Students Don't Know What Files And Folders Are, Professors Say (pcgamer.com) 186
University students in courses from engineering to physics are having to be taught what files and folders are, The Verge reports, because that's not how they've grown up using computers. Whenever they need a file, they just search for it. PCGamer summarizes the findings: "I tend to think an item lives in a particular folder. It lives in one place, and I have to go to that folder to find it," astrophysicist Catherine Garland said. "They see it like one bucket, and everything's in the bucket." Strange as it may seem to older generations of computer users who grew up maintaining an elaborate collection of nested subfolders, thanks to powerful search functions now being the default in operating systems, as well as the way phones and tablets obfuscate their file structure, and cloud storage, high school graduates don't see their hard drives the same way.
"Students have had these computers in my lab; they'll have a thousand files on their desktop completely unorganized," Peter Plavchan, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at George Mason University, told The Verge. "I'm kind of an obsessive organizer ... but they have no problem having 1,000 files in the same directory. And I think that is fundamentally because of a shift in how we access files." As The Verge points out, "The first internet search engines were used around 1990, but features like Windows Search and Spotlight on macOS are both products of the early 2000s [...] While many of today's professors grew up without search functions on their phones and computers, today's students increasingly don't remember a world without them."
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, or a reason to recoil in horror because how dare the youth of today do things differently, why the very idea. "When I was a student, I'm sure there was a professor that said, 'Oh my god, I don't understand how this person doesn't know how to solder a chip on a motherboard,'" Plavachan said. "This kind of generational issue has always been around." And Garland, the astrophysicist teaching an engineering course, has started using her PC's search function to find files in the same way her students do. "I'm like, huh ... I don't even need these subfolders," she said.
"Students have had these computers in my lab; they'll have a thousand files on their desktop completely unorganized," Peter Plavchan, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at George Mason University, told The Verge. "I'm kind of an obsessive organizer ... but they have no problem having 1,000 files in the same directory. And I think that is fundamentally because of a shift in how we access files." As The Verge points out, "The first internet search engines were used around 1990, but features like Windows Search and Spotlight on macOS are both products of the early 2000s [...] While many of today's professors grew up without search functions on their phones and computers, today's students increasingly don't remember a world without them."
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, or a reason to recoil in horror because how dare the youth of today do things differently, why the very idea. "When I was a student, I'm sure there was a professor that said, 'Oh my god, I don't understand how this person doesn't know how to solder a chip on a motherboard,'" Plavachan said. "This kind of generational issue has always been around." And Garland, the astrophysicist teaching an engineering course, has started using her PC's search function to find files in the same way her students do. "I'm like, huh ... I don't even need these subfolders," she said.
/. editors (Score:5, Funny)
/. editors don't know what dupes are.
Re: /. editors (Score:2)
Naw dude, it's a link, not a copy.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
/. editors don't know what dupes are.
Sir, this is Slashdot! If it’s not late, low information, and duped, we want our money back.
Search works fine IF you remember the file name... (Score:5, Interesting)
... or part of it.
Folders are still nice for organizing similar items -- various documents for a school class, photos from a trip, project files, etc. Having recently taught HS students I can tell you most of them have no idea what they called something, so searching for it is often useless.
I was surprised how many had no idea how file / folder systems worked. It was worse with students who used a Mac (I hate the way Mac hides/organizes things), than Windows users, who were generally familiar with Explorer and tree structures.
I've seen students and 20-somethings with the most hideous desktops, as the article mentioned, 100s or more files all over it. I think the chaos would even make Cthulhu lose his mind...
Re:Search works fine IF you remember the file name (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Search works fine IF you remember the file name (Score:4, Interesting)
Boomers and Gen-Xers don't understand hierarchical systems either.
Every generation believes that their kids are dumber than they were. They are almost always wrong.
I worked with boomers in the 1980s who had a thousand files in their home directory without a single subdirectory. When I showed one co-worker how to categorize his files into directories, he thought I had deleted the files because he couldn't see them anymore.
Re: (Score:3)
When I showed one co-worker how to categorize his files into directories
Could he get his work done with 1000 files in the home directory? Yes? Then leave it alone. I've met people who could work this way. I don't understand how their brain operates on that level. But it does.
When you categorized his files, what attributes did you use to do so? File name? Date? Type? Size? Maybe that's not how he organizes things.
I used to work for an outfit that was big on the '5 S' system (part of lean manufacturing). We used to refer to that as 'Same Shit Stashed Somewhere Sneaky'.
Re: Search works fine IF you remember the file nam (Score:2)
The designers of gui operating systems don't make it easier either by all those links to various actual locations. People forget to think in an organized way so stuff just ends up in a huge landfill of electronic documents and at a company it may mean that they are lost forever.
Re:Search works fine IF you remember the file name (Score:5, Interesting)
Hierarchical filing systems are, like most things in computers, just a reflection of real world organization. Think things like kitchen -> utensil drawer -> knives -> knife. I'm sure we were organizing things in similar fashion before we lived in caves.
What disturbs me most about things like this is that they reduce the potential pool of people who can do some very real world jobs. I can't imagine writing programs without being able to organize like this. Designing databases would likewise be impossible.
Just because we can eliminate the need for a skill does not mean we should. The skills we use for simple things feed into more complex things because the people who developed those more complex things had those skills. There might be another way to accomplish it, but should we really redesign the world to eliminate the need to organize?
A simple example that comes to mind might be a mechanic's garage. I guess we could just throw the tools all over the place and be able to find them if we put RFIDs on everything and added the ability to something like a Google Assistant to lead us to anything in the garage. But, that would have us constantly seeking tools because they wouldn't be grouped by job. It would also remove implicit reminders and negate the usefulness of muscle memory.
A great mechanic often has multiple toolboxes or kits with duplicate tools because to allow them to grab the one customized to a job. I like to do my own maintenance and have multiple toolbelts for a similar reason - one for doing electrical wiring, one for plumbing, and one for carpentry type activities.
My file system is similar except the use of links allows me to avoid unnecessary duplication. It otherwise reflects the real world. I can't imagine how I could handle the tens of thousands of files I have otherwise. Nobody who doesn't understand organization could take over my projects or manage to recreate them on their own.
Re:Search works fine IF you remember the file name (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, in the "real world" every bit as much as the electronic one, people vary dramatically in terms of their ability, and willingness, to organize things.
Watch Hoarders if you want to see extreme examples of people unable or unwilling to do this. (Often a little of both, and often an outgrowth of huge stresses and challenges elsewhere in their lives; I've come to look on such folks with sympathy, rather than judgment.)
I myself have the ability, but often not the willingness, because the time it would take to be better organized competes with a hundred other things of far greater importance and urgency. I tend to be as organized and orderly as I need to be, but, generally, little if any more.
However, if I found that large parts of my time were taken up looking for things because I don't know where I put them, or starting recipes and not finishing them because I didn't know we were out of this or that, or constantly getting sick because I didn't clean the mold off my shower tiles often enough? Precisely because my time is in demand, I'd invest a little in not wasting it through lack of sufficient organization.
Re: Search works fine IF you remember the file nam (Score:4, Funny)
Re: Search works fine IF you remember the file na (Score:2)
Re: Search works fine IF you remember the file nam (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Windows users are probably better at organizing files because they still have to use file hierarchies because the search function is getting worse with every release.
Re: Search works fine IF you remember the file nam (Score:2)
But the f:ed up start menu of Win8 and later has now forced me to memorize the program names and search for them or put shortcuts on the taskbar for frequently used.
At least openshell has provided some relief, but helping others can be a challenge.
The dynamically rearranging ribbon in some programs is another headache.
Re:Search works fine IF you remember the file name (Score:5, Insightful)
I am CLI oriented, but I think the GUI design has recognized that recall is stronger than previously assumed.
Hit win key, type 3-4 letters, hit enter and the document/application/whatever is open. It's very quick and efficient and people ultimately generally know what they are looking for, at least within the ability of modern search to figure out (filename only might be too limited, but with content search you are a cinch to find what you are looking for).
Previously the GUI thinking was to be the exact opposite of CLI. Where CLI was largely recall where the user had to type all input without necessarily seeing the thing they were working on, GUIs were all about recognition, if the user ever had to touch a key on the keyboard the GUI had 'failed'. However this meant GUIs were also painfully tedious as instead of just remembering the thing you were looking for, you had to also remember the 2-3 layers of hierarchy above it to find it. For users getting started that haven't yet learned what they are looking for, the hierarchy *might* have been useful if they understood the categories but didn't know an application name, but in practice that didn't pan out. For example a new user wants a calculator, they know the word calculator, but they didn't know that it would be under 'Accessories'.
So I'm the opposite. I almost always search. The search may be scoped (I'm in the editor for my source project, I hit keystroke to search for file to open and hit enter) but either way I search. Then if the letters that came to mind didn't work, then I might try 2 or 3 alternatives before finally relenting and trying to find the file according to the filesystem hierarchy (e.g. I know I put it in 'MyWorkSyncDrive/Specifications/' but I didn't name it the way I thought I named it).
Re: Search works fine IF you remember the file nam (Score:2)
A proper document management system with version control and useful document number formats.
Anyone seen Prim/Gask? 1/ANE40105
Re: (Score:2)
There's certainly room for improvement, but we already have a maximally compatible and completely cross-platform method: add metadata tags to your file names.
If you use an instant-search program like Everything.exe (windows) or FSearch(linux) you can just start typing (parts of) keywords and watch the list of all the files in your computer instantly shorten to only those containing the keyword fragments you have typed.
The biggest further improvement I can think of is to have the GUI auto-suggest the keyword
Re: (Score:2)
I think the search part is pretty well sorted. The problem is that adding metadata needs to be a standard part of the procedure for making and/or saving a file. Right now, for example, there's a standard save dialog so that the first time you save a file you have to decide where in the file system it's going to go, but you have to jump through extra hoops to add other kinds of metadata. Adding the metadata needs to be as natural a part of saving a file as deciding a location is.
It would also be good if
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed, that was kind of what I was alluding to with auto-suggest keywords: given the "keywords" (including file type) you've provided so far, the keywords that come closest to bisecting the associated result set (though probably not remotely close, and thus basically "most common amongst matches") are among those that would be the most likely to be useful to add.
Or even more effectively - explicitly exclude. I imagine a file dialog with a list of "keywords" that you could left-click to add, and right-cl
Re: (Score:2)
Though honestly, in my experience just using long descriptive filenames, like full sentence length, is enormously effective. I've been using the method for years and almost never have trouble finding a file.
Search sucks though. I'll admit I haven't used MacOS search in a couple years, or Linux for that matter (my Linux laptop died and I haven't felt the need to replace it.), but as of a couple years ago both were almost as bad as Windows search - slow, tedious, and far too prone to not finding the file I
They know what files are, they just call them... (Score:3, Insightful)
a different name, like document, photo, essay, spreadsheet.
As per folders (or, more pedantic, subdirectories):
Why you need to know that, if there is a search engine in your OS, right at your fingertips that you can use to search for your stuff, sometmes even by voice.
Computers of a bygone era forced many people to become OCD anal retentive types.
Luckily a new generation of people will not need to become OCD/AR just to use a computer, unless they absolutely need to (like people going into programing, for example)...
JM2C, YMMV
Re: (Score:2)
Considering just how much of a mess people's files and folders are, they NEED a search engine to find anything. Especially compounded by storage getting bigger and bigger.
Re: They know what files are, they just call them. (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
I'll leave no stone unturned.
File this... (Score:2)
Oddly enough most don't know what a secretary is either.
Re: File this... (Score:2)
And some people need one to keep them organized and produce properly formatted documents. Dyslexia is something that's preventing otherwise smart people from success.
How many years have they used their computer? (Score:2)
They have1000 files on the desktop (Score:2)
Re: They have1000 files on the desktop (Score:2)
And the excuse for the 100 open browser tabs is...
Re: (Score:2)
nor have they been taught the concepts of filing and sorting
File everything under 'A'.
A report. A graph. A picture.
Re: (Score:2)
I just file everything under M, for Misc.
Re: (Score:2)
Fortunately she never applied for the "Brain of Britain" quiz show.
10% rule. (Score:5, Insightful)
I am old. When I was a kid, 10% of the kids and adults, etc. knew what the difference between a file and a folder/directroy was. The others said things like computers are a fad.
Now, 10% of kids, adults still know the difference between a file and a folder. But the other 10% now say "I know all about computers, I use one every day, I can use it to make myself RICH!"
The same percent of people have the knowledge, it's just that the ones that don't want the knowledge.
As for the professors.... IT'S THEIR JOB TO TEACH THEM.
When one of the 90% comes along, you have to give them a beginner course, rather than expect them to know the things the smart people already know.
Re: (Score:2)
As for the professors.... IT'S THEIR JOB TO TEACH THEM.
Only if the course is a computer science course about operating systems. It's not the job of a physics professor to teach students what a file is and what a directory is.
Re: (Score:3)
It's not the job of a physics professor to teach students what a file is and what a directory is.
If not knowing this is a detriment to learning, then yes, yes it is.
Re: (Score:3)
It's not the job of a physics professor to teach students what a file is and what a directory is.
If not knowing this is a detriment to learning, then yes, yes it is.
So is it the physics professor's job to teach getting up in the morning, coming to class, reading, arithmetic, notetaking, algebra, test-taking, and calculus?
Re: (Score:2)
> Now, 10% of kids, adults still know the difference between a file and a folder. But the other 10%
There are three kinds of people in the world: those who can count and those who can't.
powerful search functions now being the default (Score:3, Insightful)
NOW being the default? Shit, everyone who's bothered to register an account here almost certainly knows how to locate any file from the command line in at least two operating systems.
Re:powerful search functions now being the default (Score:5, Funny)
What's a command line?
Re: (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:powerful search functions now being the default (Score:5, Interesting)
The operative word being 'default'.
From the CLI, search is always at hand, but it is a separate command. Your current working directory is baked into it so navigating the CLI always is path oriented, even as you have find/locate/etc at hand easily. However this isn't the situation that is relevant.
For GUIs, the paradigm used to be always click to 'navigate' hierarchies, whether files in a hierarchy in explorer or menu entries in application menus. You were directed to navigate these to find what you want and the prominent 'fast' thing to do was pull your favorites to the desktop as 'shortcuts'. Whenever you saved a file, again you were placed into a dialog to specifically direct where to save and what file to call it, prominently highlighting the directory tree to have you organize. Sure, there was a 'search' option, somewhere under the menu but the user was clearly steered toward navigating the menu and resorting to search only when they couldn't figure it out.
For modern Windows desktop and application ecosystem, that isn't true. You hit the start key and start typing whatever application or file you want and it shows it to you. When you hit save in firefox/chrome it doesn't ask anymore, it just crams it in ~/Downloads/, and you use the download menu to open the file and then maybe never think about that file again, or if you do it's back to 'search'. When an application does need user input to at *least* name a file, it still drops you in a default directory and greatly de-emphasizes navigating directories. That's when an application even bothers to save any data locally, generally applications love to keep the data on your server, eliminating the 'save' concept completely while they are at it. Your 'files' are just living states of the application you access from a browser or mobile 'app'. To the extent your local storage is used is fully abstracted from the user at the site/app developer discretion. An iOS, Android, or ChromeOS user is likely to never see or otherwise interact with the filesystem paradigm at all. The K-12 education system now lives in a 'SaaS' world and all their schoolwork just lives in Google Docs, some education centered coursework sites, or in very rare instances, Office365.
The traditional use of filesystem hierarchy in higher ed may be analogous to TeX in things that were intended to be general use, but ultimately reserved for the tier of users like you would find at University.
I however find it difficult to believe that this represents any significant portion of professor effort. Back in college there was a mandatory computer literacy course that would cover this that you had to take unless you could test out of it. This was only really necessary to ease engineering students into the Unix systems that were the standard, but it makes sense to continue this for whatever tools may be relevant.
I never trusted directories (Score:5, Informative)
We all think that a "thesaurus" is a dictionary where you look up a word and find synonyms for it. But the original Roget's Thesaurus was instead a hierarchical classification of every word in the language. He started with top six-level directories "Abstract relations, Intellect, Material world, Volution, Sentient powers" and divided those into subdirectories and so on. For each word he figured out which leaf folder made best sense. Its use as a dictionary of synonyms was just a consequence of its directory structure.
Back in 1988 at age 14 I decided to use Roget's classification for my directory structure. That way it'd be logical where each file should go. Unfortunately on the BBC computer network file system, each directory took 1k, and we only had 32k storage space per user, so I didn't get far.
At college six years later a few of us worked on a "set-based filesystem" for our group project. Our idea is that it'd make more sense for most files to be seen as members of different sets, and many of the sets weren't proper subsets, so hierarchical directories didn't make sense; symlinks and hard links are just papering over the ugly gcracks. We implemented it badly, but I think that (say) gmail message tags embody kind of the same sentiment well.
All of which to say -- I think there's nothing particularly fundamental about hierarchical directory structures. They don't properly represent the way our files should be categorized by users much of the time, nor the way they should be retrieved by users, nor indeed the way they should be stored by the OS or app. They weren't with us in lots of file systems of the past, and they're being eclipsed for many user-facing areas now. I think we'll look back at them as a transient historical curiosity, used only by some internals of some systems.
(I say this as someone who obsessively uses directories for all of my files. I even use directories my music archive, despite iTunes fighting me all the way, and I wrote simple shellscripts to copy the directory structure into the "genre" tag of the music files so at least iTunes would let me sort by directory structure.)
Re: (Score:3)
hard links are just papering over the ugly cracks
Actually hard links aren't really papering over the ugly cracks, they are a natural feature of the filesystem which is inherently more 'set-based' than people tend to realize. The only 'one true' identifier in a *nix filesystem is an inode number, and no one ever uses that. Instead a hierarchy-friendly set of 'labels' are used, and 'hard link' is merely when there happens to be more than one reference to the same inode. It's not like 'the original' is different than other links, you aren't linking to the
Re: (Score:3)
I even use directories my music archive, despite iTunes fighting me all the way [...]
A guy in college had one of those massive MP3 collections. Back when hard drives were about 20GB, he had 15GB of music. All beautifully sorted by hand. He could find you an obscure live version of a song, or a cover version, or Wierd Al's parody of it, all right there on his local storage. That music library was a work of art. For some reason, a few years later he tried installing itunes instead of Winamp. The next time I saw his MP3 folder, there were a handful of artist and genre folders, and about 13GB o
Sigh (Score:2)
Files and folders are a crap idea.
Labels and tags.
And those are inherently searchable, and require a search function to operate.
Why?
Say you have a file relevant to 2016 Accounts.
Do you put that in Accounts\2016 ? Or 2016\Accounts?
What about 2017 Sales? Now where? Sales\2017? Or 2017\Sales?
Now how do you collate all the Sales info for each year? How do you collate all the 2016 financial info? One way or another, you're stuffed.
But if you LABEL them, 2016 and Accounts, it really doesn't matter. You ca
Re: (Score:2)
Of course, labels/tags are just alternative words for directories/folders/filenames. Generally filesystems have long recognized that the human namespace (the directory tree) and the machine namespace (inodes) are distinct and have supported the flexibility you speak of to have arbitrary numbers of names in arbitrary number of directories pointing to the same data. People erroneously conceptualize additional names as 'links' to the 'original' name, but at least for hardlinks, even the first name given is m
Re: (Score:2)
> Say you have a file relevant to 2016 Accounts.
> Do you put that in Accounts\2016 ? Or 2016\Accounts?
And the answer is (surprise!) Accounts\2016.
You keep books together in a bookshelf, and knives together in a kitchen drawer.
You don't keep a knife and a book next to each other just because you bought them on the same day.
It's staggering sometimes how bad they are (Score:5, Funny)
One of the reasons we basically stopped allowing new projects in Python where I work is that we found that so many of the junior Python developers were borderline useless at ANYTHING beyond slinging some code. Basically no UNIX-related schools, couldn't even package their code for deployment, stuff like that. Stuff that when I was getting out of college was considered basic competence whether your school taught C++ or Java.
I mean the level of lack of knowledge is jaw-dropping from some of these punks like one sent our devops team a ticket that amounts to this: "please check elasticsearch because I think something broke when you upgraded postgres" in terms of "I would love to hook up your brain to a debugger and figure out what triggered this neural connection."
Old guy here (Score:2)
Old guy perspective: folders and directory structures aren't an end in themselves. The goal is to be able to find what you're looking for. Absent good search capability, that usually means organizing things so you can narrow down what you need to look at to a small enough set to feasibly scan it for what you need. The whole folder tree idiom was just a natural extension of the way we organized physical documents, that's all. Given a good search capability, you don't need to organize documents to be able to
File structure is so passe (said the developer ).. (Score:2)
Keyword file system (Score:2)
Towards A Single Folder Filesystem: https://www.skytopia.com/proje... [skytopia.com]
Keywords and metadata are the way.
Who needs "web sites"? (Score:2)
Why isn't this thread on the same page as CNN articles, eBay listings for fishing lures,
Zillow homes in Omaha?
Learning designed to set you up to fail! (Score:2)
The sky is brown!! (Score:2)
*gets bag, and walks out on society*
Re: (Score:2)
If you wanna get technical, and assuming you're probably not just dumping everything in the root directory of your drive, they are actually called subdirectories.
Another Analogy: GPS (Score:2)
This reminds me of the somewhat similar issues around navigation in the physical world, where search engines replace maps - this time, the search engines show you all (only) what you need to know to reach your destination.
Whatâ(TM)s missing? Context, sense of place, understanding of how a set of files relate to each other (same directory) and the ability to think of a route from one place to another without using the mobile map.
Like a search engine that is excellent at answering the (right) question y
Hierarchical file systems aren't very good (Score:2)
Maybe rather than try to force students to learn about standard file systems, we need more efficient ways to organize information.
Reminds me of music file indexing (Score:2)
On music file indexing vs. directories, I'll take directories every day of the week and twice on the weekend. Music file indexing might make sense when you just want to play some Justin Bieber, but not when you have an eclectic taste that doesn't span popular pop and rap. The indexing of the files would get too complicated and cumbersome to look for something very specific, for instance, playing Glenn Gould's Bach Klavier Concerto #1, recorded with Bernstein in 1955, because not only do I have that one, b
this is not new (Score:2)
I've done tech support, systems and network administration since the early 1980s and one of the things that has remained constant over all that time is that the vast majority of people just dump all their files - hundreds or thousands of them - into either one directory or onto their Desktop. Usually with meaningless filenames that do nothing to identify what's in it, or what it's for.
Tags aren't going to help them because they have no fucking concept of organisation to begin with. if they did, they'd be
This means job security for us old guys (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I hear there is a high demand for grave diggers right now.
I blame smart phones (Score:2)
Seriously. No mobile app exposes a file tree. It's just a sea of documents. Yes, there's a file system under there but all you see is a list of texts, photos, videos, What Up messages, or whatever.
If you grew up on a phone, you'll never have been exposed to file trees so naturally you won't know what they are.
Plus, the whole concept of a folder containing other folders: what filing system allows that? I've talked to people who couldn't get it because they took the "file folder" model just a little too liter
Job and project diredtories (Score:2)
The way I have organized files since the days of DOS is to create a directory for a particular job I need to work on, then have subdirectories off that for things like PCB CAD, firmware, datasheets, and so on. One big advantage of this is that I can archive all the files related to the job with one simple command. I can't imagine how anybody could do that reliably by searching for each file. You are sure to miss something.
Another habit is manual versioning, where I have subdirectories called "v1", "v2", etc
Re: no, sorry (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
or what the dewey decimal system is.
If they use a library, they better figure it out, otherwise they won't be able to find a book.
Re: no, sorry (Score:2)
000 â" Computer science, information and general works
100 â" Philosophy and psychology
200 â" Religion
300 â" Social sciences
400 â" Language
500 â" Pure Science
600 â" Technology
700 â" Arts and recreation
800 â" Literature
900 â" History and geography
Einstein once wrote " I do not know how we will fight
Re: (Score:2)
All they know is that some book is in 516.3 but not why. Not the classes or subdivides.. or even that there are classes and subdivides
The classes are often printed on the side of the rows, so I would expect they figure it out rather quickly.
Re: no, sorry (Score:2)
And if you end up in another country the system is different in those libraries, so no point in memorizing the Dewey system if you plan to be a library globetrotter.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
If they use a library, they better figure it out, otherwise they won't be able to find a book.
Reminds of this exchange on Community, S2:E15: Early 21st Century Romanticism [wikipedia.org]:
Troy: Why does being a librarian make her even hotter?
Abed: They're keepers of knowledge. She holds the answers to all of our questions, like "Will you marry me?" and "Why are there still libraries?"
Re: (Score:2)
Some libraries do, some libraries don't. Do research before posting, Nutjob.
Re: (Score:3)
Some libraries do, some libraries don't. Do research before posting,
I tried to, but not knowing either the Dewey or Library of Congress systems, I couldn't find anything.
Re: (Score:2)
Too bad you can't look in the card catalog.
Re: (Score:3)
LMGTFY -- The University of Illinois' Main Library uses DDS.
Re: (Score:2)
Find me one university library in the United States that doesn't use the LoC system.
The Dewey Graduate Library at the University of Albany?
Re: no, sorry (Score:4, Insightful)
Filing Cabinets aren't even a good way to organize things. A file should be able to exist in multiple organizational containers.
An MP3 can exist as a member of an album, an artist, a genre, a year or any number of other groupings. Wars have been waged on how best to organize MP3 Folders.
It took me a while for my mother to understand not-folders in how files were organized inside of "libraries" when Windows introduced those. (And then Windows removed them because old timers only understood filing cabinet analogies where a document is inside of one folder and one folder only).
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, it's awkward to organize existence into a tree structure, does this pdf exist as "cars" or "manuals", tags are ideal in theory.
There is software for having your files this way, boorus are built this way; they also eat several times the effort, even exploiting comedy of the commons.
To emphasize: Tags are the container, and you can indeed have that file exist in multiple containers. For multiple times the organizing work. And a bit of prescience to place with any foresight, which is a steep demand for m
Re: no, sorry (Score:5)
Actually, it doesn't have to be a single-location, well not in any human used concept of 'location'.
To use *nix terminology, a file is identified numerically as one inode. There may be an arbitrary number of 'filenames' in an arbitrary number of 'directories' pointing to the same inode (hardlink). Any change in any reference to that inode will be reflected in all links to that inode.
So effectively, every file is already 'tagged' and you can multiply tag it and organize the tags into a hierarchy.
Re: (Score:3)
Filing Cabinets aren't even a good way to organize things. A file should be able to exist in multiple organizational containers.
Well, there's symbolic links. And hierarchies of folders for things like 'Artists', 'Genres', 'ReleaseYear', etc. Problem: You have to maintain that manually. Or get an app (MP3 player) that enforces the system by the relevant attributes.
But then when you use your PC for multiple applications, one hierarchy system won't fit all. I can't stuff my engineering drawings into a 'Genres' folder. Operating systems aren't cut out to handle every use case. Some new app will come along with a metadata class that nob
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is when they then apply sorting to the real world. Try googling sorting a Worksop, Garage, Pantry or a Wardrobe and see the number of different approaches. Unfortunately the mess in most real world things is caused by lack of discipline learnt that you should be able to find anything just by asking google, Siri, Alexa
Re: (Score:2)
You have invented a library card catalog. Which I suppose is a proto-search-engine. But at least things are sorted.
Re: (Score:2)
Do new students even know the comparison to a filing cabinet, or even what a filing cabinet is? They sure as hell dont know what a card catalog is for or what the dewey decimal system is.
Back in my day, I had to jailbreak my iPhone just to get copy and paste! Kids these days... I’m not sure I like the cut of their jib.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure the libraries in the USA use the Dewey Imperial System.
Re: (Score:2)
But I also don't remember the file search to be as much 'in your face' as it is today in older operating systems. Where today it is almost as integrated into the file explorer like it is in an internet browser.
I think there was some convergence in file explorer GUI design and web browser UI design. I too think that older operating systems relied a lot more on the user understanding the directory structure a bit better. If that worked, I can't say, because I knew enough people whose des
Re: no, sorry (Score:2)
File search in older systems was barely a filename search.
Now an days you can search for a fragment of a document. It will search common file formats.
Re: (Score:2)
That was in the mid to late 90's.
Today it works indeed pretty much like a web search engine.
Re: (Score:2)
It depends, the search was usually performed on demand rather than having an index so searches of filenames would be slow and searches of file content would be even slower still. Unix systems have long had "find" to look for filenames or other attributes such as size/date etc, as well as grep which can do recursive searches of content.
Re: (Score:2)
And it still sucks.
Why can't even one OS offer integrated instant find-as-you-type local file search comparable to Everything.exe search on Windows, or FSearch (which it inspired) on Linux? Absolutely nothing official comes even remotely close. Windows Search acts like it's trying, but is hideously slow, and prone to simply not listing results even when you type the file (or utility) name exactly while looking at it in a file browser window.
As far as I can tell neither is doing anything especially "clever
Re: (Score:3)
We didn't go until the 2000s without local file search capability.
find / -iname '*pr0n*'
Re: (Score:3)
Most of the world had local file search capability since the mid 90s (Win95 could also search for text within files - I assume non-binary formats). Windows NT 4 could also index the contents of supported files (e.g. DOC IIRC).
Re: (Score:2)
That's not correct at all. We didn't go until the 2000s without local file search capability. Try actually using an older system. The Internet was barely even public in 1990. Come on.
Macs had "find file" since 1984 where files and folders and became mainstream before that it was files and directories search existed how ever it was slow.
Re: (Score:3)
And MSDOS lets you search folders with wildcards 'dir gold*.txt /s' etc. The submitter should know their computer history before making incorrect statements about computer history.
Re:Ditch the metaphor (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest concern I have is the replacement for the 'file' paradigm is generally 'let the application vendor own your data and arbitrate any and all access to it'.
The file/directory paradigm provides an abstraction of the data from the application that processes it. You have control over the data and if you want to collaborate with me, you can independently decide how to arbitrate access (send a copy get a copy, set up a shared folder, maybe a cloud storage location that isn't tied to your application). Your application vendor goes out of business? Well, you still have your software copy, or if you were renting it, well, at least you have your data still in a format that probably some other software supports.
Increasingly the data lives in the application, and the application never leaves the developers service. So if you have a work and you want me to collaborate, you need the developers to facilitate that, and may require that I also pay $5/month for the privilege of accessing your online work. I have to juggle a plethora of services that do the exact same thing because I work with a significantly disparate set of people who have all selected different vendors for the same function, and it's maddening having to juggle that when each one is pretty much the same as the others in every way that matters, but different enough user experience that it is obnoxious. And when one has an outage or quits the business... tough...
Re: (Score:2)
The biggest concern I have is the replacement for the 'file' paradigm is generally 'let the application vendor own your data and arbitrate any and all access to it'.
[...]
Increasingly the data lives in the application, and the application never leaves the developers service. So if you have a work and you want me to collaborate, you need the developers to facilitate that, and may require that I also pay $5/month for the privilege of accessing your online work.
This just goes to show that "proprietary-ness", like power, is like a gravity well. The bigger the thing in the well gets, the more power it has to push proprietary-ness.
Interestingly, this is true of any power in any field. Be it politics or money or tech or other. Pushing back against it - letting users or citizens have more power - is a constant struggle.
Re:Ditch the metaphor (Score:4)
And yet after trying various methods of organization such as tags, I still come back to folders. It's quite difficult to come up with a reasonable tag-based system that doesn't quickly become unwieldy and difficult to remember. Remember when blogs started tagging everything? You'd get this word soup in the sidebar with all the keywords of different sizes. I've never known anyone to actually use that. Been a while since I've seen that, so maybe it's been abandoned by now.
I used to think a meta filesystem would be awesome where files are just in a big tank with lots of tags and you can then view the filesystem through virtual folders that break out the tags (much like the tagged blogging systems). But that would quickly become extremely cumbersome.
Out in the real world there are still plenty of places that use physical files, despite pervasive computers and electronic record keeping. Filing cabinets are going to be in a lot of offices for a long time yet, and hopefully these young kids will adapt.
Would be interesting to see what happens to a lot of recent generations as they get into old age. Will Google engineers find the things they designed in their youth to be unusable? Or will they simply complain about the strange things the next generations do. Likely the latter; a lot of old guys can still tune carburetors!
Re: (Score:2)
But tags aren't needed. I've already laid out what most people simply need - document title, task/project and maybe dates, and with auto-versioning. For multimedia, tags are already standardized, so no need to do anything there.
Software just needs to stop providing a save/open file dialog with an open ended system they have to remember to use, and instead just use a project and title oriented one across the board for non-multimedia stuff.
Re: (Score:2)
A similar story: when doing my mandatory military service in NL the unit I was in got restructured and a lot of university educated civilians were introduced into the organization, because of automation.
One of the PHD's there looked at me with disdain, because I (without any degree) told him to not format the same floppy to make space for his ever growing set of documents he was writing.
Of course the guy lost all his documents, because everything was still being build up, no backup of documents existed. Af