At 10:07 AM 3/1/99 -0800, you wrote:
>On Mon 01 Mar, Jan Bottorff wrote:
>> At 08:42 PM 2/28/99 -0800, you wrote:
>> >Now here's a possible place where the NewCompiledMethod stuff might
have an
>> >immediate benefit - simply allow use of LargePositiveIntegers as source
>> >pointers. Infinite (almost) file sizes! None of this pathetic 64 bit
>> >limitation in the Windows api! Now just give me an infinitely big disk....
>> 
>> We already have (almost) infinitely big disks, on a volume called the
>> Internet. You have to use filenames like
>Jan, you're wicked! So all we have to do is find a way to get write access
to all those disks....
>
>How many floppies would we need to back them all up :-O

That's the cool thing about the infinite Internet disk volume, there are an
almost infinite number of floppies to back it up. This backup also goes
almost infinitely fast, as all these floppy drives work in parallel. What's
also cool is there is backup redundancy. If your personal floppy goes bad,
you just go to some place like ww.google.com and get your cached files
back. hehe :)

I'm actually not kidding about this, I see no reason why we can't just
write code that says:

	aStream := FileStream
readOnlyFileNamed:'http://www.smalltalk.org/stuff.html'.

Having both network API's and File API's is redundant. For that matter, the
OS should just cope with url style filnames. You have exactly the same
kinds of possible errors as when accessing a file on a normal file server.

- Jan

p.s. We actually DO have write access to many of these disks, the tricky
part is the non-uniform access syntax. It usually goes:
mail:webmaster at bigdisk.com, Dear Webmaster, You site needs changing at url...

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