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Computer Files Are Going Extinct

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Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#311

Post by TeMPOraL »

pm90 wrote: post #162
uniqueid wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If the market works its magic, we probably won't go back, but will end up with services that keep getting more reliable with time and outages. If Google/AWS end up with an outage where folks lose business critical data, there will now be a market for extremely high reliability data services. As you point out yourself, not dealing with the hassle of doing backups yourself has been a huge advantage. Ease of use and con…

> If I try to view this from a non-technical persons viewpoint, this shift has been transformative, really. Most folks don't care if their data has been transcoded a million times as long as its still useful and easily accessible.

Until they try to print their photos for the family album and discover that pictures taken by their high-end camera or an expensive iPhone were degraded by successive transcodings to the point they look like garbage in print, and at that point there's no way to fix it.

> This has protected a ton of businesses and users from being at the mercy of their IT team.

And put them at the mercy of third-party vendors. It's a trade-off, but having a local IT team has its benefits.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#312

Post by paulific »

markbnj wrote: post #84
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 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…

For a look at just how hands on early motoring was, check out this article about Kipling and cars (he was an enthusiastic "early adopter"): http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_steamtactics_kipearly.htm Reading this really does sound like the early days of computing (or as I imagine from reading about it).

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#313

Post by soulofmischief »

aidenn0 wrote: post #297
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…

> 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 wo…

Honestly, that's a fireable offense. Who knows what untold damage that kind of ignorant mentality has caused to the company codebase.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#314

Post by ryukafalz »

nostrademons wrote: post #165
unqueued wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want that world back at all, and actually I never grew up with any of that. But, there is a very simple and direct relationship between fuel in, movement out. And most new cars can also estimate how far they can go on how much fuel. I think that this is actually the perfect relationship, and any more optimization at this point would be harmful.

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…

>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 that you might be able to make a career in, and anything invented over 30 is a threat to the natural order of things that must be resisted at all costs.

As a 26 year old working in the tech industry, I see lots of newer tech around that I'd say is threatening, and I have for several years now. Though I suppose I'm probably in the minority. :)

The trend of technology today seems to be towards more centralized ownership of everything we interact with, when the platform providers can get away with it.

20 years ago you would buy a book and it was yours. You obviously still can now, but if you buy an ebook from Amazon, they can take it back from you. (Or if you poorly chose to buy an ebook from Microsoft... well, they all stopped working recently.)

IBM, though never a bastion of openness, had a very detailed repair manual[0] for the original IBM PC. Sure, modern machines don't have nearly as many user-serviceable parts, but in many cases today you'll find legal and technological barriers to repair in place of even the most basic of repair manuals.

It's a trend that's hard to fight, and opting out means sacrificing a lot of convenience, but I try all the same.

[0] http://classiccomputers.info/down/IBM/IBM_PC_5150/IBM_5150_H...

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#315

Post by cproctor »

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…

That's a cool idea! What resonates most with me is starting somewhere in the middle of the ladder of abstraction, low enough that a lot of the fundamental CS concepts are visible, but high enough that beginners can make something real, now. I like that networking would be built in from the start.

I'd also want to teach beginners in a way that lets them keep building and tinkering outside the environment I provide for them. This is where I'd love to see schools providing and encouraging the use of hosting space and resources like Minio, so that students can just count on them being available.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#316

Post by flukus »

eecc wrote: post #108
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…

Frankly, we’ve been fantasizing of moving away from the file-system-as-tree abstraction since forever, wanting to embrace a metadata rich database approach. Can’t happen soon enough imho

We're definitely moving away from file-system-as-tree, but our destination seems to be more like grandma saving every file on the desktop than anything resembling rich metadata.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#317

Post by robocat »

u801e wrote: post #161
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…

> And it'd be very bad if the sparkplug was live while you tried to change it, so you also needed to know where your car's battery was and how to disconnect it. I haven't worked on cars old enough where this would be an issue, but, as far as I know, all you need to do is disconnect the ignition coil before removing the spark plug.

I can't imagine how you could get a shock off an engine that isn't running...

60s tech was rotor and coil. Modern tech needs running ECU.

Also AFAIK the spark is mostly just painful and not particularly dangerous (memory of spark plug lead with cracked insulation). I have also had a shock from a charged CRT tube (youch!), and the occasional 240V mains shock (careless me).

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#318

Post by XorNot »

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…

It's also just...literally not worth your time to do anything else. Servicing your own car rapidly gets into needing a ton of tools, takes a bunch of time, and makes you no money while taking away your free time.

If you genuinely enjoy the process, and it is cathartic and serves the function free time and leisure needs to in your life, then fantastic. But otherwise it's a false economy.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#319

Post by htfu »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #298
htfu wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Alright, you're talking philosophy and me more about practical usage.

But why do you think apps own CSV any more in Files than in Finder? That's where a lot of my confusion stems.

Your view of x-callback seems off too, it's a way for apps to expose functionality in a generic way, so the opposite from being dependent on the relationship between any specific app vendors. Since there are many apps that let you glue together stuff yourself (and Apple provides one).

> 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?"

Anything on the local file system is obviously always available. For iCloud there's that status icon I referred to in my first post, but that's no different from desktop.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#320

Post by Zee2 »

rsync wrote: post #201
_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 .z…

Is that not just a thin VM on $anyCloudProvider? You can attach however much storage to it, and just ssh to it. It's essentially just a headless storage machine living somewhere off in Califonia.
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