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Computer Files Are Going Extinct

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Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#71

Post by maliker »

fit2rule wrote: post #53
maliker wrote: post #26

I don't understand how people can get work done in the post-file world. Any project I've got that's more complicated than a todo list has text files, images, code, links to websites, emails, and typeset documents. The only thing that holds all that stuff, organizes it into folders, lets me edit/run it, and makes the content searchable is a filesystem. Maybe my standards for usability are too high.

At work I am constantly battle the following sources of crufty bollocks: the ftp server, the windows-share fileserver, the 'one the linux guys use' (its ssh..), the jira ticket-attachments, the confluence 'pages', peoples mobile-phones, and so on. If only all of these OS's just had one single, shared, reliable filesystem they could all mount and/or mirror, without .. oh, I get it .. I just install another 3rd-party a…

I've standardized on Google Drive, which kind of works. Not good enough version control features for code though, which is why I still need git. Been kicking around the idea of moving to git only, but the learning curve is steep (impossible?) for non-programmers.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#72

Post by drdeadringer »

chrisseaton wrote: post #41
barrkel wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found it immediately limiting - either you put your stuff in one of the preordained categories like music, movies, photos, videos (and pretty much nothing else), or your stuff is siloed in whatever specific application you load it into. That's not a tool you can use to create things with, unless it's music, movies, photos or videos. It lacked the freedom to permit innovation. (I have never acquired an iPad beyond t…

You can write on it, draw on it, paint on it, program on it, and you already mentioned video, photography, music, spoken word. Seems like an extremely powerful creation tool to me! You could create many of humanity’s greatest works on it! What are you expecting more?

I expect actual control and ownership over those very creations I create.

On your iPad, point to where your latest video file is. Show me. Where is it? "On The Cloud"? On the iPad itself? Three clicks deep in some random purpose-specific app separate from the soundtrack file you want to integrate into the video? What about five years from now, can you still access that video however and whenever and wherever you please?

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#73

Post by chrisseaton »

drdeadringer wrote: post #72
chrisseaton wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can write on it, draw on it, paint on it, program on it, and you already mentioned video, photography, music, spoken word. Seems like an extremely powerful creation tool to me! You could create many of humanity’s greatest works on it! What are you expecting more?

I expect actual control and ownership over those very creations I create. On your iPad, point to where your latest video file is. Show me. Where is it? "On The Cloud"? On the iPad itself? Three clicks deep in some random purpose-specific app separate from the soundtrack file you want to integrate into the video? What about five years from now, can you still access that video however and whenever and wherever you plea…

> On your iPad, point to where your latest video file is. Show me. Where is it?

Why do you care where the 'file' is? That's an implementation detail. I can copy the video to somewhere else any time I want. I do this all the time with photos and videos from my iPad. It's not the issue you're saying it is.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#74

Post by cproctor »

To a computer science teacher, this feels like trying to walk up a down escalator.

First-year CS students (middle school or high school) with experience using Apple products don't have a concept of a filesystem. The shift to auto-saving documents also corrodes the intuition that files get stored on disk in some non-magical way. In the same way that it's now easier to teach networking and graph theory because youth experience identity and relationships this way, it's now a lot harder to teach lower-level abstractions. In my experience, this has changed over the last five years.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#75

Post by dreamcompiler »

scarface74 wrote: post #67
dreamcompiler wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original iPod was a Firewire hard drive; you could connect it to your Mac and use it as a backup volume if you wanted. Apple took all that away a long time ago, and obviously it wasn't for technical reasons. It was so Apple could control and restrict how the customer used their devices. One of the many reasons why I changed from an Apple fan to an Apple hater.

You were able to use an iPod as a storage device throughout its entire lifetime. If Apple wanted to “control and restrict you” it would have been a lot harder to reverse engineer the iPod indexing format and allow third parties to write software that could store and retrieve music from the iPod.

At the beginning it was literally just a disk with an HFS+ file system. You could drag files to and from it with the Finder. No reverse engineering necessary.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#76

Post by cproctor »

cproctor wrote: post #74

To a computer science teacher, this feels like trying to walk up a down escalator. First-year CS students (middle school or high school) with experience using Apple products don't have a concept of a filesystem. The shift to auto-saving documents also corrodes the intuition that files get stored on disk in some non-magical way. In the same way that it's now easier to teach networking and graph theory because youth ex…

Sort of as a response, I'm currently developing/piloting a 9th grade CS curriculum designed around constructionism ("making with code"). The first unit spends a lot of time introducing students to Terminal. By the second unit, assignments are git repos.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#77

Post by scarface74 »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #75
scarface74 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were able to use an iPod as a storage device throughout its entire lifetime. If Apple wanted to “control and restrict you” it would have been a lot harder to reverse engineer the iPod indexing format and allow third parties to write software that could store and retrieve music from the iPod.

At the beginning it was literally just a disk with an HFS+ file system. You could drag files to and from it with the Finder. No reverse engineering necessary.

You’re talking about two separate things.

You could never drag music to the iPod and have it recognized by the music player.

You could always drag random files to it and have it work as a hard drive. On Windows it was NTFS (Fat32?) on Macs it was HFS+

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#80

Post by unqueued »

cproctor wrote: post #74

To a computer science teacher, this feels like trying to walk up a down escalator. First-year CS students (middle school or high school) with experience using Apple products don't have a concept of a filesystem. The shift to auto-saving documents also corrodes the intuition that files get stored on disk in some non-magical way. In the same way that it's now easier to teach networking and graph theory because youth ex…

I have a very similar anecdote. I had a long conversation with a friend who is a high school science teacher. She told me that computer literacy has plummeted in the last ten years.

She has her students go into the field and collect data in the form of photos, spreadsheets, and typed reports. She wants students to bundle these files in zip files, and email them to her.

Students have no idea how to do this. Some of them struggle with emails. She has had to make her tutorials on this longer and longer. And she has also been forced to start accepting assignments as a pile of attachments, because so few students understand zip files.

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