It's crazy how bad the mobile epidemic has gotten. There are kids coming into a Computer Science degree that can't figure out how to unzip a zip or even finding out where files get downloaded to. (Fwiw, those I know dropped out before 2nd year)
He was using the mental model of files and folders -- that files exist and refer to stored bytes, and that there can be one or several copies of a file. There can be links to a file that take very little space relative to the file.
I had to tell him that I have no idea what sort of storage model these services expose, if any, and that the concept of a file system backed by a storage device is not the analogy that applications expose to their users these days.
He eventually understood, but I could feel his frustration -- that the mental model he had was really just chosen by a past moment in application design, and that what replaced it is nebulous and disempowering.
When i use google drive, the interface appears to be folder/file structure. Whether it is or is made to look that way is irrelevant, i suppose, as long as it works that way. I can also increase storage by downloading/deleting things so Im a bit flummoxed.
- Google Drive caches recent files and downloads other files on demand. Just like iCloud Drive, MS OneDrive, etc.
- Deleting files will free up space on your Google account.
- Clicking the "clear offline files" button will free up space on device.
All these offering are quite similar with just a few extra features here and there
It might look that way, but it doesn’t have the same features.
https://aws.amazon.com/compare/the-difference-between-block-...
If Google Photos is low on space, try deleting from Google Photos without causing it to delete from all other devices. Seems to require manually copying all those files to an untracked folder, then deleting from Google Photos.
Try managing which folders Google Photos syncs:
When it asks to add a newly found folder, the app doesn't give any way to find out where that folder is or what's in it, unless the folder's name only occurs once on the device.
Try removing folders from the app ("Whups, didn't mean to backup all the graphic assets of a random app that foolishly doesn't use 'nomedia'!"), where the folder name is not unique. It again gives nothing more than folder names and no indication of where they are or what's in them.
Try getting Google Photos to list where every file first came from, so you know where the originals are (for various reasons).
For my Dad, we got him a “simple phone” – it basically does calls and texts, has big buttons in pretty much the style of old Nokia phones but chunkier. The screen is larger and higher resolution than those, so the text is nice and clear. It works really well for him in terms of being able to cope with it with his eyes and getting the job done.
> Every app has a cloud service
And that phone doesn't run apps at all… For things beyond calls and texts¹ he uses a laptop, largely keeping with the files/folders metaphor and no extra apps.
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[1] managing his banking, certain shopping though he often instead asks one of us to do that as he is wary or falling into scam sites, facebook for more passively getting news on what family a-far is getting up to, his collection of digital photos (he used to take a lot), and such
If the students are genuinely curious, there is nothing to stop them learning about pretty much any topic in CS - really. There are few university subjects where the entire syllabus is freely available online in almost every format imaginable the way CS often is, and very often the computer you already have works just fine to learn it on.
Network building, external proof of ability to work, and a place (and just as important - a time) to translate who you are into who you want to be.
These were always the reasons, the rest you learn on the job.
It's not that you have to learn everything on your own though, it's that if you enter a program without having some understanding of the basics, you're going to have to pay to take a bunch of remedial classes.
It'd be like going for a mathematics degree when the highest class you took in high school was algebra, where the normal degree students would be starting with Calc 3 or Differential Equations. You might be ok in the major or you might not, but you don't even know enough to start on the path at that point.
I'm a programmer now, but I don't think finishing the CS course would've helped much with that.
Your maths degree probably did as much as a CS degree would have done (expanding your ability to learn, analyse & problem solve, etc.) allowing you to learn the technical details of programming on your own. CS was essentially birthed from a branch or two of mathematics, after all!
People who want/need a programming course (which is perfectly valid, I don't mean to denigrate the position in the slightest) are probably not best served by a traditional CS degree.
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[1] “hum-drum” sounds a bit too negative for what I was intending, but my brain isn't firing on all cylinders this morning and I can't think of a better term for what I was thinking there!
It’s kinda shitty, but for a long time PC gaming as a gateway drug for young kids let universities just assume a fat pipeline of already-computer-savvy applicants.
Lack of understanding coming into the courses causes issues, when I started we had to delay things because some students hadn't encountered matrixes and the maths around them.
So sure, they can teach these things but it adds to what they already are trying to teach. A lowered base means less of the advanced content can be taught.
(Hurrey for Termux)
I was very lucky that my middle school (in a fairly low-income area) was given a grant by NASA that allowed them to supply all of us with laptops during the school year. I surely wouldn't be where I am today without it.
I learned CS ~20 years ago and it was mostly the same. Half of the first year is people that are vaguely interested in computers, video games, or heard it was a good way to make money, and didn't really have any real skills going into it.
It is somewhat different now, because there are students that think they are good with technology but really have no idea how things work, they just think they know because they are slightly better than their peers at using phones and tablets.
But that's not what they are taught now. They are taught to use social media and cloud services, which is completely useless since they figured this out themselves already.
The education system here just keeps them early in a consumer mind state. It has absolutely no ambition and is just a race to the bottom.
But so it goes when society moves forward.
That's like trying to learn a foreign language by picking reading War and Peace in that language, without ever having seen a single translation to that language, or having already read War and Peace in your own. There are a lot of steps you need to take before then.
I would also be pretty surprised if a biology undergrad had never touched a microscope, possibly with the exception of the most impoverished among us. I imagine most people have tried one at some point along the K-12 journey, and there are more introductory treatments of e.g. life science on the way as well.
Starting CS without having "seen or touched" a computer would be like a biology undergrad who wouldn't be able to tell you whether a dog or a tree is a plant or animal.
Likewise the biology example seems strange; sure maybe people haven't used a microscope specifically (unlikely imo), but they very likely have used any number of other implements and taken at least one secondary school biology course
No but you'd presumably make them take some remedial classes that the mainstream students wouldn't be required to take. Or maybe not, I'm not sure how it works in biology, but in the harder STEM majors, you're generally expected to have some basic knowledge beyond what the 'easy' track at high school required for graduation.
I've seen younger generation only use Google Docs and streaming services (music/video) and not even understand what a "file" is, because everything is just on the internet.
Still Google Docs? Many people use docs.google.com daily, but they have never visited drive.google.com
But attempting to save an attachment (from Telegram, WhatsApp, Viber...) and then either open it or attach it from another program leaves me perplexed. I generally rely on "share with" to avoid this, but I am guessing not all apps register proper MIME types or detect them properly so the option I need doesn't show up every time.
I guess the fact that I mostly moved from DOS to Linux never really got me away from thinking about files and directories, and inconsistency in Android really bothers me.
One thing I appreciate about iOS is there's a Files app/UI, and if your app wants to save some user-facing data, it can go into the Files app. From there it's a simplified Explorer/Finder type file browser. It's not perfect but its consistent to me.
Been there too. After some (maybe a lot) investigation I learned that this "inconsistency" in Android happens, because some apps use "private" directories which you (or other apps) aren't allowed to look at. Think of these as directories of user Linux users who turned off read access for others, i.e. "chmog og-r $HOME"
After finding apps like Solid Explorer and especially Termux, I learned to comprehend what's going on. But I still hate it that apps (and Android) prevent me from looking at my data the way I like to do it. For "security reasons" I not allowed to view things on my devices? Sheesh!
Nice apps like Markor or Diary (from Bill Farmer) store their data in user visible directories. As such apps exist, I tend to ignore those with limiting my access.
What's even more confusing is that some apps save images directly to the "Gallery" which is separate from the "file and folder" view you get otherwise. So (as an inaccurate example), Fujifilm's app might download directly to your "Camera Roll" while GoPro's app might create a "GoPro" directory to dump photos/videos in, which offers more separation but doesn't appear in the "Photos" app by default.
Some apps even have toggles to switch between these two methods of saving files - though if I recall correctly, the non-Gallery/Camera Roll method (while desirable to many users) of saving images has technically been deprecated for a while.
You can read more here: https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage
I know incredibly competent web developers who don’t know what SSH is or how to use it. Boggles my mind, but I grew up with it so it’s what I’m used to.
I have issues with that. FF doesn't show the path in the list of downloads. There is a button to start a file manager, but I have no file managers installed, so button doesn't work. In some cases I didn't find the better way than to copy the link and to download again with wget.
The growing irrelevance of the filesystem for the average computer user isn't a ln "epidemic" any more than the obsolescence of the CLI for the average person; it's just additional progress towards adapting computers to be more human-friendly rather than the reverse. We didn't used to have cars with automatic transmissions, cruise control, or blinkers that turned off on their own once you've finished turning, and no one describes the evolution evolution of the way we drove cars from decades ago to the present in the same language as a public health emergency.
Over time, technology becoming simpler to use by parts of the interface getting pushed down into implementation details is a good thing for the vast majority of people in the long run, and it's important for those of us who are technical not to mistake the requirement of a certain feature for the ability to access it. I think the biggest concern with the dominance mobile computing isn't that users might not need to know about the filesystem but that users might not have control of their own devices in the long run if the ability to access the filesystem is removed. There's precedent in getting support from the non-technical public to care about technical details when they understand how it affects them (e.g. right to repair, the pushback against SOPA/PIPA, net neutrality), but I that we'll miss the window to influence things similarly here if we focus on the wrong thing.
It's crazy how well mobile's robust security model has protected the suddenly computing masses.