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Computer Files Are Going Extinct

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Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#201

Post by rsync »

_Understated_ wrote: post #37

> all culture, raging over us, for $12.99 a month (or $15.99 for HD) as long as we keep up our payments like good economic entities. When we stop paying, we’re left with nothing. No files. The service is revoked. This is the most frightening thing for me... by far: the concept that I no longer have control of the destiny of my own shit. Mine. Stuff I created. I understand the concept of how cloud storage works: "hey,…

"I understand the concept of how cloud storage works: "hey, we'll look after it for you, back it up and stuff, and all you need to do it pay us a small monthly fee"."

If only there was a cloud storage provider that gave you an empty UNIX filesystem to do whatever you like with.

Maybe a proper .ssh directory to populate with your own keys and authorized_keys directives ?

Bonus points if it's a zfs filesystem with a .zfs/snapshot directory in the root.

If only ...

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#202

Post by launch_queue »

mellowdream wrote: post #195

This is what I'm gonna link to my friends the next time they make fun of me for being a green-texter. This is exactly the story I went through a few years back as well. I had an iPhone 4? 9-ish years ago when I was in a music-kleptomania frenzy (back when what.cd was around too ;) ), and I remember just how frustrating it was dragging and dropping shit through iTunes all the time. Same for movies, photos, and documen…

I can say from my experience no it hasn't. You are forced to install iTunes for your computer to even be able to manipulate the device with other software, so even if you have MediaMonkey or an alternative music library you will need to install iTunes first. MediaMonkey works well generally, but as soon as there's an iOS update there's no guarantee you can transfer music because it can break something in the chain. As for metadata, you still have to use 3rd party (e.g. mp3tag) which can be its own time-consuming headache--at least you can use RegEx.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#203

Post by TeMPOraL »

chrisseaton wrote: post #191
drdeadringer wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes exactly, and thank you. Imagine if you edited a photo in Photoshop and could only access that edited photo through "Photoshop Live" or some-such. File management in the wild is dirty. Either "there is only one" or there is the Clone Wars. This is real. For anecdotal example, a family member had this issue with Picasa [before it was purchased by Google]. "I rotated and cropped thousands of my pictures, but when I…

> For anecdotal example, a family member had this issue with Picasa [before it was purchased by Google]. "I rotated and cropped thousands of my pictures, but when I look at them in my 'Pictures' folder my edits aren't there. Where are my edits? Why aren't my edits in Picasa in my 'Pictures' folder pictures?" But Apple have solved this confusion by removing the files and folders and making the application the one plac…

Only if your entire computing is 100% done on your own Apple devices, and you don't need anything beyond the capabilities offered by Apple's software.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#204

Post by rolltiide »

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 similar anecdotes, I experience a lot of Gen Xers and Boomers expecting a linear progression of computer literacy, inversely correlated to age.

"You're so lucky you grew up using this technology, so you're used to it whereas I have to struggle - yes, do ignore that I had more than your whole lifespan to get up to speed on this ubiquitous reality"

but I encounter people under 24 that can navigate a touch screen pretty well but lack any fundamental knowledge, let alone typing on a keyboard in a proficient way.

fortunately most activities no longer require this kind of thing. auto-saving, and better UI solves alot.

I can see how wanting to teach these things will have challenges.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#205

Post by astrobe_ »

derefr wrote: post #143
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…

The escalator never went down in the first place. Files are a weird, unclean semi-abstraction (growable virtual sparse block devices addressed as seekable byte-streams with heavy metadata and OS-level memory caching?) that we only feel a degree of primacy about because of how common they've been. Consider: unikernels (like, say, any old cartridge game ROM) don't have any need for files. They have precisely three abst…

> Filesystems are hard!

Huh, no. Just show how the FAT file system works. It's still used on USB drives.

Now that you have a simple model for the low level, you can gradually add complexity such as standard file operations, caching, wear-leveling, etc.

You say Minio instance, I say hex editor.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#206

Post by mukti »

esotericn wrote: post #86

You can pry my files from my cold dead hands. What amuses me about all of this is that it seems to just further cement software developers as magicians. Back in the day it was the Windows control panel. Nowadays? I have direct experience with tons of people navigating cloud service settings or whatever else via endless GUIs. Just give me the filesystem. It's all a bunch of JSON configs or whatever anyway. find -name…

I'm often able to mystify people by fixing something by dropping to a shell and modifying files.. even some developers. I think the one thing that this article points out is how unaware some developers about what they're doing. The author had an example where he used NPM to download dependencies and said "websites were made of files; now they are made of dependencies." While that is not wrong, its too often how people think, and they forget that the dependencies are actually just a bunch of files.

I actually end up helping tons of random people in my company use conda, because they can't get the concept of virtual envs. They don't understand that the libraries are actually files on the disk, and your virtual environment is just a directory and some variables.

That's not to say all developers are like this, but I think the numbers that think like this are growing. Ultimately, I'm like you - they can pry the files from my cold dead hands, if I didn't know what/where/how files were used, I wouldn't fundamentally understand how a lot of different technologies even work.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#207

Post by judge2020 »

api wrote: post #48
FpUser wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are walking into corporate traps left and right. Too bad. they should turn on their brains every once in a while.

The "bait" for these traps is almost universally ease of use and overall user experience, something open platforms and open source has failed to provide.

USB drives and SD cards seem to be doing just fine, along with hard drives for desktop use. The inconvenience of these is having to go somewhere to buy them and not being able to magically simultaneously sync between devices.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#208

Post by bitwize »

unqueued wrote: post #118
markbnj wrote: post #84

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. 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…

This has already happened at least once in the automotive realm, as auto manufacturers replaced the dashboard gauges for important measures like oil pressure with "idiot lights".

Of course the idiot light has achieved an apotheosis in the era of computerized cars, where the car's onboard computer signals a problem and illuminates the "CHECK ENGINE" light. Of course, what that means is that you need to take the car in to the garage and have a Certified, Licensed Professional Mechanic attach a doohickey to the engine computer to tell him what the problem is, so he can tell you.

My father is an old-time car geek. This shit drives him up the wall.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#209

Post by dehrmann »

mellowdream wrote: post #195

This is what I'm gonna link to my friends the next time they make fun of me for being a green-texter. This is exactly the story I went through a few years back as well. I had an iPhone 4? 9-ish years ago when I was in a music-kleptomania frenzy (back when what.cd was around too ;) ), and I remember just how frustrating it was dragging and dropping shit through iTunes all the time. Same for movies, photos, and documen…

> [media file ownership] was definitely a waste of time retagging thousands of music files out of some strange ownership OCD

Full disclosure: I used to work for Spotify. When people talk about services like Spotify and Apple Music, they usually miss how much value is added in the cataloging and search they do. These are a massive pain to do yourself, it doesn't scale past ~10,000 tracks, they've put more thought into it, and are better at handling the song/track/recording ambiguity in search results.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#210

Post by meddlepal »

blub wrote: post #199
jedimastert wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Anyone suggesting using proprietary cloud products for something that's mandatory for participating in society hasn't thought things through: 1. The privacy policy of Google & Dropbox is a catastrophe. 2. They can ban you at any time for all sorts of silly reasons and then you can't even turn your homework in any more.

1. Nobody besides idealogoues actually cares about that. See their huge install base as a demonstration of this fact.

2. The professor tells you to create a new account and submit it via that. Sure it probably violates the ToS but nobody cares.

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