Files, folders, and sorting Inventory

[Qie Niangao]

Only old fogeys sort inventory.

I stopped using email folders the day I joined the gmail beta, so many years ago.

And yet, as a new scripter—and old programmer—it took me a while to accept that LSL has no concept of files or filesystem. (Closest it gets is read-only access to object Notecards.)

Turns out LSL was just a bit ahead of its time:

Quote

Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.

Professors have varied recollections of when they first saw the disconnect. But their estimates (even the most tentative ones) are surprisingly similar. It’s been an issue for four years or so, starting — for many educators — around the fall of 2017.

—"File not found" in The Verge (HT Tech News Weekly).

 

[Ted McGregor]

pwd

cd /

cd \

cd ..

Aaaahhh ....the nostalgia of solely crawling over ones harddisk from <DIR> to <DIR> prior to various webbots scanning for cookies. ^^  Simply deleting all those <DIR>s with 'format <DRIVE> /s'.

Is it too soon to scream "Get off my lawn!?! "  yet ?

 

[Lindal Kidd]

I think this dichotomy in how people approach finding items has existed for longer than the author of The Verge article observes. Shortly after I started SL, back in 2007, I became aware that some people (like me) try to have organized inventories and detailed, many-layered directory structures; while others just throw everything in one big heap and use Search to find their items.

[Rolig Loon]

Information in my brain seems to be stored in one big heap, sadly, and the algorithm that I use for searching is slow and inefficient.  As the years go by, I keep telling myself that I have to develop a better filing system or, failing that, a more intuitive algorithm.  I've been putting it off far too long -- a lifetime, it seems. I'm afraid that I am starting to have memory leaks and overflow issues, and I have only crude tools for diagnosing them.  In an ideal world, I would love to be able to back up everything in an external drive, but everything I have found on the market requires me to transcribe things manually.  It's a slow, hopeless task.  It's way too late to do anything about creating a multi-layered storage system and a more efficient random access file retrieval protocol.  I'm afraid this brain is as efficient as it's going to get.  The only truly comforting fact is that I have a lifetime warranty.

[LittleMe Jewell]

I cringe every time I go into my husband's email to find something.  I have a couple dozen folders in my email, with everything filed properly.  All of his mail is in Inbox and Sent - Ugh.

I also still have a physical file folder credenza in my office, with 50-75 files, containing all sorts of things that I deem important - things that came on paper & I just haven't got around to scanning into the computer - which has many folder/sub-folder/sub-folder setups to contain everything about my life.

[Quartz Mole]

Back around 2000, or just before, my late wife came home highly amused after she'd had to call the IT help desk for the hospital where she then worked.    The support person began to explain to her, in very simple terms with as much reassurance as possible, how to open the windows command prompt,  navigate to a particular directory and list the files, when she rather astonished him by explaining that, since she'd started working in offices considerably earlier than 1995, when the eponymous version of Windows launched, of course she'd had to learn the basics of directory structures and how to write simple code using DOS.    

Most impressed, he sadly told her, "It's a dying art."

My approach to filing has, I fear, always been "a heap for everything and everything in its heap," which always seemed to work before I started to go as paperless as possible.    Yay for Windows Search and Quick Access, though.

Edited September 25, 2021 by Quartz Mole

[Bree Giffen]

Somehow... Sorting inventory is racist. I just know it. 🤔

[Prokofy Neva]

7 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Only old fogeys sort inventory.

I stopped using email folders the day I joined the gmail beta, so many years ago.

And yet, as a new scripter—and old programmer—it took me a while to accept that LSL has no concept of files or filesystem. (Closest it gets is read-only access to object Notecards.)

Turns out LSL was just a bit ahead of its time:

 

What happened in 2017?

And why did this happen? What changed?

[Rolig Loon]

23 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

What happened in 2017?

And why did this happen? What changed?

That's the writer's guess at the year when the younger generations decided that search engines had gotten fast enough that it was easier to just leave information in an unsorted heap than to presort it into folders and directories.  (My son discovered that with his clean laundry when he was about 15, I think. Why bother putting it all neatly into the drawers and closets when it takes less time to just grab things out of the laundry basket?)   Sorting is necessary when you have so much information that it will take an unbearably long time to retrieve what you want later if you don't.   If searching is easier, sorting is a waste of time.  Why 2017?  Blame it on Google/Amazon/Instagram/Facebook. 

EDIT:  Parenthetically, I blame the demise of penmanship on the same trend.  My grandsons have abominably poor handwriting (printing, actually) because they have grown up in an era when neatness with pen and pencil no longer made a difference.  Everyone types on a computer keyboard these days, so why bother learning how to make your scrawling pencil notes legible?  Penmanship was only necessary as long as deciphering was hard without it.

As I note several times a day, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and we have impatience and short attention spans to blame for it.  Abetted by technology.

Edited September 25, 2021 by Rolig Loon

[Quistess Alpha]

50 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

the demise of penmanship

https://time.com/4182624/handwriting-scare-history/

[Rolig Loon]

Yes,  I have heard the same complaints about the demise of penmanship as long as I have been alive.  The big difference I see now is that children can't read MY handwriting. It doesn't look like the stuff their computers spit out and they haven't been taught how to write on their own. 

[Innula Zenovka]

Back when I was an undergraduate, photocopiers were only just coming into general use in college and departmental libraries, so when I needed to read something I generally had to do it in the University Library and make notes by hand.

Cut to a few years later, and my old college profs were complaining that their grad students never bothered actually to read and understand articles, but simply photocopied them for future reference, filed them unread and forgot about them. 

Edited September 26, 2021 by Innula Zenovka

[Rolig Loon]

We are of the same era. I submitted my dissertation the last year that the university required carbon copies (photocopies were unacceptable) of all archival work. The following year,  they decided that photocopies were probably stable enough.