Computer Files Are Going Extinct(onezero.medium.com)
onezero.medium.com
Computer Files Are Going Extinct
https://onezero.medium.com/the-death-of-the-computer-file-doc-43cb028c0506
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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 them struggle with emails. She has had to make her tutorials on this longer and longer. And she has also been forced to start accepting assignments as a pile of attachments, because so few students understand zip files.
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 them struggle with emails. She has had to make her tutorials on this longer and longer. And she has also been forced to start accepting assignments as a pile of attachments, because so few students understand zip files.
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 could about it. There were no computer classes in high school. When we had high school science class, we were expected to draw pictures of our experiments (y'know, with a pencil, on paper) and fill out the lab report longhand. There was a large segment of the student body who had no idea what a file was, or how to turn a picture into one, let alone how to bundle it into a zip file.
It was a bit different in college, where we were expected to understand Excel and how to run a regression or graph some data. But then, that drew from a very different population than high school.
It's sorta like how SATs are dropping not because kids are getting stupider, but because a larger proportion of people who would never have been considered college-bound a generation ago are now expected to take the test.
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 could about it. There were no computer classes in high school. When we had high school science class, we were expected to draw pictures of our experiments (y'know, with a pencil, on paper) and fill out the lab report longhand. There was a large segment of the student body who had no idea what a file was, or how to turn a picture into one, let alone how to bundle it into a zip file.
It was a bit different in college, where we were expected to understand Excel and how to run a regression or graph some data. But then, that drew from a very different population than high school.
It's sorta like how SATs are dropping not because kids are getting stupider, but because a larger proportion of people who would never have been considered college-bound a generation ago are now expected to take the test.
I think vastly more people are reading and writing due to modern computer literacy, and I can't stand the way they are changing the meaning of words because they don't read books. It appears vocabulary is increasing, but people get their vocabulary from inadequate online dictionary entries and/or peers that don't read books either. So to me, because I grew up reading books, it's incredibly aggravating because it seems like a new and inferior language that grew out of ignorance.
I love the renaissance of language, the minting of new words and concepts, the remixing of our heritage words with new Unicode characters and the mashing of new syntax.
I see it as progress - which destroys meanings as much as liberating new meanings. A word becomes a poetic palimpsest of needlessly complex layers.
I am an engineer-type, I like concrete words with focused meanings, I failed English at school while excelling at the hard sciences. The loss of meaning disturbs me, but I value the gains, and I accept that new language requires freedom from old dictators.
I see it as progress - which destroys meanings as much as liberating new meanings. A word becomes a poetic palimpsest of needlessly complex layers.
I am an engineer-type, I like concrete words with focused meanings, I failed English at school while excelling at the hard sciences. The loss of meaning disturbs me, but I value the gains, and I accept that new language requires freedom from old dictators.
There's definitely a mix of good and bad as language changes.
Losing the word "meme" to the colloquial definition is a loss and a massive disappointment to me, because I think the gene analogy is insightful. When I talk to people about memes-as-in-memetics they're bound to get confused or even disbelieve me that it had any other meaning.
I've been accused of man-splaining in situations where I am legitimately being helpful, am an authority on the subject, and have good intentions, so I kinda don't like that words contribution, personally.
Literally should mean literally, and only literally, because it's useless if it doesn't.
On the other hand, there were all sorts of weird and redundant words that existed in English that probably shouldn't. This probably isn't true, but the word "praxis" seems like it exists because someone important misspoke when trying to say "practice" and then insisted it was a word in itself.
My impression is that the effect the parent talks about is real, though. There is a lot of regression happening in the language even as people get more literate, and the echo chamber of the internet reinforces trends into more lasting changes.
My biggest gripe of all with anyone effecting change on language lies with the marketing-focused actors who think they're doing their job well when they:
1) Appropriate colloquialisms and push them into the mainstream where they have more staying power than they otherwise would.
2) Refuse to expose people to words they're not familiar with because it might not appeal to them. Ever consider some people might want to learn new words? That starts with exposure. Lowest common denominator advertising is a well-funded stupefying force.
3) Create new words and change meanings to suit their narrative/sales pitch. A recent example is an article CNN ran about a new alternative to vapes and cigarettes. What they described is actually just a different kind of vaporizer. It emits nicotine vapor. They're calling it something different to avoid the stigma that shallow media coverage of vaping created, and making the word more ambiguous and less useful as a result.
Losing the word "meme" to the colloquial definition is a loss and a massive disappointment to me, because I think the gene analogy is insightful. When I talk to people about memes-as-in-memetics they're bound to get confused or even disbelieve me that it had any other meaning.
I've been accused of man-splaining in situations where I am legitimately being helpful, am an authority on the subject, and have good intentions, so I kinda don't like that words contribution, personally.
Literally should mean literally, and only literally, because it's useless if it doesn't.
On the other hand, there were all sorts of weird and redundant words that existed in English that probably shouldn't. This probably isn't true, but the word "praxis" seems like it exists because someone important misspoke when trying to say "practice" and then insisted it was a word in itself.
My impression is that the effect the parent talks about is real, though. There is a lot of regression happening in the language even as people get more literate, and the echo chamber of the internet reinforces trends into more lasting changes.
My biggest gripe of all with anyone effecting change on language lies with the marketing-focused actors who think they're doing their job well when they:
1) Appropriate colloquialisms and push them into the mainstream where they have more staying power than they otherwise would.
2) Refuse to expose people to words they're not familiar with because it might not appeal to them. Ever consider some people might want to learn new words? That starts with exposure. Lowest common denominator advertising is a well-funded stupefying force.
3) Create new words and change meanings to suit their narrative/sales pitch. A recent example is an article CNN ran about a new alternative to vapes and cigarettes. What they described is actually just a different kind of vaporizer. It emits nicotine vapor. They're calling it something different to avoid the stigma that shallow media coverage of vaping created, and making the word more ambiguous and less useful as a result.
> Losing the word "meme" to the colloquial definition is a loss and a massive disappointment to me
I love "The Selfish Gene", but it make me happy that memes and virality are modern metaphors for chunks of thought transmitted by wet symbolic processors. I believe that children now bellyfeel the meanings which is fantastic, even if they don't know the exact sense.
> Literally should mean literally, and only literally
I think I used to agree, but now I just like to amuse myself (and sometimes others) by misusing it. I do the same with many other words (sophisticated, nice, proud, etc). I like the layers of meaning, and I love multiple connections, although I still don't like most poetry.
> 3) Create new words and change meanings to suit their narrative/sales pitch
This is a true evil: the defiling of words for commercial gain riles me.
I love "The Selfish Gene", but it make me happy that memes and virality are modern metaphors for chunks of thought transmitted by wet symbolic processors. I believe that children now bellyfeel the meanings which is fantastic, even if they don't know the exact sense.
> Literally should mean literally, and only literally
I think I used to agree, but now I just like to amuse myself (and sometimes others) by misusing it. I do the same with many other words (sophisticated, nice, proud, etc). I like the layers of meaning, and I love multiple connections, although I still don't like most poetry.
> 3) Create new words and change meanings to suit their narrative/sales pitch
This is a true evil: the defiling of words for commercial gain riles me.
The selfish gene is a great book. I read it when it was about 15 and it really resonated with me.
Except the last chapter about f$%#ing memes. Hated it. It was like taking the core idea of the book and providing a cumbersome over-extended metaphor about ideas. So the colloquial meme is just as bad because it constantly reminds me of the original shit-house idea.
Climbing Mount Improbable was good, but I can't rate Dawkins' later work. The Extended Phenotype I found impenetrable, and I've tried reading it a few times. The God stuff ... omg, just please stop shouting about your Daddy issues.
Except the last chapter about f$%#ing memes. Hated it. It was like taking the core idea of the book and providing a cumbersome over-extended metaphor about ideas. So the colloquial meme is just as bad because it constantly reminds me of the original shit-house idea.
Climbing Mount Improbable was good, but I can't rate Dawkins' later work. The Extended Phenotype I found impenetrable, and I've tried reading it a few times. The God stuff ... omg, just please stop shouting about your Daddy issues.
I think that memes are actually driving a lot of human activity.
When you read about how selfish genes work, and then relate that to what is happening with certain "meme" concepts in the world, it makes sense to me.
The Extended Phenotype is really hard to grok, but I still love that book. I'm not sure I've ever been able to apply the idea.
I completely ignored any of his God bothering stuff - to me it seemed he was pushing his own religion (note: religions are a type of meme too).
When you read about how selfish genes work, and then relate that to what is happening with certain "meme" concepts in the world, it makes sense to me.
The Extended Phenotype is really hard to grok, but I still love that book. I'm not sure I've ever been able to apply the idea.
I completely ignored any of his God bothering stuff - to me it seemed he was pushing his own religion (note: religions are a type of meme too).
I blame modern business marketing practices on the erosion of meaning in language. Words are so overloaded and defined in ways to confuse consumers and skirt legalities that it makes many terms devoid of any useful meaning.
Latin was invented for a reason. Common language became vulgar.
Er, the Romans spoke Latin, as well as read it and wrote it. It was their vulgar language (from "vulgus", Latin for "common people"). The first Latin Bible was called The Vulgate because it was written in then common tongue of Latin instead of Greek or Hebrew. Latin was the language of commerce and conquest for the Roman Empire, as English was for the British Empire. Lastly, every language is invented, no?
Vulgar Latin vs Classical Latin, I suppose.
>common people
Thats the definition of vulgar that I meant, not the modern vulgar definition of vulgar :)
Just that scientists and philosophers wanted an in un-ambiguous form of communication that wasn't subjected to the whims of popular culture.
>common people
Thats the definition of vulgar that I meant, not the modern vulgar definition of vulgar :)
Just that scientists and philosophers wanted an in un-ambiguous form of communication that wasn't subjected to the whims of popular culture.
What, precisely, makes it inferior?
Speaking of precision. I think a big problem with modern use of English is that it has reduced precision.
What reduces precision?
1. Increased reliance on idioms to communicate. Idioms use analogies, and usually reduce precision. Our increasingly shared cultural context via the Internet means that more and more idioms are entering common use and (IMO) reducing the clarity of communication.
2. Reduced general vocabulary. We have more jargon than ever before, but regular writing is simpler than ever. Generally speaking, a reduced vocabulary means more concepts are "mapped" onto the same words (like "great," a highly over-mapped word.)
3. Irony and sarcasm are abused as argumentation tools. Mocking a point is commonly accepted as arguing against it. I believe this stems from acceptance of irony as a normal way of communicating (as opposed to using it mainly for humor). This also results in many words having two opposite meanings, a "true" one and an ironic one. (ofc this happened in the past too, see history of the word "egregious.")
4. Ease of publishing. People put less effort into writing today because the barriers are lower. Yes, there are still authors who put a lot of thought into their work, but the Internet is awash in poorly-chosen words and ill-thought-out language that frankly didn't exist in the past. Poor language has poor meaning, and this actually damages the trust people have with the written word.
Of course, this is just my personal thoughts... I don't have strong problems with modern language. I think your question about "inferior" is a good one because superior vs. inferior doesn't make sense without metrics for comparison. If the metric is personal appreciation, then superior vs inferior is just subjective. If the metric is density of information transfer, I suspect we've improved.
What reduces precision?
1. Increased reliance on idioms to communicate. Idioms use analogies, and usually reduce precision. Our increasingly shared cultural context via the Internet means that more and more idioms are entering common use and (IMO) reducing the clarity of communication.
2. Reduced general vocabulary. We have more jargon than ever before, but regular writing is simpler than ever. Generally speaking, a reduced vocabulary means more concepts are "mapped" onto the same words (like "great," a highly over-mapped word.)
3. Irony and sarcasm are abused as argumentation tools. Mocking a point is commonly accepted as arguing against it. I believe this stems from acceptance of irony as a normal way of communicating (as opposed to using it mainly for humor). This also results in many words having two opposite meanings, a "true" one and an ironic one. (ofc this happened in the past too, see history of the word "egregious.")
4. Ease of publishing. People put less effort into writing today because the barriers are lower. Yes, there are still authors who put a lot of thought into their work, but the Internet is awash in poorly-chosen words and ill-thought-out language that frankly didn't exist in the past. Poor language has poor meaning, and this actually damages the trust people have with the written word.
Of course, this is just my personal thoughts... I don't have strong problems with modern language. I think your question about "inferior" is a good one because superior vs. inferior doesn't make sense without metrics for comparison. If the metric is personal appreciation, then superior vs inferior is just subjective. If the metric is density of information transfer, I suspect we've improved.
Many of your complaints are based on an incorrect assumption: That what people do is writing.
Of course it is writing in the sense of using the alphabet. But has everyone started to write books and essays? No. In fact, people write less than they used to because letters have been mostly replaced by other methods of communication.
What you think is horrible written English is actually normal spoken English, just output through letters rather than sounds. And spoken language doesn't look anything like well-formed grammatical writing that doesn't give your English teacher a heart attack.
> 1/2
I'm getting strong Sapir–Whorf vibes here. Language adapts to what people say, not vice versa.
> Increased reliance on idioms to communicate. Idioms use analogies
No, they don't. Idioms have a meaning that is divorced from their constituent parts. They have a similar role to words.
> Reduced general vocabulary. We have more jargon than ever before, but regular writing is simpler than ever. Generally speaking, a reduced vocabulary means more concepts are "mapped" onto the same words (like "great," a highly over-mapped word.)
That is simply not how language works.
> 3
I, too, am concerned about the recent invention of satire and polemics. I hereby Modestly Propose to eat everyone that uses these diabolical stylistic devices and feed the leftovers to the Irish.
Of course it is writing in the sense of using the alphabet. But has everyone started to write books and essays? No. In fact, people write less than they used to because letters have been mostly replaced by other methods of communication.
What you think is horrible written English is actually normal spoken English, just output through letters rather than sounds. And spoken language doesn't look anything like well-formed grammatical writing that doesn't give your English teacher a heart attack.
> 1/2
I'm getting strong Sapir–Whorf vibes here. Language adapts to what people say, not vice versa.
> Increased reliance on idioms to communicate. Idioms use analogies
No, they don't. Idioms have a meaning that is divorced from their constituent parts. They have a similar role to words.
> Reduced general vocabulary. We have more jargon than ever before, but regular writing is simpler than ever. Generally speaking, a reduced vocabulary means more concepts are "mapped" onto the same words (like "great," a highly over-mapped word.)
That is simply not how language works.
> 3
I, too, am concerned about the recent invention of satire and polemics. I hereby Modestly Propose to eat everyone that uses these diabolical stylistic devices and feed the leftovers to the Irish.
I frequently write to my grandma, who is fairly well-educated, and her writing is technically good. It is, however, bad writing. It's a pattern I've noticed quite a lot with older people. They write perfectly-formed garbage. I think the amount of time people spend writing today is greater than at any time in history, and I think it shows.
That's my intuition. But I'd also note, your points (1, 3 for example) contradict eachother. You complain that writing is simple (2), but unclear (1), idiomatic, but jargon-laced.
My thinking is that modern writing is a sort of colourful digression from the Elements of Style. Irony, simplicity, and idiom seem like good ingredients for playful, powerful writing.
That's my intuition. But I'd also note, your points (1, 3 for example) contradict eachother. You complain that writing is simple (2), but unclear (1), idiomatic, but jargon-laced.
My thinking is that modern writing is a sort of colourful digression from the Elements of Style. Irony, simplicity, and idiom seem like good ingredients for playful, powerful writing.
Thanks, I appreciate your perspective on that.
I don't believe that my points contradict each other. So I'm going to address that part of your post, to avoid any confusion. But I think the rest of your argument is great, I just want to explain myself a bit better.
For starters, simpler writing can indeed be more unclear (because it's less precise, as discussed). So "simpler, but unclear" isn't contradictory in that sense. In this case the lack of clarity comes from a mismatch in the shared understanding between the writer and the reader. The more "simple" a sentence, the easier it is to misunderstand (to a point, and with exceptions).
And with respect to idioms, I would say that "uses idioms" does not convey the same idea as "idiomatic." By "idioms" I refer to reasoning by a shared analogy. A random example is the idiom, "Like water off a duck's back." It conveys meaning by analogy. This is usually less precise than using a direct description ("He didn't seem to care at all.") Sort of a dumb example, but I hope it makes sense.
Finally, about jargon -- by definition jargon is not part of shared vocabulary outside of a certain field of expertise. I believe a lot of our most precise words, which previously were common usage, are now becoming jargon. This is fine for experts but it leaves non-experts with a paucity of words to express their ideas in novel domains.
(Once again, this is just my personal impressions, not based on studies or anything. So, don't take it too seriously!)
I don't believe that my points contradict each other. So I'm going to address that part of your post, to avoid any confusion. But I think the rest of your argument is great, I just want to explain myself a bit better.
For starters, simpler writing can indeed be more unclear (because it's less precise, as discussed). So "simpler, but unclear" isn't contradictory in that sense. In this case the lack of clarity comes from a mismatch in the shared understanding between the writer and the reader. The more "simple" a sentence, the easier it is to misunderstand (to a point, and with exceptions).
And with respect to idioms, I would say that "uses idioms" does not convey the same idea as "idiomatic." By "idioms" I refer to reasoning by a shared analogy. A random example is the idiom, "Like water off a duck's back." It conveys meaning by analogy. This is usually less precise than using a direct description ("He didn't seem to care at all.") Sort of a dumb example, but I hope it makes sense.
Finally, about jargon -- by definition jargon is not part of shared vocabulary outside of a certain field of expertise. I believe a lot of our most precise words, which previously were common usage, are now becoming jargon. This is fine for experts but it leaves non-experts with a paucity of words to express their ideas in novel domains.
(Once again, this is just my personal impressions, not based on studies or anything. So, don't take it too seriously!)
I see where you're coming from, but I think one way in which we diverge is in our ideas about what is valuable in language. I quite like inaccurate, loose formulations because they're playful - and I think writing is a form of play, as much as it's a tool to communicate with. In its place, evocative vagueness can be better than sharp clarity.
My feeling as to what distinguish good writing from bad is more that good writers say what they want. Bad writers say stuff they didn't mean to, say stuff that other people want (cliches), or say nothing at all (obscurity). So in my eyes, there's no distinguishing textual characteristic of good writing. For instance, while I generally agree with you on jargon, David Foster Wallace uses jargon in a way I really like, and think is pretty central to what makes his writing good.
My feeling as to what distinguish good writing from bad is more that good writers say what they want. Bad writers say stuff they didn't mean to, say stuff that other people want (cliches), or say nothing at all (obscurity). So in my eyes, there's no distinguishing textual characteristic of good writing. For instance, while I generally agree with you on jargon, David Foster Wallace uses jargon in a way I really like, and think is pretty central to what makes his writing good.
Genre is important here. One's choice of language when playfully communicating with friends will be different than the language used to communicate in a legal brief or a scientific paper. We adapt our language to our audience and the occasion to communicate our ideas. Being thoughtful and considerate to our audience is important on all occasions.
Are you sure it's not just generational misunderstanding?
A lot of people describe dialogue from early movies in a similar way, just because it's difficult to understand. Especially the early noir stuff. They're speaking perfect English, but it might as well be a foreign language to most English speakers today.
A lot of people describe dialogue from early movies in a similar way, just because it's difficult to understand. Especially the early noir stuff. They're speaking perfect English, but it might as well be a foreign language to most English speakers today.
Pretty sure. I read a lot, a lot of which is old. I enjoy a wide variety of writing styles.
Yes, but reading old books doesn't usually capture the old vernacular well. Even if written (professionally) with that intent (Mice and Men, Flowers for Algernon) movies and audio were generally more accurate, (even if exaggerated) in that they're not subject to interpretation.
The writing of an un-edited grandparent might be a more accurate account of this.
Or not.
The writing of an un-edited grandparent might be a more accurate account of this.
Or not.
You might be right. I find a lot of old vernacular pretty objectionable on stylistic grounds - if I was going to describe it, I'd call it 'semi-colon heavy'. Lots of big, chunky sentences with curlicues. It's a hard style to like. Then again, Moby Dick is written in that style, and it's amazing. I think it's like beef wellington or lobster thermidor. It's amazing if it's done really well, but a mediocre one is horrible.
Claims like this have been made from older generations to the younger and about every language since recording began. They were once made in Latin about a degenerate bastardization that eventually became French. Naturally, the French have in turn become rather protective.
Speakers are entitled to "abuse" their language if they want to. It is theirs.
Speakers are entitled to "abuse" their language if they want to. It is theirs.
Of course. It's only natural for things to change, and it's only natural for people to talk about the changes.
I believe our language is almost like a living thing that we are stewards of. One of the ways we can help steward modern English is to discuss the good and the bad parts, and try to move the language toward the good, even just in our personal speech.
So don't take my comment as a criticism of the younger generation. It's a criticism of myself and my generation. I'm just talking about the language that's floating around all of us, right now, that we are all building together. And I want to make that language as "good" as it can be.
I believe our language is almost like a living thing that we are stewards of. One of the ways we can help steward modern English is to discuss the good and the bad parts, and try to move the language toward the good, even just in our personal speech.
So don't take my comment as a criticism of the younger generation. It's a criticism of myself and my generation. I'm just talking about the language that's floating around all of us, right now, that we are all building together. And I want to make that language as "good" as it can be.
Not the OP, but will take a crack: A divergence from the acceptable usage of words makes comprehension difficult, and can cause miscommunications, especially where precision is required; which happens often in a business environment. Even in a misunderstanding of proper usage can severely change the intent behind the messaging, if most communication happens over text (Slack/Email etc.).
That being said... if I'm reading this correctly, its specific to communication in non-business settings, where I don't really care much about whats "proper".
This is a losing battle, btw. Every society seems to struggle with the problem of keeping purity in language and all of them seem to have failed in that effort. Europeans failed to keep Latin relevant. Indians failed to keep Sanskrit relevant. The common language that is well understood by a majority will always win. And trying to keep it pure by force, just makes it die in relevance.
Which is why, the fact that Oxford English Dictionary keeps adding new words to the English dictionary is one of the best indicators of the resilience of the English language.
That being said... if I'm reading this correctly, its specific to communication in non-business settings, where I don't really care much about whats "proper".
This is a losing battle, btw. Every society seems to struggle with the problem of keeping purity in language and all of them seem to have failed in that effort. Europeans failed to keep Latin relevant. Indians failed to keep Sanskrit relevant. The common language that is well understood by a majority will always win. And trying to keep it pure by force, just makes it die in relevance.
Which is why, the fact that Oxford English Dictionary keeps adding new words to the English dictionary is one of the best indicators of the resilience of the English language.
I don't think impurity is what I'm complaining about. What I preferred was when most of the people defining written English by their usage were more of an elite. It's not about who those people were or how exactly they used language, just that they read a broad variety of published material and not just contemporary communications.
>Europeans failed to keep Latin relevant. Indians failed to keep Sanskrit relevant.
They kept the languages for thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians kept hieroglyphics going even longer. We are able to maintain languages without any problems, if we just choose to.
How much time have we all wasted reading threads that consisted mostly of folks arguing past one another, because each participant misunderstood what the other was trying to say?
I used Usenet during the 1990s, and communication was much easier, because grammar usage was much more uniform(1)(2)
(1)Changes in the rules of grammar aren't the primary problem, IMHO. The problem is folks who don't follow any rules at all; rather, they simply string together word sequences that sound familiar.
(2)I sympathize with young folks today who don't have a good grasp of grammar. Most of my education came from reading newspapers and magazines, which still employed expert editors when I was growing up.
I used Usenet during the 1990s, and communication was much easier, because grammar usage was much more uniform(1)(2)
(1)Changes in the rules of grammar aren't the primary problem, IMHO. The problem is folks who don't follow any rules at all; rather, they simply string together word sequences that sound familiar.
(2)I sympathize with young folks today who don't have a good grasp of grammar. Most of my education came from reading newspapers and magazines, which still employed expert editors when I was growing up.
The Usenet population was more uniform. People argue past each other because they don't agree on the premises, not because language has become less clear.
When people look up and misunderstand the meaning of a word, they base their interpretation on what they already know. So they are likely not to absorb a new concept but only get a new way of saying an old one. That means that the redefined word is likely to be an inferior tool on average.
It's also the case that just losing the utility of something hurts, regardless of the merits of the replacement so it's subjectively inferior to someone like me - getting older and crankier, you know.
It's also the case that just losing the utility of something hurts, regardless of the merits of the replacement so it's subjectively inferior to someone like me - getting older and crankier, you know.
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> I'm curious if this is actually computer literacy plummeting or if it's a wider population of students being expected to understand computers.
I don't think that's the reason. I did study with non-nerds and they had to deal with computers because they wanted music, or to read an article in the internet or print something with Word/Windows and install the printer drivers.
What changed now is that things are more "streamlined" and all the complexity is abstracted. Software companies have figured out that people struggled with files, so they removed them. This can make the average person less computer-literate since he doesn't have to learn much to be able to handle the computer.
I don't think that's the reason. I did study with non-nerds and they had to deal with computers because they wanted music, or to read an article in the internet or print something with Word/Windows and install the printer drivers.
What changed now is that things are more "streamlined" and all the complexity is abstracted. Software companies have figured out that people struggled with files, so they removed them. This can make the average person less computer-literate since he doesn't have to learn much to be able to handle the computer.
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?"
I somewhat understand this gripe against email but the issue I have with everyone who hates email is that you then diverge into about a dozen other communication mediums no one can settle on, making the overhead of checking all points of contact and remembering where relevant information as a chore.
Because of that, I prefer email. I'm more than happy to pickup new technology and use it but I have no desire to do so if it's going to take more time to do something I already have little desire to do.
My current location literally has 8 communication mediums and its miserable to deal with. Then I send emails and people complain... it's like people enjoy wasting their time.
Because of that, I prefer email. I'm more than happy to pickup new technology and use it but I have no desire to do so if it's going to take more time to do something I already have little desire to do.
My current location literally has 8 communication mediums and its miserable to deal with. Then I send emails and people complain... it's like people enjoy wasting their time.
I think part of it is that mobile OSes have trained people to treat their computers like appliances. The way you do something is by getting an app that is tailor made to do that thing. There is no such thing as data, that can then be acted upon by different apps and services (I.e. files). What you have, instead, is Instagram, for taking pictures and sharing them with filters, and Pinterest for sharing random places on the internet, Notes for keeping documents, etc.
I think 1 striking manifestation of the loss of the concept of files is that if someone wants to share a Note from their iOS device, the most common way for them to do it is for them to likely take a screenshot of it and share that image.
Since conceptually a note is not a thing of its own, but rather a part of the Notes app, people rightly believe you cannot share it on its own, and so need to go with the all catching screenshot fallback.
I think 1 striking manifestation of the loss of the concept of files is that if someone wants to share a Note from their iOS device, the most common way for them to do it is for them to likely take a screenshot of it and share that image.
Since conceptually a note is not a thing of its own, but rather a part of the Notes app, people rightly believe you cannot share it on its own, and so need to go with the all catching screenshot fallback.
I am in my early twenties and I would expect none of my peers during high school would have difficulty zipping up some files.
Perhaps I am just in that brief period of time where more people than just the nerds knew the basics of the filesystem.
Perhaps I am just in that brief period of time where more people than just the nerds knew the basics of the filesystem.
few years older, same. But yes, I think that time were nearly everyone was a PC user was only a few years. (and I suspect it depends on country when exactly that was)
There are several layers in this problem. To be able to zip files like a pro is great, but maybe those people shouldn't be doing it when they can use bzip2, gzip or xz instead that perform better.
99% of the time who cares about the performance or the program. If I need to create a compressed archive of a bunch of files for some one off purpose I’ll use whatever is most obvious and easiest on whatever system I’m using.
Eh as a college professor something has changed, not just the population. My experiences parallel the GP. I noticed it first with filename conventions; it rapidly changed from there.
This is in the same population of students. I noticed basically that IO tasks were eating up an increasingly big fraction of effort and time early on in courses, reflecting problems that didn't exist previously.
This seems to be for the reasons stated, that file IO stuff is being abstracted away. What used to be typical necessary computer fluency is now "low level" for many.
This is in the same population of students. I noticed basically that IO tasks were eating up an increasingly big fraction of effort and time early on in courses, reflecting problems that didn't exist previously.
This seems to be for the reasons stated, that file IO stuff is being abstracted away. What used to be typical necessary computer fluency is now "low level" for many.
> it's a wider population of students being expected to understand computers
There it is.
It isn't just education, obviously. All software has to be subjugated to an ease-of-use that buries details.
There it is.
It isn't just education, obviously. All software has to be subjugated to an ease-of-use that buries details.
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 same reason that I don't own a printer.
I haven't needed to "compress" anything since Google Drive and Dropbox meant that all I needed to do to get someone a file is type their email into a box.
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 google drive or dropbox or whatever microsoft or apple are doing instead of insisting on whatever's most comfortable for you.
In short, I don't think this is an example of students falling behind, but teachers getting left behind.
It's a little rudde to say it that way, but I really don't know how else to say it.
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 same reason that I don't own a printer.
I haven't needed to "compress" anything since Google Drive and Dropbox meant that all I needed to do to get someone a file is type their email into a box.
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 google drive or dropbox or whatever microsoft or apple are doing instead of insisting on whatever's most comfortable for you.
In short, I don't think this is an example of students falling behind, but teachers getting left behind.
It's a little rudde to say it that way, but I really don't know how else to say it.
> 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 google drive or dropbox or whatever microsoft or apple are doing instead of insisting on whatever's most comfortable for you.
Isn't the whole point of school to learn new skills? If students have illegible handwriting and poor grammar, should the teacher really be meeting the students half way?
I actually told her that she should continue doing what she was doing, because it was a real boon to her students. They might not ever learn this stuff.
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.
I could understand if what the students were doing was in some way comparable in flexibility, but it isn't. They basically only know how to click on the share button in an app, and text links for someone else to install the app. Or send them screenshots of them using an app scrolled to the relevant info.
But the biggest benefit is that having assignments in discrete organized bundles makes the most sense for everyone.
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 google drive or dropbox or whatever microsoft or apple are doing instead of insisting on whatever's most comfortable for you.
Isn't the whole point of school to learn new skills? If students have illegible handwriting and poor grammar, should the teacher really be meeting the students half way?
I actually told her that she should continue doing what she was doing, because it was a real boon to her students. They might not ever learn this stuff.
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.
I could understand if what the students were doing was in some way comparable in flexibility, but it isn't. They basically only know how to click on the share button in an app, and text links for someone else to install the app. Or send them screenshots of them using an app scrolled to the relevant info.
But the biggest benefit is that having assignments in discrete organized bundles makes the most sense for everyone.
The problem I see is that tech is doing the market-savvy thing of moving from features to solutions. We had enabling technologies that people were expected to learn to use in combination, like tools in a toolbox. Files were generic containers that could hold different things and clustered into projects in "folders" and manipulated by specialty tools.
But the new way is exemplified by iOS. You buy pre-packaged "solutions" that keep your data...somewhere...safe, presumably, and away from you so you don't screw it up. If it's something you should be doing, there will be "an app for that" that you can buy, so don't worry your pretty head. If we gave you "tools", you'd just hurt yourself. Why not stop worrying and buy something nice. We have songs, we have shows...you can send a funny animoji to all of your friends. Good times. You look awesome. You're welcome.
And for market success, they seem to be right, although they're creating a situation where, if you don't have to learn to use a toolbox of specialized tools in customized combinations, you'll never learn how and really WILL need to rely entirely on pre-built "complete solutions".
But the new way is exemplified by iOS. You buy pre-packaged "solutions" that keep your data...somewhere...safe, presumably, and away from you so you don't screw it up. If it's something you should be doing, there will be "an app for that" that you can buy, so don't worry your pretty head. If we gave you "tools", you'd just hurt yourself. Why not stop worrying and buy something nice. We have songs, we have shows...you can send a funny animoji to all of your friends. Good times. You look awesome. You're welcome.
And for market success, they seem to be right, although they're creating a situation where, if you don't have to learn to use a toolbox of specialized tools in customized combinations, you'll never learn how and really WILL need to rely entirely on pre-built "complete solutions".
> 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.
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.
Honestly, that's a fireable offense. Who knows what untold damage that kind of ignorant mentality has caused to the company codebase.
I think its important to stress on this part:
> and meet them half way?
In other words, OP is not suggesting that you force students to use another method, but work with them to understand what makes sense to them. In your specific anecdote, if the teacher showed the students how to share hyperlinks, or how to get text dumps and share them instead of screenshots, maybe they would respect her for that.
> and meet them half way?
In other words, OP is not suggesting that you force students to use another method, but work with them to understand what makes sense to them. In your specific anecdote, if the teacher showed the students how to share hyperlinks, or how to get text dumps and share them instead of screenshots, maybe they would respect her for that.
> 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.
I used to export the text of my travel itineraries, and go through several steps to get it on my phone. Now I just take a photo of the text on my screen. It's just one step :-)
I used to export the text of my travel itineraries, and go through several steps to get it on my phone. Now I just take a photo of the text on my screen. It's just one step :-)
Yeah but what if you are grading papers, do you want to mark up bitmaps? People need to learn that there is more than one way to do something.
> if you are grading papers do you want to mark up bitmaps?
Why not? Get a tablet with a stylus and draw your commentary directly on the image.
That is the way teachers have always marked up student work, just now without a paper copy or a physical red pen.
Trying to mark up documents using MS Word or Google Docs or whatever is a horrible experience in comparison.
Why not? Get a tablet with a stylus and draw your commentary directly on the image.
That is the way teachers have always marked up student work, just now without a paper copy or a physical red pen.
Trying to mark up documents using MS Word or Google Docs or whatever is a horrible experience in comparison.
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 people with Pencils - you can drag from the bottom corner upward to take a screenshot in any app with the same markup tools. Works on either side, so the lefties aren’t left out here.
It’s a nice example of software recognizing how people want to work and building to support that.
And one more for the people with Pencils - you can drag from the bottom corner upward to take a screenshot in any app with the same markup tools. Works on either side, so the lefties aren’t left out here.
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.
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.
I don't see why you could not do exactly the same thing with MS Word, or even a properly exported PDF.
And, the added benefit is that it is searchable and can be re-rendered in different formats.
But even if sending obtuse oversized bitmaps to be handled on a tablet did happen to be the best solution, that is really not the point. Her class is not about optimizing itself. Her class is about educating students. Not just about science, but about what goes into collecting data, collaborating, and submitting it in an accessible format.
I think that a high school graduate should be able to understand how to take some arbitrary files, bundle them together in a zip file, and email them to someone. I really don't think this is too much to ask of some aspiring pre-STEM students. And if she bent over backwards to use snapchat and accept assignments in the form of a bunch of screenshots, I think she would be doing them a disservice.
And, the added benefit is that it is searchable and can be re-rendered in different formats.
But even if sending obtuse oversized bitmaps to be handled on a tablet did happen to be the best solution, that is really not the point. Her class is not about optimizing itself. Her class is about educating students. Not just about science, but about what goes into collecting data, collaborating, and submitting it in an accessible format.
I think that a high school graduate should be able to understand how to take some arbitrary files, bundle them together in a zip file, and email them to someone. I really don't think this is too much to ask of some aspiring pre-STEM students. And if she bent over backwards to use snapchat and accept assignments in the form of a bunch of screenshots, I think she would be doing them a disservice.
Making hand annotation with a digital pencil more seamlessly integrated with typed and otherwise native digital docs actually seems like a great direction to be moving in. Things are moving there to a degree but it’s still hard to shift back and forth between modes.
This would be fantastically more work than typing. Text is an effective and effecient medium.
If the student can't figure out a slightly different way to accomplish a goal then they are incompetent with computers and only proficient insofar as memorizing one workflow.
If the student can't figure out a slightly different way to accomplish a goal then they are incompetent with computers and only proficient insofar as memorizing one workflow.
What? Have you ever graded written papers? Have you ever seen a paper graded by a good teacher?
We’re not talking about pages of written commentary here. The most “effective and efficient” approach involves circling words or phrases, underlining sentences, writing arrows from one part to another, scribbling some wavy lines in the margin, writing a few words here or there, ...
There is a very limited amount of time available to work through each student’s work. The point is not to entirely rewrite the paper for the student, or explain every problem with the paper in detail. The point is to highlight what the student did well, highlight the parts that make no sense, and give the student a few pieces of quick feedback so they can revise their paper or do a better job next time.
A colored pen on a black-on-white printed copy is much more “effective and efficient” (and “fantastically less work”) than electronic tools prominently involving a keyboard.
We’re not talking about pages of written commentary here. The most “effective and efficient” approach involves circling words or phrases, underlining sentences, writing arrows from one part to another, scribbling some wavy lines in the margin, writing a few words here or there, ...
There is a very limited amount of time available to work through each student’s work. The point is not to entirely rewrite the paper for the student, or explain every problem with the paper in detail. The point is to highlight what the student did well, highlight the parts that make no sense, and give the student a few pieces of quick feedback so they can revise their paper or do a better job next time.
A colored pen on a black-on-white printed copy is much more “effective and efficient” (and “fantastically less work”) than electronic tools prominently involving a keyboard.
"Effective and efficient"? Or just lazy but fast?
Achieving the goal with less effort so that you can spend more effort on other aspects of the job or on other endeavors is effecient.
Wanting each of your teachers to learn how to use a constantly changing array of 20 different social image sharing services in order to receive work in a format that is more work to process is lazy.
Wanting each of your teachers to learn how to use a constantly changing array of 20 different social image sharing services in order to receive work in a format that is more work to process is lazy.
the former. Even some professional editors prefer pen/stylus for some review stages.
You can do this with a pdf with annotations and a touch screen with a pen
Email is actually pretty crappy for files. She should setup an https drop and get a way better experience.
I use pcloud.com for a similar problem.
They have custom HTTP JSON RPC protocol, it uses POST and GET verbs. Their web site calls that one. They also have more performant TCP binary endpoints for use by native clients, with the same payload packed into custom binary format.
For users, it's a web app with download and upload links.
They have custom HTTP JSON RPC protocol, it uses POST and GET verbs. Their web site calls that one. They also have more performant TCP binary endpoints for use by native clients, with the same payload packed into custom binary format.
For users, it's a web app with download and upload links.
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.
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.
Sure, if you just install it for that. But it's a reasonably common service (e.g. around here, many universities have it for their employees and students) with that feature.
I've worked for various companies in the engineering and manufacturing industries, and zipping and sending files over email is as far from dead as you can imagine, and has a very bright future ahead of it. Frankly, today's high school students have wildly deficient computer skills. We're talking about teenagers whose usage of a computer usually consists of browsing Facebook and listening to music on Spotify, not actually doing productive work; informing workflows based on input from such users is like asking a painter how a fireman's tools should work.
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?
Because it is significantly more cumbersome. With email you get the file literally attached to the message talking about it, and you store that away and can always find the file and the context for it in the same place.
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.
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?
From a legal standpoint, there is way more to cover with those services. All sorts of hoops (NDA, compliance, etc.) would have to be jumped through. At my current employer, those services not being on our property under our complete control makes our lawyers nervous; counterfeits of our product are an existential threat to us, and keeping tight control over the software and electrical implementation details is paramount. Any idea involving a third-party service hosting sensitive engineering data goes straight into the shitcan.
If you managed to address the legal and security concerns, you'd have to fight against decades of momentum and user entrenchment. Drive and Dropbox are rare; any customers or vendors that you're working with will probably have the headache of figuring out how to interface with these services instead of just applying their ~25 years of experience administering massively powerful Windows services. Power users have assimilated those 25 years of workflow into their very being, and all the added complexity of SMB/Windows shares and other related services are extremely powerful tools that help them ensure that the right people have access to what they need and no access to what they don't. In-house tools are written to integrate with the existing infrastructure, and nobody has enough knowledge or balls to attempt replacing them. Internal data sharing services are generally based on software which has been continuously improving for decades, and has best-in-class feature sets and support.
The points above are themes that I've encountered pretty much universally in every engineering firm that I've worked for or interfaced with.
If you managed to address the legal and security concerns, you'd have to fight against decades of momentum and user entrenchment. Drive and Dropbox are rare; any customers or vendors that you're working with will probably have the headache of figuring out how to interface with these services instead of just applying their ~25 years of experience administering massively powerful Windows services. Power users have assimilated those 25 years of workflow into their very being, and all the added complexity of SMB/Windows shares and other related services are extremely powerful tools that help them ensure that the right people have access to what they need and no access to what they don't. In-house tools are written to integrate with the existing infrastructure, and nobody has enough knowledge or balls to attempt replacing them. Internal data sharing services are generally based on software which has been continuously improving for decades, and has best-in-class feature sets and support.
The points above are themes that I've encountered pretty much universally in every engineering firm that I've worked for or interfaced with.
Makes sense, thanks for the detailed response!
Not using a particular workflow ≠ unable to understand a particular workflow.
The "zip up your files and email me" is only hard when the concepts of files and email are alien, because everything lives in its own silos. Which is the point.
The "zip up your files and email me" is only hard when the concepts of files and email are alien, because everything lives in its own silos. Which is the point.
Anyone suggesting using proprietary cloud products for something that's mandatory for participating in society hasn't thought things through:
1. The privacy policy of Google & Dropbox is a catastrophe.
2. They can ban you at any time for all sorts of silly reasons and then you can't even turn your homework in any more.
1. The privacy policy of Google & Dropbox is a catastrophe.
2. They can ban you at any time for all sorts of silly reasons and then you can't even turn your homework in any more.
My kids have been to 4 schools so far (we move around a fair bit). In each one they are expected to have a Google account which is linked to their school in some sort of G Suite arrangement.
I don't know if it's a coincidence or a department policy, but Google gets them early and if you think that's bad, teachers aren't to blame - maybe schools are or possibly the education dept.
Honestly I was a little surprised that there was no discussion about it. I talk to my kids about the way the web and privacy is going and I don't expect schools to do everything but they should be a little more aware of the issues imo.
I don't know if it's a coincidence or a department policy, but Google gets them early and if you think that's bad, teachers aren't to blame - maybe schools are or possibly the education dept.
Honestly I was a little surprised that there was no discussion about it. I talk to my kids about the way the web and privacy is going and I don't expect schools to do everything but they should be a little more aware of the issues imo.
My kids user office 365, but the iPad requirement is my but beef.
> the iPad requirement is my but beef.
I feel your pain. At an obligatory 500 bucks a pop I would have been much happier to buy them laptops.
I feel your pain. At an obligatory 500 bucks a pop I would have been much happier to buy them laptops.
I rent them, but unless you have other Apple products you can only setup adult accounts, so my kindergartner has to be "13".
We somehow dodged the iPads for kindergarteners bullet but that would have made my blood boil. I guess the FingerPaint app is less messy than actual fingers and actual paint.
In my less charitable moments I think teachers are getting lazier, but when I go to those parent conferences and see the teaching staff looking like rabbits in the spotlight as parents of 3rd graders grill them on the latest academic theories I realise that really they're caught in the middle of a whole set of weird expectations.
In my less charitable moments I think teachers are getting lazier, but when I go to those parent conferences and see the teaching staff looking like rabbits in the spotlight as parents of 3rd graders grill them on the latest academic theories I realise that really they're caught in the middle of a whole set of weird expectations.
1. Nobody besides idealogoues actually cares about that. See their huge install base as a demonstration of this fact.
2. The professor tells you to create a new account and submit it via that. Sure it probably violates the ToS but nobody cares.
2. The professor tells you to create a new account and submit it via that. Sure it probably violates the ToS but nobody cares.
> Perhaps instead of email, you teacher friend could find out how her students send things to each other and meet them half way?
They probably just don't. People are sharing images, text, and links. Mostly on non-accessible, ephemeral, and unreliable platforms. They are not used to share generic data and not used to reliable platforms at all (as even email is unreliable nowadays)... except at work, and that's where people use email.
They probably just don't. People are sharing images, text, and links. Mostly on non-accessible, ephemeral, and unreliable platforms. They are not used to share generic data and not used to reliable platforms at all (as even email is unreliable nowadays)... except at work, and that's where people use email.
The problem is that all the new ways of doing things involve being a slave of some ecosystem that doesn't play well with other ecosystems. If Instagram, Snapchat, Dropbox, Slack, and Google Drive all interoperated properly, this wouldn't be a big deal.
And if you wanted them to interoperate properly... you'd essentially be reinventing a file system.
The problem is all these services try to control as much as they can. So interoperability becomes whatever contracts on the use of APIs they can sign with each other. You as a user have nothing to say.
The problem is all these services try to control as much as they can. So interoperability becomes whatever contracts on the use of APIs they can sign with each other. You as a user have nothing to say.
I'm guessing there's a decent chance that the students are already using an email provider that ties them to an ecosystem (which may already have a service geared towards sharing files!)
> Perhaps instead of email, you teacher friend could find out how her students send things to each other and meet them half way?
"Please turn in your assignments via Snapchat by 7AM tomorrow"
"Please turn in your assignments via Snapchat by 7AM tomorrow"
A friend recommended an accountant to me here in Japan. He wanted to do all correspondence via the Line App including tax forms etc.
Another contract made a Facebook messenger group and shared all versions of files by pasting them in to the messenger chat.
Wasn't particular happy about those but fortunately both were fairly short term things and to be honest I couldn't really think of anything better that I believe I could convince them to do. The Line accountant was definitely not going to use anything other than Line.
The FB Messenger file sharing, well, what. Email? Dropbox cost $$$ per user. Github requires more training. I suppose maybe Slack would have been better than FB messenger but still requires getting the other party to install apps and get used to a different workflow, So yea, I just put up their chosen method of communication for the duration.
Another contract made a Facebook messenger group and shared all versions of files by pasting them in to the messenger chat.
Wasn't particular happy about those but fortunately both were fairly short term things and to be honest I couldn't really think of anything better that I believe I could convince them to do. The Line accountant was definitely not going to use anything other than Line.
The FB Messenger file sharing, well, what. Email? Dropbox cost $$$ per user. Github requires more training. I suppose maybe Slack would have been better than FB messenger but still requires getting the other party to install apps and get used to a different workflow, So yea, I just put up their chosen method of communication for the duration.
Line accountant!! Same in Korea but with KakaoTalk. People use it for everything. People who are worried about the dominance of WhatsApp or Messenger should see what 90 percent+ dominance by one platform looks like. I did all the organising for a rental contract here through KakaoTalk. It also has a bank and in-app payments system. You can use it to buy someone a coffee at starbucks.They just recieve a barcode to be scanned at the counter. You can buy gifts for people and have them shipped without knowing the address, because the recipient just inputs it after recieving the notification.
And despite this vast monopolistic ecosystem DaumKakao put ads in the app this year. Greedy.
And despite this vast monopolistic ecosystem DaumKakao put ads in the app this year. Greedy.
> You can buy gifts for people and have them shipped without knowing the address, because the recipient just inputs it after recieving the notification.
Dang, I wish I could do that.
Dang, I wish I could do that.
I don't need to compress anything either, but zips/rars are good for getting around other types of limitations. For example, splitting a collection of files into chunks to send one by one or to increase copy speed. As an example, my archive of downloaded comics takes well over an hour to copy onto a drive as file folders, but as a single archive file it takes only a few minutes and I can unzip it on whatever device I'm putting it on.
> 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.
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.
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.
Depends on what you're planning to do with the spreadsheet. If it's display only, it's easy to bundle into a PDF or Word doc. If you need to interact with it, sure, standalone is better. But this the first case is something I deal with all the time. If I'm looking at financial statements for a board meeting, I really don't need a live spreadsheet, and it's massively more convenient to have it bundled in with the agenda, minutes, reports, etc.
On the flip side, I do public transit advocacy, and having spreadsheets of the monthly data reported to the board, it would be so much better than ocr/text extraction and manual editing.
> 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 buyer you were probably kind of an enthusiast already) or you hired one. Today outside of enthusiast circles they are just an appliance: you get in, turn it on, and go do whatever it is you need to do.
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 buyer you were probably kind of an enthusiast already) or you hired one. Today outside of enthusiast circles they are just an appliance: you get in, turn it on, and go do whatever it is you need to do.
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 we need, or how long it takes to transfer it. But until we have much more bandwidth and storage, there will be problems.
Imagine a world where we tried optimizing our cars interfaces so much that we removed gas gauges, and just had reminders that told people that they had to go to a gas station. And as a result people would frequently run out of gas, or be shocked by how much gas costs. But gas gauges were considered a power-user feature, and everyone was convinced that users would just never be able to understand them.
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.
Imagine a world where we tried optimizing our cars interfaces so much that we removed gas gauges, and just had reminders that told people that they had to go to a gas station. And as a result people would frequently run out of gas, or be shocked by how much gas costs. But gas gauges were considered a power-user feature, and everyone was convinced that users would just never be able to understand them.
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 live while you tried to change it, so you also needed to know where your car's battery was and how to disconnect it.
Nowadays, carburetors are gone, replaced by fuel injection, which controls the fuel mix so tightly that sparkplugs rarely get dirty. And the whole assemblage is so tightly tuned that if you need service, you take it to a dealer and let a professional deal with it.
The world you're asking us to imagine already exists, you've just forgotten enough of the old world that you only remember the gas gauges.
Nowadays, carburetors are gone, replaced by fuel injection, which controls the fuel mix so tightly that sparkplugs rarely get dirty. And the whole assemblage is so tightly tuned that if you need service, you take it to a dealer and let a professional deal with it.
The world you're asking us to imagine already exists, you've just forgotten enough of the old world that you only remember the gas gauges.
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.
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.
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.
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 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. I've put a lot of work into maintaining the ability to see change as opportunity past the age of 30. I suspect that most of this site is just hitting that demographic where new things become offenses against the natural order of things, though, and that's why we see such resistance to things like self-driving cars and cryptocurrency.
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. I've put a lot of work into maintaining the ability to see change as opportunity past the age of 30. I suspect that most of this site is just hitting that demographic where new things become offenses against the natural order of things, though, and that's why we see such resistance to things like self-driving cars and cryptocurrency.
> 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.
I really think that you're being overly optimistic about this. Kind of like people were about the cloud 10 years ago. There is going to be all sorts of new bullshit that you can't even imagine. I bet there will be surge blackout periods, where only rich people can travel. This will only trend worse over time, to the point where poor people are less mobile than they were when they could own cars. And you might have to subscribe to different car fleets, and will get screwed a bunch of different ways that way too.
> 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. I've put a lot of work into maintaining the ability to see change as opportunity past the age of 30. I suspect that most of this site is just hitting that demographic where new things become offenses against the natural order of things, though, and that's why we see such resistance to things like self-driving cars and cryptocurrency.
I try not to be a luddite. But I think you are discounting how people with more wisdom can see how things have degraded over time. Obviously those in power have a vested interest in you believing that things are only getting better. Phone manufacturers don't want to remind you of the days of headphone jacks and user swappable batteries.
I really think that you're being overly optimistic about this. Kind of like people were about the cloud 10 years ago. There is going to be all sorts of new bullshit that you can't even imagine. I bet there will be surge blackout periods, where only rich people can travel. This will only trend worse over time, to the point where poor people are less mobile than they were when they could own cars. And you might have to subscribe to different car fleets, and will get screwed a bunch of different ways that way too.
> 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. I've put a lot of work into maintaining the ability to see change as opportunity past the age of 30. I suspect that most of this site is just hitting that demographic where new things become offenses against the natural order of things, though, and that's why we see such resistance to things like self-driving cars and cryptocurrency.
I try not to be a luddite. But I think you are discounting how people with more wisdom can see how things have degraded over time. Obviously those in power have a vested interest in you believing that things are only getting better. Phone manufacturers don't want to remind you of the days of headphone jacks and user swappable batteries.
>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...
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...
I like to build my own PC and also help friends. Most PC gamers also build their own PC. Most parts come with instructions and almost all pieces fit nicely, its kinda like building Lego. I switched to Linux a couple of years back. But last month I helped a friend build a PC and when installing Windows 10 it just said "missing drivers" with no clue. Then my friend went to a computer shop and they installed Windows without any issue.
One would think the resistance to crypto has more to do with it's basic value proposition. Watching 4 years of every crypto coin functioning as a honeypot trap for the naive, then exploding, leaves a mark. Bitconnect making billions from scamming people rings truer in my mind than some vague ageism.
Also a good chunk of the crypto coins are based on a positive feedback loop between greed and electricity waste, which is kind of a scheme you'd expect from a supervillain.
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 content. But (purely anecdotally) the viewership seems to be limited to that demographic.
> 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 content. But (purely anecdotally) the viewership seems to be limited to that demographic.
> 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.
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.
> 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
There're a few big skills, both of which are really about mindset and worldview than anything else:
One is to recognize and embrace impermanence, and to do so as a way of inoculating yourself against sunk-cost fallacies. So for example, I put in a lot of work to learn Python, Django, and web development when I got out of college, and then to learn C++, scalability, and optimization while I was at Google. When I left Google, I had the idea to do an API-compatible reimplementation of Django where all the framework bits are written in tightly-optimized C++. But as I started evaluating that idea, I looked around and realized a.) Django was no longer the preferred way to build webapps b.) The web, arguably, was no longer the preferred technology to build apps at all and c.) users of Django either didn't care about performance or they'd gotten to be big sites that can afford massive AWS bills. Sucks to be me. Better to recognize that early before sinking a lot of work into that project. I've still got those skills (though both Django and C++ are moving targets), and they came in handy when testing and rejecting the following couple startup ideas.
A second skill is to view learning as rewarding for its own sake, and something that you do lifelong rather than just when you're young so you can get a job. I'd internalized this pretty well as a kid.
A third is to pay attention to people around you, and when they're doing something seemingly stupid, ask yourself why they're doing it rather than immediately judging. And a fourth is to pay careful attention to things that disconfirm your previous hypotheses.
As an example of both of these - when I first heard about Bitcoin in 2013, I read the whitepaper, mentally filed it under "Distributed database; might spawn 2-3 interesting companies but won't go anywhere else", and then forgot about it for a few years. When the bubble hit in 2017, I was like "Pyramid scheme. Actually double pyramid scheme, which is kinda clever. Wait for it to burst."
But then from that assessment comes a hypothesis - when I looked in detail at the ICOs being funded, I should expect to see 100% scams. I only saw roughly 35% scams, plus another 50% that were well-meaning teams who were in well over their head. With over 6000 ICOs being done, that's hundreds of projects that might actually have a chance of being something real. So while the vast majority of crypto projects are scams, there's still something very interesting going on, and perhaps its younger boosters may be onto something.
> > I've put a lot of work into maintaining the ability to see change as opportunity past the age of 30
There're a few big skills, both of which are really about mindset and worldview than anything else:
One is to recognize and embrace impermanence, and to do so as a way of inoculating yourself against sunk-cost fallacies. So for example, I put in a lot of work to learn Python, Django, and web development when I got out of college, and then to learn C++, scalability, and optimization while I was at Google. When I left Google, I had the idea to do an API-compatible reimplementation of Django where all the framework bits are written in tightly-optimized C++. But as I started evaluating that idea, I looked around and realized a.) Django was no longer the preferred way to build webapps b.) The web, arguably, was no longer the preferred technology to build apps at all and c.) users of Django either didn't care about performance or they'd gotten to be big sites that can afford massive AWS bills. Sucks to be me. Better to recognize that early before sinking a lot of work into that project. I've still got those skills (though both Django and C++ are moving targets), and they came in handy when testing and rejecting the following couple startup ideas.
A second skill is to view learning as rewarding for its own sake, and something that you do lifelong rather than just when you're young so you can get a job. I'd internalized this pretty well as a kid.
A third is to pay attention to people around you, and when they're doing something seemingly stupid, ask yourself why they're doing it rather than immediately judging. And a fourth is to pay careful attention to things that disconfirm your previous hypotheses.
As an example of both of these - when I first heard about Bitcoin in 2013, I read the whitepaper, mentally filed it under "Distributed database; might spawn 2-3 interesting companies but won't go anywhere else", and then forgot about it for a few years. When the bubble hit in 2017, I was like "Pyramid scheme. Actually double pyramid scheme, which is kinda clever. Wait for it to burst."
But then from that assessment comes a hypothesis - when I looked in detail at the ICOs being funded, I should expect to see 100% scams. I only saw roughly 35% scams, plus another 50% that were well-meaning teams who were in well over their head. With over 6000 ICOs being done, that's hundreds of projects that might actually have a chance of being something real. So while the vast majority of crypto projects are scams, there's still something very interesting going on, and perhaps its younger boosters may be onto something.
> 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 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).
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).
Yeah, that'll work, it's just that the ignition coil is usually harder to reach than the battery. (I think actually the preferred way to do it, safety-wise, is to disconnect the ignition coil.)
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.
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 service indicator comes on and I take it to the dealer, where they relieve me of a large amount of money and give me a car back that drives okay and has no maintenance lights on. I did have to change a tire once and jumpstart a car once, but that's about the extent of car maintenance I've needed.
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 service indicator comes on and I take it to the dealer, where they relieve me of a large amount of money and give me a car back that drives okay and has no maintenance lights on. I did have to change a tire once and jumpstart a car once, but that's about the extent of car maintenance I've needed.
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.
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.
It can be difficult bordering on impossible to find a trustworthy independent mechanic. Even an honest one is not necessarily going to be able to be as thorough and have the attention to detail that the owner might. And even though they are faster, they also have to spend less time than might be optimal.
I have a 30 year old car and there are one or two specialists in my city that people recommend. One of them told me I needed an engine rebuild due to an oil leak, when it was actually a specific seal that was relatively minor to replace, and the other correctly diagnosed the problem, and apparently fixed it for a reasonable price, but insisted the oil I was using was too thin, and when I deferred to their expertise, they put an even thinner oil in (I found out later) and lied about it...maybe because they thought I would come back with more leaks...so the only local mechanic I currently trust is a dealer that will work on classic cars and they charge a ridiculous amount.
So, comparing cost and expertise and tools is kind of missing the point. I would always take a new or newish car to a dealer. I have no idea how to find a decent independent mechanic, and I've tried quite a few over the years. If it takes me several times as long to do something, it doesn't really matter if that's my only practical way to get it done right.
I have a 30 year old car and there are one or two specialists in my city that people recommend. One of them told me I needed an engine rebuild due to an oil leak, when it was actually a specific seal that was relatively minor to replace, and the other correctly diagnosed the problem, and apparently fixed it for a reasonable price, but insisted the oil I was using was too thin, and when I deferred to their expertise, they put an even thinner oil in (I found out later) and lied about it...maybe because they thought I would come back with more leaks...so the only local mechanic I currently trust is a dealer that will work on classic cars and they charge a ridiculous amount.
So, comparing cost and expertise and tools is kind of missing the point. I would always take a new or newish car to a dealer. I have no idea how to find a decent independent mechanic, and I've tried quite a few over the years. If it takes me several times as long to do something, it doesn't really matter if that's my only practical way to get it done right.
> 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
It really depends on what service you plan to do. If you're going to do things like changing bulbs, air and cabin filter, wipers, and the battery, you could get along with just a conventional socket set if that.
Oil changes will require a oil filter wrench/cap, a torque wrench, and a funnel. And those tools can also be used for transmission fluid changes.
Once you get to spark plugs and brakes, you'll need more tools, but those services aren't frequent enough to really warrant buying the tools as opposed to renting them.
> takes a bunch of time
I typically will change the oil on my vehicles myself and a oil and filter change takes me about 45 minutes (including the time to drive to the auto parts store to recycle the old oil). The last time I took my car somewhere for an oil change, I had to drive to 5 different places and finally had to settle on one that made me wait about 3 hours before they could get to it and change the oil.
There are certain services or repairs that will take time (brakes, suspension, exhaust) where I would just as well take it to a mechanic to do it for me, but there are plenty of others that don't take much time at all and cost significantly less in terms of saving on labor and your time for setting up an appointment, taking the car there, getting alternative transportation or waiting, getting the car back, etc.
It really depends on what service you plan to do. If you're going to do things like changing bulbs, air and cabin filter, wipers, and the battery, you could get along with just a conventional socket set if that.
Oil changes will require a oil filter wrench/cap, a torque wrench, and a funnel. And those tools can also be used for transmission fluid changes.
Once you get to spark plugs and brakes, you'll need more tools, but those services aren't frequent enough to really warrant buying the tools as opposed to renting them.
> takes a bunch of time
I typically will change the oil on my vehicles myself and a oil and filter change takes me about 45 minutes (including the time to drive to the auto parts store to recycle the old oil). The last time I took my car somewhere for an oil change, I had to drive to 5 different places and finally had to settle on one that made me wait about 3 hours before they could get to it and change the oil.
There are certain services or repairs that will take time (brakes, suspension, exhaust) where I would just as well take it to a mechanic to do it for me, but there are plenty of others that don't take much time at all and cost significantly less in terms of saving on labor and your time for setting up an appointment, taking the car there, getting alternative transportation or waiting, getting the car back, etc.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have had a tire totally self-destruct within the last decade, so I feel like I still need a spare. I don't believe that once a tire is damaged at speed the cans of sealant are likely to work, since it will probably tear apart.
I also have AAA, and don't intend to change a tire if I don't have to, but AAA will not provide you with a suitable tire and wheel. And I don't see why someone would want to arrange for their life to depend on their cell phone working if they drive anywhere out of town.
In fact, right now, I have run-flat tires, a spare, and AAA.
I also have AAA, and don't intend to change a tire if I don't have to, but AAA will not provide you with a suitable tire and wheel. And I don't see why someone would want to arrange for their life to depend on their cell phone working if they drive anywhere out of town.
In fact, right now, I have run-flat tires, a spare, and AAA.
Maybe we'll get there. They'll put induction coils in the streets and electric cars will charge and get powered as they go. Unless you're going on a long trip there'd be no need to ever worry about power.
Or, simpler, wireless powering in most parking spaces so for most people never even having to think about power
Or, robot chargers. Put a QR code on your plug, maybe in infrared so it's invisible, and some simple device and find and start charging your car anytime you park it.
Anyway, as an old computer literate person the idea of not understanding files scares me but if people are getting by without them then it's just probably me being out of date.
Or, simpler, wireless powering in most parking spaces so for most people never even having to think about power
Or, robot chargers. Put a QR code on your plug, maybe in infrared so it's invisible, and some simple device and find and start charging your car anytime you park it.
Anyway, as an old computer literate person the idea of not understanding files scares me but if people are getting by without them then it's just probably me being out of date.
> Maybe we'll get there. They'll put induction coils in the streets and electric cars will charge and get powered as they go. Unless you're going on a long trip there'd be no need to ever worry about power.
I think that is a bit optimistic though. It would be far more obtuse than that. You'll have to subscribe to one of a several charging services, that sort of work with each other most of the time. And you won't be able to inspect for yourself how much voltage your car has left without jailbreaking it.
I think that is a bit optimistic though. It would be far more obtuse than that. You'll have to subscribe to one of a several charging services, that sort of work with each other most of the time. And you won't be able to inspect for yourself how much voltage your car has left without jailbreaking it.
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?".
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?".
I actually think that what Teslas do is good. It is the most accurate representation of driving capacity. And a lot of non electric cars are doing that now too.
The first few years of bluetooth headphones would just give you an alarm when they were at 5% capacity, and that was it. And in general, there is very little feedback given about what your storage is doing and where it is located. Just a simple question of "where are your photos" can be hard for most people to answer now. "Uhh, the 'eye cloud', but also on my phone. I mean some of them are and some aren't."
And that is why people are constantly losing their data now. I have seen plenty of people hold onto their old phones because they have data that they don't know how to get off, and it is just easier to hold onto the entire device.
The first few years of bluetooth headphones would just give you an alarm when they were at 5% capacity, and that was it. And in general, there is very little feedback given about what your storage is doing and where it is located. Just a simple question of "where are your photos" can be hard for most people to answer now. "Uhh, the 'eye cloud', but also on my phone. I mean some of them are and some aren't."
And that is why people are constantly losing their data now. I have seen plenty of people hold onto their old phones because they have data that they don't know how to get off, and it is just easier to hold onto the entire device.
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.
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.
How many KM remaining depends on the terrain, traffic, driving technique, weather and a host of other factors. Nobody is expecting 100% accuracy just a rough estimate. They are already mentally doing the conversion anyways.
The range of a car can't change by several orders of magnitude in normal use, unlike sizes of files.
> 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'd argue the problems will only start when there's enough bandwidth. That's when companies will be able to fully transparently store everything remotely and that's when people will really get screwed. Because if Google locks down your access for TOS "violation" then even having a needy friend will not bring back fully remote data.
I'd argue the problems will only start when there's enough bandwidth. That's when companies will be able to fully transparently store everything remotely and that's when people will really get screwed. Because if Google locks down your access for TOS "violation" then even having a needy friend will not bring back fully remote data.
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 to the garage and have a Certified, Licensed Professional Mechanic attach a doohickey to the engine computer to tell him what the problem is, so he can tell you.
My father is an old-time car geek. This shit drives him up the wall.
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 to the garage and have a Certified, Licensed Professional Mechanic attach a doohickey to the engine computer to tell him what the problem is, so he can tell you.
My father is an old-time car geek. This shit drives him up the wall.
> 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.
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.
Bluetooth ones are less then $10 online.
>> 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.
>> 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.
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).
I don't need a license for my washing machine. I understand how the functions on my washing machine work less than I do my user facing car controls. People spend thousands of hours driving with the keen knowledge it is possible to kill other drivers on the road. They master it's abilities even if they make bad decisions behind the wheel.
This is very interesting. I've heard similar reasons as to why computer literacy is apparently low in Japan; the keitai ecosystem was so good that e-mail in Nippon is synonymous with messaging.
Teaching to non-CS students (LibreOffice, etc). I confirm most of them have no idea what a file, folder, file system or zip is.
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The same can be said for newer cars and the people not knowing how they work to fix them up
Or gps and knowing how to navigate
This maybe another example of users just caring about using something to make lives simpler and more fun
These are both interesting insights and I, am, somehow more, selfishly surprised and amused that my career isn't going away because of increasing literacy but because user experience on few devices made it so.
”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 probably also will understand that editing said documents after informing you of their existence may not mean you’ll see said changes.
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 probably also will understand that editing said documents after informing you of their existence may not mean you’ll see said changes.
> 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 skills. Just in the last year, I have emailed zip files to several different people, like my attorney, or when I applied with the local town clerk for a parking permit. There is never going to be an app for everything.
And call me old fashioned, but I think a high school graduate should be able to write a check, put it in a physical envelope with a stamp, and mail it. And if someone lets you expedite something by emailing forms to them directly, you should be able to do that too. God forbid a medical office asks you to fax them something. (Which I still have to do several times a year)
When I was in high school, everyone knew how to use AOL to send word documents and pictures and even mp3s to each other via email. Everyone. These are skills that can be taught.
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 skills. Just in the last year, I have emailed zip files to several different people, like my attorney, or when I applied with the local town clerk for a parking permit. There is never going to be an app for everything.
And call me old fashioned, but I think a high school graduate should be able to write a check, put it in a physical envelope with a stamp, and mail it. And if someone lets you expedite something by emailing forms to them directly, you should be able to do that too. God forbid a medical office asks you to fax them something. (Which I still have to do several times a year)
When I was in high school, everyone knew how to use AOL to send word documents and pictures and even mp3s to each other via email. Everyone. These are skills that can be taught.
> 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 :)
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 :)
>go to a copy place (if you can find one)
Office supply stores will often send faxes.
Office supply stores will often send faxes.
Is it a problem that students don't know abstraction layers lower than they regularly use, or that we're collectively climbing up the abstraction ladder as the years go by? I'm a full generation older than these students, and most of my colleagues can't read or write assembly language. I've worked with programmers who have never even written a compiler, database, or central processor.
I'd say we're seeing that filesystems weren't a great user experience, at least the way they've been implemented in the past, and I'd place the blame on the other side. The design of computer systems today isn't the only possible way to design them. They exist to serve users. If our old systems aren't well-liked by users, and we spend all our efforts hiding their inherent design so people can actually use them, maybe our foundation is wrong.
Even the most technical people in the world have been trying to replace our filesystems with object databases for a few decades now, and plenty of people use only "services" (database in the cloud) or "apps" (database on phone). Isn't it possible filesystems have outlived their usefulness? For a lot of people, they really only exist to boot the OS.
Computer science students need to learn about filesystems and C and Unix, sure, like cooks and carpenters need to learn US customary units.
I'd say we're seeing that filesystems weren't a great user experience, at least the way they've been implemented in the past, and I'd place the blame on the other side. The design of computer systems today isn't the only possible way to design them. They exist to serve users. If our old systems aren't well-liked by users, and we spend all our efforts hiding their inherent design so people can actually use them, maybe our foundation is wrong.
Even the most technical people in the world have been trying to replace our filesystems with object databases for a few decades now, and plenty of people use only "services" (database in the cloud) or "apps" (database on phone). Isn't it possible filesystems have outlived their usefulness? For a lot of people, they really only exist to boot the OS.
Computer science students need to learn about filesystems and C and Unix, sure, like cooks and carpenters need to learn US customary units.
There are good and bad abstractions, and the whole issue here is that filesystems are a good abstraction, both intellectually and ethically, and the "new" replacements are mutually incompatible lies that reduce your ability to accomplish what your goals with your device and simultaneously try to take ownership of the data and the device away from you.
Well, I've been using and programming computers for decades now, but I have to admit I've never "written a compiler, database, or central processor". This is quite a high bar for computer competency, I think.
The comments about file systems are interesting, but I doubt that programming is going to get much easier just because you store your source code in database tables instead of files.
The comments about file systems are interesting, but I doubt that programming is going to get much easier just because you store your source code in database tables instead of files.
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?”
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 sense that a physical object would -- it was just an arrangement of sequins.
I like this analogy better than comparing it to a bunch of light switches. Gotta keep this in my back pocket.
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.
And they remain in the same place until the file space they occupy is reclaimed by the OS and rewritten with new content.
The most funny thing happens with SSDs. Even when same block is reclaimed and overwritten by OS, it very rarely overwrites the bits in NAND flash, due to the wear leveling implemented in SSD controller chip. When the actual bits are destroyed is unpredictable, probably that's why some vendors have hardware encryption there.
There is a issue with sd cards that they can revert back to an earlier state.
Perhaps assure him it's not really gone, Google, Zuckerberg, the NSA, Russia et. al. still have a copy?
Nothing to add, but I really love his question. It's so pure and innocent haha
Waste heat, maybe? (cf. Landauer's principle)
What I see as most problematic is the fact that people want to become CS majors before they become computer enthusiasts.
Long before I studied computer science concepts, I was enamored with computers. I was a power user then. When I was in elementary school I couldn't have Internet access any time I wanted (it was literally a call on the family telephone) so I spent lots of time playing around with the operating system and the installed applications. Many nights were spent exploring the nooks and crannies of Windows and Office. I learned about the cmd.exe and wrote batch scripts before I had any idea what computer science was about.
Later when I moved from Windows to Mac in the early 00's, I did the same. The same kind of curiosity led me to naturally explore the various system utilities, from Mac-specific like hdiutil or diskutil to general Unix-y.
I don't know whether this is fighting a losing battle, but I doubt anyone who's not curious enough to learn about the innards of their computers can really become successful CS majors and hackers.
Long before I studied computer science concepts, I was enamored with computers. I was a power user then. When I was in elementary school I couldn't have Internet access any time I wanted (it was literally a call on the family telephone) so I spent lots of time playing around with the operating system and the installed applications. Many nights were spent exploring the nooks and crannies of Windows and Office. I learned about the cmd.exe and wrote batch scripts before I had any idea what computer science was about.
Later when I moved from Windows to Mac in the early 00's, I did the same. The same kind of curiosity led me to naturally explore the various system utilities, from Mac-specific like hdiutil or diskutil to general Unix-y.
I don't know whether this is fighting a losing battle, but I doubt anyone who's not curious enough to learn about the innards of their computers can really become successful CS majors and hackers.
A lot of the people I saw in college who were CS majors didn't really seem to care about CS as a topic and only saw it as a lucrative career path. These same people would constantly struggle to understand the most basic concepts and not seem to care about understanding it beyond being able to finish their assignments.
It's sad because I feel like I and a handful of other people in the program were the only ones actually enjoying it. It probably also has a lot to do with older people telling so many kids as they were growing up that they're "so good with computers" because they showed them how to setup their email accounts and it gave them a false sense of skill that made them think they should do it for a living.
It's sad because I feel like I and a handful of other people in the program were the only ones actually enjoying it. It probably also has a lot to do with older people telling so many kids as they were growing up that they're "so good with computers" because they showed them how to setup their email accounts and it gave them a false sense of skill that made them think they should do it for a living.
I work in an office environment with relatively young people and it is absolutely shocking how little people know about computers or some underlying technologies,despite using them all day,every day.Very few if any, go beyond of the basics of how to open up a website or create a word document. The willingness to learn something new is close to zero and always downplayed with "I'm not good with computers". I've got a feeling that to most office workers pivot table in Excel is the highest possible level of technical knowledge.
I had to explain to someone in my office how URLs worked - he only knew how to get to sites by typing what he wanted to visit into google search. Our intranet is obviously not crawled by google so he had no idea how to access it.
I got the same "I'm not good with computers" response.
Modern web browsers are the cause of this they don't distinguish between an address and a search query -frustrating.
I got the same "I'm not good with computers" response.
Modern web browsers are the cause of this they don't distinguish between an address and a search query -frustrating.
Browser vendors get a kickback for each search.
Isn't this the way it has always been? Then they expect help from the rare few who do understand how computers work, while at the same time somehow looking down at them for not being "normal".
I agree, nothing has changed much and I even think it's going that route where the ones that "know" are awarded handsomely, while the "don't knows" are left on a side with peanuts.
I consider myself very knowledgeable about computers and computing.
Yet I could not fix my car, my microwave or my refrigerator if my life depended on it.
Does it make me less? Is it wrong that I use my car 2 hours a day and the only thing I know is to press a bunch of buttons?
Not for me. I enjoy CompSci technology. I wouldn't like to spend my time fixing my car.
Yet I could not fix my car, my microwave or my refrigerator if my life depended on it.
Does it make me less? Is it wrong that I use my car 2 hours a day and the only thing I know is to press a bunch of buttons?
Not for me. I enjoy CompSci technology. I wouldn't like to spend my time fixing my car.
I don't expect an average user going about fixing their computer. It's more like they know how to drive a car, however it's always in 1st gear and in a straight line.
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.)
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.)
> it's now a lot harder to teach lower-level abstractions
I now have to teach teenagers the concept of "computer".
The idea that an app is a "recipe", a set of instructions, and something needs to execute that recipe, a "computer"--aka your phone, is now a foreign concept.
I now have to teach teenagers the concept of "computer".
The idea that an app is a "recipe", a set of instructions, and something needs to execute that recipe, a "computer"--aka your phone, is now a foreign concept.
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...
?
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.
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.
They should teach them Terminal on OSX. I would expect most CS folks would need it per building code or Git. Maybe I am too disconnected, and life is now IDE.
I showed my son at a young age terminal commands to browse the filesystem. It really seems to be helping him now that he coding.
I showed my son at a young age terminal commands to browse the filesystem. It really seems to be helping him now that he coding.
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
Can’t happen soon enough imho
But we're not moving towards a metadata rich database, we're moving towards balkanized proprietary walled gardens in the cloud.
That's true. The problem is that even when you pay for service, the incentive is to suck your data away, data-mine the hell out of it and hold you at ransom.
It's like cable TV, originally one paid a premium to avoid advertisements. Today it's just the norm, and you get the advertisements anyway.
It's like cable TV, originally one paid a premium to avoid advertisements. Today it's just the norm, and you get the advertisements anyway.
Both of these are true. We're moving towards walled gardens in the cloud, but within these cloud, your "files" are becoming rows in a highly sophisticated database, perhaps in addition to blobs in a highly sophisticated object storage system.
But it doesn't matter because you - the user - aren't exposed to the benefits or even the abstraction of that database. You don't get to make arbitrary queries for metadata. You get access to whatever half-featured interface the vendor bothered to implement, whereas the database is optimized for their operational and datamining purposes.
Agree! Can't happen soon enough.
My project Aquameta is one such attempt, trying to rethink the programming stack, and by extension all user data, as relational data instead of files, with the filesystem still there under the hood, but basically as a bootstrapping mechanism to get the database running.
Here's an essay about the reasoning and approach:
http://blog.aquameta.com/intro-chpater2-filesystem/
The TLDR is that the filesystem lacks a sophisticated information model, and doesn't provide mechanisms for defining structures, and we really need to embrace this basic requirement at a systemic level.
Boot to PostgreSQL! :)
My project Aquameta is one such attempt, trying to rethink the programming stack, and by extension all user data, as relational data instead of files, with the filesystem still there under the hood, but basically as a bootstrapping mechanism to get the database running.
Here's an essay about the reasoning and approach:
http://blog.aquameta.com/intro-chpater2-filesystem/
The TLDR is that the filesystem lacks a sophisticated information model, and doesn't provide mechanisms for defining structures, and we really need to embrace this basic requirement at a systemic level.
Boot to PostgreSQL! :)
> a metadata rich database approach
Can you ELI5 what this means? Very curious to understand ideas on alternatives to the traditional file-system abstraction.
Can you ELI5 what this means? Very curious to understand ideas on alternatives to the traditional file-system abstraction.
Not the guy you were asking but...
I do a lot of self-study, and I use Calibre (ebook library software) to organise my reading materials. I used it because my Linux file browser has problems displaying covers for EPUB files. (And a couple of other) I like that my reading material has lots of ways for me to organise it without creating duplicates (tags mainly) search and browse my books. Then one evening I found myself wishing I could have all my other relevant 'files' in the same system: audio, video, source code, repos, blogs, podcasts, notes etc... Basically a metadata rich database - except not really a database in my case as I need to pull in 'stuff' from all over the place, and not only on one device.
Files are nice, and I hate anything that takes away my ability to organise stuff on a physical level (which, truth be told Calibre stubbornly refuses to let you set up your folder system, so I cheat by using tags) but at the same time, the problem with the skeuomorphic paradigm of files and folder is that there are so many more options open in the digital world than in the real world when dealing with items.
Imagine being able to sit at your office desk and open the drawer to pull out a piece of paper. When you look at the paper it shows you some text. Rotate the paper to the left and the text disappears and a video starts playing, turn it to the right and you hear a podcast, place it on your desk and 4 more pieces of paper appear next to it - or it calls someone relevant to the info.
All possible with digital info, but not with a real piece of paper - yet.
That is the only thing I see as a real negative about files and folders - it may be limiting what we can really do with our digital world because we're stuck in a file-system metaphor created hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago.
I do a lot of self-study, and I use Calibre (ebook library software) to organise my reading materials. I used it because my Linux file browser has problems displaying covers for EPUB files. (And a couple of other) I like that my reading material has lots of ways for me to organise it without creating duplicates (tags mainly) search and browse my books. Then one evening I found myself wishing I could have all my other relevant 'files' in the same system: audio, video, source code, repos, blogs, podcasts, notes etc... Basically a metadata rich database - except not really a database in my case as I need to pull in 'stuff' from all over the place, and not only on one device.
Files are nice, and I hate anything that takes away my ability to organise stuff on a physical level (which, truth be told Calibre stubbornly refuses to let you set up your folder system, so I cheat by using tags) but at the same time, the problem with the skeuomorphic paradigm of files and folder is that there are so many more options open in the digital world than in the real world when dealing with items.
Imagine being able to sit at your office desk and open the drawer to pull out a piece of paper. When you look at the paper it shows you some text. Rotate the paper to the left and the text disappears and a video starts playing, turn it to the right and you hear a podcast, place it on your desk and 4 more pieces of paper appear next to it - or it calls someone relevant to the info.
All possible with digital info, but not with a real piece of paper - yet.
That is the only thing I see as a real negative about files and folders - it may be limiting what we can really do with our digital world because we're stuck in a file-system metaphor created hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago.
Typically when people talk about that, they mean they want to move from an approach where files have a location to an approach where files are queried based on metadata.
So rather than going to /home/kaslai/images/ to (hopefully) see all my images, I'd instead query my filesystem, perhaps like /owner:kaslai/type:image.
The specific syntax would need some serious thought, especially if we want to make it fairly ergonomic to slot in to existing systems.
There are a large number of approaches that one could take. I'm personally a fan of a hybrid, where you could navigate to a location and then make queries on anything within that location.
IMO one of the coolest features that such a filesystem could have is dealing with music. There's no perfect way to map CD rips to a hierarchical filesystem, but that wouldn't be a problem if I could just open a "directory" like /home/kaslai/music/?artist/?album/ which would automatically make virtual directories based on the artist and album, or I could just use /home/kaslai/music?artist=Smash\ Mouth to get a list of all 182 copies of All Star that I have in my library.
So rather than going to /home/kaslai/images/ to (hopefully) see all my images, I'd instead query my filesystem, perhaps like /owner:kaslai/type:image.
The specific syntax would need some serious thought, especially if we want to make it fairly ergonomic to slot in to existing systems.
There are a large number of approaches that one could take. I'm personally a fan of a hybrid, where you could navigate to a location and then make queries on anything within that location.
IMO one of the coolest features that such a filesystem could have is dealing with music. There's no perfect way to map CD rips to a hierarchical filesystem, but that wouldn't be a problem if I could just open a "directory" like /home/kaslai/music/?artist/?album/ which would automatically make virtual directories based on the artist and album, or I could just use /home/kaslai/music?artist=Smash\ Mouth to get a list of all 182 copies of All Star that I have in my library.
Have a look here: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/the-b...
Basically the idea is that the OS identifies and indexes all data on disk providing primitives to access content by query rather than only by a hierarchical path.
This applies to user content but also object code, libraries (providing versioning, compatibility, integrity, whatever criteria.)
Basically the idea is that the OS identifies and indexes all data on disk providing primitives to access content by query rather than only by a hierarchical path.
This applies to user content but also object code, libraries (providing versioning, compatibility, integrity, whatever criteria.)
Almost all file systems have metadata. Its up to the apps what metadata to store and display. Music files have artist, album etc. photos have location, camera settings etc. The tree structure is just a feature. You can for example make one file appear in many folders. User rights are often linked to the tree structure, which is very useful.
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.
Wasn't that the way Google Docs was originally implemented, but everyone preferred having it organized more like a file system, so Google Drive has a folder structure.
The same could be said about terminals; they used to be used by everybody, now they're only used by power-users. I don't think that's inherently bad. I didn't use a terminal until college, but it wasn't a barrier by any means.
I have similar anecdotes, I experience a lot of Gen Xers and Boomers expecting a linear progression of computer literacy, inversely correlated to age.
"You're so lucky you grew up using this technology, so you're used to it whereas I have to struggle - yes, do ignore that I had more than your whole lifespan to get up to speed on this ubiquitous reality"
but I encounter people under 24 that can navigate a touch screen pretty well but lack any fundamental knowledge, let alone typing on a keyboard in a proficient way.
fortunately most activities no longer require this kind of thing. auto-saving, and better UI solves alot.
I can see how wanting to teach these things will have challenges.
"You're so lucky you grew up using this technology, so you're used to it whereas I have to struggle - yes, do ignore that I had more than your whole lifespan to get up to speed on this ubiquitous reality"
but I encounter people under 24 that can navigate a touch screen pretty well but lack any fundamental knowledge, let alone typing on a keyboard in a proficient way.
fortunately most activities no longer require this kind of thing. auto-saving, and better UI solves alot.
I can see how wanting to teach these things will have challenges.
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-long-term solutions for consumers.
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-long-term solutions for consumers.
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 convenience will trump quality for the majority of use cases and the market will keep shifting in that direction.
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. This has protected a ton of businesses and users from being at the mercy of their IT team.
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. This has protected a ton of businesses and users from being at the mercy of their IT team.
One of the dangerous factors of cloud-first thinking is that it tends to abstract away people's concerns for redundancy. "Oh, CloudBrand handles distributed backups for me in 32 different regions, I checked the box for that." And when CloudBrand has some new scale of failure, it just takes down all your copies at once.
Every service is "extremely high reliability" until it isn't. Sometimes, the causes of failure are even beyond technical ones. Look at the situation with Adobe Creative Cloud users in Venezuela-- the discs and wires are still fine, but customers are losing real value because of legal mandates. Your high availability platform can withstand a network cable cut, but can it withstand a court order?
If you're still thinking local first, it encourages awareness of multiple baskets. iCloud is down? You can still pull the photos off your camera's flash card, or your workstation's SSD, or the external spinning-rust hard disc you used for cold backups, or the third-party dedicated backups service you use...
Every service is "extremely high reliability" until it isn't. Sometimes, the causes of failure are even beyond technical ones. Look at the situation with Adobe Creative Cloud users in Venezuela-- the discs and wires are still fine, but customers are losing real value because of legal mandates. Your high availability platform can withstand a network cable cut, but can it withstand a court order?
If you're still thinking local first, it encourages awareness of multiple baskets. iCloud is down? You can still pull the photos off your camera's flash card, or your workstation's SSD, or the external spinning-rust hard disc you used for cold backups, or the third-party dedicated backups service you use...
> 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.
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.
It will probably expand in both directions. There is work going in to new creation tools. They function best client side.
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 abstractions they deal with data in terms of:
• a .data section in ROM (maybe needing bank-switching to get in place);
• some kind of byte-addressable NVRAM (like battery-backed "save RAM", or CMOS memory) either bus-mapped, or through MMIO.
• tape or (floppy) disk, sometimes at an extremely low level (send commands to the drive motor, write guard nybbles, etc.), sometimes through a DOS where you can just request to seek to a given track then read or write a given sector on that track. Either way, more like a block device than a filesystem.
---
For today's kids, I'd suggest: don't start with files. Teach key-value storage first. Interact with a library like LMDB without explaining where it's putting the data. They'll understand this just fine.
Then, teach object storage in terms of key-value storage. Object storage—especially once you add object versioning—is much closer to the modern metaphor that user-facing apps expose. You compose a complete new version of an object in an in-memory scratch buffer, and then it atomically replaces the previous object. You can't corrupt an object by half-saving it. Etc. Again, don't bother explaining how this works yet; just give them a scripting runtime hooked up to a Minio instance.
After they get that, you can ask them what they'd do if they needed to create an object that wouldn't fit in memory. Then you can explain block devices, as a "place where large scratch buffers can live"—but don't force them to figure out how to allocate those buffers from the block device! That's gonna pull in a whole bunch of prerequisite teaching. Instead, pull out another API: Linux's LVM. Logical volume management takes block devices in, and spits block devices out. The logical volumes are the scratch buffers. Explain mmap(2), and how these buffers end up a lot slower that memory buffers. Explain how these buffers survive a disk crash.
After you get to that point, then you can explain that all the other ways computers durably store data are built on top of these logical-volume durable scratch buffers. You can explain how LMDB works in terms of disk pages; and then you can explain how a content-addressable storage works in terms of combining an LMDB-like KV store with hashing and splitting.
And, after that—if you like—you can explain that sometimes, when we need something that's like object storage but where everything in the storage bucket is actually a tiny scratch buffer, we use filesystems. You can explain what an "extent" is by talking about how something like LMDB, that has a "freelist" of pages from its underlying logical-volume, can reserve a contiguous set of those pages and then let something else access them. Then you can explain a filesystem as a key-value store that has buckets called "inodes" with page-range keys, and extent-address values. (And an associated versioned object store of directory-objects, where each object is a serialized list of records (dirents), each containing a reference to an inode and giving it a name and other stuff.)
Filesystems are hard!
Consider: unikernels (like, say, any old cartridge game ROM) don't have any need for files. They have precisely three abstractions they deal with data in terms of:
• a .data section in ROM (maybe needing bank-switching to get in place);
• some kind of byte-addressable NVRAM (like battery-backed "save RAM", or CMOS memory) either bus-mapped, or through MMIO.
• tape or (floppy) disk, sometimes at an extremely low level (send commands to the drive motor, write guard nybbles, etc.), sometimes through a DOS where you can just request to seek to a given track then read or write a given sector on that track. Either way, more like a block device than a filesystem.
---
For today's kids, I'd suggest: don't start with files. Teach key-value storage first. Interact with a library like LMDB without explaining where it's putting the data. They'll understand this just fine.
Then, teach object storage in terms of key-value storage. Object storage—especially once you add object versioning—is much closer to the modern metaphor that user-facing apps expose. You compose a complete new version of an object in an in-memory scratch buffer, and then it atomically replaces the previous object. You can't corrupt an object by half-saving it. Etc. Again, don't bother explaining how this works yet; just give them a scripting runtime hooked up to a Minio instance.
After they get that, you can ask them what they'd do if they needed to create an object that wouldn't fit in memory. Then you can explain block devices, as a "place where large scratch buffers can live"—but don't force them to figure out how to allocate those buffers from the block device! That's gonna pull in a whole bunch of prerequisite teaching. Instead, pull out another API: Linux's LVM. Logical volume management takes block devices in, and spits block devices out. The logical volumes are the scratch buffers. Explain mmap(2), and how these buffers end up a lot slower that memory buffers. Explain how these buffers survive a disk crash.
After you get to that point, then you can explain that all the other ways computers durably store data are built on top of these logical-volume durable scratch buffers. You can explain how LMDB works in terms of disk pages; and then you can explain how a content-addressable storage works in terms of combining an LMDB-like KV store with hashing and splitting.
And, after that—if you like—you can explain that sometimes, when we need something that's like object storage but where everything in the storage bucket is actually a tiny scratch buffer, we use filesystems. You can explain what an "extent" is by talking about how something like LMDB, that has a "freelist" of pages from its underlying logical-volume, can reserve a contiguous set of those pages and then let something else access them. Then you can explain a filesystem as a key-value store that has buckets called "inodes" with page-range keys, and extent-address values. (And an associated versioned object store of directory-objects, where each object is a serialized list of records (dirents), each containing a reference to an inode and giving it a name and other stuff.)
Filesystems are hard!
> 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.
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.
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.
The answer to "why do you want files as an abstraction" is that files are the units of ownership of data. If you don't control the files that represent your data, you don't own it. You might think you do, but you don't, because someone else ultimately decides the fate of those files.
My point was that there don't need to be files anywhere to represent data at all. Computers can work entirely without files. For example, your whole hard drive could consist of an RDBMS, where you'd not "download" files, but rather "download" streams of tables, which would import directly as tables into the RDBMS.
"Files" are a very specific abstraction; thinking they're the only way to transfer chunks of data around is a symptom of lack of imagination. There are very similar abstractions to files, such as object-store objects. The only practical difference between files and objects is that updates to objects are transactional+atomic, such that nobody ever sees an "in progress" object. But an object store (backed by a block device) is a simpler system than a filesystem (backed by a block device.)
You can control the objects that represent your data. You could also control, via an RBAC-like system, the K-V or tuple-store records that represent your data. Or the Merkle-tree commits. Or the blockchain transactions. Or the graph edges. Or the live actor processes holding in-memory state. You can transfer all of these things around between computers, both by replication (copying) and by migration (moving.) What do files have to do with any of this? An accident of history is what.
"Files" are a very specific abstraction; thinking they're the only way to transfer chunks of data around is a symptom of lack of imagination. There are very similar abstractions to files, such as object-store objects. The only practical difference between files and objects is that updates to objects are transactional+atomic, such that nobody ever sees an "in progress" object. But an object store (backed by a block device) is a simpler system than a filesystem (backed by a block device.)
You can control the objects that represent your data. You could also control, via an RBAC-like system, the K-V or tuple-store records that represent your data. Or the Merkle-tree commits. Or the blockchain transactions. Or the graph edges. Or the live actor processes holding in-memory state. You can transfer all of these things around between computers, both by replication (copying) and by migration (moving.) What do files have to do with any of this? An accident of history is what.
They are not the only way to transfer chunks of data.
They are the most successful and versatile mass way to transfer chunks of data and define ownership in the history of computing.
I’m sure an RDBMS or a graph DB can do those things as well. But no one has succeeded in doing it even close to as effectively as files managed to. And many have tried. In fact, probably the greatest computer software failure of all time, Windows Longhorn, was largely a failure in trying to replace a file based system with a graph DB based system.
People very much can imagine alternatives. There are no shortage of imaginable alternatives. There is a huge shortage of successful in use alternatives that are as versatile or effective as files.
They are the most successful and versatile mass way to transfer chunks of data and define ownership in the history of computing.
I’m sure an RDBMS or a graph DB can do those things as well. But no one has succeeded in doing it even close to as effectively as files managed to. And many have tried. In fact, probably the greatest computer software failure of all time, Windows Longhorn, was largely a failure in trying to replace a file based system with a graph DB based system.
People very much can imagine alternatives. There are no shortage of imaginable alternatives. There is a huge shortage of successful in use alternatives that are as versatile or effective as files.
You're focusing on "files" as they compare to things very different from them. But imagine for a moment what an OS with an object store in place of a filesystem, would be like. Pretty much exactly the same, except that the scratch buffers backing temp files and databases wouldn't hang off the object-store "tree", but rather would either be anonymous (from mmap(2)), or would be represented by a device node (i.e. a logical volume) rather than being objects themselves. All the freestanding read-only asset bundles, executables, documents, etc. would stay the same, since these were always objects being emulated under a filesystem to begin with.
And downloads would also be objects. Because, when you think about it, at least over HTTP, downloads and uploads already are of objects—the source doesn't get allocated a scratch buffer on the destination that it can then freely seek(2) around and write(2) into; instead, the source just streams a representation to the dest, that gets buffered until it's complete, and then a new object is constructed on the dest from that full local stream-buffered copy. (WebDAV introduces some file semantics into HTTP's representational object semantics, but it doesn't actually go all the way to enabling you to mount a DBMS over WebDAV.) Other protocols are similar (e.g. FTP; SMTP.) Even BitTorrent is working with objects, once you realize that it's the pieces of your files that are the objects. Rsync is the only weird protocol, that would really need to be reimplemented in terms of syscalls to allocate explicit durable scratch buffers. (That and SMB/NFS/AFP/etc., but those are protocols with the explicit goal of exposing a share on a remote host as something with filesystem semantics, so you'd kind of expect them to need filesystem support on the local machine.)
Now, want to know something interesting? We already have this. Any inherently copy-on-write filesystem, like APFS or btrfs, is actually an object store masquerading as a filesystem. You get filesystem semantics, but they're layered on on top of object-storage semantics, and it's more efficient when you strip them away and use the object storage semantics directly (like when using btrfs send/receive, or when telling APFS to directly clone a container.) And these filesystems also have exactly what I mentioned above: special syscalls (or in this case, file attributes) to allocate scratch buffers that bypass Copy-on-Write, for things like databases.
There's no reason that a modern ground-up OS (e.g. Google's Fuchsia) would need to use a filesystem rather than an object store. A constructive proof's already there that it can be done, just obscured a bit behind a need for legacy compatibility; a need that wouldn't be there in a ground-up OS design.
(Or, you can take as a constructive proof any "cloud native" unikernel design that just uses IaaS object/KV/tuple/document-storage service requests as its "syscalls", and has no local persistent storage whatsoever, never even bothering to understand block devices attached to it by its hypervisor.)
And downloads would also be objects. Because, when you think about it, at least over HTTP, downloads and uploads already are of objects—the source doesn't get allocated a scratch buffer on the destination that it can then freely seek(2) around and write(2) into; instead, the source just streams a representation to the dest, that gets buffered until it's complete, and then a new object is constructed on the dest from that full local stream-buffered copy. (WebDAV introduces some file semantics into HTTP's representational object semantics, but it doesn't actually go all the way to enabling you to mount a DBMS over WebDAV.) Other protocols are similar (e.g. FTP; SMTP.) Even BitTorrent is working with objects, once you realize that it's the pieces of your files that are the objects. Rsync is the only weird protocol, that would really need to be reimplemented in terms of syscalls to allocate explicit durable scratch buffers. (That and SMB/NFS/AFP/etc., but those are protocols with the explicit goal of exposing a share on a remote host as something with filesystem semantics, so you'd kind of expect them to need filesystem support on the local machine.)
Now, want to know something interesting? We already have this. Any inherently copy-on-write filesystem, like APFS or btrfs, is actually an object store masquerading as a filesystem. You get filesystem semantics, but they're layered on on top of object-storage semantics, and it's more efficient when you strip them away and use the object storage semantics directly (like when using btrfs send/receive, or when telling APFS to directly clone a container.) And these filesystems also have exactly what I mentioned above: special syscalls (or in this case, file attributes) to allocate scratch buffers that bypass Copy-on-Write, for things like databases.
There's no reason that a modern ground-up OS (e.g. Google's Fuchsia) would need to use a filesystem rather than an object store. A constructive proof's already there that it can be done, just obscured a bit behind a need for legacy compatibility; a need that wouldn't be there in a ground-up OS design.
(Or, you can take as a constructive proof any "cloud native" unikernel design that just uses IaaS object/KV/tuple/document-storage service requests as its "syscalls", and has no local persistent storage whatsoever, never even bothering to understand block devices attached to it by its hypervisor.)
> "Files" are a very specific abstraction; thinking they're the only way to transfer chunks of data around is a symptom of lack of imagination.
I didn't say they were the only way to transfer chunks of data around. I said they were the units of ownership of data. If your data is somewhere in a huge RDBMS mixed together with lots of other people's data, you don't own it, because you don't control its fate; whoever owns and manages the RDBMS does. The same goes for all the other object control and storage systems you mention: individual people who have personal data don't own any of those things.
I didn't say they were the only way to transfer chunks of data around. I said they were the units of ownership of data. If your data is somewhere in a huge RDBMS mixed together with lots of other people's data, you don't own it, because you don't control its fate; whoever owns and manages the RDBMS does. The same goes for all the other object control and storage systems you mention: individual people who have personal data don't own any of those things.
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?"
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.
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.
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 getting higher - the day is not far off when we have to peel-back the abstraction of "persistent data generally" in terms of files before we can get on to peeling-back the abstraction of files themselves. Or who knows, maybe we'll all abandon the desktop analogy of computing altogether, with it's hierarchies of files and links, to move on to some new purely-graph-theoretical database notion of persistent data. Somebody will still have to talk to the disk controller, however, and I can only imagine how distant that reality will be (and already is) from most students' day-to-day experience with computing.
At the same time, I can see a great equalizing force in all this. Computers have reduced the technical acumen demanded from their users to the point that owning a computer and using a computer and even being a "computer enthusiast" doesn't put you very much ahead of anybody else on-average when it comes to starting out towards becoming a computer scientist. I think this, in combination with that everybody wants to be a software engineer these days, will eventually put us somewhere around the 1970's in relative terms with regards to technical literacy in the cohort of incoming computer science students. This might sound nightmarish to the current establishment, but it has at least a positive side-effect: computer science is getting more accessible because teachers can no longer assume that pupils come from a background of "quasi-technical" computer literacy (again, this is because conventional computer literacy has become decreasingly technical in nature).
I've heard one of the general causes behind the lack of diversity in gender and economic-background in tech workers is, at some point around the mid 1980's, CS instructors started asking of their students tasks like: "Open your editor and type..." and someone in the classroom would raise their hand and ask "Ah, um... what's an `editor'? And by the way, I don't own a computer either" and the instructor's reaction would be to privately advise that student to seek a different major, at best, or open derision at worst.
So I think we're getting away from that, which is at least a way to look at the bright side. It does make the teaching job a bit more challenging.
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.
At the same time, I can see a great equalizing force in all this. Computers have reduced the technical acumen demanded from their users to the point that owning a computer and using a computer and even being a "computer enthusiast" doesn't put you very much ahead of anybody else on-average when it comes to starting out towards becoming a computer scientist. I think this, in combination with that everybody wants to be a software engineer these days, will eventually put us somewhere around the 1970's in relative terms with regards to technical literacy in the cohort of incoming computer science students. This might sound nightmarish to the current establishment, but it has at least a positive side-effect: computer science is getting more accessible because teachers can no longer assume that pupils come from a background of "quasi-technical" computer literacy (again, this is because conventional computer literacy has become decreasingly technical in nature).
I've heard one of the general causes behind the lack of diversity in gender and economic-background in tech workers is, at some point around the mid 1980's, CS instructors started asking of their students tasks like: "Open your editor and type..." and someone in the classroom would raise their hand and ask "Ah, um... what's an `editor'? And by the way, I don't own a computer either" and the instructor's reaction would be to privately advise that student to seek a different major, at best, or open derision at worst.
So I think we're getting away from that, which is at least a way to look at the bright side. It does make the teaching job a bit more challenging.
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.
> 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".
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".
One of my greatest culture shocks in terms of technology was around 6 years ago when I received an iPad, having no experience with Apple products. After the initial setup, the first thing I wanted was to transfer some files - TV episodes and PDFs - to the device. My first attempt was to SSH into it, only to discover that's not an option, and would require a third-party app store and jailbreak. Then I just connected the iPad to my PC by cable, expecting to see a mass storage device. No luck. Likewise, no luck finding a file explorer on the iPad.
The iPad is strongly tied to the workflow that Apple suggests, and that's a workflow that removes files as a concept, abstracting them away. It's quite possibly a genius approach in terms of how accessible it is to non-tech people, even though it doesn't sit right with me.
The iPad is strongly tied to the workflow that Apple suggests, and that's a workflow that removes files as a concept, abstracting them away. It's quite possibly a genius approach in terms of how accessible it is to non-tech people, even though it doesn't sit right with me.
The original iPod was a Firewire hard drive; you could connect it to your Mac and use it as a backup volume if you wanted. Apple took all that away a long time ago, and obviously it wasn't for technical reasons. It was so Apple could control and restrict how the customer used their devices. One of the many reasons why I changed from an Apple fan to an Apple hater.
Well, Apple has introduced the ability to connect external drives to iPads (and iPhones), and added regular a file browser for them to iOS. You just need a USB-to-lighting cable now...
And while iPod could be connected as a drive via firewire, that was never the way to add/remove music there, since (for better or worse) it was never a dumb "play this folder" type player, but maintained a associated library format with metadata etc.
And while iPod could be connected as a drive via firewire, that was never the way to add/remove music there, since (for better or worse) it was never a dumb "play this folder" type player, but maintained a associated library format with metadata etc.
IIRC, at first, that was just for cost/energy savings: rather than having a media-indexing daemon running on the iPod itself, they just made that media-indexing process happen in advance on your PC. And, in fact, as a single scan at import-into-library time, rather than a repeated filesystem scan to find changes.
That latter choice also put a human in the loop, since you were probably interactively importing media (whereas media-indexing usually happens in the background.) This meant the human could be relied upon to notice and fix bad ID3 tags, which was a big problem for most audio files of the era and made many MP3 players a useless "unlabelled warehouse" when you had a lot of files on them.
That latter choice also put a human in the loop, since you were probably interactively importing media (whereas media-indexing usually happens in the background.) This meant the human could be relied upon to notice and fix bad ID3 tags, which was a big problem for most audio files of the era and made many MP3 players a useless "unlabelled warehouse" when you had a lot of files on them.
I modified an iPod clip to use mp3's dropped on. I can't remember the utility I used. This was years ago.
I was a kid when I got my first iPod and I remember storing a copy of Starcraft on it, to be able to play on school computers and on the computers at the University near my house.
Great memories
Great memories
Ha, that's how I got my boss to buy me one. I backed up the server and carried my music around with me. Now I just carry a portable hard drive...
You were able to use an iPod as a storage device throughout its entire lifetime. If Apple wanted to “control and restrict you” it would have been a lot harder to reverse engineer the iPod indexing format and allow third parties to write software that could store and retrieve music from the iPod.
At the beginning it was literally just a disk with an HFS+ file system. You could drag files to and from it with the Finder. No reverse engineering necessary.
You’re talking about two separate things.
You could never drag music to the iPod and have it recognized by the music player.
You could always drag random files to it and have it work as a hard drive. On Windows it was NTFS (Fat32?) on Macs it was HFS+
You could never drag music to the iPod and have it recognized by the music player.
You could always drag random files to it and have it work as a hard drive. On Windows it was NTFS (Fat32?) on Macs it was HFS+
I never mentioned music. I was talking about files in general.
And even with music it was easy to drag music files from an iPod; they were merely in a hidden folder. I don't remember trying to drag music to an iPod with the Finder because it used to be so easy to do that with iTunes.
And even with music it was easy to drag music files from an iPod; they were merely in a hidden folder. I don't remember trying to drag music to an iPod with the Finder because it used to be so easy to do that with iTunes.
Yes you could always drag music from the iPod, but you never had anyway of knowing which song was which because all of the names were changed to a random filename.
The files kept their embedded ID3 tags, so if you had tagged them correctly in iTunes, you could use an ID3 tagger's "tag to filename" conversion to name the files.
I found it immediately limiting - either you put your stuff in one of the preordained categories like music, movies, photos, videos (and pretty much nothing else), or your stuff is siloed in whatever specific application you load it into.
That's not a tool you can use to create things with, unless it's music, movies, photos or videos. It lacked the freedom to permit innovation.
(I have never acquired an iPad beyond the first one I got, which was a gift.)
That's not a tool you can use to create things with, unless it's music, movies, photos or videos. It lacked the freedom to permit innovation.
(I have never acquired an iPad beyond the first one I got, which was a gift.)
What did you want to create with it, that you couldn't?
My parents went from "scared of computers" to "ipad" pros, because it's really hard to break or get hacked, it doesn't get viruses they know how to force quit an app.
I'm scared of iPad getting files now, because it's going to be a mess for me.
My parents went from "scared of computers" to "ipad" pros, because it's really hard to break or get hacked, it doesn't get viruses they know how to force quit an app.
I'm scared of iPad getting files now, because it's going to be a mess for me.
For me, files are the centre of the world, while apps come and go, companies come and go. Data is what lasts, and why it's so important to control it.
I'd want to use command line tools - or UI's that are just as composable - to manipulate my files.
The iPad perspective just seems completely crippled from the POV. Like a toy.
Just to take an example - look at the Moon article also on the front page right now: https://medium.com/@sulej.robert/the-moon-made-twice-at-home...
I'd want to use command line tools - or UI's that are just as composable - to manipulate my files.
The iPad perspective just seems completely crippled from the POV. Like a toy.
Just to take an example - look at the Moon article also on the front page right now: https://medium.com/@sulej.robert/the-moon-made-twice-at-home...
Apple pretty much has acknowledged that, and has been slowly introducing a file system interface over the last several years. If you haven’t looked at an iPad in awhile, you should to refresh your POV.
The obvious buildup is to when the iPad transitions to a notebook computer.
The obvious buildup is to when the iPad transitions to a notebook computer.
That hasn’t been true for years - at least since iOS 5 in 2011 with iCloud.
You can write on it, draw on it, paint on it, program on it, and you already mentioned video, photography, music, spoken word. Seems like an extremely powerful creation tool to me!
You could create many of humanity’s greatest works on it! What are you expecting more?
You could create many of humanity’s greatest works on it! What are you expecting more?
I expect actual control and ownership over those very creations I create.
On your iPad, point to where your latest video file is. Show me. Where is it? "On The Cloud"? On the iPad itself? Three clicks deep in some random purpose-specific app separate from the soundtrack file you want to integrate into the video? What about five years from now, can you still access that video however and whenever and wherever you please?
On your iPad, point to where your latest video file is. Show me. Where is it? "On The Cloud"? On the iPad itself? Three clicks deep in some random purpose-specific app separate from the soundtrack file you want to integrate into the video? What about five years from now, can you still access that video however and whenever and wherever you please?
> On your iPad, point to where your latest video file is. Show me. Where is it?
Why do you care where the 'file' is? That's an implementation detail. I can copy the video to somewhere else any time I want. I do this all the time with photos and videos from my iPad. It's not the issue you're saying it is.
Why do you care where the 'file' is? That's an implementation detail. I can copy the video to somewhere else any time I want. I do this all the time with photos and videos from my iPad. It's not the issue you're saying it is.
It is an issue.
I know people who are not able to properly manage their own files [no quotation marks needed]. They have copies of files here, there, and everywhere else and when asked which copy of the photograph they edited to their perfection they cannot tell you if it was the local copy, the cloud copy, the copy on the shared folder, the copy through that special app wherever that is... nevermind asking them about the concept of having backups.
Simple point-and-show-me information saves you an organizational migraine.
I know people who are not able to properly manage their own files [no quotation marks needed]. They have copies of files here, there, and everywhere else and when asked which copy of the photograph they edited to their perfection they cannot tell you if it was the local copy, the cloud copy, the copy on the shared folder, the copy through that special app wherever that is... nevermind asking them about the concept of having backups.
Simple point-and-show-me information saves you an organizational migraine.
Isn’t that an argument for abstracting that kinda back-and-forth away rather than against it?
As it stands, if it’s in the cloud and not on your device there’s an indicator. Try to open it and it downloads. Edit it and the changes get synced back up. Unless something is edited in multiple places while offline, or someone takes your lead and tries to manually manage copying stuff back and forth, there’s no different local copy and cloud copy.
When you start talking about like, starting to edit it, well with video that’s not really how things work. If you tweak the contrast of a photo sure today’s devices abstract that in-place, but assembling multiple media into something that, if not re-encoded is at least re-muxed, why would you assume it to be “the same” file?
Should the audio track be automatically wiped, since it’s now been incorporated into the other file? That makes no sense, and I don’t see how an iOS device treats source material differently.
As it stands, if it’s in the cloud and not on your device there’s an indicator. Try to open it and it downloads. Edit it and the changes get synced back up. Unless something is edited in multiple places while offline, or someone takes your lead and tries to manually manage copying stuff back and forth, there’s no different local copy and cloud copy.
When you start talking about like, starting to edit it, well with video that’s not really how things work. If you tweak the contrast of a photo sure today’s devices abstract that in-place, but assembling multiple media into something that, if not re-encoded is at least re-muxed, why would you assume it to be “the same” file?
Should the audio track be automatically wiped, since it’s now been incorporated into the other file? That makes no sense, and I don’t see how an iOS device treats source material differently.
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.
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 look at them in my 'Pictures' folder my edits aren't there. Where are my edits? Why aren't my edits in Picasa in my 'Pictures' folder pictures?"
I'm ok being called a pedantic purist on this type of thing. If you want my help, I need to know what you are talking about. Show me your file. If all I am possibly able to see is not what you want, one of us is in trouble.
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 look at them in my 'Pictures' folder my edits aren't there. Where are my edits? Why aren't my edits in Picasa in my 'Pictures' folder pictures?"
I'm ok being called a pedantic purist on this type of thing. If you want my help, I need to know what you are talking about. Show me your file. If all I am possibly able to see is not what you want, one of us is in trouble.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 look at them in my 'Pictures' folder my edits aren't there. Where are my edits? Why aren't my edits in Picasa in my 'Pictures' folder pictures?"
But Apple have solved this confusion by removing the files and folders and making the application the one place to do things.
But Apple have solved this confusion by removing the files and folders and making the application the one place to do things.
Only if your entire computing is 100% done on your own Apple devices, and you don't need anything beyond the capabilities offered by Apple's software.
God forbid you want to access the same file with different apps.
Apple's solution is the problem I spoke about.
Putting blinders on a horse allows the horse to behave for the driver. I want the horse to behave like a horse.
Putting blinders on a horse allows the horse to behave for the driver. I want the horse to behave like a horse.
While I agree with the sentiment, it’s a few years out of date.
Starting with iOS 8 - 5 years ago, Apple has had extensibility points where third parties like Dropbox and OneDrive could be used to store documents and used in the common places where you would want to save and upload files across apps.
- of course the Files app was introduced two years ago.
- there have been third party document providers that exposed an ftp server on the device that you could send files from.
- apps like VLC expose a web server from your device you can use to upload files.
- with iOS 13 you can connect a standard USB device or network file share and it appears within the Files app and any app that supports saving/loading files via the standard APIs
- it’s still a sticking point that there is no easy way to add music to your library without going through the iTunes app.
Starting with iOS 8 - 5 years ago, Apple has had extensibility points where third parties like Dropbox and OneDrive could be used to store documents and used in the common places where you would want to save and upload files across apps.
- of course the Files app was introduced two years ago.
- there have been third party document providers that exposed an ftp server on the device that you could send files from.
- apps like VLC expose a web server from your device you can use to upload files.
- with iOS 13 you can connect a standard USB device or network file share and it appears within the Files app and any app that supports saving/loading files via the standard APIs
- it’s still a sticking point that there is no easy way to add music to your library without going through the iTunes app.
I don't think the sentiment is out of date.
I have a borrowed iPhone X and just a few days ago I wanted to download videos I took with it. I connected it to my PC and I don't see it as a drive. I had to look up the Internet to learn how to transfer my own files. The solution was to switch Windows to the horrible tile thingy UI, get to the "Photos" application, and from there, there is a button to import the files. I kinda felt treated as an infant.
I have a borrowed iPhone X and just a few days ago I wanted to download videos I took with it. I connected it to my PC and I don't see it as a drive. I had to look up the Internet to learn how to transfer my own files. The solution was to switch Windows to the horrible tile thingy UI, get to the "Photos" application, and from there, there is a button to import the files. I kinda felt treated as an infant.
That’s an issue with Windows. The iPhone has always presented itself as a camera on Windows and you access the pictures like you do any other camera.
While I appreciate all these great apps to provide me with a backdoor to the actual file system essentially, I would rather prefer to just put them there with the file browser of my choice. That is also true for "normal users" in my experience.
Not accusing Apple here, there are countless other offenders. There just isn't a convincing argument to restrict the access through conventional channels in my opinion.
Not accusing Apple here, there are countless other offenders. There just isn't a convincing argument to restrict the access through conventional channels in my opinion.
The built in Files app is the file browser that lets you browse files stored locally on the device, any installed cloud storage providers, attached USB devices and network shares. It’s not a “backdoor”. It’s built in.
Files still doesn't have the concept of a 'home folder' on the local device. I heard they even had this feature in early betas but took it away.
You mean the "On My [device]" folder, as referred to here? https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT206481
You can download a 3rd party app that lets you use your local storage as a document location.
https://medium.com/codezillas/how-to-add-a-local-folder-to-y...
https://medium.com/codezillas/how-to-add-a-local-folder-to-y...
No need any more, you can create a folder in the home folder without any link to any particular app
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Six years ago it was possible to use Dropbox as the files intermediary. With the current version (13) of iOS, there's a fairly direct access to files. There's a files explorer with support for connections to network shares & external drives. Apple is less interested in abstracting them away as they used to be.
And then they added the Files app and brought back all the classic file handling. Because it was impossible to work with files siloed inside apps.
I'm not sure if this is only an about accessibility to non-tech people.
Think about it: You can't get files on your device in a useable format anymore. This means piracy becomes exponentially harder to consume (i.e. you can't use your iPad [easily] as a reader for your pirated ebooks). Quite honestly, that's a stroke of genius and likely a secondary motivation for this workflow.
Think about it: You can't get files on your device in a useable format anymore. This means piracy becomes exponentially harder to consume (i.e. you can't use your iPad [easily] as a reader for your pirated ebooks). Quite honestly, that's a stroke of genius and likely a secondary motivation for this workflow.
You can very easily use your iPad as a reader for arbitrarily downloaded ebooks. Go to Gutenberg or Archive.org or the pirate site of your choice. Select a book. Select the format. Epubs and PDFs have the option of being sent to iBooks. Mobi can be opened with a compatible reader app if you have one installed. And the file can be saved to Dropbox or whatever file service you have installed. With the latest version of iOS (IpadOS) you can save to your Downloads folder or even to a connected storage device, or to a file share on your local network. You can also load books via Dropbox, local network, or connected storage.
I do this all the time. For me, it's convenient to use Dropbox as the intermediary, but there's plenty of other ways too.
I do this all the time. For me, it's convenient to use Dropbox as the intermediary, but there's plenty of other ways too.
What? You can very easily use your iPad as a reader for pirated ebooks. Like, I cannot understand how it could possibly be made smoother than it is.
Whether pdf or epub, and whichever device or type of device you use to add the file, once you do it will automatically be stored in your icloud and synced across devices. Same as any purchase.
Whether pdf or epub, and whichever device or type of device you use to add the file, once you do it will automatically be stored in your icloud and synced across devices. Same as any purchase.
This is not true any more. I can go to a music blog on my iPhone, download a zip of an album to my phone using the Safari download manager, unzip it in place with the core iOS file manager, move the resulting folder into the media library folder for my music player app, and play it on my device.
I can later open up the iOS file manager and find the mp3 for my new favourite song in my music player's folder, click Share and send the file to my friend on Telegram or whatever.
iPhones are pretty reasonable piracy tools now.
I can later open up the iOS file manager and find the mp3 for my new favourite song in my music player's folder, click Share and send the file to my friend on Telegram or whatever.
iPhones are pretty reasonable piracy tools now.
It’s always been pretty easy to read pirated ebooks on the iPad.
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> My first attempt was to SSH into it
Come on that’s not a sensible thing to expect from a non-specialist device, is it? I’m not sure this is a reasonable criticism.
Come on that’s not a sensible thing to expect from a non-specialist device, is it? I’m not sure this is a reasonable criticism.
Well, sure, I didn't expect it to be running a SSH server right away, but I was hoping to have a SSH option somewhere in the settings or, in the worst case, a downloadable app. It's a power user feature of course, but knowing that it's a Unix-based device, I absolutely expected easy SSH access. Then again, this is something that happened a lot with my brief use of iOS - I would repeatedly find that Apple clearly didn't intend for power user features to be accessed.
I have no experience with OS X so don't know if the same applies there.
I have no experience with OS X so don't know if the same applies there.
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.
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?
OS X has SSH, and it is an option you can enable.
> and would require a third-party app store and jailbreak.
Maybe not reasonable to expect it built in, I shouldn't have the jailbreak my own device though.
Maybe not reasonable to expect it built in, I shouldn't have the jailbreak my own device though.
It’s not your device. Or rather, you may own the hardware, but you don’t own the software on the device. You agreed to that in one of the many clickwrap EULAs you were presented with.
Now then, don’t you feel so much better? /s
Now then, don’t you feel so much better? /s
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My Android tablet offers an SSH daemon, through Termux.
Mind, the filesystem access is badly crippled, but it does exist.
(And no, I'm not a fan of Android.)
Mind, the filesystem access is badly crippled, but it does exist.
(And no, I'm not a fan of Android.)
i had a very similar experience and it is infuriating. i can’t believe nobody makes a smartphone that is just a computer. android is closer but its only a half step.
We're very close with both the Librem 5 and PinePhone in their final development stages. They run actually Linux, and the PinePhone is only $150.
Android with termux is a pretty good approximation to a handheld GNU/linux machine. You can access the files created by other apps on the phone, so it's easy to cat text files in your Dropbox area, etc. you can wget files from other machines. You can ssh into the phone from your desktop machine, and then work on the phone with a real keyboard. GNU compilers work on the phone. About the only complaint I have is that I have not found an X11 server app for Android that is useful, and it's not been for lack of looking.
A smartphone that's "just a computer" is probably gonna be pretty bad for most people. Even the more-restrictive Apple App Store has to be constantly on guard against apps trying to get around the rules and spy on users and eat battery for no good reason and other undesirable junk—and not just little fly-by-night scamsters, but Facebook and such. Take away any effort to keep that under control and the experience for most of the non-HN crowd would be awful.
While it didn’t exist back then there’s been an actual file manager for a while now, and long before that files could be downloaded and opened by (hence stored with) apps, and then shared onwards if later settling on a different pdf reader or whatever.
Other approaches like using iTunes to transfer files (again, to some specific app), while clunkier and less intuitive than mass storage, still worked.
Apps like VLC could spin up a temp web server for file upload, and again if using device to pull from something instead of pushing from eg desktop to it, a lot of scripting and automation has been possible, essentially piping data and files between apps.
So at its core I think it’s more about having a very app-centric approach, including leaving it up to apps whether (and how) to work at file level. Not exactly helping but hardly preventing either.
Of course being accessible, nudging people towards sourcing their media through Apple etc are factors here, but there’s more to it than just limitations, and it hasn’t really been as heavy-handed or locked-down as many seem to think.
Edit: whoops, started writing this before the other posts mentioning the same things, then returned and finished without refreshing. Oh well.
Other approaches like using iTunes to transfer files (again, to some specific app), while clunkier and less intuitive than mass storage, still worked.
Apps like VLC could spin up a temp web server for file upload, and again if using device to pull from something instead of pushing from eg desktop to it, a lot of scripting and automation has been possible, essentially piping data and files between apps.
So at its core I think it’s more about having a very app-centric approach, including leaving it up to apps whether (and how) to work at file level. Not exactly helping but hardly preventing either.
Of course being accessible, nudging people towards sourcing their media through Apple etc are factors here, but there’s more to it than just limitations, and it hasn’t really been as heavy-handed or locked-down as many seem to think.
Edit: whoops, started writing this before the other posts mentioning the same things, then returned and finished without refreshing. Oh well.
I was given iPad as a gift some years ago (they also gave a receipt). After playing with it for few hours and discovering that it does not let me do the thing I want I promptly returned it to the store for nice refund ;)
"The iPad is strongly tied to the workflow that Apple suggests, and that's a workflow that removes files as a concept, abstracting them away. It's quite possibly a genius approach in terms of how accessible it is to non-tech people, even though it doesn't sit right with me."
I ran into the same thing when I acquired an iphone. After moving all of my music files to the iphone (with itunes, etc.) - look at this picture:
https://www.ilounge.com/assets/images/articles_tagging/2011/...
SO many choices ... and what is missing ? filename
This comes into play when you have uncompressed, raw rips (WAV/PCM) of CDs which have no metadata - there is nothing but the filename.
I ran into the same thing when I acquired an iphone. After moving all of my music files to the iphone (with itunes, etc.) - look at this picture:
https://www.ilounge.com/assets/images/articles_tagging/2011/...
SO many choices ... and what is missing ? filename
This comes into play when you have uncompressed, raw rips (WAV/PCM) of CDs which have no metadata - there is nothing but the filename.
Yeah, the iPad is a shopping mall.
Yep - had the same experience because I got into Procreate with the pencil and all (which is amazing). Had the same exact experience. It's a great device but I feel like they're dumbing computing down too much =(
apple is built on free and open tools, and you can’t make free and open tools on apple products. it is a sad state of affairs.
I use VLC on my iDevices, and I add media to it pretty easily. The fact that you expected this to work out of the box is interesting - I mean, I agree, it should work that way - but the fact that you can still very much manage your entire Media library on an iPad, user filesystem basis, shouldn't be discarded. You just didn't know you could do that with VLC maybe? (Or FileExplorer, or many of hundreds of other apps ..)
From what I recall, there was some kind of problem with apps not making use of hardware video decoding. I vaguely remember trying VLC but only getting acceptable performance on Apple's own application without a jailbreak. This is circa 2013 though.
The iPhone 4s and first generation iPad were capable of software transcoding video and playing it.
Parent was talking about not utilizing the hardware video codecs, which is indeed software “transcoding”. It drains your battery like crazy.
There are countless video players for iOS and most of them will use hardware decoding properly
> 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, 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".
Makes sense.
But add to that fact that if you stop paying they'll keep you from your stuff. Also if they don't like you for practically any reason they'll keep you from your stuff. Or if they suffer a huge data loss they'll claim that the T's and C's protect them and they'll still keep you from your stuff.
What the hell are we sleep-walking into here?
Caveat: I'm a tech. I have a local copy, a local backup (that I rotate on an ad-hoc basis with the other HD at my mum and dads house) and an offsite cloud-backup (using Sync) so I'm covered but this stuff isn't aimed at me, it's aimed at my mum and my non-tech friends who just think "hey, it's <mega-corp>. They've got thousands of people and loads of equipment and they know what they're doing!"
They sure do!
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, 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".
Makes sense.
But add to that fact that if you stop paying they'll keep you from your stuff. Also if they don't like you for practically any reason they'll keep you from your stuff. Or if they suffer a huge data loss they'll claim that the T's and C's protect them and they'll still keep you from your stuff.
What the hell are we sleep-walking into here?
Caveat: I'm a tech. I have a local copy, a local backup (that I rotate on an ad-hoc basis with the other HD at my mum and dads house) and an offsite cloud-backup (using Sync) so I'm covered but this stuff isn't aimed at me, it's aimed at my mum and my non-tech friends who just think "hey, it's <mega-corp>. They've got thousands of people and loads of equipment and they know what they're doing!"
They sure do!
Out of all my data, music and video is the thing I worry about least. I'm not going to lose my business or job because Apple Music stops working or I can't see the latest Netflix series. The last thing I want to spend my time doing is managing and worrying about terabytes of media.
Well clearly you don't have a library of Alexandria. Not to claim I do, but, well, i do curate my own library, both in books and in media and I do have some stuff that isn't easy to come by: mispressed Amorphous Androgynous CDs. Early Nate Tarrant music. The Screaming Abdabs bootleg - and to me they hold value just like a family album might hold to some. It's not about money or what i do, it's about intrinsic value of culture history, and if someone flips a switch and turns the while internet off, i will still be able to dig out the old hard drives stored in the basement and show my kid Tarkovskys' Stalker or Kubricks' 2001. Hell, i'll watch them again for the 79th time...
But if you just consume it... well, that's good too. Just keep in mind not all do, and curating a media collection is gardening to some.
But if you just consume it... well, that's good too. Just keep in mind not all do, and curating a media collection is gardening to some.
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People are walking into corporate traps left and right. Too bad. they should turn on their brains every once in a while.
The "bait" for these traps is almost universally ease of use and overall user experience, something open platforms and open source has failed to provide.
USB drives and SD cards seem to be doing just fine, along with hard drives for desktop use. The inconvenience of these is having to go somewhere to buy them and not being able to magically simultaneously sync between devices.
"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 .zfs/snapshot directory in the root.
If only ...
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 .zfs/snapshot directory in the root.
If only ...
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.
The parent commenter is rsync (.net)
I believe they're aware and were making a joke.
Sounds like a magnificient startup opportunity: everything you've ever watched / listened to / read stored into a file. Make files great again and make a great exit doing it.
Honestly that sounds like a privacy nightmare... that's the kind of shit that would make me live in a cabin in the middle of the forest with no power!
The article just felt...unjustifiably alarmist to me.
Most non-technical people I know cannot manage files even after decades of computing experience. I understand why many services try to abstract or simplify the concept.
For example, Google or Apple is processing the crap out of your email attachment image because they know you don’t understand the idea that trying to send five 10MB photos likely will not fit in an email. All you want to do is send your photos to Grandma. So instead your iDevice handles it for you and either compresses them or throws them in a temporary cloud storage location with a link. Grandma gets her photos - for most people the alternative is a confusing mail delivery bounce followed by frustration.
Apple added Stacks to the desktop because everyone’s tired of seeing other people’s computers with a mess of icons smashed together on the desktop, because that’s the only place files could be conceivably stored in the mind of a non-technical user. The whole idea of a file hierarchy seems either too confusing or too labor intensive to that type of user.
Nerds like us always have and had options. We are aware and capable of coming up with a more friendly solution to us, like a home built NAS or Synology box; ask a non-technical user what those are and be met with a blank stare.
For most people, they really should be paying someone else to maintain their data, iCloud, Google or whatever. Nobody’s home back up scheme can match what these companies are doing in their data centers. And no, these services don’t just delete your data immediately after your monthly payment method bounces - you are given time and nags to download your data or renew, often your data just becomes download-only.
Are we annoyed that most options are not for us, or have to be in a form of a workaround to a technology stack that’s marketed to non-technical people? Maybe. It would be wonderful if there was a device as nice as an iPad that also gave us full access like a Linux PC.
But also, nobody’s forcing us in 2019 to stop using our files as we did in 1999. We didn’t have all these services back then. File management was the option. It is still an option.
And in 2019, Apple finally adds mass storage support to the iPad. Sometimes things come around.
Most non-technical people I know cannot manage files even after decades of computing experience. I understand why many services try to abstract or simplify the concept.
For example, Google or Apple is processing the crap out of your email attachment image because they know you don’t understand the idea that trying to send five 10MB photos likely will not fit in an email. All you want to do is send your photos to Grandma. So instead your iDevice handles it for you and either compresses them or throws them in a temporary cloud storage location with a link. Grandma gets her photos - for most people the alternative is a confusing mail delivery bounce followed by frustration.
Apple added Stacks to the desktop because everyone’s tired of seeing other people’s computers with a mess of icons smashed together on the desktop, because that’s the only place files could be conceivably stored in the mind of a non-technical user. The whole idea of a file hierarchy seems either too confusing or too labor intensive to that type of user.
Nerds like us always have and had options. We are aware and capable of coming up with a more friendly solution to us, like a home built NAS or Synology box; ask a non-technical user what those are and be met with a blank stare.
For most people, they really should be paying someone else to maintain their data, iCloud, Google or whatever. Nobody’s home back up scheme can match what these companies are doing in their data centers. And no, these services don’t just delete your data immediately after your monthly payment method bounces - you are given time and nags to download your data or renew, often your data just becomes download-only.
Are we annoyed that most options are not for us, or have to be in a form of a workaround to a technology stack that’s marketed to non-technical people? Maybe. It would be wonderful if there was a device as nice as an iPad that also gave us full access like a Linux PC.
But also, nobody’s forcing us in 2019 to stop using our files as we did in 1999. We didn’t have all these services back then. File management was the option. It is still an option.
And in 2019, Apple finally adds mass storage support to the iPad. Sometimes things come around.
20 years ago, I thought that learning the basics of a filesystem would be a staple of education. I painstakingly taught this to my non-technical relatives. It wasn't that hard. I just assumed that this stuff would start getting taught in public schools.
Instead, we've been struggling (and often failing) to dumb computers down. The fact that people still struggle with the same tasks is a testament to that.
I have lost track of the number of people who have lost precious pictures or documents because they don't understand what device they are stored on, and threw away their old iPad. By focusing on the most common case "emailing photos to grandma" we end up introducing all sorts of new problems.
Instead, we've been struggling (and often failing) to dumb computers down. The fact that people still struggle with the same tasks is a testament to that.
I have lost track of the number of people who have lost precious pictures or documents because they don't understand what device they are stored on, and threw away their old iPad. By focusing on the most common case "emailing photos to grandma" we end up introducing all sorts of new problems.
Just to go into a bit more detail: 1) An auntie thought that dragging 100GB of music into her Dropbox meant that she could just leave on a trip and access her music, without having to wait for it to sync. 2) An uncle didn't know how to access his late wife's photos from her iPad. Which cloud were they in? Were they only on her locked iPad? Who knows! 3) People making public YouTube videos to share private moments with family. (Pedos exploit this to find videos of children bathing)
Have we really improved things? I find these new file abstractions we have created to be much more confusing.
Old people understand the concept of physical media just fine. They know what a record or a roll of film is. And because of this phobia about educating users, we hide so much that they don't even know if their data has been synced, or if it is private.
Have we really improved things? I find these new file abstractions we have created to be much more confusing.
Old people understand the concept of physical media just fine. They know what a record or a roll of film is. And because of this phobia about educating users, we hide so much that they don't even know if their data has been synced, or if it is private.
> Have we really improved things? I find these new file abstractions we have created to be much more confusing.
We haven't, and here's why: a file system was one abstraction. A simple one, that made sense, and wasn't very far detached from actual implementation details. Which meant that weird black magic almost never leaked from underneath.
What we have now, with the cloud and dumbed down software, is many mutually inconsistent and sometimes incompatible abstractions, all completely detached from the reality behind them, which means they have inconsistent corner cases that make no sense unless you know enough about software to be able to imagine what those abstractions are backed by.
In the best tradition of commerce, we've helped people avoid having to learn a simple concept by introducing them to lots of "simplifying" lies.
We haven't, and here's why: a file system was one abstraction. A simple one, that made sense, and wasn't very far detached from actual implementation details. Which meant that weird black magic almost never leaked from underneath.
What we have now, with the cloud and dumbed down software, is many mutually inconsistent and sometimes incompatible abstractions, all completely detached from the reality behind them, which means they have inconsistent corner cases that make no sense unless you know enough about software to be able to imagine what those abstractions are backed by.
In the best tradition of commerce, we've helped people avoid having to learn a simple concept by introducing them to lots of "simplifying" lies.
[deleted]
[deleted]
It would be nice if people actually replied to you instead of just downvoting.
Rings very true. The alarmist views expressed in the article sound like the tale we have been hearing for the past 1-2 decades that desktops and powerful computers are going away, and everything is going to be in the cloud, everyone is going to use thin clients to access everything. It's 2019, where are all the thin clients? I mean I know they exist, but they are not anywhere near becoming "the main way the computing is done".
> Most non-technical people I know cannot manage files even after decades of computing experience. I understand why many services try to abstract or simplify the concept.
You have met my mother I see. She still uses her multi-function printer like a copier because she's never quite grasped the idea that she can store her document scans on her computer.
You have met my mother I see. She still uses her multi-function printer like a copier because she's never quite grasped the idea that she can store her document scans on her computer.
You can pry my files from my cold dead hands.
What amuses me about all of this is that it seems to just further cement software developers as magicians. Back in the day it was the Windows control panel.
Nowadays? I have direct experience with tons of people navigating cloud service settings or whatever else via endless GUIs. Just give me the filesystem. It's all a bunch of JSON configs or whatever anyway. find -name blah -execdir sed -i blah. Bosh.
Well, I'll never struggle for work at least. Perhaps this is our 'guild'...?
What amuses me about all of this is that it seems to just further cement software developers as magicians. Back in the day it was the Windows control panel.
Nowadays? I have direct experience with tons of people navigating cloud service settings or whatever else via endless GUIs. Just give me the filesystem. It's all a bunch of JSON configs or whatever anyway. find -name blah -execdir sed -i blah. Bosh.
Well, I'll never struggle for work at least. Perhaps this is our 'guild'...?
I'm often able to mystify people by fixing something by dropping to a shell and modifying files.. even some developers. I think the one thing that this article points out is how unaware some developers about what they're doing. The author had an example where he used NPM to download dependencies and said "websites were made of files; now they are made of dependencies." While that is not wrong, its too often how people think, and they forget that the dependencies are actually just a bunch of files.
I actually end up helping tons of random people in my company use conda, because they can't get the concept of virtual envs. They don't understand that the libraries are actually files on the disk, and your virtual environment is just a directory and some variables.
That's not to say all developers are like this, but I think the numbers that think like this are growing. Ultimately, I'm like you - they can pry the files from my cold dead hands, if I didn't know what/where/how files were used, I wouldn't fundamentally understand how a lot of different technologies even work.
I actually end up helping tons of random people in my company use conda, because they can't get the concept of virtual envs. They don't understand that the libraries are actually files on the disk, and your virtual environment is just a directory and some variables.
That's not to say all developers are like this, but I think the numbers that think like this are growing. Ultimately, I'm like you - they can pry the files from my cold dead hands, if I didn't know what/where/how files were used, I wouldn't fundamentally understand how a lot of different technologies even work.
I think the author's point of "made of dependencies, not files" is that they are not human files. They are autogenerated webs of dependent repositories, not to be touched by the user, unless something has gone seriously wrong. I wouldn't qualify personal files that are directly created and managed by a human user as being the same thing as a mass of folders curated and managed by a dependency manager utility.
We'd call this karma, I think. On the one hand these big corps create siloed software environments that not only take all control away from users, but also remove the necessity to think. From their pov, users are as dumb as rocks and should stay at that level. At the same time the same corps cry about the lack of supply of new engineers and pretend to promote CS in college (by giving out ipads and watching a colorful presentation about software, I guess).
> pretend to promote CS in college
Potentially because that means in 5-20 years they'll have a much bigger pool of labor available? They've already done illegal market-manipulating collusion which resulted in billions of dollars of salaries not being paid: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19666545 ; in the end they got hit with fines for a few million bucks and some developers got a paycheck for a few thousand bucks (two orders of magnitude less than the wages stolen from them).
I'm just a college student, but I find it hard to not think that when I see the big companies spending tons of money to push people to learn to code.
Potentially because that means in 5-20 years they'll have a much bigger pool of labor available? They've already done illegal market-manipulating collusion which resulted in billions of dollars of salaries not being paid: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19666545 ; in the end they got hit with fines for a few million bucks and some developers got a paycheck for a few thousand bucks (two orders of magnitude less than the wages stolen from them).
I'm just a college student, but I find it hard to not think that when I see the big companies spending tons of money to push people to learn to code.
I think you're reading too much into conspiracy theories. That can be fun and all but I can assure you these things are emergent and not some concerted effort to keep wages lower.
The Steve Jobs market manipulation was def a dick move, but.. well, its Steve Jobs. There will be other such efforts too, but that alone doesn't indicate the kind of concerted market manipulation that you think exists.
The emphasis on coding is similar to the emphasis on schooling and mathematics at the dawn of the industrial revolution: societies realized then that basic mathematical literacy can be immensely beneficial to people. And we understand today that basic programming skills can have a similar transformative effect.
Jobs in tech are increasing at a tremendous rate. As we shift to more automation, the demand for computer literacy will only increase.
The Steve Jobs market manipulation was def a dick move, but.. well, its Steve Jobs. There will be other such efforts too, but that alone doesn't indicate the kind of concerted market manipulation that you think exists.
The emphasis on coding is similar to the emphasis on schooling and mathematics at the dawn of the industrial revolution: societies realized then that basic mathematical literacy can be immensely beneficial to people. And we understand today that basic programming skills can have a similar transformative effect.
Jobs in tech are increasing at a tremendous rate. As we shift to more automation, the demand for computer literacy will only increase.
What I meant is these corps really want to increase the workforce and then cut the salaries, but at the same time they want to profit from dumb users who are easy to rip off. But the corps can't get both.
I don't understand how people can get work done in the post-file world. Any project I've got that's more complicated than a todo list has text files, images, code, links to websites, emails, and typeset documents. The only thing that holds all that stuff, organizes it into folders, lets me edit/run it, and makes the content searchable is a filesystem. Maybe my standards for usability are too high.
That's because the post file world is designed for consumers, not producers. YouTube creators and software programmers are still using standard computers.
It'd be nice if desktop computing went back to the nerds. Let the masses have their mobile, and let computer software not be so dumbed-down.
It seems to me that this is the clear trend. MacOS is increasingly “mobilizing” and Microsoft has already moved to a Windows-as-a-Service [0]. The only sane desktop/workstation choice is Linux and the rift grows wider every year. As the number of use cases for a workstation OS continue to diminish and the big players stop catering to that market segment, sooner or later we’ll reach the fabled Year of the Linux Desktop!
[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/update/w...
[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/update/w...
even for a consumer, file synchronization is very painful without a filesystem. I usually use Resilio Sync between my devices, but I couldn't get it to work properly on an iPad without manually copying files between apps every time I wanted to update a file.
most iPhone consumers I know of are constantly complaining about their phone running out of memory from photos and whatnot, and they don't understand how to transfer between devices.
most iPhone consumers I know of are constantly complaining about their phone running out of memory from photos and whatnot, and they don't understand how to transfer between devices.
It makes sense to me economically. There are probably 1000x as many consumers as prolific creators. It would be nice for casual creators on mobile devices to have better tools, and it looks like we're starting to get there with better filesystem support on iOS/Android.
At work I am constantly battle the following sources of crufty bollocks: the ftp server, the windows-share fileserver, the 'one the linux guys use' (its ssh..), the jira ticket-attachments, the confluence 'pages', peoples mobile-phones, and so on.
If only all of these OS's just had one single, shared, reliable filesystem they could all mount and/or mirror, without .. oh, I get it .. I just install another 3rd-party app ..
C'mon, OS vendors. Pop the cloud already.
If only all of these OS's just had one single, shared, reliable filesystem they could all mount and/or mirror, without .. oh, I get it .. I just install another 3rd-party app ..
C'mon, OS vendors. Pop the cloud already.
I've standardized on Google Drive, which kind of works. Not good enough version control features for code though, which is why I still need git. Been kicking around the idea of moving to git only, but the learning curve is steep (impossible?) for non-programmers.
Just a word of warning on Drive in particular. I received this notice the other day when trying to download one of my files from Drive:
--
Sorry, you can't view or download this file at this time.
Too many users have viewed or downloaded this file recently. Please try accessing the file again later. If the file you are trying to access is particularly large or is shared with many people, it may take up to 24 hours to be able to view or download the file. If you still can't access a file after 24 hours, contact your domain administrator.
--
Note that this was my own file. I was the creator and I was the only downloader.
So, I guess I really didn't own it after all. That's the position that I'm going to have to recommend to anyone using any "cloud" service. If it's in the cloud, you don't own it. If you really care about it, back it up, and test your restores. Your cloud storage can disappear on a whim.
--
Sorry, you can't view or download this file at this time.
Too many users have viewed or downloaded this file recently. Please try accessing the file again later. If the file you are trying to access is particularly large or is shared with many people, it may take up to 24 hours to be able to view or download the file. If you still can't access a file after 24 hours, contact your domain administrator.
--
Note that this was my own file. I was the creator and I was the only downloader.
So, I guess I really didn't own it after all. That's the position that I'm going to have to recommend to anyone using any "cloud" service. If it's in the cloud, you don't own it. If you really care about it, back it up, and test your restores. Your cloud storage can disappear on a whim.
>If only all of these OS's just had one single, shared, reliable filesystem they could all mount and/or mirror...
FTP provides exactly this experience. Every platform can interface with it and it can be made network-transparent.
FTP provides exactly this experience. Every platform can interface with it and it can be made network-transparent.
> If only all of these OS's just had one single, shared, reliable filesystem they could all mount and/or mirror
A local file system? UDF does the job.
A local file system? UDF does the job.
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, because it is socially healthier.
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, because it is socially healthier.
>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.
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.
I think the demographics are closer to thinking the data belongs to an app (the first group) vs. believing the data is its own thing (the second group).
I'm strongly in the second group. I don't object to an app using its specific file format if it's really needed. But I want to have the data in files, which I can independently move around without invoking the app, and possibly view and alter in software other than said app.
I'm strongly in the second group. I don't object to an app using its specific file format if it's really needed. But I want to have the data in files, which I can independently move around without invoking the app, and possibly view and alter in software other than said app.
That’s not going to happen while top-down social policy is to adapt ourselves to what’s good for corporations.
We’re not given much time to consider anything but what’s good for the economy.
Pragmatic acquiescence trickles down.
We’re not given much time to consider anything but what’s good for the economy.
Pragmatic acquiescence trickles down.
This is why years ago I switched to a static site generator. Using something like Django was fragile. My provider would change some library and poof - the site is down. I don't use my site often (post on it once every so many months) - so I simply switched. Never gone down since then.
A few days ago I opened a Jupyter notebook I had authored in 2015 - and it failed to reproduce my results. I relied on pandas, and pandas has gone through API changes. Fortunately, it wasn't hard for me to search around for the newer versions of those APIs and fix things - but this is only 4 years after I authored it. Can I have any confidence that 20 years from now I could reproduce the results - or even find documentation for the APIs I used to understand exactly what I was doing?
I mean sure - I could put the OS and all the libraries needed to reproduce the work in a container and be guaranteed[1] it'll run later, but the only people who will do that are those who need to for regulatory compliance[2].
[1] Not really. The software to run the container may no longer be supported, and the people with the knowledge may charge more than most can afford to get it to work.
[2] Something we're dealing with at work these days. Writing stuff for the automotive industry and they expect that any software + tools should work 15-20 years from now. Same level of expectation for availability as any other car part. Now that there is so much SW in modern cars, this is a good opportunity for being a consultant 15-20 years from now!
A few days ago I opened a Jupyter notebook I had authored in 2015 - and it failed to reproduce my results. I relied on pandas, and pandas has gone through API changes. Fortunately, it wasn't hard for me to search around for the newer versions of those APIs and fix things - but this is only 4 years after I authored it. Can I have any confidence that 20 years from now I could reproduce the results - or even find documentation for the APIs I used to understand exactly what I was doing?
I mean sure - I could put the OS and all the libraries needed to reproduce the work in a container and be guaranteed[1] it'll run later, but the only people who will do that are those who need to for regulatory compliance[2].
[1] Not really. The software to run the container may no longer be supported, and the people with the knowledge may charge more than most can afford to get it to work.
[2] Something we're dealing with at work these days. Writing stuff for the automotive industry and they expect that any software + tools should work 15-20 years from now. Same level of expectation for availability as any other car part. Now that there is so much SW in modern cars, this is a good opportunity for being a consultant 15-20 years from now!
Of course they are. That's just part of the pendulum swinging towards centralization. Files, your files, are an obstacle to centralization so you should lose your ability to access them.
So no more books in your library, just access to books through a device under the control of some large - usually American - entity. No more music collections, just access to someone else's music collection. Ditto for movies, you don't have your own copies, there is just access on a pay-per-view basis.
And of course only the 'proper' artists, movie production houses and writers will be available.
I refuse to play this game. I have my own collection of music, books and movies. Yes, it takes up space. But that's fine with me, at least no billionaire will be able to dictate what I can read, view or listen to.
Extending this to your personal files was an obvious move.
So no more books in your library, just access to books through a device under the control of some large - usually American - entity. No more music collections, just access to someone else's music collection. Ditto for movies, you don't have your own copies, there is just access on a pay-per-view basis.
And of course only the 'proper' artists, movie production houses and writers will be available.
I refuse to play this game. I have my own collection of music, books and movies. Yes, it takes up space. But that's fine with me, at least no billionaire will be able to dictate what I can read, view or listen to.
Extending this to your personal files was an obvious move.
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 documents! I couldn't see the appeal of using the iPhone at all - why would somebody use this when they could just plug an Android device into their PC and use their file explorer? (The update to iOS7 was the nail in the coffin - I found the neon design just repulsive.)
I guess my question is - has the Apple "ecosystem" gotten better for this? Can I actually edit metadata for .mp3s and .mp4s and just drop them into an iPhone or iPad now? And copy them out as well or download them offline, bit for bit? If so, are dongles still the norm?
*An aside - I've definitely eased up on the file-ownership thing now. I just let YouTube Premium handle everything. It was definitely a waste of time retagging thousands of music files out of some strange ownership OCD. I see it as a net positive overall - now I just find it amazing that someone even uploaded some white-label vinyl-only run-of-100 Foul Play UK garage record (and similar records going for >$100 on discogs - maybe even ownership has its limits?) at 128kbps at all, even if it doesn't stay there forever :)
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 documents! I couldn't see the appeal of using the iPhone at all - why would somebody use this when they could just plug an Android device into their PC and use their file explorer? (The update to iOS7 was the nail in the coffin - I found the neon design just repulsive.)
I guess my question is - has the Apple "ecosystem" gotten better for this? Can I actually edit metadata for .mp3s and .mp4s and just drop them into an iPhone or iPad now? And copy them out as well or download them offline, bit for bit? If so, are dongles still the norm?
*An aside - I've definitely eased up on the file-ownership thing now. I just let YouTube Premium handle everything. It was definitely a waste of time retagging thousands of music files out of some strange ownership OCD. I see it as a net positive overall - now I just find it amazing that someone even uploaded some white-label vinyl-only run-of-100 Foul Play UK garage record (and similar records going for >$100 on discogs - maybe even ownership has its limits?) at 128kbps at all, even if it doesn't stay there forever :)
I can say from my experience no it hasn't. You are forced to install iTunes for your computer to even be able to manipulate the device with other software, so even if you have MediaMonkey or an alternative music library you will need to install iTunes first. MediaMonkey works well generally, but as soon as there's an iOS update there's no guarantee you can transfer music because it can break something in the chain.
As for metadata, you still have to use 3rd party (e.g. mp3tag) which can be its own time-consuming headache--at least you can use RegEx.
> [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, and are better at handling the song/track/recording ambiguity in search results.
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, and are better at handling the song/track/recording ambiguity in search results.
The reports of the death of the file(system) are grossly exaggerated.
And it's not been for lack of trying.
While I share many of the author's misgivings, files are actually making a bit of a comeback. After many years of trying to void the very idea of a file, Apple was essentially forced to introduce the Files app for iOS and introduce mass-storage support for (some) iPads. This is a good sign.
The anti-file movement has also been very strong and vocal in the programming world, where many claim that many if not all of our programming problems would go away if only we put our code in databases, or (Smalltalk) images instead. Yet the files, they persist.
That doesn't mean that files, or hierarchical filesystems, are perfect. However, whatever the problems ("Unititled 54.txt", anyone?), the proposed cures for what ails files invariably appear to be worse than the symptoms. And almost inevitably, we have to bring back or reinvent the very same concepts that we gleefully got rid of. That's a resilient concept! One that is apparently useful and pertinent at a somewhat deeper level than we fully understand.
So how about we stop trying to "get rid of files", but instead see if we cannot improve the concept and the mechanism(s) to fix the problems.
And it's not been for lack of trying.
While I share many of the author's misgivings, files are actually making a bit of a comeback. After many years of trying to void the very idea of a file, Apple was essentially forced to introduce the Files app for iOS and introduce mass-storage support for (some) iPads. This is a good sign.
The anti-file movement has also been very strong and vocal in the programming world, where many claim that many if not all of our programming problems would go away if only we put our code in databases, or (Smalltalk) images instead. Yet the files, they persist.
That doesn't mean that files, or hierarchical filesystems, are perfect. However, whatever the problems ("Unititled 54.txt", anyone?), the proposed cures for what ails files invariably appear to be worse than the symptoms. And almost inevitably, we have to bring back or reinvent the very same concepts that we gleefully got rid of. That's a resilient concept! One that is apparently useful and pertinent at a somewhat deeper level than we fully understand.
So how about we stop trying to "get rid of files", but instead see if we cannot improve the concept and the mechanism(s) to fix the problems.
I haven't seen many non-tech people who manage their files in a systematic way. Most non-tech people don't have a naming convention for their files (seen many files named "letter.doc" or "shmith.doc" or "smith2.doc"), let alone a predefined folder structure for their files. What I have seen most of the time is this: A desktop full of files, hundreds, even thousands of files, some within folders, some flat. A chaos.
I am a tech person. I do organise my files in folders. And I don't want any other organizing principle for my documents. But I realize that this concept does not work for most other people.
I am a tech person. I do organise my files in folders. And I don't want any other organizing principle for my documents. But I realize that this concept does not work for most other people.
Perhaps one day we can store stuff directly into a transactional database. I'd actually love to see an OS based on this principle.
Remember WinFS?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS
The idea was that the OS used a relational DB-like file system to store things and recognise them for what they are and deal with them differently instead of everything being streams of bytes, e.g. pictures aren't the same as Word documents.
Didn't materialise but I remember at the time being dead excited by the concept.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS
The idea was that the OS used a relational DB-like file system to store things and recognise them for what they are and deal with them differently instead of everything being streams of bytes, e.g. pictures aren't the same as Word documents.
Didn't materialise but I remember at the time being dead excited by the concept.
And the database will at a lower level consist of ..... files.....
High end databases are often run directly on block storage. The db already manages allocation and caching so a filesystem just adds overhead and wonky semantics.
And therefore files will eventually go extinct?
And therefore your nitpick that a database will consist of files is wrong. (not to mention that the article is not about files as an implementation detail, but as files about a user interface)
What is this magical "high-end" database that operates without the use of any "files"? Certainly not Oracle or Sybase. Sure, they have "data partitions", but the database executables are distributed and stored in files. And what is the magical file-less operating system that they run on? Ooooh we're in "files are extinct land". Where nothing needs files.
Files were an abstraction that appeared as well as disappeared in my lifetime, at least on home computers - before them, you were saving direct to the medium which was mostly audio magtape. And I've honestly never really liked them.
Files get lost in the clutter, get overwritten or corrupted, don't get saved when you crash, are on this computer and not that one, don't make it across when you transition to a newer box, have to be mailed around or put on (gasp) physical media and passed around like a crude lump of plastic. And then your media gets a virus, oops.
It was an improvement to autosave. It was an improvement to version. It was an improvement to distribute across redundant backups. It was an improvement, to be able to get at it from anywhere.
There's UI issues in the new way of doing things, but that seems likely to shake out with experience. Files were often clunky at first too.
Files get lost in the clutter, get overwritten or corrupted, don't get saved when you crash, are on this computer and not that one, don't make it across when you transition to a newer box, have to be mailed around or put on (gasp) physical media and passed around like a crude lump of plastic. And then your media gets a virus, oops.
It was an improvement to autosave. It was an improvement to version. It was an improvement to distribute across redundant backups. It was an improvement, to be able to get at it from anywhere.
There's UI issues in the new way of doing things, but that seems likely to shake out with experience. Files were often clunky at first too.
Also it's worth mentioning, if I still had my files from my 486 PC (I don't), could I even access them? Mostly, not, or not without an emulator and fifty floppy disks of some ancient app I binned in the 1990s. And a floppy disk drive. And an adaptor cable.
Files rot, unless they are intentionally low rot by design. Most weren't.
Files rot, unless they are intentionally low rot by design. Most weren't.
Files and directories are not a great abstraction. Never have been.
E.g. the insides of git are much better (although the abstractions layered on top are fucking gruesome.)
Something like IPFS is an obvious way forward. https://ipfs.io/
E.g. the insides of git are much better (although the abstractions layered on top are fucking gruesome.)
Something like IPFS is an obvious way forward. https://ipfs.io/
Problem is that we're not getting a better interoperable metadata-rich relational object storage system. We're getting closed silos in short-lived cloud surveillance services.
I agree, but then the issue is social/political rather than technical.
I'd love it if the WWW was e.g. Xanadu+Prolog.
I'd love it if the WWW was e.g. Xanadu+Prolog.
And ipfs is really just a combo of the two concepts: files and folders wrapped into a git-like tree of hashes; and all that tree-hash-files-folders structure is being synced over a torrent-like protocol.
From my POV it's more like distributed content-addressable RAM with support for file/directory-structured blobs. You can build alternate abstractions over it.
Non-technical people will not hesitate to adopt online services to manage their data. I have a dropbox and other services of my own, but I'm talking about the mainstream apps mentioned in the article that also have a purpose.
People completely ignore the fact you would have no access to this data if you have no online connection (or access to the account). It's not that files are going away, it's that they're being increasingly managed by tech companies, and normal people don't know any better, as evident by the article's title... it shows the author doesn't what files are for and that they are invisibly managed by a third party.
People completely ignore the fact you would have no access to this data if you have no online connection (or access to the account). It's not that files are going away, it's that they're being increasingly managed by tech companies, and normal people don't know any better, as evident by the article's title... it shows the author doesn't what files are for and that they are invisibly managed by a third party.
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.
"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.
My major concern is that data backup is getting more and more difficult. I feel it's increasingly more difficult to figure out what to back up and how to restore it. I have heard several horror stories from people who messed up something and had all their cloud data disappear forever.
If this resonates with you, I'd invite you to follow my work on MooseDrive [0]. I'm calling it a "data ownership" company. The product is focused on storage for developers.
[0] https://moosedrive.io
[0] https://moosedrive.io
To me the whole idea of data ownership and everything this article is talking about is antithetical to some company somewhere or cloud storage. I personally collect mp3s. I could easily pay for a Spotify subscription or even have it included as part of a mobile phone contract at a discounted rate, but I prefer to have the actual files on my computer, I own them and no one can change that fact. I religiously catalogue and sort all my files and back them up to multiple external media constantly. I am currently working on a couple of projects that are all to do with organising files locally via their metadata (mp3s, JPEGs, et al). I avoid anything cloud. I am slowly but surely migrating away from the cloud.
The vision for the product is for you to be able to do everything you just described, and still have the files available for sharing and publishing through the cloud. Note, that doesn't mean stored in the cloud, unless that's what the user wants.
Would read, but alas, behind the medium paywall...
Aren't all things in computers eventually a file (descriptor)?
And with the rate of data volume increasing, things going the opposite of the headline?
And with the cloud, they are being replicated multiple times there and locally?
Aren't all things in computers eventually a file (descriptor)?
And with the rate of data volume increasing, things going the opposite of the headline?
And with the cloud, they are being replicated multiple times there and locally?
> The file has been replaced with the platform, the service, the ecosystem. ... When we stop paying, we’re left with nothing. No files. The service is revoked
> Years ago websites were made of files; now they are made of dependencies.
Similar to the ongoing trend of turning every product into service, both on-line and off-line. It turns ownership into relationships, which is something I consider strongly negative. Ownership doesn't require as much maintenance and is much more forgiving, and I can own a lot of things, but there's only so many relationships I can be in before my mind is no longer able to keep track of them all.
File this next to "Mouse buttons are going extinct, because Apple."
Can medium go extinct first?
I couldn’t read this medium article, it said that I had read too many free articles this month, but hopefully this is relevant: files “are back” in iPadOS. Most iPad apps had interoperability with data in other apps, when it made sense but now with the new File app, I am increasingly doing more on my iPad Pro. I have a GPU rig for deep learning, and use a MacBook for Lisp and Haskell hacking, but now most of my time is spent on an iPad doing research, writing, and entertainment.
"Files are dead" is an oft-quoted meme, but they aren't going away anytime soon.
I wrote a piece offering a counterpoint to this view five years ago (in response to a similar article by Fred Wilson) and I think most of the points still hold true today:
https://blog.zamzar.com/2015/01/02/why-fred-wilson-is-wrong-...
I wrote a piece offering a counterpoint to this view five years ago (in response to a similar article by Fred Wilson) and I think most of the points still hold true today:
https://blog.zamzar.com/2015/01/02/why-fred-wilson-is-wrong-...
I find myself very frustrated using newer versions of the Microsoft Office suite. When I want to save a file, I just want the tried-and-true Windows file dialog popped up, but instead I have to click around and avoid going into weird Onedrive dialogs.
I save everything to OneDrive anyway, but I'm a not-so-old fogey that is more comfortable using the filesystem myself, rather than crummy layers stuck on top of it.
I save everything to OneDrive anyway, but I'm a not-so-old fogey that is more comfortable using the filesystem myself, rather than crummy layers stuck on top of it.
> Files are skeuomorphic. That’s a fancy word that just means they’re a digital concept that mirrors a physical item.
So, the digital equivalent of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopoeia
So, the digital equivalent of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopoeia
For a better reading experience and for those using Cloudflare's DNS: https://outline.com/yU64Cu
I do use Cloudflare’s DNS but I’ll admit I don’t know much/anything about how it really works... can you explain why the DNS server would matter here?
Somewhat related, I have made a deal with the devil and use Comcast and, until yesterday, I was using their combo modem/router. Comcast doesn’t let you change the router’s DNS settings (which are, of course, set to Comcast servers) but I was under the impression that the DNS settings closest to the client always prevailed. But fiddling around with WireShark yesterday I could clearly see my DNS requests going to 75.75.75.75 (Comcast) even though my laptop was set to use CloudFlare. Is that even possible? Could the router have been set by Comcast to somehow override my settings or to intercept & reroute DNS requests?
Somewhat related, I have made a deal with the devil and use Comcast and, until yesterday, I was using their combo modem/router. Comcast doesn’t let you change the router’s DNS settings (which are, of course, set to Comcast servers) but I was under the impression that the DNS settings closest to the client always prevailed. But fiddling around with WireShark yesterday I could clearly see my DNS requests going to 75.75.75.75 (Comcast) even though my laptop was set to use CloudFlare. Is that even possible? Could the router have been set by Comcast to somehow override my settings or to intercept & reroute DNS requests?
archive.is inaccessible via Cloudflare DNS:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317
Remember "Worse is Better" by Gabriel?
Lisp was a correct, consistent and complete system, prioritizing these over simplicity. C, on the other hand, was a simple system but not nearly as much complete, consistent or correct as Lisp. Nevertheless, Lisp lost to C.
This is what happens when Capitalism meets Software. When it comes to winning markets, shipping simple stuff is always better than shipping a slightly more complex (in terms of code as well as UX) but correct stuff. That is why most companies prioritize feature development over bugfixes. That is why selecting multiple items from a list is still inconsistent across the web. That is why XMPP lost and Whatsapp and Messenger are winning.
There are efforts like Solid (https://solid.inrupt.com) by Tim Berners-Lee himself that's trying to bring back the concept of files and data-ownership to end-users, to enforce correctness and consistency. But I'm still skeptical if the efforts will ever win the market.
This is what happens when Capitalism meets Software. When it comes to winning markets, shipping simple stuff is always better than shipping a slightly more complex (in terms of code as well as UX) but correct stuff. That is why most companies prioritize feature development over bugfixes. That is why selecting multiple items from a list is still inconsistent across the web. That is why XMPP lost and Whatsapp and Messenger are winning.
There are efforts like Solid (https://solid.inrupt.com) by Tim Berners-Lee himself that's trying to bring back the concept of files and data-ownership to end-users, to enforce correctness and consistency. But I'm still skeptical if the efforts will ever win the market.
Your database (in the context of things like blogs and so on) is a filesystem, it's just built on top of a higher level abstraction than traditional filesystems.
It reminds me of Stallman's best quote: the computer industry is more fashionable than the women's fashion industry.
For much the same reasons.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=information+th...
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=information+th...
Some of this is that the file/folder abstraction is inadequate for organizing large amounts of data.
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?
I can imagine corporations totally like the idea of users not being able to save their own precious data to a file. In the end they want to own and control your data as much as possible for profit and power. And they sell that idea by telling you it's more convenient. As if it were not possible to create great file management tools or maybe even your own files as a database that you can manage easily.
Same with the 'cloud'. What's the difference between running your own FTP server and a cloud server? Technically not that much IMAO, only the latter means the data is controlled by some corporation running that server. And why is there hardly any progress in the area of building a private turn-key 'cloud' server so you don't need gmail, dropbox, github, etc..? I'm sure it can be made, easy to setup, robust, with backup, you name it, just like a Mac pc that's made for non technical people. We know how to build it, but we don't do it, we build for corporations instead.
The further we go down this road the less control we will have, and the ramifications of that don't look pretty to me to say the least.
Same with the 'cloud'. What's the difference between running your own FTP server and a cloud server? Technically not that much IMAO, only the latter means the data is controlled by some corporation running that server. And why is there hardly any progress in the area of building a private turn-key 'cloud' server so you don't need gmail, dropbox, github, etc..? I'm sure it can be made, easy to setup, robust, with backup, you name it, just like a Mac pc that's made for non technical people. We know how to build it, but we don't do it, we build for corporations instead.
The further we go down this road the less control we will have, and the ramifications of that don't look pretty to me to say the least.
With the advent of database-managed, self-hosted personal clouds (i.e Nextcloud/Droppy,) the difference is even smaller. It's developing into a self-hosted "just works" personal cloud ecosystem.
A HN comment from 2 years ago I bookmarked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15235151
The war on general computing implies disempowering users, rather than empowering them. But that it's "not surprising" doesn't mean it's good, or that it can't be reversed.
I wonder what associations for craftsmanship in software, respect for users, and similar things there are? If there was a web ring about that, I would browse it.
The war on general computing implies disempowering users, rather than empowering them. But that it's "not surprising" doesn't mean it's good, or that it can't be reversed.
I wonder what associations for craftsmanship in software, respect for users, and similar things there are? If there was a web ring about that, I would browse it.
Heh, that's a possibility, actually. Govs like how software and personal phones enable global surveillance, but they don't like the power that general computing devices give (all these encryption protocols, bitcoins and so on). So obviously some people in the govs are trying to convince the rest to keep the first and take back the general computing part. We may even see in our lifetimes how common people will only be allowed access to dumb software (the Apple model), and general unrestricted software and hardware will be threated like weapons, with licenses and prison time for software engineers. The alternative path for society is cheap and powerful general use phones with quantum coprocessors and a constitutional amendments that defend these rights. I'm pretty sure that the two alternatives are now being considered somewhere in DoD offices.
Files will never go "extinct". Files exist. They will continue to exist. You people are insane.
The author says "everyone started to use Spotify" Everyone? Yeah everyone with their shiny $1000+ iFon toys in their hands doing touch gestures.
Spotify has 215m users. I’d assume that is more than the group that used to download MP3s and burn CDs (which would require some technical knowhow and a CD burner).
You're seriously exaggerating. In the past, almost everyone had a CD-burner. You could use just a couple of clear as day GUI programs, a dozen of clicks and one drag and drop to download an album and burn a CD. Eleven year olds were doing it no problem.
iTunes was the most popular music source by 2007 and had built in CD burning capabilities. You created a playlist and hit “burn”. Almost every computer came with a CD burner between around 2000-2010.
I agree, this doesn't sound "everyone": https://support.spotify.com/us/using_spotify/the_basics/full...
Apple music is available in another 59 countries that Spotify is not.
Apple music is available in another 59 countries that Spotify is not.
It's not like Spotify has some insurmountable specs to run or is only available on iOS. I have it running in Manjaro, and its catalog is far more extensive than what I could have found on SoulSeek or DC++ back in the day.
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 experience identity and relationships this way, it's now a lot harder to teach lower-level abstractions. In my experience, this has changed over the last five years.