Comment on Freed At Last From Patents, Does Anyone Still Care About MP3?
tal@lemmy.today 2 days ago
The average person does not deal with files anymore. Many people use online applications for everything from multimedia to documents, which happily abstract away the experience of managing file formats.
I remember someone saying that and me having a hard time believing it, but I’ve seen several people say that.
theverge.com/…/students-file-folder-directory-str…
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.
old.reddit.com/…/is_genz_really_this_bad_with_com…
The OS interfaces have followed this trend, by developing OS that are more similar to a smartphone design (Windows 8 was the first great example of this). And everything became more user-friendly (my 65+ yo parents barely know how to turn on a computer, but now, use apps for the bank and send emails from their phone). The combined result is that the younger generations have never learned the basic of how a computer works (file structure, file installation…) and are not very comfortable with the PC setup (how they prefer to keep their notes on the phone makes me confused).
So the “kids” do not need to know these things for their daily enjoyment life (play videogames, watch videos, messaging… all stuff that required some basic computer skills even just 10 years ago, but now can be done much more easily, I still remember having to install some bulky pc game with 3 discs) and we nobody is teaching them because the people in charge thought “well the kids know this computer stuff better than us” so no more courses in elementary school on how to install ms word.
For a while I was convinced my students were screwing with me but no, many of them actually do not know the keyboard short cuts for copy and paste. If it’s not tablet/phone centric, they’re probably not familiar with it.
Also, most have used GSuite through school and were restricted from adding anything to their Chrome Books. They’ve used integrated sites, not applications that need downloading. They’re also adept at Web 3.0, creation stuff, more than professional type programs.
As much as boomers don’t know how to use PCs because they were too new for them, GenZs and later are not particularly computer savvy because computers are too old for them.
I can understand some arguments that there’s always room to advance UI paradigms, but I have to say that I don’t think that cloud-based smartphone UIs are the endgame. If one is going to consume content, okay, fine. Like, as a TV replacement or something, sure. But there’s a huge range of software – including most of what I’d use for “serious” tasks – out there that doesn’t fall into that class, and really doesn’t follow that model. Statistics software? Software development? CAD? I guess Microsoft 365 – which I have not used – probably has some kind of cloud-based spreadsheet stuff. I haven’t used Adobe Creative Cloud, but I assume that it must have some kind of functionality analogous to Photoshop.
kagis
Looks like off-line Photoshop is dead these days, and Adobe shifted to a pure SaaS model:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Creative_Cloud#Critic…
Shifting to a software as a service model, Adobe announced more frequent feature updates to its products and the eschewing of their traditional release cycles.[26] Customers must pay a monthly subscription fee. Consequently, if subscribers cancel or stop paying, they will lose access to the software as well as the ability to open work saved in proprietary file formats.[27]
shakes head
Man.
And for that matter, I’d think that a lot of countries might have concerns about dependence on a cloud service. I mean, I would if we were talking about China. I’m not even talking about data security or anything – what happens if Country A sanctions Country B and all of Country B’s users have their data abruptly inaccessible?
I get that Internet connectivity is more-widespread now. But, while I’m handicapped without an Internet connection, because I don’t have access to useful online resources, I can still basically do all of the tasks I want to do locally. Having my software unavailable because the backend is unreachable seems really problematic.
This was actually something I found interesting with the brief TikTok shutdown in the US. A lot of creators only had their content in the editing software owned by TikTok or the app itself, meaning they lost access to all of their content.
The biggest risk of cloud only setups is you don’t own it.
I wouldn’t expect most users to understand how to use it, but has there not been a tiktok downloader made yet? If not that’s a good opportunity for someone looking for a project.
I think most of the tools have a way to download content, the issue is no one does or has a system for their backups. Which is the risk with the cloud, you’re putting all your eggs in someone elses basket.
I would guess that at least part of the issue there is also that the data isn’t all that useful unless it’s also exported to some format that other software can read. That format may not capture everything that the native format stores.
In another comment in this thread, I was reading the article on Adobe Creative Cloud, which commented on the fact that the format is proprietary. I can set up some “data storage service”, and maybe Adobe lets users export their Creative Cloud data there. Maybe users even have local storage.
But…then, what do you do with the data? Suppose I just get a copy of the native format. If nothing other than the software on Adobe’s servers can use it, that doesn’t help me at all. Maybe you can export the data, export to an open format like a PNG or something, but you probably don’t retain everything. Like, I can maybe get my final image out, but I don’t get all the project workflow stuff associated with the work I’ve done. Macros, brushes, stuff broken up into layers, undo history…
I mean, you have to have the ability to use the software to maintain full use of the data, and Adobe’s not going to give you that.
Current students generally have horrendous computer literacy. There was only about a 20ish year window where using a computer meant you were forced to become vaguely proficient in how it worked. Toward the end of the 90s into the 2000s plug and play began to work more reliably, then 10 years after that smartphone popularity took off and it’s been apps ever since.
Students in high school this year were born from ~2007-2011. Most of them probably had a smartphone before a computer, if they even had the latter at all.
Even university students studying computer science don’t have this basic knowledge anymore.
It’s a sample of 1, but we hired a guy with a CS Master’s degree. I told him in polite ways that he should not use ChatGPT and his code sucked. When he was told to fix something, he rewrote it completely with a new prompt instead of understanding bugs. He didn’t last more than 2 months.
Damn, I never even thought of the implications for compsci. That’s gotta be an interesting challenge for profs these days.
First people didn’t really understand computers, so we taught about them to children - back in late 90’s when I was in school, we had a few years of dedicated computer classes every week.
People then started to assume kids just “know” computers (“digital native” and all that) and we stopped teaching them because hey, they know it already.
And now we are suddenly surprised that kids don’t know how to use computers.
I agree with that to a certain extent, but computer classes (at least where I grew up) weren’t very comprehensive or germane to the skills people are talking about in this thread. If I think back, in elementary school we mostly had a few educational programs (typing, spelling, oregon trail, etc), and in middle school we did some stuff with excel and I’m sure some other things I’m forgetting, but we definitely didn’t have anything about how computers fundamentally worked. Maybe there was some very simple coding in basic, but it would’ve been very limited.
The reason I learned how to mess around with files and things was because computers simply weren’t very easy to use. Trying to get games running when they didn’t work just out of the box was a great teaching tool. Early on you had to learn the DOS commands (which by necessity meant learning file menus), and in windows (I can’t speak to anything Mac related) before plug and play worked well there was still endless tinkering you had to do with config files. Like you get the game installed but the sound doesn’t work, so you have to edit the config files to try different channels for your soundblaster. Or maybe your new printer won’t print, so you have to search online for the dll files you need.
There just stopped being a need to learn how to do anything like that, so the functioning of computers became that much less understood. I agree that the whole digital native narrative was dumb and hurt children’s learning (if anything the generation who dealt with the problems outline above are much closer to digital “natives”), and there’s a ton of stuff computer classes should be teaching these days. But classes will always only be effective in a limited capacity compared to learning about something because you need or want it to work for you in your life outside of school.
Godamn this made my job feel secure
Ms 365 just assumes that your company has a Ms azure cloud solution, exchange server or just defaults to onedrive. You have to wrestle the software into giving you a local storage folder browser when picking the place to save a new document to. It’s frustrating.
@dustyData Oh my gosh. I see this every single day at work. So many people have no idea where any of their documents are saved, until they can’t find them. I’ll be honest, I use a lot of streaming services for music as well, but I think I might actually go back to simply buying music. Who knows. Call me old-fashioned and only 35 years old, but I still see a point in local storage in traditional desktop type software. There’s not enough of it around here.
I owned Adobe CS 4. CS 5 and 6 had nothing new I needed. When my OS no longer supported CS 4, I purchased Affinity Suite; it still works great with no subscription or cloud hosting.
Back when the iTunes Music Store still existed, I took advantage of their feature to convert my library of audio to digitally mastered DRM-free 256 bit AAC. All my recordings of tapes and LPs replaced by professionally remastered tracks. Since then, I’ve supplemented with tracks purchased directly from the bands I’m interested in, plus some lower value stuff from YouTube.
In fact, the only cloud service I depend on is NextCloud, which I host myself, and which lives behind a VPN.
I run my own JellyFin server with all my DVD rips hosted on it. That’s a large part of my streaming video that I’d want to watch more than once.
Probably not a huge number of people do what I do, but enough to keep people employed who still make products you download once and enjoy forever.
I hear you for sure. I very much prefer local software and saved files local as well. The problem is there’s more money to be made doing it the other way. Unless it’s FOSS you can pretty much count on the company to follow the money.
the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.
This is so weird to me. Aren’t people at all curious? Like, I would never try to fix a car’s engine, but I have a basic understanding of how one works. I wouldn’t install a toilet, but I know about J-traps. I wouldn’t write my own 3D engine, but I know the basics of how they work.
Files and folder is such a fundamental and basic thing. Where’s the basic curiosity?
Honestly, I’m a little surprised that a smartphone user wouldn’t have a familiarity of a concept of files, setting aside the whole familiarity-with-a-PC thing. Like, I’ve always had a file manager on my Android smartphone. I mean, ok…most software packages don’t require having one browse the file structure on the thing. And many are isolated, don’t have permission to touch shared files. Probably a good thing to sandbox apps, helps reduce the impact of malware.
But…I mean, even sandboxed apps can provide file access to the application-private directory on Android. I guess they just mostly don’t, if the idea is that they should only be looking at files in application-private storage on-device, or if they’re just the front end to a cloud service.
Hmm. I mean, I have GNU/Linux software running in Termux, do stuff like scp from there. A file manager. Open local video files in mpv or in PDF viewers and such. I’ve a Markdown editor that permits browsing the filesystem. Ditto for an org-mode editor. I’ve got a directory hierarchy that I’ve created, though simpler and I don’t touch it as much as on the PC.
But, I suppose that maybe most apps just don’t expose it in their UI. I could see a typical Android user just never using any of the above software (though…not having a local PDF viewer or video player seems odd, but I guess someone could just rely wholly on streaming services for video and always open PDFs off the network).
I remember being absolutely shocked when trying to view a locally-stored HTML file once that Android-based web browsers apparently didn’t permit opening local HTML files, that one had to set up a local webserver (though that may have something to do with the fact that I believe that by default, with Web browser security models, a webpage loaded via the file:// URI scheme has general access to your local filesystem but one talking to a webserver on localhost does not…maybe that was the rationale).
I can understand some arguments that there’s always room to advance UI paradigms, but I have to say that I don’t think that cloud-based smartphone UIs are the endgame.
I think the first filesystems had flat layout (no directories), but also had different file types for a library, an executable, a plaintext file. Then there were filesystems where directories could only list files, not other directories.
Slowly and gradually over time they evolved to the abstractions of directories listing files and other directories. I think in early Unix even a directory was a usual file, just differently interpreted.
Now, instead of teaching clueless people they’ve made a whole culture of computing for clueless people only, unfit for proper usage.
One might see how representation of something like a lent of objects is the flat layout again. At some point it doesn’t matter that there’s a normal filesystem under it, or something.
One might also see how using tags to somewhat organize objects into another lent is similar to a two-level layout, where a directory can only list files.
If one is going to consume content, okay, fine.
How would one know if they want to use computers seriously if they haven’t been taught, don’t know where to start teaching themselves, probably have, mild or not, executive dysfunction (a lot of conditions) and, if put in the right situation, would be very capable and interested, but in the wrong situation just can’t learn a single thing?
That was me, I could only reduce distractions and non-transparency after moving to Linux (and then OpenBSD, and then FreeBSD) with obscure WMs and setups. I’m born in 1996, so I had it easier.
I think the first filesystems had flat layout (no directories),
That is true for MS-DOS 1.0. But Unix had a tree structured directory system from the very beginning (early 1970s). And the directory listing command “ls” was basically the same in the first Unix 50 years ago as it is in modern Linux.
I meant - before Unix.
I think the first filesystems had flat layout (no directories), but also had different file types for a library, an executable, a plaintext file. Then there were filesystems where directories could only list files, not other directories.
The original Macintosh filesystem was flat, used for about two years around the mid-1980s. I don’t think I’ve ever used it, personally.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_File_System
MFS is called a flat file system because it does not support a hierarchy of directories.
I thought that Apple ProDOS’s file system – late 1970s to early 1980s – was also flat, from memory. It looks like it was at one point, though they added hierarchical support to it later:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_ProDOS
ProDOS adds a standard method of accessing ROM-based drivers on expansion cards for disk devices, expands the maximum volume size from about 400 kilobytes to 32 megabytes, introduces support for hierarchical subdirectories (a vital feature for organizing a hard disk’s storage space), and supports RAM disks on machines with 128 KB or more of memory.
Looks like FAT, used by MS-DOS, early 1980s, also started out flat-file, then added hierarchical support:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table
The BIOS Parameter Block (BPB) was introduced with PC DOS 2.0 as well, and this version also added read-only, archive, volume label, and directory attribute bits for hierarchical sub-directories.[24]
Seems to confirm the tendency, except I was thinking about higher-end and more professional systems.
Oh, yeah, not saying that they were the first filesystems, just that I can remember that transition on the personal computer.
futatorius@lemm.ee 2 days ago
The abstraction away of the idea of files and folders is a deliberate user disempowerment strategy by app and mobile OS creators. The underlying concept is that the app owns the data, you don’t. It also conceals the fact that use of standard file formats and directory structure conventions were developed to facilitate interoperability: apps come and go, but the data was meant to live on regardless. Of course, vendors want to break interoperability since doing so enables lock-in. Even when the format of the underlying content is standarized, they’ll still try to fuck you over by imposing a proprietary metadata standard.
Just another example of enshittification at work.