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Computer Files Are Going Extinct

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Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#291

Post by JoshMnem »

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…

URLs are also getting to be a problem. Browsers started to trim URLs, and it's resulting in web developers who are very savvy with computers who don't really understand how URLs work or that there is always a trailing slash on the root of a website and what it means.

Google is in the process of making it worse by hiding URLs in the search results. (It's also a security risk. Google's site-name detection often makes terrible mistakes and points users to malware.)

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#292

Post by detaro »

anderspitman wrote: post #290
pnutjam wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Just a page with a form you can upload files through. You can setup something like that e.g. with Owncloud/Nextcloud. And dedicated education tools also often have it.

For normal document-sized files, email is fine though too IMHO, for university stuff I never really cared which way was used.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#293

Post by igornadj »

arch-ninja wrote: post #4

There is value in knowing there are 2 demographics: most people use apps and don't care how the app handles it's data; indeed the app usually alters the user's behaviour. Some people run the opposite: they instruct apps and the app had better use the data given in the format given or the user moves to another app (or writes their own). Someday I hope the second demographic's lifestyle is taught in highschools, becaus…

>socially healthier

That's a bold statement, can you elaborate?

People want to go for walks, meet up with friends, share memories, they don't care how it's done. Having the tools get out of the way and just do those things is a net benefit to society.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#294

Post by zabzonk »

derefr wrote: post #219
astrobe_ wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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" represen…

This is true. Way back when, I was teaching a commercial course on C to a class which included a COBOL programmer. At the end of one session, he came up to me and asked, "But what is this 'memory' stuff, and why would I ever want to use it?"

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#295

Post by aidenn0 »

nostrademons wrote: post #96
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'm curious if this is actually computer literacy plummeting or if it's a wider population of students being expected to understand computers. When I was in high school the vast majority of my peers understood how to bundle up a bunch of photos, documents, etc. into a zip file and e-mail them. This is because my peers were nerds, and we were excited about this new computer technology and eager to learn everything we…

Even fairly computer-savvy younger kids don't really use e-mail. I had 3 HS students in a D&D group a few years back (now they are finishing college), and they were fairly tech savvy (2 of them went on to major in CS). I setup a listserv for our group to coordinate schedule &c. The response was "I don't really check my e-mail, can we use FB messanger?"

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#296

Post by anderspitman »

seabird wrote: post #279
saghm wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: what do you do when the files you want to send are larger than the max attachment size for the email provider? If you send it through another medium, why not do that by default instead of email?

SMB shares or the like are pretty much universal in such a situation. I generally tend toward making something available on a file share and emailing a link, but because of permissions and access controls, email is generally easier, especially for transient files that really don't need to be permanently saved. Never once have I used Dropbox or Google Drive in such a situation, even with very small companies.

What hiccups do you run into in terms of permissions with sending an "anyone with link can view" link over email? Asking because I'm working on a competing technology and want to get the UX right.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#297

Post by aidenn0 »

unqueued wrote: post #109
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…

> 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…

> Her students objectively less able to share information with each other. I have certainly seen kids who have to go as far as taking screenshots of what an app contains and send a screenshot to someone, than actually be able to export text.

True story: while performing support for development tools, I asked a developer for a source file. They opened it in their IDE, took a screenshot, pasted the screenshot into a word document, hit page-down in the IDE, took a screenshot...

We got a several dozen page word document filled with screenshots of the text file.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#298

Post by TeMPOraL »

htfu wrote: post #289
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…

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 h…

> 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.

PSD files can be read by other applications. Not perfectly, but can. Many other proprietary formats have been reversed or opened to the point that other applications can read or edit them. And then there's a whole set of formats that aren't tied to any application per se. No app owns JPG, PNG, WAV or CSV.

> 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.

It's not an implementation detail. The "back and forth across apps through piping and callbacks" is under control of the app developers, and the extent to which it works depends on the contractual deals they sign between each other. A file system is an universal intermediary layer owned by no one, which maximizes interoperability and doesn't require the user to maintain or be aware of relationships between app vendors.

(Or, look at it from a software design point of view. If you were presented with large and potentially dynamic network of components exchanging data through APIs, you might actually come up with a file system equivalent as a way of separating concerns and maximizing composability.)

> the difference between On my device and iCloud isn't clear or something

That would be an important difference to have. Basically, "I'm on a train and Internet is spotty, or my ISP has an outage, will I be able to open and work on this file or not?" is a question for which the answer is kind of critical. The Internet is not electricity, it's not always available.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#299

Post by jpindar »

u801e wrote: post #218
unqueued wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 lett…

>go to a copy place (if you can find one)

Office supply stores will often send faxes.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#300

Post by htfu »

ACS_Solver wrote: post #245
htfu wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the early jailbreak days I used to run a daemon so I could log in and poke around, but unless you’re developing, well what was your exact use-case? I never found one, it’s not a server. 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.

Even without scripting, shell access and so on, I have regular file transfer as a major use case for SSH, through scp or rsync. Sending some files to my phone is very convenient now due to the brilliant KDE Connect project, but I'd still say scp is the next most convenient option.

True, pushing from desktop to phone is slightly more convenient than digging out phone and pulling from destop. But isn't the important part that the phone can indeed transfer stuff over SSH, not the exact manner it's done?
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