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Computer Files Are Going Extinct

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Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#101

Post by thrower123213 »

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…

This is very interesting. I've heard similar reasons as to why computer literacy is apparently low in Japan; the keitai ecosystem was so good that e-mail in Nippon is synonymous with messaging.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#102

Post by asadkn »

aurora72 wrote: post #5

The author says "everyone started to use Spotify" Everyone? Yeah everyone with their shiny $1000+ iFon toys in their hands doing touch gestures.

I agree, this doesn't sound "everyone": https://support.spotify.com/us/using_spotify/the_basics/full...

Apple music is available in another 59 countries that Spotify is not.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#103

Post by layoutIfNeeded »

scarface74 wrote: post #69
ACS_Solver wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I recall, there was some kind of problem with apps not making use of hardware video decoding. I vaguely remember trying VLC but only getting acceptable performance on Apple's own application without a jailbreak. This is circa 2013 though.

The iPhone 4s and first generation iPad were capable of software transcoding video and playing it.

Parent was talking about not utilizing the hardware video codecs, which is indeed software “transcoding”. It drains your battery like crazy.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#105

Post by htfu »

drdeadringer wrote: post #93
chrisseaton wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 abou…

Isn’t that an argument for abstracting that kinda back-and-forth away rather than against it?

As it stands, if it’s in the cloud and not on your device there’s an indicator. Try to open it and it downloads. Edit it and the changes get synced back up. Unless something is edited in multiple places while offline, or someone takes your lead and tries to manually manage copying stuff back and forth, there’s no different local copy and cloud copy.

When you start talking about like, starting to edit it, well with video that’s not really how things work. If you tweak the contrast of a photo sure today’s devices abstract that in-place, but assembling multiple media into something that, if not re-encoded is at least re-muxed, why would you assume it to be “the same” file?

Should the audio track be automatically wiped, since it’s now been incorporated into the other file? That makes no sense, and I don’t see how an iOS device treats source material differently.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#106

Post by Ididntdothis »

My major concern is that data backup is getting more and more difficult. I feel it's increasingly more difficult to figure out what to back up and how to restore it. I have heard several horror stories from people who messed up something and had all their cloud data disappear forever.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#107

Post by buckminster »

psilocipher wrote: post #79
amelius wrote: post #10

Perhaps one day we can store stuff directly into a transactional database. I'd actually love to see an OS based on this principle.

And the database will at a lower level consist of ..... files.....

High end databases are often run directly on block storage. The db already manages allocation and caching so a filesystem just adds overhead and wonky semantics.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#108

Post by eecc »

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…

Frankly, we’ve been fantasizing of moving away from the file-system-as-tree abstraction since forever, wanting to embrace a metadata rich database approach.

Can’t happen soon enough imho

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#109

Post by unqueued »

jedimastert wrote: post #92
unqueued wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sam…

> 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 suppose, in the same way that people using crayons are moving away from the printed word.

> 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.

Isn't the whole point of school to learn new skills? If students have illegible handwriting and poor grammar, should the teacher really be meeting the students half way?

I actually told her that she should continue doing what she was doing, because it was a real boon to her students. They might not ever learn this stuff.

Her students objectively less able to share information with each other. I have certainly seen kids who have to go as far as taking screenshots of what an app contains and send a screenshot to someone, than actually be able to export text.

I could understand if what the students were doing was in some way comparable in flexibility, but it isn't. They basically only know how to click on the share button in an app, and text links for someone else to install the app. Or send them screenshots of them using an app scrolled to the relevant info.

But the biggest benefit is that having assignments in discrete organized bundles makes the most sense for everyone.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#110

Post by apostacy »

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…

Just to go into a bit more detail: 1) An auntie thought that dragging 100GB of music into her Dropbox meant that she could just leave on a trip and access her music, without having to wait for it to sync. 2) An uncle didn't know how to access his late wife's photos from her iPad. Which cloud were they in? Were they only on her locked iPad? Who knows! 3) People making public YouTube videos to share private moments with family. (Pedos exploit this to find videos of children bathing)

Have we really improved things? I find these new file abstractions we have created to be much more confusing.

Old people understand the concept of physical media just fine. They know what a record or a roll of film is. And because of this phobia about educating users, we hide so much that they don't even know if their data has been synced, or if it is private.

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