It is possible that the very notion of files and a file system is outdated and should be replaced with a generalized notion of an information space with interlinked information objects in a hypertext manner. As personal computers get gigabyte harddisks, and additional terabytes become available over the network, users will need to access hundreds of thousands or even millions of information objects. Also, several commercial products are already available to add full-text search capabilities to existing file systems, but these utility programs are typically not integrated with the general file user interface. Agents Agents are autonomous processes in the computer that act on behalf of the user in some specified role. The eventual goal of some researchers is to have highly intelligent agents that know the user's schedule, can retrieve exactly the desired information at any given time, and in general combine the functions of butler and secretary.
Agents can also be very simple.
For example, an agent might count the number of times a user gives an invalid command and then offer the user an explanation when the count reaches a certain number. Even without the high level of artificial intelligence and the excessive requirements for standardization of information exchange needed to support some of the more fancy scenarios, agents can still help users with many tasks. For example, MS Outlook allows users to construct agents to sort and filter their incoming electronic mail according to various criteria. A typical agent could search for talk announcements and place them in a special mail folder from which they could be automatically deleted after the announced date of the talk unless the user had moved them to a permanent archive first. Consistency Consistency is one of those principles that sounds like a great idea when you first come across it, but it is very difficult to apply the principle in any real situation where there is a wide array of conflicting things with which you can be consistent.