121–130 of 408 posts
The war on general computing implies disempowering users, rather than empowering them. But that it's "not surprising" doesn't mean it's good, or that it can't be reversed.
I wonder what associations for craftsmanship in software, respect for users, and similar things there are? If there was a web ring about that, I would browse it.
I am a tech person. I do organise my files in folders. And I don't want any other organizing principle for my documents. But I realize that this concept does not work for most other people.
A few days ago I opened a Jupyter notebook I had authored in 2015 - and it failed to reproduce my results. I relied on pandas, and pandas has gone through API changes. Fortunately, it wasn't hard for me to search around for the newer versions of those APIs and fix things - but this is only 4 years after I authored it. Can I have any confidence that 20 years from now I could reproduce the results - or even find documentation for the APIs I used to understand exactly what I was doing?
I mean sure - I could put the OS and all the libraries needed to reproduce the work in a container and be guaranteed[1] it'll run later, but the only people who will do that are those who need to for regulatory compliance[2].
[1] Not really. The software to run the container may no longer be supported, and the people with the knowledge may charge more than most can afford to get it to work.
[2] Something we're dealing with at work these days. Writing stuff for the automotive industry and they expect that any software + tools should work 15-20 years from now. Same level of expectation for availability as any other car part. Now that there is so much SW in modern cars, this is a good opportunity for being a consultant 15-20 years from now!
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> My first attempt was to SSH into it Come on that’s not a sensible thing to expect from a non-specialist device, is it? I’m not sure this is a reasonable criticism.
Well, sure, I didn't expect it to be running a SSH server right away, but I was hoping to have a SSH option somewhere in the settings or, in the worst case, a downloadable app. It's a power user feature of course, but knowing that it's a Unix-based device, I absolutely expected easy SSH access. Then again, this is something that happened a lot with my brief use of iOS - I would repeatedly find that Apple clearly didn…
These days I use SSH a ton on my iOS devices through various apps and for many purposes (direct shell access, firing off scripts, port forwarding...) but that’s all logging into machines.
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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 l…
There are whole categories of stuff you can't do with this approach, because every application now becomes a minimal file manager itself, just to avoid the "confusing" idea that data can live independently from applications.
Perhaps one day we can store stuff directly into a transactional database. I'd actually love to see an OS based on this principle.
MVS is pretty much that.
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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.
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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.
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…
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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 wit…
We haven't, and here's why: a file system was one abstraction. A simple one, that made sense, and wasn't very far detached from actual implementation details. Which meant that weird black magic almost never leaked from underneath.
What we have now, with the cloud and dumbed down software, is many mutually inconsistent and sometimes incompatible abstractions, all completely detached from the reality behind them, which means they have inconsistent corner cases that make no sense unless you know enough about software to be able to imagine what those abstractions are backed by.
In the best tradition of commerce, we've helped people avoid having to learn a simple concept by introducing them to lots of "simplifying" lies.