> A cross-platform filesystem that you could read/write from Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android etc.
"Future possibilities" ... in 2019.
It frustrates me to no end that there are some areas where programmers are willing to go to extreme lengths to be perfectly compatible (C/C++, Unicode, IEEE FP, ethernet, TCP/IP/HTTP, HTML/CSS/JS, PNG/JPEG, ...), and in other areas it's just accepted that everybody is completely incompatible and users have to deal with the mess (newline characters, SQL dialects, filesystems, syscalls, opcodes, graphics APIs, driver models, some multimedia codecs still, ...).
I can put a "Pile of Poo" character in a text file and have it work correctly everywhere from my telephone to a server in Finland -- but I can't put that text file on a disk and expect to see the file on two PCs that happen to be running different operating systems.
I wish we were far enough along that I could complain we can't (efficiently) run one compiled program on any operating system -- there's really no technical reason we can't do that -- but we're not even close. We can't even look at a list of data files on a disk.
What is everybody working on?! We don't need any more web 2.0. We need to fix 50 years of historical accidents and incompatibilities. In 1969, Richard Hamming said "Today we stand on each other's feet", and AFAICT nothing since then has changed. Nobody cooperates with anybody else. As Alan Kay once said, "The real computer revolution hasn't happened yet". Adding more JavaScript trackers is not going to help us get there.
Those JavaScript trackers pays for WebAssembly. Right not it's about the closest to the holy grail for cross-platform applications. The (for-profit) companies pushing the state of the art in browser technologies all happen to run on ads.
"Future possibilities" ... in 2019.
It frustrates me to no end that there are some areas where programmers are willing to go to extreme lengths to be perfectly compatible (C/C++, Unicode, IEEE FP, ethernet, TCP/IP/HTTP, HTML/CSS/JS, PNG/JPEG, ...), and in other areas it's just accepted that everybody is completely incompatible and users have to deal with the mess (newline characters, SQL dialects, filesystems, syscalls, opcodes, graphics APIs, driver models, some multimedia codecs still, ...).
I can put a "Pile of Poo" character in a text file and have it work correctly everywhere from my telephone to a server in Finland -- but I can't put that text file on a disk and expect to see the file on two PCs that happen to be running different operating systems.
I wish we were far enough along that I could complain we can't (efficiently) run one compiled program on any operating system -- there's really no technical reason we can't do that -- but we're not even close. We can't even look at a list of data files on a disk.
What is everybody working on?! We don't need any more web 2.0. We need to fix 50 years of historical accidents and incompatibilities. In 1969, Richard Hamming said "Today we stand on each other's feet", and AFAICT nothing since then has changed. Nobody cooperates with anybody else. As Alan Kay once said, "The real computer revolution hasn't happened yet". Adding more JavaScript trackers is not going to help us get there.
OK, rant over. Sorry.