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Computer Files Are Going Extinct

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Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#351

Post by rbritton »

XorNot wrote: post #318
nostrademons wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe. It depends on your luck in getting a professional who is actually knowledgeable and competent, and as a secondary aspect, knowing enough to do it yourself generally enables you to accurately judge the job someone else does. For the common oil change and lube, mechanics have a tendency to skip the lube part because there is no easy way to verify it has actually been done —- you actually need to crawl under the vehicle and check the zerks for fresh grease at which point there’s no reason not to just do it yourself and save the money.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#352

Post by markbnj »

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…

>> 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 we need, or how long it takes to transfer it. But until we have much more bandwidth and storage, there will be problems.

I think you're mixing up analogies at different levels of abstraction... yes people know they need to fuel their vehicles, and they know they need to plug their computers into power or charge the battery, and connect to the Internet. People probably don't know much about fuel injection, and plenty of them probably don't know what a spark plug is. It's possible that they also don't really need to know what the underlying storage abstraction for data is.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#353

Post by mirrorlake »

panic wrote: post #329
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?”

There's a kind of pillow covered in small, reversible sequins, which makes a pretty good analog for the situation inside the computer. If you pet one of these pillows, your hand's motion flips the sequins to show one color or the other, creating patterns. Petting all over the pillow in a single direction restores the pillow to a single color, erasing the pattern. But the pattern didn't really "go anywhere" in the sen…

I like this analogy better than comparing it to a bunch of light switches. Gotta keep this in my back pocket.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#354

Post by crankylinuxuser »

dmcdm wrote: post #348
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 also teach computer science (part-time adjunct, I have a regular industry job too), so the quality of computer literacy in the incoming student body is on my mind pretty regularly. This has been especially troublesome when teaching operating systems, because the OS is the deepest layer in the pile of abstractions students have to peel-back over the course of their CS education. The pile of abstractions is only gett…

> On a more personal gripe, a minor irritation of late is the number of students who want to do their OS homework in the Windows Subsystem for Linux, instead of even setting up a basic VM.

That's easy to solve, and can give the students a history lesson.

Give them some tasks that work with ~/con :)

Or you can have them work with files all named the same but differ with case. Windows based machines get "confused".

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#355

Post by burk96 »

antaviana wrote: post #226
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…

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?”

Nothing to add, but I really love his question. It's so pure and innocent haha

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#356

Post by spc476 »

pnutjam wrote: post #250
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…

From a security perspective, zips can be dangerous. Some email systems strip them off automatically.

From a truly paranoid security perspective, all files can be dangerous. At one point, a computer could be infected by a virus from a JPEG image (thanks, Microsoft!).

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#357

Post by anderspitman »

seabird wrote: post #338
anderspitman wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What I'm doing is not "anyone with link can view", it's uploading the file in question to an SMB (or equivalent) share and sending the location of that. If the user in question doesn't have permissions for my department's share, they can't access it.

Sorry I was on mobile and wasn't very clear. I meant in terms of services like Google Drive or Dropbox, what about the sharing functionality doesn't work for you?

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#358

Post by anderspitman »

detaro wrote: post #292
anderspitman wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

NextCloud is quite a dependency for a simple file upload.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#359

Post by stormbeard »

Zee2 wrote: post #320
rsync wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I believe they're aware and were making a joke.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#360

Post by wlesieutre »

unqueued wrote: post #344
wlesieutre wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iPad OS’s new “full page screenshot” feature for webpages kicks out a long PDF (no page breaks, it’s one long scrollable page like the actual webpage was) and sends it straight to the markup view. You can draw on it just like marking up an image, but the text is still selectable and searchable. It’s a nice example of software recognizing how people want to work and building to support that. And one more for the peopl…

Years ago, I tried using ghostcript to set the attributes of a webpage PDF so that it is like 8k pixels tall and had no linebreaks, but Preview.app would just render it as a single page really zoomed out, and I would have to zoom all the way in. Does it function better now?

When I open in a Preview window it behaves well and fits to the width.

Switching Preview to full screen trips it up still. For some reason that view wants to fit the whole document, and it zooms very far out to do it.

And on the iPad side there appears to be a limit on how long a document the "Full Page" screenshot will make. An HN thread with 110 comments came through entirely, but another one with 160 comments was truncated. Didn't dig any deeper than that, but I wonder what's going on there.

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