https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
A generation that grew up with Google is forcing professors to rethink their lesson plans
Catherine Garland, an astrophysicist, started seeing the problem in 2017. She was teaching an engineering course, and her students were using simulation software to model turbines for jet engines. She'd laid out the assignment clearly, but student after student was calling her over for help. They were all getting the same error message: The program couldn't find their files.
Garland thought it would be an easy fix. She asked each student where they'd saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. "What are you talking about?" multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn't understand the question.
Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations' understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.
Professors have varied recollections of when they first saw the disconnect. But their estimates (even the most tentative ones) are surprisingly similar. It's been an issue for four years or so, starting — for many educators — around the fall of 2017.
That's approximately when Lincoln Colling, a lecturer in the psychology department at the University of Sussex, told a class full of research students to pull a file out of a specific directory and was met with blank stares. It was the same semester that Nicolás Guarín-Zapata, an applied physicist and lecturer at Colombia's Universidad EAFIT, noticed that students in his classes were having trouble finding their documents. It's the same year that posts began to pop up on STEM-educator forums asking for help explaining the concept of a file.
While some of us may find this phenomenon strange to understand it is becoming increasingly real for many. Are there any other examples of things that we take for granted becoming incomprehensible to those younger that ourselves? I'm not thinking of 'hanging up' the telephone, or why the icon for saving a file appears to some young people to be a vending machine, but things that cause difficulty for others.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28, @02:03PM (14 children)
I think this is a symptom of the general fall in computer literacy and comprehension. I have mentored many young people and they basically just chuck information down wherever they can without organising it as that is “unnecessary”. Naming conventions, dating and organising in relevant folders is not a thing these days — just as backups are out of fashion, except for the “elite”.
OK, I hanker back to the time of floppies where they would fail so often you could get nightmares if you hadn't made your backups, sometimes living in the twilight zone between your word processor going down before saving the work to a floppy.
Ye horrors 😱
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28, @02:38PM (13 children)
There is probably a combination of factors that led to this situation.
For one, search has indeed become much more powerful than it used to be 20 years ago. Hitting the Windows/super key followed by a few letters of a recent file is often successful and if so, much faster than browsing through even just one folder, even if everything is on the desktop.
Second, cloud providers have shoved their solutions down everybody’s throats, with Google in a leading position. Some Android vendors have also been accomplices of that. Your photos are in a "Photos" app, and for most uses you don’t need to know whether that’s in /storage/emulated/0/DCIM, or "the cloud"...
Finally, computers nowadays mostly just work, and "most" activities that "most" people use computers for are mainly web-oriented. When I was young, with no internet around, the main activity after getting bored of the three games that came with my Packard Bell was clicking everywhere in the OS, trying to understand as much as possible about the system, trying to configure the silliest of things; Who configures OS sounds anymore?
(Score: 3, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 28, @05:17PM
>Who configures OS sounds anymore?
I do, professionally. I configure them all off in our product so they don't distract from or conflict with the sounds we make in our kiosk mode app.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28, @05:53PM (4 children)
Windows search sucks ass and regularry does not find what i'm looking for.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Tork on Friday April 28, @06:40PM (2 children)
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28, @11:53PM (1 child)
By default Windows 10 file explorer search can't find stuff that used to be found with Windows 7. And also no longer supports "live searching"[1].
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/windows-10-file-explorer-search-wildcard/feeef179-a29c-4197-a8f8-65b6d8a78442 [microsoft.com]
MS Teams search doesn't work - can't go to the actual message (and context). So it's about as useless as a web search engine that doesn't allow you to visit the webpage that has the search terms.
Outlook search is slightly better but often doesn't work either.
Seems like Microsoft started breaking search sometime after Windows XP/7.
Guess search is now more about you finding the stuff they want you to find, not the stuff you want to find.
The ironic thing is nowadays lots of PCs have SSDs and fast enough CPUs so even the Win 95/2K dumb brute force way would be able to find the stuff fast enough in most cases - since most people don't have that many files. With SSDs you can go through 1TB in seconds or faster.
[1] https://www.majorgeeks.com/content/page/windows_10_instant_results_live_search_removed_what_you_can_do.html [majorgeeks.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Saturday April 29, @02:35AM
Even on old spinning rust, the old search method was speedy enough up to around 100k files or so.
I don't know what the fuck Windows 10 does, because I gave up even trying to use its search.
Fortunately, I tend to keep mine sorted out. If I lose something, it's usually Windows being clever about where it puts it. (No I do not want my image files in your stupid picture directory, did you hear that, DIRECTORY.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28, @07:15PM
> Windows search sucks ass and regularry does not find what i'm looking for.
Funny typo!
Listen, if you can't spell *larry's name correctly, then Search isn't going to find him.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Friday April 28, @06:13PM (3 children)
You forgot to mention - in android (at least) you are barely even allowed to browse your file system. On my android phone I can't backup my contacts list without rooting my phone or paying someone. WTF?
(Score: 5, Informative) by owl on Friday April 28, @07:17PM
This is a huge source of the issue. For a huge portion of the 18 year old's just now entering college, the only computer they have ever interacted with regularally is their cell phone. And on both Android and IOS, the filesystem and even files themselves are hidden away so deeply that it is quite possible for phone only computer users to literally not even know about files or filesystems.
Take photos/videos as an example. On phones, one does not open a "file browser" (if one even exists, Android has one, well hidden away, that is nearly impossible to use for doing anything but looking at "Downloads") and navigate to one's Photos folder to then find the files that are the photos and videos.
Instead, one opens the "gallery app" -- and the app hides away all the files and folders from the user. And this is the same with everything else on phones. If this is the only interaction with a computer a new college student has ever had, it is little wonder they simply do not understand "file" or "file system" or "folder" in any way at all.
(Score: 3, Informative) by aebonyne on Friday April 28, @09:45PM
I use Slight Backup [f-droid.org]. It looks like you have to enable side-loading so you can install it through F-Droid, but it's free (and libre) and doesn't require root.
Centralization breaks the internet.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday April 29, @02:38AM
When did this happen? I have a very old Android (3.x??) phone whose present mission in life is to export my contacts list on demand.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Friday April 28, @06:25PM (1 child)
Fast forward to today and ... well I think Apple sort of did it, but not as ambitiously. I'm a Mac user, and I also use an iPhone and iPad to do my daily work stuff. Images are particularly of importance and so I make use of Apple's "Photo Album". And that photo album is just a big database of photos. If I take a photo on my phone it gets added to the DB and then automatically syncs to any other devices I have logged in to that iTunes account. For example: I can take a photo on my phone, then flip over to my Mac, open the "Photo Album" on Mac and bam there's my photo, I can just copy-paste into wherever it needs to go. (There's an added benefit of it double checking that the photo isn't a dupe, that's a recent addition I think.)
So... yeah my photos are all in a database and not in a folder structure anymore. Oh and ya wanna hear something creepy? I can search for photos of people by typing in their names. I had a Trump meme in my camera roll and was able to search to find it. It can also find photos of me or my wife just by typing in the name. I think I had to tell it it was her, though, but now it recognizes her across most of my photos. Okay I wandered off-topic here but I was surprised by that. Fun fact: It can tell I have cats in my camera roll but it doesn't recognize them individually ... yet.
I don't really know much about how computers are used by the younger generation today but if my experience is any indication I do kinda wonder if, generally speaking, things like file-paths are on their way out and smartphones might be to blame. From my point of view that's not really a case of growing ignorance but more of a case of evolving needs/uses.
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 3, Informative) by driverless on Saturday April 29, @03:49AM
WinFS, the unkillable zombie "great idea" that's been hanging around forever.
The concept did actually get put into practice, only at the application level rather than the filesystem level, so you have the Windows GUI and a bunch of applications all sort-of emulating what WinFS was supposed to do.
Badly.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Saturday April 29, @03:45AM
Yup, it's the vendors who are the problem, not the users. As they've dumbed things down more and more on each UI refresh they've removed the ability to usefully interact with the technology. Einstein's "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler” applies here as it does to other things like cars: It's not a go-somewhere wheely-thing, it's a car that needs some knowledge of how it operates in order to use it and you can only simplify it to a certain point before it actually becomes harder to use, not easier. For a prime example of this in UI design, consider the escape-room UI that's become trendy in the last decade or so, where instead of (for desktop use) typing Cmd-H you have to click on the top right corner of the tab while holding shift and then slide the invisible lever at the bottom over to make the toolbar visible and then select the half-brick icon and double-click it and then drag and drop it over the object you want to modify. Don't bother learning all this though because in three weeks it'll change again.
Since vendors like Google and Microsoft have for at least a decade now degenerated from actual innovation to just UI designers wanking around with their opinions because they can't think of anything else to do, what they're doing is training a generation of people to not know how to use the tools at their disposal. Here kid, have a blunt chisel made of styrofoam, we've simplified it for you so you don't have to worry about sharp edges or how to hold it or anything else.
(Score: 4, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28, @02:24PM (6 children)
...but at least they understand that there are 38 genders and that men can get pregnant. You know, the important stuff.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28, @03:12PM (5 children)
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28, @05:14PM (3 children)
Did it have a rainbow on it? I know it had a mentally ill pervert on it, but I don't recall a rainbow.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28, @06:01PM (2 children)
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28, @06:50PM (1 child)
Oh no, they stopped drinking the pisswater! Let's shame them into sucking the tranny cock!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28, @07:01PM
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28, @06:29PM
(Score: 5, Insightful) by BsAtHome on Friday April 28, @02:30PM (2 children)
Welcome to Idiocracy.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 28, @03:03PM (1 child)
Nothing new, see below about my digital design student from 1989...
Funny thing happened one semester. I taught that lab 5 times, and 4/5 times there were generally one or two star students who "got it" and carried the room, everybody else more or less copied what they did and got by o.k. in the end. One semester was lacking a star student... they even came out and identified this challenge for us. As teaching assistants we worked 5x harder that semester and the class still struggled. They weren't even smart enough to copy work from previous semesters (which was exactly identical...) not even when presented by us, made freely available as "sample implementations" etc. They could do the mechanical copy, but just couldn't understand or explain how any of it worked or why to save their lives.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28, @05:41PM
Those guys are now your boss.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by digitalaudiorock on Friday April 28, @02:50PM (7 children)
I have to wonder how much of this is at least partially because of Windows nonsense. That is, how all the default folders are obfuscated as "My Documents" etc. I mean FFS...They seem to go out of their way to pretend C:\ isn't even there. Compare that to all defaults being in /home/username on 'nix. The difficulty folks have finding files on Windows is very common as far as I see.
Compare that to how I do things: I run Gentoo running just fluxbox. I haven't used any sort of "file explorer" in decades. A urxvt terminal using "cd" and "ls" is my file explorer, and when combined with tab completion, that's orders of magnitude faster than any GUI.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 28, @02:59PM (5 children)
On its face, the "recently used documents folder" is a godsend, until is isn't serving your needs that is.
Far better is a consistent interface, across applications, which makes it easy to find what you're looking for.
But: the global set of software developers, given freedom to stuff files in any one of a hundred possible locations, can never be expected to standardize. They call software development management at the 1 to 10 level "Herding Cats" - imagine how that scales internationally across millions of developers.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Friday April 28, @03:19PM (4 children)
Speaking of default file locations, I absolutely detest programs that don't honor you're current working directory, notably when run from a command prompt. Libreoffice is one example. That's one that makes me want to scream.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 28, @03:24PM
Qt has a QDesktop class that semi-standardizes file locations across operating systems, things like Desktop, Documents, current working folder, etc.
There _should_ be a standard that is taught by every school, API, etc. but, sadly, I've never encountered one.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Touché) by maxwell demon on Friday April 28, @06:27PM
Well, users that are working directories are uncommon enough that this possibility may be safely ignored. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Friday April 28, @07:29PM (1 child)
I often bring up the "save as" dialog again just to find out where the heck LibreOffice put the file.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Saturday April 29, @02:43AM
I wonder if this is an OS-related thing (even if the deficiency lies in LO). It remembers where I put it on XP. On the rare occasions I've used it on some species of linux, I've had to go dumpster-diving every single time.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Sunday April 30, @03:40AM
I make a lot of use of "locate". "ls -tr | tail" is often helpful. "find" is more powerful, but the large number of options makes use difficult, and I've had trouble getting consistent results. "grep -si" or "grep -sir" is good for text files.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by shellsterdude on Friday April 28, @02:54PM (14 children)
It is possibly acceptable to be getting a college degree and not be the most computer literate in certain fields. If you are an engineer or computer scientist, or really in any technical field and you're too dumb or incompetent to understand filesystems and/or too dumb or incompetent to figure out how to figure out what one is in the age of the internet, then you are too stupid and/or helpless to be in that field and you should fail out. We have had multiple generations of "We shouldn't be too harsh, they just need to learn in a 'different way'", and it's predictably led to a generation that is incredibly incapable of basic tasks, and worse, the ability or curiosity to learn. The only thing many of these students have learned is that if they appear helpless and blame their failures on some intrinsic trait about themselves, people will give them a pass. This cannot continue or humanity at large will actually become helpless and stupid. There is a huge difference between helping flagging students and coddling them, and we've clearly slipped well into coddling. Another thing we've managed to "teach" the current generation is that everything that came before them is bigoted, inferior, and thus irrelevant to them. This is just a convenient excuse to be lazy and incurious. How can a student be expected to have context about how computers work, for instance, if they don't at least have a cursory understanding of how computers evolved? This is true of everything. You don't need to be an expert to learn a little bit of history about all the things that intersect with your daily experience and your chosen career.
(Score: 5, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 28, @03:07PM (12 children)
I taught at a private University in the late 1980s.
A for-profit private University.
A private university that pulled me aside for giving too many Ds and Fs in the digital design lab homework assignments - I would only go so low when absolutely no understanding of the core concepts was demonstrated on the paper (no demonstration D) or they didn't really even try (no effort F).
I was told, in direct terms: "These are paying customers, if they show up to class most of the time and they turn anything at all in they get at least a C."
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2, Troll) by DannyB on Friday April 28, @04:10PM (5 children)
They should get a trophy for participation. And have a big ceremony about it.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 28, @05:32PM (3 children)
>They should get a trophy for participation.
For $20K per year in 1988 they sure should be getting something.
Funny thing, a few weeks before I got my Masters' degree, I got a B.S. parking ticket (empty lot, semester hadn't started, but they were paying the parking enforcers to start early, so....) I appealed (first ticket I ever appealed) - was denied. I pulled my transcripts before the ticket could register with the system (at a cost very close to paying the ticket itself), they didn't show my degree or last semester's credits yet, but had everything else. I decided to not pay the $20 fine and see what happened.
1st job never asked for transcripts, and couldn't have gotten them behind my back because there was a hold on them due to the fine. That job ran for 12 years.
In the meantime, I would get a monthly letter requesting I pay the ticket. I bought a house and moved, didn't inform the university, but after a year they tracked me down and continued to send a letter a month asking for payment. I believe the letters continued for nearly 10 years, I know it was more than seven. Postage on 120 letters alone was easily more than the fine, even at bulk rate which they didn't always use, some were hand licked stamps. Then the cost of envelopes, printing the notices, carrying the item on the books and auditing it every year - that attempt to collect a B.S. $20 fine easily cost my Alma Mater over $100 through the years. Apparently something prevented them from accruing interest on the unpaid fine...
Next job at graduation +12 years and some months asked for my transcripts and diploma - I gave them what I had, the incomplete transcript and the B.S. paper thing they hand out in the ceremony that's well known by everyone to be symbolic and not actual proof of conferment of the degree - I was thinking for a minute that I'd finally have to cough up the $20, but nope. Accepted at pay level 5 (highest available in the company) for 12 years experience with an applicable Masters Degree. Jobs after that never asked at at all.
Makes one wonder just how many people actually just fake the degree and get away with it forever. I earned mine, but have never been able to produce proof, hasn't even slightly bothered me yet.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 4, Funny) by Reziac on Saturday April 29, @02:45AM
Oh, that $20 fine that went on to perpetuity wasn't about YOU.
It was about the person in charge of chasing around piddly-ass deadbeats continuing to have a cushy job at university expense.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 29, @06:14PM
That wouldn't have happened to have been a California school, was it? I had a colleague who graduated undergrad from Berkeley in the early 80's and in the 2010's he got a nastygram from them claiming he owed them several hundred dollars from his undergrad days. He was able to prove to their satisfaction that he did not owe them that money (I don't remember the details), but it was troubling/annoying to him that they hunted him down after 30 years and made these accusations.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Mykl on Sunday April 30, @11:21PM
I bet you also park in handicapped spaces when there aren't any handicapped people around.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 28, @05:41PM
Oh, regarding the ceremony, I could have easily walked three times: once for my BS - which I did, once for my MS a semester before I earned it because all my friends were getting their degree then and we wanted to walk together, so I did it then too, and after I actually received the degree I could have walked again - that last parking ticket was still under appeal when the ceremony happened. I suspect at my school you can "graduate" every semester if you want to: "free" cap and gown, "free" ceremonial diploma, even "free" yearbooks, you just have to be present to ask for one. "Free" for everyone paying $10K+ per semester (or, like me, working for $14K per year + "free" tuition, when I should easily have been paid at least $30K per year for my teaching work)... It's a fun ceremony - once - even twice with friends.
After a couple of decades of dragging around the cap and gown, letting my kids wear them for halloween once, I finally threw them out. The diplomas and ceremonial Bents etc. are in a box somewhere, haven't been seen by anyone for many years.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday April 28, @06:17PM (3 children)
Oh great. And I didn't think I could get any more cynical about conventional education system.
(Score: 3, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 28, @06:42PM (2 children)
That was certainly one of the more impactful life lessons from my 6+ years there. That, and: never let a drunk Cuban kid ride in your car after winning a football game.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday April 28, @06:57PM (1 child)
> never let a drunk Cuban kid ride in your car after winning a football game.
Oh, I don't wanna know. Yeah no.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 28, @07:30PM
If it's any consolation: he didn't get sick. I don't think he actually consumed very much alcohol in reality, he was just acting like he did.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28, @07:17PM (1 child)
Place: A University, London, England
Time: Sometime in the 90's
Event: Final Year Electrical&Electronic Engineering Students Maths exam
Number of passes: 1
98% Foreign Students, their respective Governments etc were paying the big fat full fees which the place had become dependent on, it was a big case of 'oh fuck!'...so, one quick shifting of a marking curve later...magically 90% pass (some scoring as low as 9% in the exam).
Working in Higher Education was fun.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 29, @12:14AM
I dunno, in my university, the EE students most likely to pass were the foreign students, harder to redo if you were paying big fat full fees.
It was the Brits who would be failing. Not the Singaporeans, and they wouldn't need the curve thing to pass the math... Probably similar today.
Heck in the USA they're using a curve thing or something to reduce the number of Asians entering Harvard.
Well there are 4.7 billion Asians. So top 1% is about 47M, the population of UK is about 67M.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fliptop on Friday April 28, @04:54PM
Are you suggesting this should replace calculus as the "weed out the weaklings" class?
To be oneself, and unafraid whether right or wrong, is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 28, @02:56PM (25 children)
1989, teaching a senior level digital design course in the electrical engineering department (we didn't have a computer engineering accreditation yet, that was coming next year - but this course was squarely in the middle of the computer engineering curriculum about to be accredited.) The first two weeks were doing a paper design and testing it in hardware, the balance of the course was using a Mentor Graphics simulation system to learn what you missed during your paper design and hand testing. It was a DRAM controller, and as part of the lab demonstration I would pull the refresh clock wire and ask them to test it again - some tried to refuse to test it, certain it would fail because DRAM needs refreshing, right? In the lab, it never failed, even with the refresh signal completely disconnected, grounded, pulled high, whatever - the DRAM never lost a stored bit, as tested by hand in the lab. The simulator showed a very different side of design: actually checking all the setup and hold times, etc. and guaranteeing that your controller design met all required specifications, not just "works for me on the bench."
So, we've got a room full of basically computer engineering students, about to graduate and go out into the world with degrees from our university in Electrical Engineering with a specialization in Computer Engineering, and one of these gems drops this on me:
"I don't understand how to work with directory trees or folders, you have to do that part for me."
"No, I don't, this is part of the skills you should already have before coming to this class. I'll show you how they work..."
"No! I'm not required to know that, this is a course on digital design, not computer folder trees, there was no pre-requisite course teaching folders."
"No, yourself. Digital circuit simulation is the bulk of this course, using the Mentor Graphics tools. In order to use the tools, you need to know how to navigate the file system of the computer that the simulator is running on."
"NO! You have to do that part for me, that's not part of this course!!!"
"You chose to do the labs independently, while we recommended that everyone pair up, or make a team of 3. Your partner almost certainly could show you how it works, there's no way I'm going to navigate the file system for you every time you have to interact with it."
"I'm a special older (like 32 years old) student, I have a JOB, I can't be here on other people's schedules, I can't spend my time learning things that aren't part of the course..."
There were almost always other groups in the lab when he was there, that argument ended when one of them stepped up and showed him how it works - like I offered to do from the outset. I think, mentally, he accepted the other lab student's help because the student was "doing that part for him" - but, in reality, he was bright enough to pick it up after seeing what was involved once or twice.
That born in 1959 and earlier generation often had the "I don't need to learn anything about computers, it's just a waste of my time" attitude. Why one of those took a course in digital design is still a mystery, although the result was made clear to me at another time - message from the Dean of Engineering delivered to me via my Advisor regarding how I was grading the lab homework: "These are paying customers, if they show up and turn anything at all in, they get at least a C."
It's not entirely shocking that a younger generation is taking on the same lame "oh, I don't need to know any of that stuff, I get by just fine without it" attitude, since they're always interacting with their apps at higher levels.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Rich on Friday April 28, @03:29PM (16 children)
Tales from the elders. In ca. 1991, a music journalist I know asked me and a friend for a suggestion to move up from typewriter and fax. We got him a Mac LC. He was very happy and everything was fine for maybe a year. Then he told us that it takes ages to open a file. We went back for a visit and found out that zillions of files had piled up in a single folder and the file dialog was aching under the load. We told him about folders, he understood, was happy again, and he's been using these ever since (going through iirc two or three more machines) and neatly organizes much more stuff now.
And today, we're back at square one, because the vendors sell the kit (mostly smartphones) for the unwashed masses which might be over-challenged with a metaphor that allows you to select things and invoke operations on it (Mac desktop, RPN calculators, noun-verb). Bonus is that if everything happens as action (verb-noun) they can control the environment for a better lock-in.
(So much stuff, in fact, that he would rather buy a new machine this January than have his one fixed, because he wouldn't want to wait a week for the "Genius"es to mend it. I had to convince him that the new Apple stuff is overpriced, short-lived throwaway kit these days and macOS isn't getting better either, and sold him a new battery and overnight assembly. Fortunately, it was the last gen without glued-in battery.)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 28, @04:58PM (15 children)
Those slow file dialogs lived on until at least the mid-late 2000s. I "interviewed" with an online troll who had a "little coding test" to make acceptable performance in a file dialog opening a folder with 10,000+ files in it. Yeah, I could do that, but it would take probably 40-60 hours to do it well, which is why none of the API providers have bothered yet, because what idiot has a folder with 10,000+ files in it? I declined the interview, but researched the troll - he was operating out of the Philippines and apparently was using his "interview tests" to do things he could get paid for, himself.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday April 28, @06:46PM (3 children)
Uh, can I point you at a good friend's fiancee? She's brilliant, and my guess is she expects computers to do a better job of keeping track of things. Which of course involves reading her mind- it's all so obvious, right?
I've been doing this stuff a long time so I get it, but I gotta admit I could envision something (far far better than MS's file search) that would index file and directory structures in a very efficient database.
A company I worked for in the 90s would occasionally "interview" job applicants to pick their brains / get free consulting on project ideas. Sigh.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Friday April 28, @07:20PM (2 children)
Well, if you haven't been exposed to a concept, you can't have a grasp of it, like said music journalist. That doesn't make you an idiot, I guess.
Happened to myself. Must've been early 2012, I had been stoically holding on to my flipphone, when I was asked to enter my contact data into some (iirc non-academic) chick's smartphone. I fumbled around to figure out how it works, when she couldn't take it anymore with her small attention span, grabbed the phone, and entered the data herself within a few seconds. (Kids these days can operate these touch keyboards with the speed of a Dragonforce shred solo...) I figured out that I could design and build a smartphone, but not use it. Even though I had a Newton and Palms/Handsprings before, and done commercial development for the latter. That was enough to convince myself to get one, if just for the training.
Full cicle to TFA: It was a S/E Xperia Ray, which to the best of my knowledge had NO file manager at all in its base setup.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 28, @07:27PM (1 child)
We had a young college student who watched our kids back in the days of three letter per key texting, she could bang out 80wpm on 10 buttons.
First time somebody handed me an iPhone to see something, in 2006, apparently I "held it wrong" and the thing they wanted me to see instantly disappeared.
Last time somebody handed me an iPhone to see something, in 2023, apparently I "held it wrong" and the thing they wanted me to see instantly disappeared. Somehow, I never have this problem with my Android in a protective cover case.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday April 28, @08:35PM
Steve Jobs' spirit lives on. Apple have honored him well.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday April 29, @02:58AM (10 children)
What idiot has a folder with 10,000+ files in it?
Encountered a version of Outlook (this was about 2002ish) that had a habit of making single-file backups for each and every email read or sent. Five or six copies of each one. The poor PC (latest and greatest) was to where it took 20 seconds, I timed it, to acknowledge a mouse click.
Over 50,000 individual files in whatever directory it stashed them.
Deleted the lot of them (which took a while, Windows gags if you try to operate on more than about 1000 at a time) and suddenly the PC is sprightly as a spring lamb.
So, the answer is... the idiot is Microsoft.
Never seen that before or since. It was a bog-standard install with no customization and only a little of the usual HP bloatware (also done away with). Have a suspicion it was some Outlook backup function gone loopy.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 29, @11:58AM (9 children)
I forget what program(s) they were, but I have encountered one or more that automatically sort large quantities of files like that into tree folder structures. I think one of them was a file sharing system like LimeWire, so you would end up with no more than about 100 files or folders per folder and could search/reach any file of a hundred million in about 4 steps, meaning only searching a max of 400 things to find one of 100,000,000 things by it's index.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday April 29, @02:54PM (8 children)
Funny thing, back in the DOS era there were a bunch of programs that would do such sorting work for you. Sic 'em on a mass-dump directory and pretty soon you'd have nicely sorted files, by type and whatever other specs you chose, and an index to find them quick.
Now, we're expected to sort it all out ourselves, and fight with what Win10 calls a search function.
One might blame the early MacOS for this no-files-at-all trend, as the OS would keep track because the user was presumed too dense to distinguish a textfile from a media file. So we'd see EVERYTHING stored on the desktop, because that was the default. No one has more files than the number of icons that can fit on a 640x480 screen, right??
Another reason why tho I have probably half a million files (that I put there... the oldest ones have been dragged from HD to HD for over 25 years) on my everyday PC, if I want one I haven't seen in a while, I at least know which partition, base hierarchy, and sub-hierarchy it's almost certainly going to be in.
Tho I must sadly admit that I have a great many subdirectories named TEMP (there is nothing so permanent as a temporary camp) and STUFF. If it's nowhere else, it's probably in STUFF...
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 29, @03:02PM (3 children)
Our biggest file dump is digital photographs going back to about 1996. They're organized by year and month, and sometimes special events. Works well enough, though why I still have to do that by hand here almost 30 years later is a continuing frustration to me. Every "photo management system" I have even tangled with seems to become a lock-in: use ME and ONLY ME to manage ALL your digital images, usually with a subscription fee attached.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday April 29, @03:22PM (2 children)
Yeah, digital photos are kind of their own problem. If you've got tons of 'em with varied subject matter, it's just not practical to hand-sort, and about the best you can do is sort by date/camera/whatever and label the folders as best you can. And you'll still lose the cute baby pic because it happened to be taken with a bunch of the cute kitten.
There used (dunno about now) to be tools that would sort by EXIF fields, and of course some cameras have geotagging, but wouldn't it be nice if the camera would add "Grandma's birthday party" or whatever you really need to find the durn things?? Now there's a use for the microphone they all have nowadays...
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 29, @06:10PM (1 child)
There's an app called Piwigo that looks, at a glance, like it might be worthwhile, but I haven't had the time to even give it a test run yet.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday April 29, @08:24PM
Might be useful for professionals, a bit overkill for those of us with a point-and-shoot.
Well, there's digiKam.
https://www.digikam.org/ [digikam.org]
https://apps.kde.org/digikam/ [kde.org]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Rich on Saturday April 29, @08:14PM (3 children)
Um. No. Quite to the contrary. The Mac and its finder had folders even before the file system was hierarchical, even in the very first release early 1984. 400K MFS floppies had a folder number attached to every file and the finder showed that accordingly in the right folder. With the Mac Plus and its 800K floppies, the b-tree backed, extent managing HFS was introduced that at that time was the most advanced PC file system by far. (Linus didn't like it because of the way file names are handled, but from the data structures themselves it's still solid by today's standards. It did hardly ever go bad even with the permanently crashing System 7.5.3 and if it went bad, the recovery tools usually got your stuff back).
The only thing that was special about the desktop that you COULD put files on it, otherwise it technically was a folder like every other.
Also, the file types were 4-byte codes stored with the file, plus a 4-byte creator, so the Finder (hence its name) could find the matching application upon double click, yet still allow compatible applications to open a certain data type. You couldn't bend the type by changing the file name, you'd need to do that with ResEdit or a little application called "FileTyper", but from a technical point, Classic was better in that regard than Mac OS X.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday April 29, @08:32PM (2 children)
All that, BUT my point was that it =taught= ordinary users that everything can be piled together, and no need to care what the filetype was or where it was kept.
Saw that over and over.
What can or should be done and what the system encourages of the ordinary user (who does not care about files or folders, only about their daily use) are entirely different things.
And I much dislike the default Windows \Documents and Settings for the same reason. It's easy because it's default, and it teaches users to just dump everything in the default location without considering whether it's easy to find that way. But at least there's SOME default sorting out.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Sunday April 30, @11:37PM (1 child)
I'm curious. I assume that you use some flavour of Unix for your OS, though I guess it ultimately doesn't matter.
My question: Does your install not have a "/documents" folder or similar under your user folder? Do none of your apps have a default save location?
I would assert that it's a user issue, not an OS issue, when folders aren't used. That old version of MacOS (then called System n) no more encouraged or discouraged folder use than modern Linux distros.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday May 01, @04:24AM
Actually, I mostly use XP64, and I don't save to \D&S at all. Or \Users or whatever it's now called on WinAds, I don't even remember because I don't use the default. I have my own settled directory structure, some of it migrated unchanged all the way up from 30 years ago. In Days of Yore when I was doing individual support, I'd at least try to teach my clients to sort out their data. Because otherwise I'd get a call to come help find something vital, and my first words would be "why is all your porn on the root?" (actual case)
But I have a PCLinuxOS box that runs all the time, and various others. (Hotswap bay and a stack of HDs.)
Not thrilled with /home/* but mostly because I dislike "everything is a file", but what ya gonna do, PCLOS is nice as itself. But since I don't save mass quantities of files on that system, it doesn't much matter. For what I have done, some apps have sane defaults, others make you scratch your head. Some have none at all. The KDE stable is mostly reasonable about it.
What was really irritating is when some early Chrome (Win version) installed itself clear the hell down in \Application Data. The whole program. On the sly, as an "update" for something else I've since forgotten (might have been early Earth).
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by owl on Friday April 28, @03:43PM (7 children)
Ah, ok, there is a possible clue there. He was one of those who had discovered that a Computer Engineering degree was a path to a higher paying job, and was only taking that major from a "I can apply for those higher paying positions" point of view. No inherent interest in the topic, the"degree" was just a means to an end goal: "get a better paying job".
Little did he realize that this particular degree required some actual additional background knowledge and preferably some inherent interest in the subject.
Sadly, there is a baseline percentage of engineering students that are only there because "this piece of paper assures me a higher paying job" but otherwise have zero interest in the field. For those that don't fail out, when they do get out in industry, they become known to the ones who know what they are actually doing as "head-count".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 28, @05:04PM
We prefer to call them dead wood - first to go when rank and yank comes down from above...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28, @06:11PM
In science, we call them Principal Investigator and they soak up all the funding.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday April 28, @06:40PM (4 children)
This gives me a thought: In arts studies, it is common that you'll have to demonstrate some abilities in the art to even be accepted. Maybe similar tests should be standard in computer science and engineering, too?
I guess demonstrating basic use of the command line would be a good test.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday April 28, @08:26PM (3 children)
I guarantee that understanding the command line is independent of understanding disk file structures. I learned the first in college...the second I learned on the job. (Well, that *was* a long time ago. Around 1970.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 29, @01:28AM (2 children)
File systems before 1970 were stacks of punched cards, weren't they?
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday April 29, @02:53AM (1 child)
No. The permanent ones were on tapes, but computers had disks for storing stuff while you were working on it. You had to roll things in from tape and back out to tape, but tape was slow, and random access on tapes was REALLY slow. (Of course, this depends on which computer you were using, but we rented time at a service bureau that had some medium fancy computers. [Actually that may have been a few years later, as it was after I graduated and went to work, but only a few.])
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 29, @11:50AM
Our community college just replaced their last punch card terminals with CRTs the year I took a class there, probably 1985.
Those disks, even on an expensive multi user system had to be pretty tiny by today's standards, but then you probably were storing mostly plain text, not video or other media, so you still could have a fair number of files.
As I recall, folder trees on our VAX tended to be about four branches deep at the most: root, users, individuals, and most individuals would just keep files in their personal root, but some would have project folders.
Funny thing about line numbers and punch cards, when you drop a deck of punch cards and they get shuffled, there was a system program to sort them by line number for you.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday April 28, @03:27PM (6 children)
Have you seen what the most popular computer has been in the last 10 years? Smartphones. Not laptops and not desktops. Smartphones. You know, with the single-tasking, point-and-drool interface? It's really bizarre. My generation (I'm an early-ish Millennial) is going to end up fixing computers for older *and* younger people.
Sometimes, honestly, I think this proves most people aren't intelligent enough to work an actual general-purpose computer, and that they favor a smartphone interface because it abstracts away practically all the actual brain-work of using one. Watch someone with low computer literacy use a normal computer; they treat it like they wish it had a smartphone workflow. "Push button, do thing."
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Friday April 28, @04:35PM (2 children)
Why is that a bad thing?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Opportunist on Friday April 28, @04:51PM
Because they still use computers and computers are today in the position to cause damage to other computers if used incorrectly.
(Score: 4, Touché) by PiMuNu on Friday April 28, @06:15PM
Read this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintenance [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 28, @05:10PM (1 child)
>most people aren't intelligent enough to work an actual general-purpose computer, and that they favor a smartphone interface because it abstracts away practically all the actual brain-work of using one. Watch someone with low computer literacy use a normal computer; they treat it like they wish it had a smartphone workflow. "Push button, do thing."
The genius of the fruity computing and smartphone mega-corp was their marketing: how to make dumb people feel smart, exclusive, happy in their brand identity. Provide a "walled garden" ecosystem where they can't get hurt as easily as in a general-purpose capable environment.
Before the iPhone came out, I had a Chumby [google.com] - they weren't good for much, but they were actually pretty killer customizable alarm clocks. When iOS dropped, first with the phone, later with an iPad One that I won in a contest I didn't even know I had entered, I thought: hey, this looks like a great place to make a customizable alarm clock like all those on Chumby. Well, digging into iOS at the time, guess what one of the "off limits to third party developers" API interfaces was: "timed wake from sleep" - basically the only practical way to make an alarm clock app - that was "reserved for Apple provided applications only." Yeah, blow me Steve.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Informative) by ilsa on Friday April 28, @07:10PM
Your story is particularly hilarious because I have an iPad that isn't really good for much anymore... So I'm using it for an alarm clock. :)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Friday April 28, @06:08PM
I'd argue that smartphones fully realized the split between content *consumers* and content *creators*. Once that happened, you didn't need to familiarize yourself with desktop computer workflow (or own a desktop computer) to get through your day. As such I wouldn't go with "intelligent enough." In my humble analysis, consider those who work somewhere other than a desk, and you've got the whole-day use case of a smartphone or tablet.
I can't find the reference, but Jeff Hawkins of PalmPilot fame made the argument that when you're entering and formatting data, you wanted to do it on a desktop application, and when you wanted to query and make minor modifications/additions, you would do it on the handheld device (owing to its restricted interface).
At a desk, you're the one updating the info that people consume on their smartphones. Grow up using a smartphone and walking from class to class, and you start shaping your technology experience [wikipedia.org] around its capabilities and interface. Maybe not for information workers proper, but why not for the vast majority of others?
This is particularly the case in non-developed areas [cnbc.com] of the non-developed-world, where cellular phone service may be the only option in a farming village, and a PC wouldn't help you much without ubiquitous Internet access. Scale that out, mix in some market pressures, and see what it produces.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by pTamok on Friday April 28, @03:40PM (9 children)
Did you realise there are young people today who have no idea how to write an address on, and apply a stamp to, an envelope?
And there a some people (not even young), who do not know to use their left hands for ablutions and right for eating!
Even some who find using coins and banknotes 'too difficult', and simply wave their mobile phones in the general direction of the payment screen.
Some men wear brown shoes when conducting business in the city.
Teenagers don't understand Euclid.
It's cultural. You learn what is necessary to operate in your local cultural milieu. Computers in the form of 'smartphones' and tablets are what people use, and they are used to the user-interface designed for use by people who are not 'techies'. I have great difficulty in navigating an iPhone because I've never had to learn it, and I don't know the gestures, the meanings of the icons, and the 'sweet spots' on the phone's screen. I could learn, but because I don't have an iPhone, I'm left clueless if someone hands me theirs to look something up, or do something in an app for them.
On the other hand, I can program in FORTRAN, MACRO32, and Zilog Z80 assembler, use multiple different command-line interfaces, and the most Linux Desktop Environments, Windows, not so much since I stopped using it at XP, and Macintoshes at MacOS 7. I'm not stupid, just ignorant of current conventions.
The world has moved on. People don't use filing cabinets and typewriters, or phones with dials. Few write with a pen or pencil, instead bashing things out with their thumbs in an app with predictive text. Youngsters are not learning to drive stick-shift cars because they are unlikely to drive one - the world moving to electric. The times, they are a-changing.
In many ways, I thing the contemporary approach is worse. Apps restrict what you can do. Search instead of a hierarchical filing system only works if you have intelligent tags, and can remember sufficient unique identifiers, Understanding the underpinning of the technology is becoming a niche profession: everyone else is a user - car drivers instead of car mechanics. You don't need to be able to build a car to drive one.
It is going to get worse for the hold-outs who want to keep with the old ways. As a cranky and grumpy old man, I am being dragged kicking and screaming into the contemporary way of doing things, but as long as I have alcohol, I can be stoical, and possibly even practice mindfulness.
(Score: 2) by Barenflimski on Friday April 28, @03:52PM
Cheers!
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday April 28, @06:12PM (2 children)
I know someone whose professional subordinates (who live and work in San Francisco) don't carry wallets at all, only cell phones. If a restaurant doesn't offer Apple Pay, they don't eat there, and they get all receipts emailed to them. So if you talk to the younger types, you can get a really good profile on their perspective on the world.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Friday April 28, @06:59PM
I doubt very much they get all their receipts emailed to them. Email is so last century. It's probably Facebook/Snapchat/Instagram or some other walled garden 'instant messaging' thing. Or a specific 'Receipts' app. I know I get weird looks if I ask a young 'un to send me an email.
(Score: 3, Informative) by driverless on Saturday April 29, @04:13AM
It may also be country-specific, for example the US and some European countries are still very much cash-oriented while here I can't remember the last time I used cash for anything. I literally can't remember, it was years and years ago. It was a bit of a shock working in Europe and suddenly having to carry wads of cash around because so many places won't accept credit cards or do Paywave/Paypass.
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Friday April 28, @06:50PM (1 child)
I get what your saying, but I don't think the rationale is acceptable.
Mail hasn't gone away. If they want to send a parcel, then they have to figure out how mail works.
Computers are still used very heavily all around the world. Barring exceptionally terrible circumstances, _everyone_ has access to computers, and has HAD access to computers their entire lives. We are surrounded by them everywhere we go. It's not like computers aren't used anymore. One is _expected_ to have basic computer skills.
If somebody pointedly ignored every single computer around them, for their entire life, that's their problem.
If such people are unwilling to learn, then they willingly forfeit all opportunities that require such technology, which is basically _everything_ more complicated than working a retail job. Although I suppose they can find success in a management position... which is a pretty sobering thought.
(Score: 2) by owl on Friday April 28, @08:00PM
Quite so. But, for a, sadly, rather large percentage of new 18yo college entrants, the only computer they have ever interacted with for their entire life has been their cell phone and/or maybe their ipad. And both Android and IOS go to such effort to hide details like 'files' and 'hierarchical filesystems' from their users that it is very believable that someone who has only ever interacted with a computer via a phone/tablet that they would simply not know anything about files or hierarchical file systems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28, @07:56PM
> ...young people today who have no idea how to write an address on, and apply a stamp to, an envelope?
Yes. About 10 years ago a student in Japan needed to send me a letter, by snail mail. I emailed him my address and he sent the letter at a Post Office. Then he emailed again, he couldn't understand why the letter appeared in him home mailbox. This repeated a second cycle, then I asked him to send me a digital pic of the envelope.
The address and return_address locations on the envelope were swapped!
I have to believe that he saw envelopes arrive at his parent's house as a child, but somehow he never figured out that the addressee goes in the middle of the envelope (and return_address upper left).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Friday April 28, @08:32PM
You've got valid points, but the smart phone interface is really limited. This wasn't an accident, but it means that there are things that it's nearly impossible to do using it.
Personally, I use my smartphone as a phone and as an alarm clock. Period. Anything else I do via a more general purpose computer. (This is partially because of the horror stories about security, and I understand the options much better on my computer.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday April 29, @04:09AM
OK boomer.
It had to be said :-).
(Score: 4, Informative) by SomeRandomGeek on Friday April 28, @03:54PM (11 children)
I have vivid memories of my high school years, teaching myself to program on a first generation Apple Macintosh in the late 80s. I was tremendously confused about the file system. The mac had folders instead of directories. And unlike any other OS, files had a resource fork and a data fork. This left me wondering whether these were differences in substance or just terminology. And I realized that although I had been working with files as a user for years, as a programmer I had no idea what they actually were. I never did find a decent explanation of what a file actually was on a mac. Fortunately, a few years later I discovered UNIX, where it is all straightforward, and thoroughly (although not always clearly) documented.
For those that are wondering, the data fork was like a UNIX file, just an array of bytes accessible through a block device. And the resource fork was a name to resource mapping, where you could store/retrieve operating system "resources", most notably icons, but also many other kinds of structured data.
(Score: 4, Informative) by DannyB on Friday April 28, @04:30PM (8 children)
I was a Classic Mac developer. Oh how I liked the concepts of having a separate resource fork in a file. It's not really the fork you think about. It is the resource manager which uses that separate fork of the file. Think of a file as having a "unix style file" along with an attached type/id database of arbitrary data. So I could ask for ICON 131, PICT 327, ICON 42, MESG 87, etc. The types were well defined. You could store entire dialog box templates in the resource fork of a file. You NEVER opened the resource fork for reading/writing bytes. You just used the resource manager which did it for you.
Later it occurred to me that on more advanced file systems there shouldn't be any reason why a file should be limited to two forks. There should be a main 'data' fork, eg, unix style. And then separate forks with arbitrary names, such as 'RSRC' fork for a resource fork.
On Classic Mac, an application executable had zero bytes in the data fork (eg, 'unix' style file). Everything was in the resource fork. Including CODE segments. Fetch CODE 131, etc. A certain CODE segment was the main entry point when the program was loaded. Segments of code could be loaded (and discarded) on demand, on an OS that had no virtual memory, nor memory protection across applications.
These 4-character type names of resources were just 32-bit integer values that happened to be 4 ASCII characters. Developers would refer to them by their ASCII, but it was just an integer, and not an actual string data structure in memory.
Another thing I miss was how the file system worked. There were directories, but they were called "folder" in the UI. But there were no drive letters. But there wasn't a single top level root path either. Each mounted drive had a name and serial number. You could refer to things with a name, and construct a path name of folders down to a specific file. The path separator was the colon rather than a slash (or a bass-ackwards slash on Windoze). Aside: Java always had nice mechanisms for writing portable code despite differing path separators on different systems, and having unix style root path vs separate drives, which may or may not have drive letters.
Files on Mac had no suffixes. (unlike today where they've gone over to the dark side)
Files had TWO attributes: TYPE and CREATOR. The TYPE was a four character (32-bit int) value indicating what type of data was in the data fork of the file. Such as TEXT, PICT, JPEG, GIF, WORD, SYLK, CSV, etc. The Creator was another four character identifier that indicated which application should be used to open this file. The icon displayed for a file was dependent on the COMBINATION of the type and creator. You could have multiple TEXT files that had different icons, because they were created by different apps. One TEXT file might go to NotePad, and another to SimpleText, and another to MPW, and another to MacWrite, etc. But you could open any TEXT file with any other app that had a manifest that said it was able to open files of type TEXT. So there could be no possible confusion of ever being able to open a JPG file in a text editor. It simply wasn't allowed. But any possible way of opening compatible file types in different apps was easy and could never go wrong.
And there were no file suffixes. The type and creator attributes were hidden. A technical detail that end users don't care about. Just like silly three letter file suffixes that are unimportant to end users. I just want to save my file and open it again later. And the system should "just know" what app to open it with. Or it should "just know" what other apps are capable of opening it without error.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday April 28, @06:27PM (5 children)
I actually looked this up for a redundant comment below. Is this documented clearly (or narratively) somewhere online? Just the concept of an inode that has to act as a middleman between a filename and its contents, and that forks/extended attributes can be inserted into such a structure is helpful when thinking about data storage.
(Score: 4, Informative) by DannyB on Friday April 28, @07:15PM (3 children)
I never heard of the term inode until I began studying Linux in about 1996/7. I didn't get my first box until June 1999 and never looked back. It was quite a serious transition from being a Classic Mac developer.
There were two file systems. MFS and HFS. MFS was the original Mac floppy disk file system. As the Mac eventually got hard drives, MFS was naturally used to make it like a gigantic floppy disk. This did not work out so well. So Apple developed HFS.
Briefly: MFS was a flat file system with one top level directory and that's it. An invisible file, I think it was called "Desktop", IIRC, kept track of nested files and folders which was then presented as an illusion in the UI. BTW, that UI was called "The Finder".
HFS had the file system structurally organized as a hierarchy. And it has a repair mechanism that could be invoked at "mount" time if the drive had not been unmounted correctly.
I do not know if you can find documentation online. There do seem to be some Classic Mac archive sites. The developer documentation was very thorough and complete. This was way before the web. How else was a developer to learn how all this worked. And it was quite a huge collection of documentation in 3 ring notebooks.
The idea of having more than two forks for a file was my own thought at the time. Classic Mac files had exactly two forks: data fork and resource fork. Both were just a random access stream of bytes. The resource manager was usually the only thing that ever touched the data fork. The "directory entry" for a file allowed long file names, I think it was something like 27 characters. Any character except a colon was allowed in a file name. File names had no suffixes. You could name files with a suffix, but it didn't mean anything to the OS. Each directory entry had values like:
* file name
* type (4 char or 32 bit int) - what kind of data is in the data fork
* creator (4 char) - preferred program to launch to open this file, although other programs compatible with the 'type' could be used to open it
* info - a 255 character blob of text the user could type into the "file info" (eg "properties" in Microsoft speak)
* color - when color macs came, out you could color code your files, any kind of file, application, data, anything
* data fork -- random access stream of bytes
* resource fork -- random access stream of bytes typically managed by a 'database' called the resource manager
Folders had similar attributes, except for type, creator, and forks.
Developers had tools that could manipulate all of these attributes.
And there was NO command line! I know that is hard to believe. But it's true. Not until MPW came out. Macintosh Programmer's Workshop. MPW was obviously inspired by some unix guys. Some of the commands were obvious derivatives of unix tools. I recognized this when I encountered Linux much later. Until MPW you did development on a Lisa computer configured to boot up as a Macintosh XL (although you could dual boot with the Lisa Office System)
MPW did not have a terminal interface. It was like a text editor. It had a powerful shell language with pipes. In any open text file in MPW you could select a command and press Cmd-Enter to execute that command. Output from the command would insert into the text file right after the command text you had selected to execute the command. So you could have files with many useful prewritten commands, and just select a command, or copy/paste it to a new text window and select/execute it. You could select a bunch of commands together and press Cmd-Enter. (Cmd was sort of like a Ctrl key on Mac before OS X.)
MPW was not part of the OS. The OS had no terminal or shell or command line. MPW was something that only developers installed. End users could never see what naughty things happened under the covers at all ever.
The system design was amazing and unconventional. Feel free to ask questions and I'll do my best to recollect. It was one of the most fun times of my life. I wish some of it's ideas had caught on. Especially the idea of files having type/creator and no file suffixes. Once you get how that works.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday April 28, @07:18PM
Corrections:
* The resource manager was usually the only thing that ever touched the data fork. -- ugh, resource fork, not data fork
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Sunday April 30, @11:57PM (1 child)
Agree that it's a shame the Resource fork never took off elsewhere. I find it quite archaic that we have to add file type identifiers at the end of every file we create. Just changing the letters at the end can render a file unusable to the entire system unless you can remember what the original letters were (some OSes try to protect users from doing this, but not all).
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday May 01, @04:05PM
There is some Linux command line program that will examine a file and tell you what type it is. It's name slips my mind at the moment.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 2) by owl on Friday April 28, @08:49PM
In a general sense, there is no inherent reason why a "file" has to be limited to a single stream of bytes from 0 to [file length]. Some filesystems (classic Mac, MacOS for "classic Mac" compatibility, NTFS) provide not only the classic "raw stream of bytes from 0 to [file length] but also secondary "streams of bytes" each addressable as bytes 0...[length of that secondary stream].
In the classic MacOS case, Apple utilized the secondary stream of bytes to provide a key-value database, and provided all the tooling in the OS to access it as such, so that applications not only had a "stream of bytes" file but also a secondary "key-value" store with every file. It would be as if every Unix 'file' included, hidden from view but accessible by Posix API's, a secondary sqlite DB pre-configured as a key-value store for arbitrary data.
In the case of NTFS, each file can have an almost unlimited number of secondary streams of bytes in addition to the default one that is the usual "file contents" you see and interact with. Windows itself uses one of the streams to store the data that triggers the "this file was downloaded from the internet, are you sure you want to launch it" warning dialogs.
Here's a couple references I found from a very quick search:
http://www.flexhex.com/docs/articles/alternate-streams.phtml [flexhex.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_fork [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Saturday April 29, @12:34AM (1 child)
It's still sort of supported on NTFS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS#Alternate_data_stream_(ADS) [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday April 29, @04:19AM
They were just an attempt by MS to copy the Apple resource/data fork concept without really knowing what to do with it, "Apple only gives you two forks while Bill gives you knives and spoons as well!". The only significant use of ADS's I'm aware of is, or was, malware hiding stuff from virus scanners in there before the anti-malware vendors cottoned on to the practice.
(Score: 2, Informative) by pTamok on Friday April 28, @07:07PM (1 child)
That is incorrect. NTFS has 'Alternate Data Streams', which are the same concept. They are not very well known.
Beeping Computer: Windows Alternate Data Streams [bleepingcomputer.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Friday April 28, @07:20PM
That is true, but NTFS did not exist at that time. The first I know of NTFS existing was with Windows NT which come during the 1990s. The Mac resource/data fork was present in Mac long before it hit the market in Feb 1984.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...