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Computer Files Are Going Extinct

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Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#211

Post by detaro »

dehrmann wrote: post #209
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 doesn't scale past ~10,000 tracks, they've put more thought into it,

Spotify also says supporting more than 10000 tracks in "My Library" isn't necessary, so the people who hit that limit aren't helped by Spotify either

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#212

Post by u801e »

perl4ever wrote: post #144
nostrademons wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People used to need to understand that the gas went through a carburetor, where it was mixed with air that came through an air filter, both of which could get clogged. And then it would be drawn into a cylinder through a valve that was opened by a camshaft, where it would be ignited by a sparkplug. Sparkplugs could get dirty, so you better know how to change them yourself. And it'd be very bad if the sparkplug was li…

Also, I learned how to change a tire very early. From what I read, a large number of people can't do that these days. But spark plugs and air filters are still a thing.

With the tools they include in the car and how hard it is to get to the spare tire (in some models), I would be hard pressed to get the wheel off (especially if some shop decided it would be a good idea to really overtorque the lug nuts with an impact wrench).

In fact, the last shop that worked on my car did exactly that and I had to buy a breaker bar and stand on it in order to loosen the lug bolts on my car before I retorqued them to the correct value.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#214

Post by u801e »

nostrademons wrote: post #159
perl4ever wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, I learned how to change a tire very early. From what I read, a large number of people can't do that these days. But spark plugs and air filters are still a thing.

My dad taught me parts of an engine, along with how to service them, when I was in elementary school (mid-80s). I was on a big "learn how cars work" kick at the time, so he figured he'd indulge me and maybe teach a few practical skills at the same time. I've owned my car for 10 years now, and the total number of times I have had to change my oil, air filter, spark plug, or any other part of the engine is zero . My A1…

I depends on the car model, but I find that it's quicker to do some maintenance yourself rather than scheduling an appointment, waiting or using their shuttle service, and getting the car back.

The air filter and cabin filter replacement come to mind (and, at least in my Honda Odyssey, can both be replaced in about 10 minutes give or take).

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#215

Post by jradd »

files are an abstraction and reference to objects in memory. The only problem I see is storage life cycle without cache in volatile plus redundant non-volatile memory. Same problem for blocks and segments, no?

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#216

Post by u801e »

bitwize wrote: post #208
unqueued wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

You can buy a OBD-II scanner for around $30 and get that information yourself without having to take it to a mechanic. That should for work for any car built since 1996.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#217

Post by ghaff »

perl4ever wrote: post #144
nostrademons wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People used to need to understand that the gas went through a carburetor, where it was mixed with air that came through an air filter, both of which could get clogged. And then it would be drawn into a cylinder through a valve that was opened by a camshaft, where it would be ignited by a sparkplug. Sparkplugs could get dirty, so you better know how to change them yourself. And it'd be very bad if the sparkplug was li…

Also, I learned how to change a tire very early. From what I read, a large number of people can't do that these days. But spark plugs and air filters are still a thing.

In all fairness a non-trivial number of vehicles don’t even have a spare tire these days much less a full-size one. And the stock jack even SUVs come with is often next to useless.

Having to swap out tires is pretty unusual in normal driving these days and it’s not like you carry spares of everything else that could break and strand you in a car. So I sort of understand it even if I don’t really like it.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#218

Post by u801e »

unqueued wrote: post #170
Someone wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

”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.” As others said, that’s because they don’t need to do that. In my experience, they will know how to share their Google Docs (which is where their spreadsheets and typed reports in all likelihood get written) with you. They probab…

> In my experience, they will know how to share their Google Docs (which is where their spreadsheets and typed reports in all likelihood get written) with you. From what she has told me, and from what I have seen, some of them don't even get that far. Their idea of sharing information is to send screenshots in MMS messages or over snapchat. And, I think that if you graduate high school, you should have these basic sk…

> God forbid a medical office asks you to fax them something. (Which I still have to do several times a year)

Doing that was much easier in the days when computers came with fax/modems and most places had landlines. Now you have to search for some online service that will inject adverts in your fax or go to a copy place (if you can find one) and pay lots of money to send a fax. I'd almost rather mail a certified letter with return receipt instead :)

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#219

Post by derefr »

astrobe_ wrote: post #205
derefr wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't say the implementation of a filesystem was hard. You can certainly communicate, as a complete standalone fact, the brute engineering perspective on what makes a particular filesystem work. Probably even in a single lesson.

But the point isn't to teach students about a filesystem; the point is to teach students what files are when they don't understand why you'd even want the abstraction that "files" represent; when "files" aren't an abstraction they're familiar with compared to other abstractions. You have to justify "files" in the context of things they do know—to explain what purpose files would serve if they were invented today; what reason you'd introduce a filesystem into a data architecture that had all these other things (KV storage, object storage, logical volumes) but not files.

Students would ask: Why are files streams? Why are the streams arbitrarily writable, when this means files can become corrupted from a partial write? Why are files extendable, but only at the end, not in the middle or the beginning? Why do files have names? (And, once you explain inodes+dirents, they'll ask why there's a directory tree if hard links exist; and why it's the dirents that have the names, but the files themselves that have the other metadata—xattrs; alternate data streams, etc.) What is the difference between a file stored in a directory, a file stored in a filesystem stored in a mounted loopback image stored in another file, and a file stored in a subvolume or filesystem container? Why do directories need special system calls to read and write them? Why is a virtual filesystem used in many OSes to represent kernel objects like named pipes and device nodes? Etc.

(This isn't even a hypothetical; engineers at AWS and GCP probably had to answer this very question when asked to justify building EFS and Cloud Filestore. Why do we need a filesystem as a service, when we already have these other services that provide these other abstractions?)

This is not altogether unlike teaching a student what a programming language is and why you'd even want one of those, when they're immersed in an environment where software is created without them. Would you just sit down and show the kids C, because it's small and easy-ish to understand?

A filesystem is a data-storage abstraction, like C is a machine abstraction. But neither are primitive abstractions. They build on numerous other, theoretically purer abstractions. It's much easier to explain the motivation for the creation of a language like C, if you already understand the motivation of the creation of a simpler language that rests upon fewer other abstractions—like ASM, or like Scheme. Likewise, it's much easier to understand the motivation behind the creation of the abstraction that is filesystems, if you already understand the motivation behind the creation of simpler data-storage abstractions, like logical volumes or memory-page-backed search trees.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#220

Post by hakfoo »

I wonder if this is a variation on a business anti-pattern we see in a lot of other places:

"It's better to acquire a new customer at any cost, versus retaining an existing one."

There are plenty of verticals where if you develop a piece of software that's blunt, direct, and full of power-user features, it won't take off because it gets panned as "too hard to use."

Tricks like abstracting where and how the data is stored tend to be appealing to non-skilled users. They see "look how easy, I don't have to figure out which files are in the cloud and which are on disc, and can't accidentally try to open a spreadsheet in the photo editor." New users buy into it, the developers get their hockey-stick growth chart and everyone declares victory. After a few months, a small percentage of users end up dropping the product with a migraine because they can't break out of the jails and abstractions that are clearly standing in the way of improved productivity.

No real point in satisfying those users anyway-- they've already paid, so there's no further value they can provide to your ecosystem.

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