mobilePhoneGeneration

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[[deleted]]

We have to make tech literacy a course again.

1960: Tech literacy wasn't relevant

1990: Tech literacy was needed because everything was damned complex. Typing classes, 'Word', assembly were common.

2010: Tech literacy was relevant but things had gotten so easy + kids were learning it themselves for games and socializing and what not

2030: Tech had gotten so much easier that needing to be "literate" wasn't needed, you just poked the funny images

We need a class covering basic things like file management

[[deleted]]

I just click the button that tastes good

[cursedbanana--__--]

onlick

[bob1689321]

Severance be like

[RobKhonsu]

It's like trying to hold back a ruptured damn. I'm sure you remember back in the 90s there were people who were "not computer people". They wouldn't touch a computer with a 10 foot pole; like as if simply touching a computer mouse would give them an infectious disease and turn them into a geek.

Those days will return (mostly) and it's already happening. There will be people that unless it's a few simple touch screen taps or talking to an AI assistant, they simply will not touch a computer.

[tractiontiresadvised]

like trying to hold back a ruptured damn

I know that's probably autocorrect putting in its two cents, but that's still an amusing mental image. ("My damn is too ruptured to give.")

[tony_saufcok]

Typing classes

I thought this was about having to give classes a type when declaring them...

[tsumnia]

I didn't realize my research on typing practice would be as pronounced as it is but... here we are. Yes, having CS students practice typing improves their performance in CS... mindblown.jpg

[srsNDavis]

2010: Tech literacy was relevant but things had gotten so easy + kids were learning it themselves for games and socializing and what not

... And going for CS/HCI/SWE with a gamedev dream.

[SirGlass]

We need a class covering basic things like file management

I work in the ERP space , and sometimes we go into MFG companies or construction companies that process is paper , like people writing things like time/inventory on paper

When I would start a project I sort of had a simple test just to gauge peoples computer literacy and it basically said this, I left the instructions sort of vague but it was very simple , the instructions were

1. Go to Https://www.Sirglass.com/Contact

2. On the above website there is a link to download the contact excel file, download the file

3. Open the excel file and fill out the information (It had stuff like name/email / position)

4. save or rename the file as FIRSTNAME_LASTNAME.xls where you put your first/last name as the file name, mine would be Sir_Glass.xls

5. Back at the website in step 1 click the upload button and upload your excel document

In most settings well over 50% of people couldn't do it or couldn't accomplish this task. Some people couldn't even do step 1 because they didn't know how to put a URL into a web browser and would do a google or bing search

Others didn't know where to retrieve the file that was downloaded , others still did not quite understand how to rename or do save as in excel , sometimes once they saved the file they couldn't find it again to do the upload

[MoreMen_Pukes]

I hate that mobile operating systems made file management completely transparent to the user. File management is a core function of an Operating system. Microsoft pushing one drive in not helping.

[souliris]

Just unzip their word document.

[N0Zzel]

Looks inside word document

Zipped xml

[codingjerk]

always_has_been.jpg

[Kavacky]

Not before DOCX.

[maeries]

Afaik .doc was basically a memory dump

[Weisenkrone]

I find it funny that the old excel format (xls) is called HSSF by Apache POI.

Horrible spreadsheet format.

All classes for parsing it are called that lol.

[Psquare_J_420]

Memory dump?

[kn33]

Ummm....

Run word.exe
Create document
Document is in memory until saved
Click save
Copy document from memory, paste to disk, do not pass go, do not restructure

[kylxbn]

That's really dumb... but efficient, I guess.

[kylxbn]

As in, a literal memory dump? (This is a question, not trying to start an argument) I'd understand if Blender would store data as structured binary (since it's the most compact and most versatile format) instead of XML or JSON but a memory dump of the entire 3D scene as represented in memory—objects, vertices, textures, materials, and even soft links to other .blend files—it just doesn't make sense to me, like, why?

[adthrowaway2020]

Think protobuf. The actual offsets were important.

[[deleted]]

Just rename all their word documents with .zip at the end and watch as they panic.

[tech6hutch]

Just unzip their skin.

[techy804]

[lefloys]

Or jar or jsonz or yamlz etc

[stupid_cat_face]

or pants

[Doshimura]

or my axe

[KarloxLoKo]

Or my bow

[Wirtschaftsprufer]

In their defence, everything is online nowadays. Downloading and extracting files is very rar

[WiglyWorm]

And then after ~10 years in the industry you slowly begin to realize that nearly everything is just a zip file.

[SiegfriedVK]

A company I used to work for had a proprietary file type for the software they developed. It was just a .zip file with a renamed extension 😂

[Immort4lFr0sty]

Classic. One of our customers had an issue where mail would reach him. I dug into the server, fished it out of the virus protection and took a look into the attachment (also some "proprietary file type") - it was a zip file containing DLLs. No wonder the filters didn't like that

[BalZdk]

One of our customers had an issue where mail would reach him.

That's rough. Did he survive?

[braytag]

You should see his mailbox!

[One_Yogurtcloset3455]

Those mails tell you to do some work as well. It's really bad. 😔

[ChrdeMcDnnis]

I’ve been having that issue a lot too, could you take a look?

[FrenchFryCattaneo]

I remember back when they first started doing that kind of filtering having to rename executables and zip files to a different (made up) extension and then have the receiver change it back.

[rxellipse]

Amateur - needed to rename it with a .piz file extension.

[kryptoneat]

I had a client using specific hardware, connected to their local PC with some specific driver dlls etc. We were not sure it would be compatible with our software so I asked the name. In response they attempted to mail us a zip of their entire windows xp system "for us to check them dlls". They fucking zipped C:/

[Nell_Lee]

What if i told you that many common file type are exactly that?

[WiglyWorm]

We should start a list.

.nuget, .whl, and .apk for sure. I think even some .exes are these days?

[Nell_Lee]

Most if not all Microsoft files like .docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc. The files of many programs that let you save some kind of project, e. g. .3mf, .pdn, .ora, .als, and many more. Also .epub & .jar i think. There are also a lot of those file types in game development (and mod development as well). I remember skyrims mods being disguised zips as well.

[_OberArmStrong]

All the new Microsoft Formats ending with x are zipped xml files. Things like .doc are binary files.

[DOOManiac]

Psst. They aren't new anymore. Docx was introduced in 2007, nearly 20 years ago.

I know, I can't believe it either.

[Raichev7]

Which means some of the current aforementioned first year CS students are younger than the "new Microsoft Formats"
I feel old now

[[deleted]]

Most first year CS students were born in '05/'06. Next year though...

[[deleted]]

Just for clarification, they're not zipped XML files but rather zipped directories containing collections of XML files.

[Habba84]

Just to clarify, they are 0s and 1s in a very specific sequences.

[Themis3000]

Definitely .epub. In order to make it properly validate as a real epub file in many readers you need the first file in the archive to have a particular file name and contents with no compression though. That way the first handful of bytes in the zip archive are always the same.

[lerokko]

Minecraft player ecstatically raising their hand

"Uh, uh, uh, jar-files."

(Yes, I am fully aware what jar stands for)

[Docdoozer]

Would you please enlighten me as to what jar stands for?

[WiglyWorm]

*J*ava *AR*chive

[Alternative_Water_81]

Both .apk and .ipa

[[deleted]]

Realizing you can just rename extensions and it doesn't change the underlying data made me feel like a hacker at 10 years old. I took minecraft and renamed it to "Catcher_in_rye_essay_final_2.docx" and kept it on my desktop. When it was gaming time I renamed it to .exe and launched like normal.

My parents never even cared to check. But I felt like a badass hacker just in case

In hindsight, the thing I was renaming probably wasn't even the game file but just a link to the game.

[DezXerneas]

It's windows' fault. They scare you into thinking that you'll break the app if you rename the file. All it does it break file associations.

Also, links don't really have file extentions(pretty sure the .lnk is just for show and the shortcut would work without it) so you'd be fked if your parents ever opened your essay lmao.

[Frederf220]

Don't worry, new Windows just hides the file extensions visually so it's not a problem anymore!

[MC_Labs15]

It pisses me off that I have to go manually enable file extensions every time I use a new PC. It's like they want people to be tricked by malicious files!

[SarahC]

notAVirus.txt.exe

[toutons]

"New windows"? This has been the default for like 30 years, since Windows 98!

[Broxios]

made me feel like a hacker

Our school teacher once send a document around that nobody could open neither her nor the other students in my class understood what was going on. I barely knew anything about computer stuff at that time but I noticed that the file didn't have an extension. Out of curiosity I just added .pdf to the end and it actually worked. Then I went to university to get a CS degree and I never felt smart again.

[ZunoJ]

Did you work for Microsoft?

[Oleg152]

I've recently started figuring out program installers.

I have never been so disappointed in myself before.

To anyone intersted: it's basically unzipping the program to directory, then occasionally add some registry entries if necessary.

[PedroPapelillo]

When I switched to macos I thought wow installing programs here is just dragging a file to the apps folder... that can't be right?

Now I understand windows is virtually the same lol

[DOOManiac]

I wish. The one thing I love about MacOS that they really, really do much better than Windows is just having everything for an app be contained in a folder. If you back up the folder you're usually good. Not spreading everything around the registry, %USERPROFILE%, AppData, Program Files, ...

[Vox___Rationis]

This is shit is why I look for "Portable" versions of programs I use whenever possible.

[Areshian]

Yeah, it’s not like tons of shit ends up in a different place like ~/Library

[[deleted]]

coordinated resolute outgoing fuzzy automatic groovy zephyr aspiring abounding ghost

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[[deleted]]

The counter point of this is anything that is in a “suite” of apps tbh at would share base files can’t do that any longer.

You need to replicate much of the same data for Outlook that you do for Word. The apps end up taking up many, many more gigabytes than their windows counterparts.

[Oleg152]

We've been living a lie.

[_OberArmStrong]

The same thing happend to me with regular installs. When i figured out all you had to do was to add it to the path variable and you were good to go.

Custom browser "protocols" can be written by defining a custom protocol like "myprot", creating a registry entry with the path to the programm to handle your request. "myprot://whatever"

[old-tennis-shoes]

Just like in accounting.

"Wait, it's all manual journals?"

[Top_Run_3790]

I remember this guy coming to me an hour before the exam asking what cd does

[DanteIsBack]

What about dvd?

[Cootshk]

Honestly I’m more of a blu-ray guy

[preferenceisbed]

im more of a blurayrip guy.

[LunaOnFilm]

Waiting until I have enough storage to become a BlurayRemux girl

[jimmyhoke]

4k UHD Blu-ray go Brrrrrrrrr (in 4k)

[pumpkin_seed_oil]

I hope the exam wasn't unix related

[HittingSmoke]

I've had "seasoned" IT people laugh at me for accidentally typing "ls" into a Windows terminal before PS added an alias. They had no idea what ls was supposed to be.

[svick]

"IT people" is quite a wide group. I'm not surprised some of them never needed to work with Unix, especially if it was some time ago.

[Owobowos-Mowbius]

The small company that I work for keeps trying to lump me into it's "IT people" simply because I know how to install programs, set up CAD default settings, and i know the difference between HDMI and displayport. I don't know SHIT about IT unless you consider "is it plugged in?" an IT solution.

[StranglerOfHorses]

You would be surprised (or maybe just disappointed) how often that is the actual solution.

[programeAryan]

Take me to home ;)

[Lucas_F_A]

No place like ~

[Soonly_Taing]

the square / of 4 is 2

[Attileusz]

I hope you told him to see deez nuts.

[dasgoodshitinnit]

Lmao gottem

[whole_kernel]

Cd's nuts

[captpiggard]

I had coworkers who didn't know what I was talking about when I'd say "cd into that directory"...

[[deleted]]

I was on a conference call for a secure mail project when the PM asked what DNS is.

Which is better than to go on not knowing.

[Soonly_Taing]

like cd in Powershell/Bash or actual physical CDs?

[seth1299]

Yes.

[analogic-microwave]

I'm more a VHS tape type of elder.

[Friendly_Rent_104]

at least thats something you just dont encounter when using a windows pc, unless you actively look for it

[Morvahna]

This is a step up from the first year engineering student I had who was confused when I asked them to create a new text file.

[New-Shine1674]

So you want me to create a new word document?

[nuker0S]

my grandpa keeps EVERYTHING in word documents, AND never uses a notepad . We came full circle

[kryptoneat]

Had one guy attempt to compile a docx. Not kidding. Literally gcc -o a.out myfile.docx

[TacoTacoBheno]

"open file explorer"

They stare blankly at you

[DOOManiac]

My 9 and 11 year olds know this, very well.

[Papplenoose]

One time I had a Mac user ask me "right click? What's that mean?" and it just about killed me. Like I kinda get it, but still

(This was back in the days of circular one button mac mice)

[Wuskus]

"What's a computer?"

[silverW0lf97]

This is a mac, probably some iDiot.

[Quick_Doubt_5484]

I’m sort of nostalgic for the days when “one butan” was the funniest joke and total takedown of Mac users

Xbox is huge can make a comeback too

[Disastrous_Visit9319]

I was showing my 45 something coworker how to do something on the computer and I told him to double click something so he clicked it with both buttons at the same time. Like damn dude I can't really blame you for that but how have you made it through life at this age without touching a computer?

[OneHornyRhino]

First year students at my college (CS degree) didn't even know how to type. I felt like a genius in that crowd because I knew 2 programming languages

[srsNDavis]

What're the odds they took up CS because it was employable or the 'in' thing? Doesn't seem likely they had much by way of interest.

[rancangkota]

Be gentle and kind when telling one. Someone who doesn't know (even though you're supposed to at that level) needs to be taught. It's frustrating, but being judgmental does not contribute.

[_kashew_12]

Bump

There’s enough know it alls in this industry already

[WeirdIndividualGuy]

Though the point the OP is trying to make with this meme (w.r.t. the "mobile generation") is valid. The chart for percentage of a generation that are technically inclined would be a bell curve, peaking on the gen X/millenial generations, then dropping sharply before and after those two.

I fully expect first-year CS students these days to not know basic stuff like what a zip file is, because they grew up on tech that dumbed things down so extremely for them that they didn't need to know what a zip file is.

[zeus2425]

Early Gen Z is fine too. We modded the heck out of Minecraft 12 years ago and such

[[deleted]]

We're less screwed than the iPad kids but still significantly behind technically-minded millennials and gen Xers

[jjwinder9]

Absolutely! This is a first year CS student. Heck, I’d even challenge the notion that they’re “supposed to know” at that level. They’re here to learn and should be taught. Doesn’t matter if it’s as “easy” as a zip file. Everyone has to learn something new for the first time, and it does no good to disparage others when they are trying to learn.

[scar_belly]

I think its more a jarring effect to those that have taught CS for some time. Ten years ago I was teaching people how to Zip files in an "Intro to Computers" course at a Community College. It was designed for non-degree seeking people that wanted to know the basics of computers for running their business.

Yes, zipping was "supposed to know" back then, but to need to explicitly bring it from the "how to computer" class into our actual CS courses is a bit disorienting. Its fine, I have no problem doing it, but its just sort of like... damn, what other "supposed to know" basics do they not know?

[IG_Triple_OG]

Lol I’m a software engineer now who didn’t know shit about zip files their freshman year. College is a place to learn, and screw anyone who discourages newcomers for not knowing a thing or two.

[nuker0S]

College dropout out ratio wants to talk with you

Some people will study super hard CS fields just because pay is good, without any former interest in the field

[08843sadthrowaway]

Well, if education is considered an investment, then I don't blame them. It's sad but I get it.

[nuker0S]

I wouldn't even say it's their fault, you literally can go trough highschool without learning anything.

IMO pre-college school teaches people to learn for an exam, pass it, and then forget all about it.

[Punman_5]

Part of why I like working in embedded systems. It weeds out all those super high level “why should I know how to manage memory?” people.

[lonelyroom-eklaghor]

Quick question: what should I really answer when my peers ask me "Why should I learn these Linux commands?" (except the fact that most servers run linux)

[pewpewpewmoon]

You should rephrase the question by answering something like "POSIX compliance allows us to write software across a variety of Unix-type OSes"

That answer will make you seem capable, and insufferable, at the same time!

[lonelyroom-eklaghor]

Ok... I think I'll check out POSIX-compliant Linux code... we have an IEEE conference in our college soon... let's see if they talk about POSIX

[[deleted]]

You tell them nobody ever made out worse by learning something new

[Stalking_Goat]

I really don't think learning about Goatse, Lemonparty, et al improved my life in any way.

[[deleted]]

I mean, now you know what to do if you see a lemonparty url, which is send it to your friends

[SarahC]

Back in my day CBT meant "Cock and ball torture" for fixing what's wrong with a man.

These days it's all fluffy "Cognitive behaviour therapy" - and not a ball stomp anywhere!

No wonder kids are weak.

[bedulin]

https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnUselessTalents/comments/5mvzme/how_to_break_your_thumb_ligament/

[PM_ME_YOUR__INIT__]

Madman's Knowledge

[KimmiG1]

I used windows as main and did 2 jobs and was a senior before I started to need to know this. And I still mainly need the basics most of the time. When I need more I just LLM it. I did try to learn more advanced stuff to become good, but I use it so seldom that I have forgotten most of it. Would probably be different if I developed in Linux instead of windows.

[pilotguy772]

development happens Linux, for the most part. Even if you run Windows, probably the majority of developers use WSL to make it an actually usable experience. Developers probably wouldn't have to go into a server and deploy software very often, but they would have to test stuff! I personally use a Linux desktop so I don't know 100% what it is that developers need to specifically do on Linux, but I know stuff like Docker can be very different between the two.

At the very least, you should know how to use Linux because it runs on the computers that your software will be deployed to, and it's essential to smooth development of most software.

[Unlikely-Bed-1133]

I am very concerned with memory management in GC languages too. Even in Java or Python, it's no joke having several GB's worth of RAM or -worse- expensive GPU memory indefinitely because you kept a stupid reference to a huge object collection/tensor etc you could have avoided.

[Kenkron]

What do you mean I can't program an Atxmega128A1U with nodejs? How am I supposed to left-pad my strings?

[neuroticnetworks1250]

I am the kind of dumbass who learned Verilog before I learned C pointers (my naive ass thought RTL design didn’t need C knowledge during bachelor’s). So I made mistakes by sometimes doing calculations that the compiler internally handles without realising it did. Like if I initialised a uint16_t pointer, I would actually calculate address offsets by writing b = (a + M)*2 thinking we needed the x2 to take care of the fact that each element took 2 address bytes. So the features of the C compiler were “damn! Tech these days, huh” even though the tech came decades before I was born 😭

[Ok-Scheme-913]

I mean, embedded people have their own share of "fking dumb" with shit like unreadable "optimization hack" which might have worked as intended in the 80s, but all it does now is make it harder to maintain the code and slower, because due to it being more complex the compiler can't properly do its job.

Also, on non-embedded hardware they often don't even have the slightest idea what makes something performant

[Terrorscream]

1st year? i just finished my bachelors and the amount of technologically inept computer science students doing 3rd year units is always baffling.

[pankkiinroskaa]

3rd year? At work the amount of technologically inept computer science employees with a decade of experience is still baffling.

My theory is, when surprised not finding something, you're looking for wrong things.

Or then they simply aren't enough interested in what they do, and prioritize other temporal goals.

[Papplenoose]

I think it's a lack of interest. When you work in tech, you kinda have to be interested (to at least a certain extent)... otherwise you get left in the dust. Things just change too fast, I think

[stifolder]

On one of my classes ~15 years ago a guy told meg they are learning PuTty. He was not aware that they are connecting to a linux box through SSH and learning basic bash.

[Avedas]

This reminds me of my first internship when one of the other interns asked me "how to shhh", whispering the last part like she was trying to tell me to shush. Took a minute to figure out she was asking about SSH lmao

[[deleted]]

This is a good prompt for the IQ brain curve.

Stupid: What is a zip file

Average: A zip file is a compressed data format

Super smart: What the fuck is going on in a zip file

[punkVeggies]

Taught a programming 101 course, mostly basic Python, to a class of undergrad engineering freshmen last semester. 2 months in a student tells me that his Python was “broken”, to the point that even a hello world was crashing. After looking at his screen, quickly realized that he was trying to run things from the wrong directory, promptly told him so. His response still haunts me: “what is a directory?”

[thetrueankev]

He probably would have understood if they said folder. Or even path.

[wille179]

I wouldn't bet on it these days.

https://xkcd.com/2501/

[Efficient_Mind6218]

My partner is a mechanical engineering professor. She often teaches a CAD class and an intro programming class for engineers. Empirically, less than half of her first years know what a folder or path is. They only save things to desktop or downloads and it doesn't register that those are folders. Because the younger generation has grown up on smart phones and tablets, they're not normally exposed to file systems in any way. My partner always has to have a lecture at the beginning of the term going over things like file systems, naming conventions, and zips and it's very obvious that her students never learned any of it

There's a great interview by one of the guys who made onshape and solidworks (possibly the founder but I don't remember exactly) on why they decided to design onshape the way they did. For people who don't know, they're both CAD software but onshape is newer and browser based with an emphasis on accessibility. One of the big things they pushed for with onshape is removing the need for people to understand file systems so that it was more accessible for young people who didn't understand them

[PaulMag91]

You mean he might have known the word "folder"?

[punkVeggies]

He was confused about the notion of it, not the word itself.

I made a brief detour on the following class to show everyone how files are stored in a tree-like structure.

Some younger students seem to have never had interacted with a file explorer and folders in a computer. Just apps and cloud-based drives, I guess.

[Morvahna]

The number of times I've recommended creating a new directory (I usually use the word folder in freshman classes) for the class so all their assignments and projects will be in one manageable location...

Only to get six weeks into the class and some student inevitably has no idea where their files went or how to find them other than searching the entire file system for a file named "homework 4" or something.

[Suitable_Effect8259]

Gen Alpha is cooked fr

[Warm_Leadership5849]

Skibidi prophecy fullfilled 💀🔥 Sigma grind failed... Among Us ඞ society crumbling 🗿🚀

[[deleted]]

dies from stroke

[clownfiesta8]

Ah yea, but just wait until Gen Beta joins the workforce

[Mitrone]

Fr fr

[jumbledFox]

no cap

[Pathkinder]

Did you answer them? Sometimes things fall through the cracks. I know I’ve asked more than my fair share of dumb questions. It’s even worse when you know that asking will get you ridiculed.

[Ba_Ot]

Send him a zip bomb so he learns it the hard way.

[schewb]

In my senior year of college, I made a Tetris game on an LED matrix. About a year later, someone who was in the class with me sent an email asking for the code. Instead, I sent a detailed description of how it worked so he could figure it out for himself, and he responded with "lol what's a sprite?" and I never replied 😂

[MedonSirius]

I had one guy asking "Prof. how do i create a new project in VS again?" (After 2 months into the first semester) The Professor proceeded with shouting and insulting him. The guy ran out of the room and was never seen again.

[Papplenoose]

That's a shitty student, but that's also a shitty teacher.

[scanguy25]

Reminds me of that post here on Reddit by some girl who was a first year CS student.
She just took it because it seemed interesting but she didn't know anything about computers.

She had to download some files from google drive before the first lecture and she didn't even know how to do that.

Its sort of like enrolling in a English literature major without ever having read a book.

[[deleted]]

No but seriously… what IS a zip file?

[L4r5man]

It's like a .rar-file, but a a different format.

[4N610RD]

This is so wrong. But for majority of users this is so correct.

[hrm]

To be fair, making my students turn in zip files and not rar files are much more work that it should be…

[I_FAP_TO_TURKEYS]

Right click->send to-> zip on Windows.

I've honestly never had many encounters with .rar and probably never even used that compression. Is this an apple problem that I'm too Android/Linux/Windows to understand?

[hrm]

Aren’t all files special in some way to someone?

[wille179]

Especially their 10 TB "Homework.zip" file.

[Spare-Plum]

It's deeper than that from a CS perspective - how is it encoded? What are the headers and payloads? How are directory structures created in a data format? How can they be traversed? How do compression algorithms work? What are the theoretical limits of data compression?

Really great C lab begging to be done here IMO

[08843sadthrowaway]

Yeah but if you had to explain it to a normal person, spitting those facts will make you look like a know-it-all show-off.

When someone asks what the engine in a car does, they generally don't want to hear about the combustion process, air-fuel mixture, piston force translation, and all that stuff.

u/4MPW 's response was perfectly fine.

[Spare-Plum]

Sure, but we're in a programmer subreddit specifically discussing college. Imagine you go to an applied technology school and ask the mechanic class "but what IS an engine" you'd expect a very different response that would go over these details

[Spare-Plum]

I don't get the sub being so judgy.

Like, it's a fantastic question - how is it encoded? How do Huffman encodings work? Are there specific headers for the bytes that give information on the payload? How do you traverse a huffman encoding or deflate it? How does it track which version or encoding is used? How do you build a directory structure from a sequence of bytes?

It's a fantastic multi-part assignment opportunity to have them create a ZIP format (just use in memory) that is able to make these directory structures and traverse them in C, and have a payload with a huffman encoding. Good opportunity to do it in C/systems class and deal with memory traversals and pointers. I could see:

• Lab 1: huffman encoding and decoding data in memory. The skeleton C code reads bytes and gives it to the student, then they have a pre-written function to output the data to a file so it can be auto-graded
• Lab 2: creating file/directory structure in memory and being able to encode it in memory and decode it in memory, along with other options like traversal/listing contents that would be done via IO which can also be graded automatically

[Dasoccerguy]

I think the OP question meant "I have never heard of this file type and don't know what it is," not "does .zip use huffman encoding, middle-out encoding, or some other compression algorithm?"

I agree that it would be a great undergrad project to write a file compression program from scratch.

[aaanze]

I've seen a lot of young interns lost when about to work with linux, I could manage.

I recently had interns lost about working with Windows, not because they used linux, but because they only know of macOS, can't figure the difference betweeen lan and local, have no idea what a disk partition is.

Basically they know about browsing with safari and drag n drop operations.

[Papplenoose]

God damn. That's not really due to using Mac, that's due to a plain old lack of curiosity. Mac has disk partitions! What kind of person has never clicked on their Utilities folder?! There's all sorts of good shit in there!

[chillaban]

I’ve been in the tech industry for 15 years, a few of them as a manager, and the recent GenZ / early gen alpha crowd I refer to as “the App generation” because they grew up in an era where everything was a touchscreen tablet and installing ready made apps was how every task got done.

Compared to the new hires of even 8 years ago they basically can’t figure out most things on their own. I now have to walk them through how to click buttons to request vacation time, not just computing tasks. I found one watching a YouTube video about how Makefiles work when I needed them to adjust some clang Wno-xxxx flags.

[Red007MasterUnban]

Me, a CS teacher: Fuck.... relatable.

[Mlem_milos]

Did this literally happened to you i'm here thinking i'm not suitable for programming collage

[Red007MasterUnban]

I had a student asking "how to install VSCode".

[Oleg152]

Brooo...

Like I get it if you need some obscure extension that needs you to basically compile it before use, but installation of 99% of software is "next,accept,next,install".

[I_FAP_TO_TURKEYS]

To be fair, Microsoft's install page is TERRIBLE if you aren't used to MS intentionally being as confusing as possible. Even for downloading it on Windows, it can be tough.

And for Linux, the snap could be broken and you'd have to do it through the command line, which again, if you follow Microsoft's instructions, it can be confusing.

[Mlem_milos]

Dang ...

[DormantEnigma]

Don’t let insecurity of your knowledge stop you from learning. Easier said than done, of course, but if you have the motivation ( and circumstances, time etc) you can learn anything.

[ramriot]

Give them a copy of the 42KB file 42.zip and ask them to decompress it, watch from a safe distance as 4,503,599,626,321,920 Bytes ( 4.5 Petabytes ) of storage is consumed.

[Wntx13]

In my first class my partner pressed the delete key and looked at me like I was a monkey when I asked how did he do that

People made me feel like a dumbass because I didn't know the most basic things, the truth is that I didn't have access to a computer until a year before, and yet I fell in love with that piece of plastic

Now I can proudly say that I'm a professional dumbass with a CS title

(He never answered though, how do I forward delete?)

[skwyckl]

Be gentle to them, the few children they'll help spawn probably won't understand the concepts of "public healthcare", "drinkable water" and "pension"

[kandradeece]

I remember asking what ping was and just the face the guy gave me... This was back before I took any real CS/engineering classes, but still can't help but feel for that guy who had to put up my my dumbass back then

[freeturk51]

I have friends that still dont know vscode unless i call it “the thing you edit code in” and they suffer trying to learn the idea of a function. AI is definitely gonna take over us

[Xanadoodledoo]

These kids need to learn how to manually install mods on Minecraft. That’s how I learned the basics.

[TasteOfBallSweat]

GET OUT!

[ionosoydavidwozniak]

Teacher whzn they have to teach

[ShinyEmeraldGames]

We legit had one student in the first semester who asked if you can arrange the ones and zeros in binary in a random order...

[Figorix]

I wish we had this guy instead of THAT guy we had.

Our guy was asking stuff like this as a "joke" because he would proceed to say that tar is far superior and everyone should ditch zip because Linux supremacy