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Computer Files Are Going Extinct

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Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#91

Post by maliker »

faanghacker wrote: post #83
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.

That's because the post file world is designed for consumers, not producers. YouTube creators and software programmers are still using standard computers.

It makes sense to me economically. There are probably 1000x as many consumers as prolific creators. It would be nice for casual creators on mobile devices to have better tools, and it looks like we're starting to get there with better filesystem support on iOS/Android.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#92

Post by jedimastert »

unqueued wrote: post #80
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 th…

I might imply that your highschool teacher friend is instead falling out of computer literacy, and that highshool students are moving away from her form of a computer-based workflow.

I very rarely send emails at all outside of work. Maybe one or two support emails. I also fairly rarely create zip files either. Of course, I know how to do these things, but I don't really do it anymore. I haven't needed to, for the same reason that I don't own a printer.

I haven't needed to "compress" anything since Google Drive and Dropbox meant that all I needed to do to get someone a file is type their email into a box.

Perhaps instead of email, you teacher friend could find out how her students send things to each other and meet them half way? Make up a google drive or dropbox or whatever microsoft or apple are doing instead of insisting on whatever's most comfortable for you.

In short, I don't think this is an example of students falling behind, but teachers getting left behind.

It's a little rudde to say it that way, but I really don't know how else to say it.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#93

Post by drdeadringer »

chrisseaton wrote: post #73
drdeadringer wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is an issue.

I know people who are not able to properly manage their own files [no quotation marks needed]. They have copies of files here, there, and everywhere else and when asked which copy of the photograph they edited to their perfection they cannot tell you if it was the local copy, the cloud copy, the copy on the shared folder, the copy through that special app wherever that is... nevermind asking them about the concept of having backups.

Simple point-and-show-me information saves you an organizational migraine.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#94

Post by [deleted] »

apostacy wrote: post #85
dangus wrote: post #34

The article just felt...unjustifiably alarmist to me. Most non-technical people I know cannot manage files even after decades of computing experience. I understand why many services try to abstract or simplify the concept. For example, Google or Apple is processing the crap out of your email attachment image because they know you don’t understand the idea that trying to send five 10MB photos likely will not fit in an…

20 years ago, I thought that learning the basics of a filesystem would be a staple of education. I painstakingly taught this to my non-technical relatives. It wasn't that hard. I just assumed that this stuff would start getting taught in public schools. Instead, we've been struggling (and often failing) to dumb computers down. The fact that people still struggle with the same tasks is a testament to that. I have lost…

[deleted]

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#95

Post by htfu »

ACS_Solver wrote: post #12

One of my greatest culture shocks in terms of technology was around 6 years ago when I received an iPad, having no experience with Apple products. After the initial setup, the first thing I wanted was to transfer some files - TV episodes and PDFs - to the device. My first attempt was to SSH into it, only to discover that's not an option, and would require a third-party app store and jailbreak. Then I just connected t…

While it didn’t exist back then there’s been an actual file manager for a while now, and long before that files could be downloaded and opened by (hence stored with) apps, and then shared onwards if later settling on a different pdf reader or whatever.

Other approaches like using iTunes to transfer files (again, to some specific app), while clunkier and less intuitive than mass storage, still worked.

Apps like VLC could spin up a temp web server for file upload, and again if using device to pull from something instead of pushing from eg desktop to it, a lot of scripting and automation has been possible, essentially piping data and files between apps.

So at its core I think it’s more about having a very app-centric approach, including leaving it up to apps whether (and how) to work at file level. Not exactly helping but hardly preventing either.

Of course being accessible, nudging people towards sourcing their media through Apple etc are factors here, but there’s more to it than just limitations, and it hasn’t really been as heavy-handed or locked-down as many seem to think.

Edit: whoops, started writing this before the other posts mentioning the same things, then returned and finished without refreshing. Oh well.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#96

Post by nostrademons »

unqueued wrote: post #80
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 th…

I'm curious if this is actually computer literacy plummeting or if it's a wider population of students being expected to understand computers.

When I was in high school the vast majority of my peers understood how to bundle up a bunch of photos, documents, etc. into a zip file and e-mail them. This is because my peers were nerds, and we were excited about this new computer technology and eager to learn everything we could about it. There were no computer classes in high school. When we had high school science class, we were expected to draw pictures of our experiments (y'know, with a pencil, on paper) and fill out the lab report longhand. There was a large segment of the student body who had no idea what a file was, or how to turn a picture into one, let alone how to bundle it into a zip file.

It was a bit different in college, where we were expected to understand Excel and how to run a regression or graph some data. But then, that drew from a very different population than high school.

It's sorta like how SATs are dropping not because kids are getting stupider, but because a larger proportion of people who would never have been considered college-bound a generation ago are now expected to take the test.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#97

Post by [deleted] »

apostacy wrote: post #85
dangus wrote: post #34

The article just felt...unjustifiably alarmist to me. Most non-technical people I know cannot manage files even after decades of computing experience. I understand why many services try to abstract or simplify the concept. For example, Google or Apple is processing the crap out of your email attachment image because they know you don’t understand the idea that trying to send five 10MB photos likely will not fit in an…

20 years ago, I thought that learning the basics of a filesystem would be a staple of education. I painstakingly taught this to my non-technical relatives. It wasn't that hard. I just assumed that this stuff would start getting taught in public schools. Instead, we've been struggling (and often failing) to dumb computers down. The fact that people still struggle with the same tasks is a testament to that. I have lost…

[deleted]

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#98

Post by caleb-allen »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #43
ACS_Solver wrote: post #12

One of my greatest culture shocks in terms of technology was around 6 years ago when I received an iPad, having no experience with Apple products. After the initial setup, the first thing I wanted was to transfer some files - TV episodes and PDFs - to the device. My first attempt was to SSH into it, only to discover that's not an option, and would require a third-party app store and jailbreak. Then I just connected t…

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.

I was a kid when I got my first iPod and I remember storing a copy of Starcraft on it, to be able to play on school computers and on the computers at the University near my house.

Great memories

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#99

Post by [deleted] »

unqueued wrote: post #80
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 th…

[deleted]

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#100

Post by lewisjoe »

Remember "Worse is Better" by Gabriel? Lisp was a correct, consistent and complete system, prioritizing these over simplicity. C, on the other hand, was a simple system but not nearly as much complete, consistent or correct as Lisp. Nevertheless, Lisp lost to C.

This is what happens when Capitalism meets Software. When it comes to winning markets, shipping simple stuff is always better than shipping a slightly more complex (in terms of code as well as UX) but correct stuff. That is why most companies prioritize feature development over bugfixes. That is why selecting multiple items from a list is still inconsistent across the web. That is why XMPP lost and Whatsapp and Messenger are winning.

There are efforts like Solid (https://solid.inrupt.com) by Tim Berners-Lee himself that's trying to bring back the concept of files and data-ownership to end-users, to enforce correctness and consistency. But I'm still skeptical if the efforts will ever win the market.

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