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File not found - Please tell me this is a joke...
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tooki:

--- Quote from: m98 on September 30, 2021, 10:26:21 pm ---
--- Quote from: tooki on September 30, 2021, 09:00:54 pm ---Even more unjustified bashing on young people for stupid stuff. The reason they don’t know it, if they don’t know it, is that nobody taught them.

--- End quote ---
How can you just never have been exposed to the physical concept of files and folders, even if you haven't ever heard of the virtual pendent?
Seriously, someone who doesn't know such stuff by the time they're in college should really reconsider if they have enough natural curiosity to enjoy an engineering career...

--- End quote ---
The chances of a young person these days having interacted with a filing cabinet are, frankly, vastly smaller than the chances of them having interacted with a computer directory structure!!

It was always a tenuous analogy anyway, since we don’t interact with paper the same way we do with computer data.

And besides, people are often extremely talented in one discipline and not in another, and engineering is no exception. Hell, I had an IT professor who’d literally written our textbook on management information systems, yet struggled to use PowerPoint on a daily basis. (I’ve never seen anyone before or since who always advanced slides by right clicking and then clicking “Next slide”!)

I once made $300 (nearly all for travel) to go plug in a pair of PC speakers for a guy. This guy was a brain surgeon. He could literally rewire your brain, but couldn’t plug in two cables.


--- Quote from: CJay on October 01, 2021, 06:38:16 am ---I work 'in IT', we've got professors, doctors, highly qualified engineers, people who speak to and advise governments etc.

We're huge, wherevere you are in the world there's a really good chance you're relying on or are connected to a bit of our technology as you read this, if you're not right now then you probably have been or will be.
 
Some of the things I hear every week go along the lines of "I'm so stupid I don't understand how" or "I'm such an idiot when it comes to computers".

People  don't say that because they are stupid but because they are defending themselves against the kind of sneering, elitist attitudes being displayed in this thread.

Give your heads a wobble and think about how you'd feel if someone you were looking to for advice told you you're an idiot for not intuitively understanding something that you didn't need to know to do your job, don't care about or have never seen before and are completely alien to you.


--- End quote ---
Thank you, well said!

The user behavior you describe is called “learned helplessness”, and I 100% agree that elitist attitudes reinforce it.
xrunner:

--- Quote from: james_s on October 01, 2021, 04:51:13 am ---
--- Quote from: xrunner on October 01, 2021, 01:49:15 am ---Yep my neighbor is the same. I help him as much as I can with PC issues but there are concepts he hasn't grasped for years as I've kept explaining it over and over. Like when he got a new PC, he wanted to know how we'd get his gmail over to the new PC. He was really worried about it. I said we don't have to move the messages because they are .. well ... look just trust me on this OK? I wasn't about to try to explain it because it would have been to no avail.

--- End quote ---

The emails aren't on the PC in the first place, they're somewhere out in the world, and the PC is just a vehicle to take you to them. If you go out and buy a new car you don't have to find all new stores to go to, the same stores you visited with your old car are still there and the new car will take you to them the same way.

--- End quote ---

Uh-huh, yea. If so, then how can the emails appear on his PC if they are somewhere else? If they are "on" Google somewhere then how can I see them here? See you and I understand these things but he doesn't. I've been very patient over the years but I can only go so far.

Like this last week he has had a hearing problem and is going to get hearing aids. His hearing issue is the reverse of what I've ever known - the sounds from the outside world are too loud, not too weak. Anyway he went to the audiologist and is going to get a kit that will help the issue. He said they have an app that will work on an iPhone to allow a person to adjust the hearing aids and he wanted to know where to get a cheap iPhone. He owns an iPad which I got him into several years ago so he could watch his college games and do other things easily (another teaching foray ...). Anyway I told him, well why do you need an iPhone when you have an iPad?

He said because the lady said the app runs on an iPhone. I said I'll bet you $50 it will be just fine on the iPad. I guarantee you it uses Bluetooth and so it'll work on either one. Well lo and behold of course it is fine to run on an iPad. It's an apple app. He thought I was a genius (I am most certainly not). Then he wanted to get something that made repetitive "clicks" or "beeps" because that is the type of sound that irritates his hearing. He wanted to know if I had a metronome or anything that made loud clicks so he could take it to the audiologist and test the adjustments. I said why don't you get a metronome app for the iPad and use that? I never looked for that kind of app but I was certain they existed. Well what do you know - of course there are metronome apps - quite a few. See he doesn't think like we do. He can't seem to imagine such a solution even though to me that was the first thing I thought of.

I do my best but I know when to just tell him what to do and not try to explain beyond a certain point.

Miyuki:

--- Quote from: Kleinstein on October 01, 2021, 08:34:56 am ---There was a time before a directory tree. With smaller discs there was no need to have subdirectories.

The directory tree is also only one possibility to organize the data on a disc. Many of us are used to it, but there are alternatives like a more data-base form. Especially with SSDs do allow a more random access. In some aspects the file system is still from the times of magnetic tapes.

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File system (folders and directories) is just a human readable presentation of data on block devices under it, folders are completely virtual concep 
All "modern" devices/systems use libraries (for images, music, and so on) and shove files to strangely named folder on filesystem
ajb:

--- Quote from: rsjsouza on October 01, 2021, 02:48:46 am ---Despite being a user for about ten years now, she still has no concept of the physical location of files and directories on a disk but learned how to move her e-mails (together with the attachments) to different folders in Thunderbird.
--- End quote ---

This right here reflects a fundamental problem with the basic assumptions of this thread.  Files/folders/directories are NOT reflective of the "physical" location of data on disk.  A file "in" a given directory may be located anywhere on disk, even broken up into multiple bits spread across the whole thing.  Directory trees are just one method of logically organizing and locating data within a collection, and they are not inherently a better way of doing that than other methods such as a large searchable pool, or a set of tags, or whatever.  In fact some of those methods are far better suited to some workflows/use cases than directories.  A lot of us are used to directory trees because that's been the dominant abstraction provided to us, and we've had not choice but to use them for many years.  The fact that we find it so natural (to the point that we assume -- or at least our language implies -- that it reflects a fundamental physical reality of disk storage) is a reflection of our familiarity with it, not our intelligence. 

People who have come up in the age of google docs etc have had the advantage of other options when it comes to organizing and interacting with documents and media, and simply don't need to worry about the directory/folder abstraction as much as we had to.  If I want to find a particular photo of my orange cat in Google Photos, for example, I don't have to browse to the "cat" folder in my "photos" folder and then click on each file to see if it's the one I want.  I can simply type "orange cat" into the search box, and an incredible amount of machine learning technology instantly shows me all of the photos of that cat in a fast, easy to browse list of thumbnails.  It's night and day compared to the experience of just twenty years ago.  Sure it's not perfect and has some downsides, but why would the average person bother with manually sorting all of their photos into folders if it's so easy to find things WITHOUT doing that?


--- Quote from: m98 on September 30, 2021, 10:26:21 pm ---
--- Quote from: tooki on September 30, 2021, 09:00:54 pm ---Even more unjustified bashing on young people for stupid stuff. The reason they don’t know it, if they don’t know it, is that nobody taught them.

--- End quote ---
How can you just never have been exposed to the physical concept of files and folders, even if you haven't ever heard of the virtual pendent?
--- End quote ---

It used to be that every office had tons of filing cabinets for all of the paper documents they needed to conduct business.  You might even have multiple employees, or even an entire department, dedicated to just dealing with files.  I remember my old doctor's office had a whole wall of cabinets for patient files.  That's not how things are anymore.  I still have a filing cabinet in my office, but like 1/4 of one drawer is old paper documents I haven't looked at in years, one drawer is for boxes of printable label stock, and the last drawer is where I keep my snacks.  Here again, a lot of us who came up in that earlier time, where we had to do everything on paper, and thus had to *organize* all of that paper, then experienced the shift to electronic documents, where there was a direct parallel between 'a document' on paper and 'a document' as a digital file, can easily mistake our familiarity with the abstraction and where it comes from for intelligence.  It's increasingly easy for a person to come up without ever needing to deal with enough paper to directly experience that parallel.  Besides, it's not even that good of a parallel these days.  Sure, a PDF is generally interchangeable, in terms of content and functionality, with a paper document, but not all data that we deal with is like that. 


--- Quote ---Seriously, someone who doesn't know such stuff by the time they're in college should really reconsider if they have enough natural curiosity to enjoy an engineering career...
--- End quote ---

Get over yourself.  Not all STEM is engineering. Not all engineering is computer engineering.  You can't expect someone to be conversant in the various archaic abstractions of every other STEM discipline just because they're interested in one discipline. 
james_s:

--- Quote from: CJay on October 01, 2021, 06:26:28 am ---Except you can use a local mail client with GMail and download messages so for someone who grew up using an email client with local storage it's really not a stupid question.

--- End quote ---

And I do, but the emails are still on the server, the email client just makes a local copy of them. It's like taking a photo of some landmarks and bringing the photos home with you. The landmarks are still there, you can buy a new camera and still go out and take photos of the same landmarks and look at them later.
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