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Computer Files Are Going Extinct

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Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#281

Post by friendlybus »

uniqueid wrote: post #148
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 theory that in ten years or so the tide may turn. That’s enough time for this generation to have lost, or have had to deal with unpleasant migrations of, their valuable data due to online services shutting down... repeatedly. I don’t know. On the other hand, most older people like myself have had to deal with data loss from failed, obsolete or lost storage devices. There’s still no “one size fits all” very-l…

It will probably expand in both directions. There is work going in to new creation tools. They function best client side.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#282

Post by phaseshifter »

pm90 wrote: post #172
nostrademons wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm looking forward to self-driving electrics. You hop in the car, it takes you to your destination, and then you hop out. At off-peak hours they drive themselves to a car farm far away from the city, and recharge. The car service handles all maintenance. There's this phenomena where anything invented before you turn 10 is just part of the natural order of things, anything between 10 and 30 is a great new opportunity…

You're making some great points here. I'm curious to know how you're handling this part: > I've put a lot of work into maintaining the ability to see change as opportunity past the age of 30 I do agree with you mostly and most younger coworkers don't seem to want or care about hacker news. I remember when I was in college and found this website, it was the greatest discovery ever and there was so much interesting con…

> But (purely anecdotally) the viewership seems to be limited to that demographic.

From the opposite perspective of a 20 something, my more technical friends with a genuine interest (the type to build their own PC/NAS clusters, Arch Linux/Gentoo users) are the ones I know that do browse HN regularly. We're still around but I also can see most people would rather browse Reddit.

I'd like to think the conversations here have more substance than on other sites and that is still a major draw.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#283

Post by jimktrains2 »

Zanni wrote: post #228
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…

A little of both, maybe. In defense of your position, though, I agree that zip files are an odd choice. Why not bundle everything into a single document, a Word file or a PDF?

How do you bundle a spreadsheet into a PDF? Even embedded into word is a lot less usable and runs the risk of linking to the document and not embedding.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#284

Post by userbinator »

slededit wrote: post #133
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…

Teslas do this, they show battery charge in terms of miles or kilometers which is obviously not the correct unit. It's more abstract and often wrong but closer to what the person wants to know. Oddly enough the iPhone doesn't do this, it will happily tell you how many GB you have left when what the user really wants to know is "How many more songs or photos can I store?".

when what the user really wants to know is "How many more songs or photos can I store?"

That depends on how large they are, and that can vary widely, which is why abstracting away files (or more specifically, file size) is such a bad idea.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#285

Post by jimktrains2 »

nostrademons wrote: post #134
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…

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…

I mean, all of that still applies to small engines.

Even in cars, you still need to clean/change your air filter an change your oil and oil filter, even if you pay someone else to do it. There's still coolant, that needs additives (e.g. antifreeze), and windshield wiper fluid that needs to be checked and filled.

I don't think it's asking people too much to have a basic concept, maybe 1 or 2 why's deep, of how the devices they own and use function.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#286

Post by cproctor »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #119
cproctor wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... ?

No, Papert's constructionism is exactly what I'm pointing at. My phrase, "making with code," was meant to suggest that like maker education, this approach to introductory CS emphasizes personal relationships with powerful ideas, through personally-meaningful projects done in a community of practice. By leading with Terminal, I hope to emphasize students' laptops as tools for making things, not just providing access to content.

A lot of current approaches prioritize scalability over everything else, leading to canned and sandboxed curricula.

I'm curious, though, whether this is in tension with your understanding of constructionism.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#287

Post by ekianjo »

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 haven't needed to,

Erm, you need to have an email to register for any kind of service out there, so "know how to use email" is pretty much a requirement even for everyone. And this is not going away, unless you want a future where everyone has to be reached thru uncompatible walled gardens.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#288

Post by TuringTest »

Felz wrote: post #256
antaviana wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hairdresser, who knew I was into computers, once asked me “when I delete a picture on my mobile phone, where does it go?”. I first thought he was asking if there was some kind of Recycle Bin on Android, but then he said: “when we die, our body is burier or burned, that is it becomes bones or ashes, but what happens with the picture on the mobile phone, what does it become?”

The real answer is actually the same in both cases: the bits (atoms) get used for something else. Although bones can linger for quite a while, not sure if there's a file parallel for that.

Sure there's a parallel. The bits are still there, in the same place and same order, just there's no longer an index to find and use them, so they're not "alive".

And they remain in the same place until the file space they occupy is reclaimed by the OS and rewritten with new content.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#289

Post by htfu »

drdeadringer wrote: post #154
TeMPOraL wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP is trying to say that data is no longer in a form independent from the application you last used on it. 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.

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…

Help me understand. Saving yields a psd which indeed requires PS. Whether project lives "inside" app or not it's still bound to it by format, and separate from your source.

So you export the edited version, explicitly overwriting your original. Consumer apps don't care when an "edit" means fresh destructive encoding and overwrite, tools like Photoshop do, but that seems a different discussion. I suppose I'm getting hung up on not at all getting/agreeing with your examples.

For "regular" files where that project/"edit in progress" distinction doesn't apply (text/code for example), whether edit-in-place is accomplished through system file manager or back and forth across apps through piping and callbacks is just an implementation and workflow detail.

I rarely leave the terminal on my laptop, and prefer my stuff always backed up, so that probably what has me predisposed towards the "traditional" iOS cloud storage and x-callback-url approach to working with files and data across apps and gluing them together. It just mirrors nicely.

I get that others have different tastes. But what exactly are yours? Files is confusing because there's also camera roll and the difference between On my device and iCloud isn't clear or something?

Same for grandparent, just makes little sense in the context of like, iOS 8, close to none for 13.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#290

Post by anderspitman »

pnutjam wrote: post #242
unqueued wrote: post #109

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 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 goog…

Email is actually pretty crappy for files. She should setup an https drop and get a way better experience.

How would that look for assignment submissions? Something like WebDAV?
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