of Fitzpatrick's basis thesis back in 2010 and seen excruciatingly minimal progress in the space of "actually making these things work for normal people".
Which is it?
At this point, I get the sense that Upspin/Camlistore don’t really _want_ to succeed in terms of catching mass-market success and disrupting the innovation-stifling tech giants. It seems like they’re more interested in scratching their personal itch and being content with that. Totally fine, but I’m going to be slighly less excited about releases from both of these projects in the future unless I get indications that the core team members are willing to escape the same trap that plagues all standardization schemes (https://xkcd.com/927/)
1) Polish vs Openness:
- Keybase is a polished product and a closed identity platform;
- Upspin is open-source plumbing and an (almost) open platform.
2) Focus
- Keybase is a crypto identity platform which happens to have a file storage app;
- Upspin is a file storage platform which happens to have a crypto identify feature.
Note: I call Upspin "almost open" because it does not support running your own key server in a private namespace. All users must use the same public key server. In exchange for a slightly less open platform, Upspin gets a strong guarantee of a single global namespace, which is a really great feature for end users. I think it's great that the project is clear about its priorities and the tradeoffs it's willing to make, and communicates them upfront.
The problem with upspin is that there's a SPOC keyserver, not that there's a single namespace. You could trivially have a single global namespace with many delegated keyservers using DNS. You know, like e-mail. But the authors unfortunately don't want that.
I don’t think it’s that simple.
Consider messaging apps: do users care about their own messages? No - a list of sentences is meaningless when detached from the overall conversation.
So in who’s $HOME do you store that conversation?
We think the APIs have settled down a lot now, but they may yet change.
A letter is private correspondence; the date it is written is essentially the date it is published. A manifesto, on the other hand, could be considered a public document, and so its date of publishing may not necessarily be the date it was written.
I get that it was written a while ago and only made available for public consumption recently. However, appending a date to the article name signals to most users that the article is an older article that may have been previously posted. This is the part that's confusing, and I think masks what is essentially a new document in the eyes of the public.