Should have given you an 11 for lateral thinking. 
In the movie âFail Safeâ (circa 1963) an early scene includes speculation about who might survive a nuclear war. Corporate accountants are mentioned, because their work is often done in reinforced structures, surrounded by tons of paper in steel filing cabinets.
I canât imagine that a data center, crammed with high-performance servers, offers anywhere near the same level of protection.
Dale
Also to mention a prominent example of a shift away from folder/file structure, the Gmail system. There tags are preferred to folders, which means that an item can be classified under multiple categories.
More then 10 years ago I have heard (and it was said it is not joke, but true) about one guy who, traveling from Turkey to Gibraltar, accepted his destination without checking on a map. Apparently, he realized he was driving badly when he drove into the English Channel Tunnel. His navigation led to some Gibraltar in Great Britain. I just looked and there is actually an island with that name.
When I was young (may be 7âŚ8) my parents earned extra money with commissioned work. Their task was to calculate the results of long series of measurements. They used logarithmic sliders for calculations. When they were counting, I was also counting (there was a third, smaller slider at home). By the time I was able to check one line of calculations, my dad had already done a whole page.
In high school, we had one or two hours in math with a slide rule. We had one of about 1.5m for the whole class to see. The teacher quickly realized that I knew it perfectly well and I was actually conducting those lessons.
Association with that teacher.
In my opinion, a bad teacher will never admit that he canât do something. A good teacher has no problem with that. Once, when I was not at school, the maths teacher, when she did not know how to do a probability problem, said to the whole class: âIf Piotrek had been, we would have already solved this problem. It is probably not bad if a high school student is better than his teacher.â She didnât have the calculus of probability at school, and I feel that intuitively. At the maturity exam, I solved the problem of probability calculus using 3 different methods, the last solution of which began with the words âWith peasant understanding âŚâ. Of course I got the same result tree times 
Yeah, I finally gave up trying to shoehorn GMail into Firefox. FireFoxâs traditional POP3/IMAP folder paradigm just doesnât play nicely with GMailâs bastardization of organization tag paradigm.
However I donât actually use their tag structure. I keep my own copy of email by pulling incoming mail with fetchmail over POP3, and file items in a conventional hierarchy with Thunderbird. I donât like losing access to important email if I lose Internet connectivity.
Has anyone ever tried to get a movie you already own onto an iOS device ( for your kids ) without using Itunes ? Itâs awful . This problem is completely the result of Google and Apple constructing awful environments for learning computer science or how information is stored.
I was familiar with Bob Pease from his analog design / debugging books : https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/analog/article/21805320/whats-all-this-messy-office-stuff-anyhow
I did not know to take that one at face value; as another part of dementia screening! I had heard only the Jack and Jill nursery rhyme, and gave you my own version of Mary Had a Little Lamb in responseâŚ
No I have not had that one either.
My colleague and I (both contracting at Microsoft) were filling out some test data for a laptop computer. Battery state of charge? Washington. Washington State.
Yes Gmail interface drove me nuts for a while. I mainly use Outlook. But every once in a while Gmail puts some good e-mail into the spam folder and it does not get to Outlook.
When I was in elementary school, the instructor on the educational TV program said that we swing our arms when we walk to push air out of the way. I did not know what was the correct explanation but I knew that that explanation was wrong. I could not get anywhere with the teacher (who if I recall was a substitute.)
Just work around it. I ripped all my movie DVDs to MP4s and serve them to my home devices using Samba. My Android tablet happily plays them. I have no idea if you can do the same on iOS; I avoid Apple devices because they want you to do things their way or no way.
Letâs face it, the world will always be unsatisfactory, but one can always gain a smidgen of autonomy and have some fun by subverting aspects of it. Gcal puts cutesy drawings on the screen which take up screen space whenever it detects key words like coffee or lunch. I substitute alternate spellings like coughey or words from other languages like pranzo. I like to think itâs interfering with their thick as two planks ML algorithms trying to work out what to advertise to me. Maybe theyâll decide to advertise dictionaries to me.
1 Like
I once read an article in the travel supplement of a newspaper, back when I bought newspapers, explaining that itâs colder in winter because the earth is further away from the sun then. Probably written by a work experience student. How would we run the world without work experience students? 
Doesnât reflect well on our education system though. 
Uh Oh. Now I can cheat next time⌠
Well if you can remember the answers, then you donât really need the test. 
Probably needs some beeswax, Itâs squeaking a bit.
Canât get the proper whale stuff anymore.
2 Likes
I think you are touching upon an important point. We oldies are very familiar with the hierarchical folder (sorry, âdirectoryâ) structure as a means of organising information. However, it is far from perfect and maybe Google are right to offer a different way.
The biggest problem (in my opinion) with the hierarchical approach is the need to classify each item of information (a file, typically) and place it in the hierarchy accordingly. The problem is that many items could justifiably be placed in one of several different locations. As a crude example, my Arduino source code files could justifiably be stored under âProgrammingâ or âElectronicsâ.
Once youâve chosen a location, you need to reproduce the same thought process to find it again.
There are (at least) two techniques to help mitigate this difficulty. One is to add âlinksâ to the original file in all the possible alternative locations. In effect, you are placing the same object into several categories. Doing this in real life is very tedious to the point of being impractical, and you still need to handle the situation where a new category is created after the object has been filed. For example, I might create a âMicrocontrollersâ folder; arguably a link to the Arduino source files could go in there, but the idea of sweeping the hierarchy for candidate files is untenable.
The second approach is to supplement the hierarchical filing system with a comprehensive search feature, which should root out files no matter where they are in the hierarchy. This immediately begs the question: âWhy bother with a hierarchy at all, then?â Just dump all the files in one giant folder and use Search to find them.
Googleâs approach of hiding the hierarchy (if there even is one) and giving items multiple tags seems like another reasonable approach. It allows for multiple-classification and a reasonably convenient way of finding the items you are interested in. The big challenge with tags is keeping them to a reasonable number. It is very easy for them to proliferate, so you end up with tags for âElectronicsâ, âProgrammingâ, âC++â, âArduinoâ, âMicrocontrollersâ, etc, until the tags themselves become unmanageable.
To me, convenient storing and retrieving of data items feels like a challenge we havenât really met optimally just yet. Hierarchies, tags, search-based âflatâ systems⌠they all have their pros and cons. Perhaps we oldies are wrong to think primarily in terms of hierarchical filing systems.
1 Like
Because we all remember what we named the file 2 years on? If the file is in a folder named âwidgetsâ at least we have some clue. Ever go into a folder and clean it out after some time?
Qmail used to reference inodes. Many a system admin thought they could move the folder and lost everything. Iâm not even sure how/if backup and restores were possible on these systems.
Firstly, Iâm not advocating that approach. Simply pointing out that it is one possible logical conclusion from relying on Search to find your stuff, because Search hides from you any hierarchical structure that may (or may not) exist.
Secondly, when I use a search tool I donât normally need to remember the file name; I use Copernic Desktop Search, which (like the inbuilt Windows one) indexes file contents and well as file names. So I could search for âmillis()â and find the documents Iâve saved which explain how to use it in preference to âdelay()â. To be sure I could search only for documents which contain both terms.
Thatâs what I meant about storing stuff hierarchically but using a search tool to access it. It (arguably) removes the need for the hierarchy in the first place. Iâm experimenting with a âflatâ method for storing all my bookmarks (i.e. without any classifications), giving them multiple tags, and using a search tool on the tags. Itâs OK, but not âthe answerâ, I would say.
Funny, Jim Williams must have seen my workbench and made a copy of it ⌠
I used to program computers with hollerith cards and punch tapeâŚ
Hollerith were better, if you made mistake you just made a new one and dumped the bad one in the dustbin, tape was more âmodernâ but if you made a mistake you needed knife, tape, scissors in order to do a âfastâ correction⌠those were times
Jacques
ON1TJ
1 Like