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Computer Files Are Going Extinct

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Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#111

Post by fenwick67 »

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…

> Perhaps instead of email, you teacher friend could find out how her students send things to each other and meet them half way?

"Please turn in your assignments via Snapchat by 7AM tomorrow"

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#112

Post by dreamcompiler »

scarface74 wrote: post #77
dreamcompiler wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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+

I never mentioned music. I was talking about files in general.

And even with music it was easy to drag music files from an iPod; they were merely in a hidden folder. I don't remember trying to drag music to an iPod with the Finder because it used to be so easy to do that with iTunes.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#113

Post by nine_k »

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…

Not using a particular workflow ≠ unable to understand a particular workflow.

The "zip up your files and email me" is only hard when the concepts of files and email are alien, because everything lives in its own silos. Which is the point.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#114

Post by unqueued »

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…

It would be nice if people actually replied to you instead of just downvoting.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#115

Post by tomc1985 »

scarface74 wrote: post #66
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 I agree with the sentiment, it’s a few years out of date. Starting with iOS 8 - 5 years ago, Apple has had extensibility points where third parties like Dropbox and OneDrive could be used to store documents and used in the common places where you would want to save and upload files across apps. - of course the Files app was introduced two years ago. - there have been third party document providers that exposed…

Files still doesn't have the concept of a 'home folder' on the local device. I heard they even had this feature in early betas but took it away.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#116

Post by PopePompus »

gameswithgo wrote: post #23
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…

i had a very similar experience and it is infuriating. i can’t believe nobody makes a smartphone that is just a computer. android is closer but its only a half step.

Android with termux is a pretty good approximation to a handheld GNU/linux machine. You can access the files created by other apps on the phone, so it's easy to cat text files in your Dropbox area, etc. you can wget files from other machines. You can ssh into the phone from your desktop machine, and then work on the phone with a real keyboard. GNU compilers work on the phone. About the only complaint I have is that I have not found an X11 server app for Android that is useful, and it's not been for lack of looking.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#117

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

> Perhaps instead of email, you teacher friend could find out how her students send things to each other and meet them half way?

They probably just don't. People are sharing images, text, and links. Mostly on non-accessible, ephemeral, and unreliable platforms. They are not used to share generic data and not used to reliable platforms at all (as even email is unreliable nowadays)... except at work, and that's where people use email.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#118

Post by unqueued »

markbnj wrote: post #84
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 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. I suspect it is the same progression as any other new technology that undergoes mainstreaming. Take automobiles for example. In the early days if you owned a car you either made yourself something of an expert (and if you were an early…

I agree that technology will be more streamlined as it becomes more widely adopted.

But people still understand that they need to put gas in their car to make their car go, and if they run out of gas, their car can not go. We don't have to know what gas is, but it is still a quantity of something.

But our concept of files and data is becoming so abstracted that we do not even know where our data is anymore, how much we need, or how long it takes to transfer it. But until we have much more bandwidth and storage, there will be problems.

Imagine a world where we tried optimizing our cars interfaces so much that we removed gas gauges, and just had reminders that told people that they had to go to a gas station. And as a result people would frequently run out of gas, or be shocked by how much gas costs. But gas gauges were considered a power-user feature, and everyone was convinced that users would just never be able to understand them.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#119

Post by jrochkind1 »

cproctor wrote: post #76
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.

Hm, does "constructionism" mean a new thing in educational theory now? You don't seem to be using it like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theo...

?

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#120

Post by tomc1985 »

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'd be nice if desktop computing went back to the nerds. Let the masses have their mobile, and let computer software not be so dumbed-down.
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