And yet most of these people who struggle could (I’ll bet) sort a bucket of things into piles of buttons and piles of washers.
And then buttons into piles of square vs. round vs. etc. buttons and each pile into sub-piles of red vs. green, etc, buttons.
It’s a different application of the same principle. Maybe their learning styles mean they need to be helped to understand it in a different way?
Of course, they may be more interested in ‘green’ so tags may then come into play, or they can start with piles of green and red, and use tags to sort buttons from washers in each.
It’s weird to be reading this and thinking “but isn’t ‘files’ just a namespace convention for memory addressing?” and then seeing these comments about these kids would get it so much more if they understood about the “underlying structure” of the ‘files’.
Hmm - well, I’m working at the analogy level where the analogy is between my hanging files and the papers in folders in each hanging file … and the folders and files on my PC.
I’m not working at the “technology of how bits are moved around by melted sand and silicon” level.
I guess it all depends where you want to set the boundary between ‘magic box’ and ‘how to use this tool’ (or perhaps ‘many of the things you can do with this tool’).
I find Apple Photos to be particularly problematic in the way it deliberately hides your photos from the file system. Users literally have no idea where their photos are on their computer - and photos are some of the most precious things on people’s computers.
I don’t mind a fixed hierarchical file system going away.
In fact I’d like to see it go away, with multiple dynamic views, some of them hierarchical some not, of the same data.
I’d argue that the negatives come out in systems that are ‘magical’ but ‘opaque’, where people can’t reason about how they work.
In systems where the authors have a specific idea of how you should be grouping/organizing things and won’t let you organize/group them in a way other than what they had in mind.
Systems where they make it difficult to get information in and out. Or where things are silo’d per application.
Search is great as a function to have, but I don’t really trust a search+recommendation agent by a profit making organization.
Sooooo many newly relevant explainers for things being funded in $MM. In fairness though, it’s the one world, and is there really any more than the one computer? I think it might not be important until the second doctorate how things are arranged.
anothernewbbaccount> disempowering
Keep in mind that the filesystem is ambivalent and at some random point the flash will become ‘bad’ which means maybe recoverable to (often) a flat filesystem. The most important file (Final paper final 2021.pdf) which has been stored duodecafold will be unavailable. I think at some point FAT32 bottomed out at 22 levels of filesystem, after which perf. was unreliable? And what point have we, other than the surety that /var/tmp objects are mostly distinguishable? 30 layers? 30,295?
People do hear the lectures about the storable states v. number of possible configurations of DNA in a universe of matter, I think. How did that go…?
Eh, it’s not just students who can’t organize files. When I’m doing backups, I notice all the crap that Microsoft and other software throws under user storage, where it doesn’t belong.
Not just program user preferences, which are okay, but vast libraries of gunk for Visual Studio, Android Studio, etc. Sometimes you can change the location, but they don’t make it easy.
At my old job, they had a KWIC (Keyword in Context) file. Basically a printout of every word in any title of the technical report collection with 30 characters before it and ~70 characters after it. Very much like keyword searching in the computer, but when they made it, computer time was too precious to be dedicated something mundane like the library catalog. So they would load the titles and report numbers from tape, run the program to create the file and pint it out.
Apple dumps all your imported photos into the Photos Library, a “package” that is a type of folder that people don’t know is a folder, that you can’t open by double clicking, that uses obscure file naming, and that is not indexed by the Spotlight file search system.
and you would learn that M10 was an 1829 book by Otis Madison available at NYPL, PT-m and WRHS, and then you’d consult another table that listed which abbreviations corresponded to which libraries. It’s the kind of book that might encourage someone to take up shorthand.
I scanned it, OCRed it, did a few hundred worldcat searches, and compiled a zotero library from it. So much easier when the computer does the cross referencing and sorting.
Out of interest - when was this magical time when this skill did not need to be taught and all new entrants to university came naturally endowed by their creator with the knowledge of how to organise files?
Presumably, it was some time after small green things from Alpha Centauri ceased to be real small green things from Alpha Centauri but before 2017.
And those periods would bug me because I grew up with software that assumed everything after a period would be a file extension… And I’m dubious about the dash. Underscore is where it’s at.
All of which is rubbish for most purposes these days.
macOS and Windows tried this with things like smart folders and WinFS in the mid-2000s. I was really excited about the idea that apps like iTunes and photo libraries wouldn’t be siloed. It seems like most of those initiatives failed and the things that did get released made things more confusing.
If you don’t have folders and filenames, you need some universally unique identifier…and those aren’t human friendly. Filesystems that are metadata heavy got way more difficult when we started networking different OSes and downloading files off the Internet.
I can’t speak specifically to folder organization, but I do think computer science had a decade or two where most new students were familiar with the basics of computers from around the late 80s to the late 2000s. I feel like I’ve heard anecdotes from professors both when this era started and ended (like this story). I don’t think it’s just the introduction of smart phones. I think home computers around the mid-2000s needed a lot less fussing. So kids tinkered less with the lower level stuff. I also think before the web was ubiquitous you ended up doing a lot more locally. Recently, I remember sitting at a computer without the Internet and thinking, “What do I do?”
I’ve heard people point to home computers as a reason for the gender disparity in computer science. When home computers were marketed as video games for boys it meant there was a new barrier for women when college started and the disparity grew. Speaking to the small number of women that did continue with computer science, the environment wasn’t great and many more left due to the culture. Maybe students not being able to organize files helps evens the field?
