Re: [ossig] Nothing exciting in Comp.Sci. anymore?

[Imran William Smith <iwsmith@xxxxxxxx>]

Mukhsein Johari wrote:

> 
> You could have tree-style storage 

True, relational databases are not much good with tree structures,
parent-child relationships etc.  I spent most of my
life working with databases, so I *do* tend to think
of everything in the relational model.



> 
> What I understand him to say is that we should not let
> our 'knowledge' of what _is_ limit our thinking in
> creating what _could_ be. Lateral thinking and
> thinking out of the box will likely result in vastly
> different solutions that may be far superior to
> current convention. 
> 

Good point.  Unix has done well out of the 'everything
is a file' method - makes for a nice small number of
system calls to achieve everything.  But there could
be other ways.

Certainly the tree structure of typical filesystems is not perfect -
the web shows us the benefits of 'no top node, and
heavy hyperlinking'.  You can only organise things
in one dimension : a folder for departments, or a folder
each year, or a folder for each manager, ... but not
all 3 at the same time.   Symbolic links try to achieve
the 'many ways to point to the same thing' but don't
really work as well as hyperlinks.


Imran


---------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe: send mail to ossig-request@mncc.com.my
with "unsubscribe ossig" in the body of the message