Digital Nirvana

Apple, Google and Microsoft want to liberate us from the tyranny of folders and file names. You would never have to remember the name of a file or the folder in which you put it in to retrieve it. In a way, this is already how a lot of us use the Internet - I for one, just Google for a page rather than bookmark it and try to locate it within my labyrinthine bookmarks folder. This is good and I appreciate it. However, unlike the World Wide Web, your desktop PC would some time run out of disc space. When that happens, you can either just buy another hard disc or try to clean your existing hard disc. If you choose the latter, how do you find stuff you do not want? These tools make it easy for you to find stuff you want but not what you do not want.


IBM has created a Universal Virtual Computer to solve the problem of digital decay. Does any one else think this is an overkill? Is using well-documented document or image formats with portable reference reader implementations not good enough? What is to stop subtle errors in porting the UVC to new platforms from preventing the documents to be displayed as originally intended?


(Originally posted on Advogato.)

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