[Air-l] folder and file names as direct speech

Jill Walker jill.walker at uib.no
Sun Dec 12 11:33:23 PST 2004


> Students are
> using folder names and file names as public announcements.  For 
> example,
> a student might put a folder on the scratch drive called "Last Samurai
> here plz", asking any student who has the film to upload it to there 
> for
> her to copy.  There's one today called "plzzzz we need the new version
> of adobe photoshop".  There's also a folder called "movies", containing
> (among other things) a text file with the following name:
> "can u put ur requests in this (Text document and not folders) cuz we
> dont know which folder contains something or not and have to enter each
> ONE.txt"

This is (or was) common practice on filesharing networks - not the p2p 
kind, but the kinds where you use a client to log onto a network of 
servers, some of which will let you in for free, others which only let 
you in if you type in the fifth word of the twentieth line of a website 
you only get to after viewing a long ad for porn, some which will let 
you in but won't let you download any warez unless you upload some 
first, and yet others which only let members or perhaps even friends 
log in. Of course these servers are there for you to "backup" your 
applications, music and movies, not for piracy.

Though I think the clients often permit chat, there's not much 
opportunity for chatting - so communication between users and 
administrative information is all given through the file system.

I assume gopher used to work like this before the web, though I never 
tried it?

Jill




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