Sylvia Else <sylvia@email.invalid> wrote:
> On 01-Nov-21 12:51 pm, RS Wood wrote:
> > From the «WWW Wut the hell» department:
> > Feed: OSnews
> > Title: Students don’t know what files and folders are, professors say
>
> When "computer literate" means knowing how to navigate the UI of a
> smartphone.

As opposed to knowing how to operate Windows XP?
(and anything designed to be familiar to people who learnt to use computers
in the Windows 95/98/XP era)

For better or worse, people no longer need to go to classes to learn how to
operate a computer, even the one in their pocket.

Theo

Ant <ant@zimage.comant> wrote:
> Folders is a GUI term. How do you make icons to symbolize directories?
> Folders. ;P

Surely folders are the container and directories are the index to the
container? You pick up a thick collection of papers: the papers are held in
a folder, and the first page might be the directory to what's inside. (at
least if you were in some mid 20th century organisation with a paper filing
system - like the 'FBI files' and such)

Both analogies work, but people who don't live in a corporate world are less
familiar with directories (beyond the telephone directory) because they
don't have a paper filing system with organised directories, they just have
a loose container of papers. Which is roughly how we store things today:
with less rigorous top-down organisation.

Theo

Theo <theom+news@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:

> Sylvia Else <sylvia@email.invalid> wrote:
>
>> On 01-Nov-21 12:51 pm, RS Wood wrote:
>>
>>> From the WWW Wut the hell department:
>>> Title: Students don't know what files and folders are, professors say
>>
>> When "computer literate" means knowing how to navigate the UI of a
>> smartphone.
>
> As opposed to knowing how to operate Windows XP? (and anything
> designed to be familiar to people who learnt to use computers in the
> Windows 95/98/XP era)
>
> For better or worse, people no longer need to go to classes to learn how to
> operate a computer, even the one in their pocket.
>

I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my
telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure
out how to use my telephone.
-- Bjarne Stroustrup

--
Mike Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada

RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> wrote:
> 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[1].
I wish this was only high school graduates. The amount of people in the
general population that can't find a file is staggering. I have
witnessed Jane of accounting calling the Helpdesk and being escalated
up, because she stored $File in her Recycling Bin, and complained it
being gone. (Same goes for e-Mail)

The only people I remember being very good with file organization and
storage were the people that used to run the old Solaris workstations,
rather than DOS/Windows.

> We???re power users here, but even I rely on fd, locate, and ripgrep quite
> often.
I might as well also mention my good friend "find $DIR > files" here. I'd
then save that file somewhere I remember, especially if they normally
use a non-*NIX-OS, as I really can't be bothered using Windows Search.

> I guess this most surprising part is this is surprising. Computing is
> application focused. People open MS Office Word, Apple Pages, or LibreOffice
> Writer; they don???t open a file. Operating systems don???t have pluggable
> extensions which let people manipulate various file types; they have
> applications which run on them.
IF they find the application /s.
On that note, I'd argue computing was never that file-focused to begin
with. "vi /etc/motd" also technically opens vi(m) first, and then tells
it the file to edit.

> On top of that, files and folders are a meta-construct so humans can grok
> filesystem semantics and, ultimately, blocks on a storage device.
To be fair, modern Systems (especially Android and iOS, which don't
really let you access the full Filesystem by design) are another way of
abstracting Files/Data to users. If you want a really absurd
abstraction, IIRC Microsoft stores Files on OneDrive in a SQL Database.

Also, relevant XKCD:
https://xkcd.com/378/

On 11/02/2021 01:44 AM, Ant wrote:
> Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote:
>> Anssi Saari <as@sci.fi> wrote:
>> > Nyssa <Nyssa@LogicalInsight.net> writes:
>> >
>> >> Directories and sub-directories.
>> >
>> > Me too and why not, I don't have a command to make folders or remove
>> > them, I just have mkdir and rmdir. And chdir. Even Windows 10 today
>> > still has the same commands, even in the newfangled "Power" shell.
>
>> The fact that you even know of the existence of mkdir, rmdir, chdir,
>> etc. means you are more knowledgable about computers than 99% of
>> windows, macos, android, or iOS users.
>
>> That's why the got renamed. That 99% learned them as "folders" (well,
>> at least the 99% that are also windows/macos users) and those of us in
>> the other 1% were just too small a minority to stop those floodwaters
>> from overrunning everything.
>
> Folders is a GUI term. How do you make icons to symbolize directories? Folders. ;P

OTOH, what's wrong with actual words? I have serious problems with
icons, especially tiny ones. "Grey blob with red splotch in the lower
right corner" means... uh... oh crap, now I have to mouse over it to get
the WORD :-("

--
Cheers, Bev
STRESS MANAGEMENT

Picture yourself near a stream.
Birds are singing in the crisp, cool mountain air.
Nothing can bother you here.
No one knows this secret place.
You are in total seclusion from
that place called the world.
The soothing sound of a gentle waterfall
fills the air with a cascade of serenity.
The water is crystal clear.
You can easily make out the face of the person
whose head you're holding under the water.
-- KevinT

The Real Bev <bashley101@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/02/2021 01:44 AM, Ant wrote:
>> Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote:
>>> Anssi Saari <as@sci.fi> wrote:
>>> > Nyssa <Nyssa@LogicalInsight.net> writes:
>>> >
>>> >> Directories and sub-directories.
>>> >
>>> > Me too and why not, I don't have a command to make folders or remove
>>> > them, I just have mkdir and rmdir. And chdir. Even Windows 10 today
>>> > still has the same commands, even in the newfangled "Power" shell.
>>
>>> The fact that you even know of the existence of mkdir, rmdir, chdir,
>>> etc. means you are more knowledgable about computers than 99% of
>>> windows, macos, android, or iOS users.
>>
>>> That's why the got renamed. That 99% learned them as "folders" (well,
>>> at least the 99% that are also windows/macos users) and those of us in
>>> the other 1% were just too small a minority to stop those floodwaters
>>> from overrunning everything.
>>
>> Folders is a GUI term. How do you make icons to symbolize directories? Folders. ;P
>
> OTOH, what's wrong with actual words?

Nothing. And GUI's used to include the word with the icon:

+----+
|icon|
+----+
folder

And that worked well. Very well actually. If you (etheral "you") were
unfamiliar with the meaning of the icon, the word was present to help
you become familiar (of course you needed familarity with the meaning
of the word). Once you learned the pictorial association to the
function, you no longer needed to "read the word" and could ignore it.

But then some GUI artist, in need to making changes to save their job
from oblivion, decided that having words present was too "cluttered"
and started creating layouts with just the icons. Which worked ok in
their tests, because all their recruits knew the pictorial association
to the function. But they failed to test with users who were
unfamiliar with the picture to function mapping, because removing the
words meant it became significantly harder for those unfamiliar users
to learn the pictorial meanings. And so was developed the mouse hover
word, so the "word" could still be present, but invisible, until you
hovered your mouse pointer over it.

> I have serious problems with icons, especially tiny ones. "Grey blob
> with red splotch in the lower right corner" means... uh... oh crap,
> now I have to mouse over it to get the WORD :-("

Yup, and take up even more time "hovering" out the meanings.

And, then, when one goes to touch interfaces (smartphones), there is no
"hover" a mouse pointer, so no way to "get the WORD"....

The Real Bev <bashley101@gmail.com> writes:

> OTOH, what's wrong with actual words? I have serious problems with
> icons, especially tiny ones. "Grey blob with red splotch in the lower
> right corner" means... uh... oh crap, now I have to mouse over it to get
> the WORD :-("

()()()()()

In another follow-up post, Rich <rich@example.invalid> answers your
question with, "Nothing" and offers an account of how they went away.

I'd say, "Words are hard". A large number of people are far weaker on
words that we'uns text fans realize. The TV generation has segued
smoothly into the GUI/U-Tube/touchscreen generation. I've become
increasingly puzzled by the fact that well educated friends (some with
PhDs in non-STEM subjects) have difficulty with words. The ca. 50%
alleged to read at the 5th grade level can't be expected to be better.
But we've all (barring dysfunction in visual cortex) inherited the
highly developed pattern recognition skill our remote ancestors
evolved for survival. Design of GUIs, advertising and other media
have shaken down across decades and heterogeneous studios, workshops
and labs to conventional wisdom that reflects and exploits that.

--
Mike Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada

The command line is like language. The GUI is like shopping.

On 11/05/2021 10:10 PM, Mike Spencer wrote:
> The Real Bev <bashley101@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> OTOH, what's wrong with actual words? I have serious problems with
>> icons, especially tiny ones. "Grey blob with red splotch in the lower
>> right corner" means... uh... oh crap, now I have to mouse over it to get
>> the WORD :-("
>
> ()()()()()
>
> In another follow-up post, Rich <rich@example.invalid> answers your
> question with, "Nothing" and offers an account of how they went away.
>
> I'd say, "Words are hard". A large number of people are far weaker on
> words that we'uns text fans realize. The TV generation has segued
> smoothly into the GUI/U-Tube/touchscreen generation. I've become
> increasingly puzzled by the fact that well educated friends (some with
> PhDs in non-STEM subjects) have difficulty with words. The ca. 50%
> alleged to read at the 5th grade level can't be expected to be better.

I blame our K-12 schools for that, and the unions that prevent
incompetent teachers from being fired, as well as the laws/regulations
that require time to be spent on useless PC crap rather than actual
education. The smart kids will get by (it's assumed) so the lower half
gets all the attention, no matter how useless it is.

What's worse, I don't see any mechanism for changing this. </rant>

> But we've all (barring dysfunction in visual cortex) inherited the
> highly developed pattern recognition skill our remote ancestors
> evolved for survival. Design of GUIs, advertising and other media
> have shaken down across decades and heterogeneous studios, workshops
> and labs to conventional wisdom that reflects and exploits that.

It's evil to exploit the stupid and ignorant, but it works pretty well!

--
Cheers, Bev
Ride faster, I hear banjo music!