Fine fine. Let's just say that the last "blank-slate" OS to acheive commercial success did so, what, 35 years ago? If I'm assuming too much transparency in the NVRAM technology (and honestly, I don't think I am -- DRAM is hardly transparent already, c.f. three levels of cache on the die of modern CPUs), then you're assuming far more agility in the OS choice than is realistic in the market.
Well, there hasn't been a major upset in the PC paradigm in 35 years :) Really, I agree with that bit-- marketing the thing would be a nightmare. But whether it's the first company to try it or the tenth, at some point the utility benefits will become too great for users to ignore.
> DRAM is hardly transparent already, c.f. three levels of cache on the die of modern CPUs
Keep in mind I'm talking about interface, not implementation. My code might care about cache misses, but my users have no reason to (except in the very, very aggregate). We leak a user-facing distinction between storage and memory because the difference is too significant to pretend it doesn't exist.
I think that OS choice agility is increasing rapidly. Consider the number of people whose primary computers are mobile phones (replaced every 1 to 3 years) and whose secondary computers are glorified web browsers. This is rapidly becoming true for businesses as well, as they adopt more web-based tools.
All mobile phone OSes are still based on a filesystem. If you want to claim that the user's perspective of the computer is going to move away from a "file", then I agree. If you think the underlying software is going to do so simply because it got no-power-to-maintain memory, I think you're crazy.
Straw man. I said nothing of my opinion on non-volatile memory. I was only pointing out that more and more users are less and less tied to any particular operating system.
Uh... the whole subthread was about NVRAM and the likelihood of it replacing the filesystem with different storage models. You'll have to forgive me for inferring an opinion about the subject we were discussing; I just don't see how that can be a straw man. It's just what happens when you inject a non sequitur into an existing discussion.
Not a non sequitur at all. You wrote "you're assuming far more agility in the OS choice than is realistic in the market" which was a point to support your case about NVRAM. I was merely stating that point was weak because, realistically, the agility in OS choice is increasing within the market.
I actually wrote in defense of the traditional filesystem model in another post on this thread. Just because I don't agree with your reasoning doesn't mean I don't agree with your conclusion.
