Tech Geezers vs. Young Bloods 768
Lam1969 writes "Robert Mitchell talks about how technology is dividing him from younger generations: "The technologies I've watched grow have shaped an entire culture of which I am not a part." Adds Dinosaur: "Ask them [members of the younger generation] HOW the things work, and they have no idea. They are really riding on the backs of the 'old folks' like us that built the goodies they enjoy.""
In other news, water found to be wet, fire hot. (Score:5, Insightful)
Aside from that, anyone who is actually surprised that people who grew up using a given piece of tech will have different attitudes towards it than the people who've had to adapt to it needs to be locked up someplace where they won't pose a threat to their own well-being. It should be obvious to anyone who hasn't spent their entire life in a coma that this is just how it works.
I'm not trying to post flamebait here, but honestly I can't even concieve of another reaction to this...
The knowledge will be passed along. (Score:5, Insightful)
Old people are just as stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
Do the same thing to the old folks. They dont know either. Of course some punk ass kid on a skateboard doesnt know how stuff works, hes retarded. A generation does not invent, select individuals do. Remember, people are stupid.
That's how it's supposed to work (Score:5, Insightful)
Fact is, our society is becoming increasingly specialized, and it's no surprise that some people won't understand the technology behind it even though they use it frequently. They're just specialized in other things, that's all.
As long as *somebody* knows how the technology works (engineers and scientists), there isn't a need to worry.
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:5, Insightful)
You always get this kind of attitude when a technology reaches a divergent point. I would hazard that many people know how to build CPUs and how the internal workings of a system function as ever, it's just that the hardware and the software have slowly diverged over the past twenty years. No longer do you need to know the particulars of a video card to communicate with it, etc. It isn't necessary for software people to know hardware, and visa versa. Both fields have become complex enough to function independently.
Thanks to standardization of system design and function, this isn't really a problem. And I'm certain that AMD and Intel take very careful consideration of the software demands their hardware will face (as do Crucial, ASUS, et al).
There may be a few remaining niches where the software and the hardware remain inextricably intertwined, such as small consumer devices, (iPod Nano, palmtop computers, etc).
It's the modern dilemma: there is too much to know. Two or three hundred years ago, you could read every book ever written. Now you can't even read every book ever written about computing.
It's the old joke: How many software engineers does it take to change a light bulb?
That's a hardware problem.
Re:In other news, water found to be wet, fire hot. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think it's the average user, the author is bothered by, it's the average technology person.
I'm often unpleasantly surprised with some of my supposedly technical colleagues' ignorance as to how computers work.
Cry me a river. (Score:4, Insightful)
Okay, go explain how the Cotton Gin, steam locomotion, automobiles, electricity, the telephone system, the over-the-air broadcasting system you use to watch Wheel of Fortune, etc work. Oh, you can't? Then shut up and stop whining.
But what's truly more complex? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, we're not using assembly today, but even some of the more minor systems implemented in C++ are far more complex than anything that was written in pure assembly several decade ago. I mean, look at something like an optimizing JIT Java virtual machine or a
Yes, but ultimately (Score:1, Insightful)
Let's see your notes on how to lay down paths on silicon, or construct logic gates on silicon, or see your first homemade tube transistor, or the source code you have for harddrive firmware.
I'm an expert in my field. Yet I am a very long way from understanding all the fundamental intricacies of that which constructs the framework upon which I earn my living. I can write a TSR, yes, but know little about what all the paths are for inside of a CPU, and how they all interact to form a functioning whole.
The knowledge base the we each posess is reliant upon the discoveries and developments of those who came before us, and has been built-up through years of learning and discovery.
To mock the next generation for their lack of understanding is akin to mocking a child for not understanding the full complexities of the world. To ridicule that child for knowing that daddy's car can get him to school, yet not knowing that steam is required to force the crude from the shale, into a pipeline, off to a refinery, ad neaseum.
Not so bad...indicative of progress! (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course we're riding on the backs of the older generation; just as the older generation rode on the backs of their elders who designed the technology that made computers possible in the first place. Older generations tend to like to trivialize the accomplishments of the younger generation because "it wouldn't be possible if we hadn't done X" first.
Of course, nothing you did would be possible unless someone decided to create before you. Thus is the cycle of progress and the older generation trying to trivialize the work of the "new generation" is really self-deprecating; they are basically saying that they would have preferred that their work not spur further innovation.
Embrace the innovation cycle; recognize that one day, a new generation of people will come along and build further upon your ideas and enjoy the fact that you helped lay the foundation!
It isn't like this is unexpected (Score:5, Insightful)
I have read many stories where there are generations of knowledge passed down to an elite class of society that are revered by the rest as demigods for their knowledge of how to keep machines running that provide the world with food, air, heating and all the comforts of life.
Stupidity? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, how is it stupidity to simply be ignorant of things that you don't need to know? I don't know how my digital camera works beyond a few of the basics (light shines on CCD, then... er... picture ends up on my flash card), that doesn't stop me from being a reasonably good photographer. I know how to use my camera, how to manipulate the aperture and the shutter time and the ISO to get the picture that I want. Isn't that what counts?
No person can be an expert on everything, and in my experience the people who try tend to be the real useless ones...
Riiight... (Score:5, Insightful)
Standing on the shoulders of those who came before is the definition of progress. So, please, unless you make your own wiring and screws and capacitors and what have you, shut up and stop whining.
Screw new technology... (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people will just never become curious about the things they use from day to day. Others will. That's the difference.
Re:In other news, water found to be wet, fire hot. (Score:4, Insightful)
The way to keep from getting screwed is to know what's going on. The author of TFA is in danger of not knowing how the next-gen tech is going to screw him. The next-gen users are in danger of not knowing how their tech works so that they can fix it or live without if it breaks. Or even recognise a better alternative when they see it. (I guess that last one depends on your definition of "better", which is part of that generation gap thing. .
Maybe it's old-fashioned or apocalyptic of me, but I still see a burgeoning Morlocks vs. Eloi dystopia in the making here, especially when insubstantials are involved such as data access and communication methodology.
Why do we need to know how things work in the US?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In other news, water found to be wet, fire hot. (Score:3, Insightful)
None of the examples from TFA involve technology people; no engineers, designers, etc. All his examples are Just Plain Folks(TM). The recurring theme in his rant is that there's a culture of technology use that he's not a part of. Welcome to the generation gap, dude.
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the same thing every time I see this stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a smart, technically savvy individual, who generally knows how ALL of his technology works. In fact, I make it a point to do so most of the time.
And as long as that's the case, that means that I WANT the younger generation to be ignorant, so I can reap the rewards of their ignorance.
As long as they're still ignorant, I'm still getting paid.
Re:In other news, water found to be wet, fire hot. (Score:4, Insightful)
You only need to know about your own little world. "Jack of all trades" are irrelevant in just about every other community these days what makes computers different?
Yeah, I like to know a little bit about everything but I'm not a guru in anything. I can putter along in whatever I'm faced with (PHP, perl, Linux, BSD/OS X, Windows, networking, DNS, SMTP, whatever) but I'm not a guru in any. That's not a good thing. I'd be better paid (and possibly less happy) if I was.
I know plenty of geniuses in multiple fields that don't know shit about other stuff and you know what? It doesn't matter in the long run.
What I'm more bothered by is that the average tech person still desires to be above everyone else in some way or another.
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:3, Insightful)
It's the modern dilemma: there is too much to know. Two or three hundred years ago, you could read every book ever written. Now you can't even read every book ever written about computing.
But you can read most of what's been written about computing. By eliminating redundant books/passages, you can probably reduce the amount of material by an order of magnitude or two.
Ah, the joys of an object oriented universe... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, the joys of an object oriented universe. Nah, you don't need to understand the internals of *how* it works, you just need the API docs.
Do programming courses in college still teach actual algorithms (prime number sieve, sorting, searching, etc.) or just how to program to APIs? I know OOP makes development easier precisely because you don't have to understand the object internals, but it's like a pocket calculator -- there are real lessons to be learned from putting it away and doing the work manually.
Also, I realize that I'm picking on programmers here, but the truth is that IT mindshare eventually follows them, so the disinterested attitude that found its way into the ranks of the developers eventually got around to everyone else.
I am also somewhat alarmed at how many IT people I have met who do not program, never have programmed and never plan to program.
BTW, present company (probably) excepted, of course.
Re:But what's truly more complex? (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because CS1 students are expected to write programs that were once at the pinnacle of computer science doesn't mean that programming the same applications in assembly is any easier.
Just wanted to point out the obvious...
Social issue not a tech issue (Score:5, Insightful)
System performance tuning (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Old people are just as stupid. (Score:3, Insightful)
He complains about not acting like a 14 year old? (Score:2, Insightful)
If he were clever he'd stop complaining and start capitalizing on stupid teen trends.
Down with ageism. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really. (Score:5, Insightful)
But committing to memory all of the oral tradition even in one culture would have a similar education to what we have today. I think it was Pliny who said that the Druids had something like 20 years of training. And it doesn't take a professional Linguist to read something like "How to Kill a Dragon" and realize the depth of these traditions. Or how easily can one commit the entire Rig Veda to memory (it was originally memorized, you know).
In other words, the required knowledge in specialized fields really isn't a new phenominon.
The second issue is that most of this stuff isn't really that conceptually complex. It can easily be explained in Contemporary Standard American English without using jargon. The problem is that people have so much ego invested in broken analogies (OSI model used to "explain" how TCP works, for example, with few people even remembering that OSI was supposed to be a competitor to TCP and built along fundamentally different assumptions).
In short it is not that there is too much to know, but that it is hard to winnow it down so that you know what information to consume. The problem is compounded by broken requirements like knowing the OSI model which is not only dead but broken.
(I always tell people to memorize the OSI model for exams and then don't ever worry about using it after.)
Re:But what's truly more complex? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Old people are just as stupid. (Score:3, Insightful)
In the mid-80's or so, a technical support person could be expected to be one a very few people doing that job at a particular company, and was most likely to handle calls from people who knew a fair amount about the system they were using. So, the person had to be able to answer questions on a wide range of systems (because there was no one to re-direct the calls to), and answer complex problems (because simple problems would be solved without their intervention.)
Today a technical support rep is likely to get "Why doesn't the cupholder work anymore?" calls, and is likely to be part of a large team. So, they only need a little information about a few topics: Anything else they can refer on/over, if needed, or assume is unanswerable (because the cost of answering the question is greater than the cost of not being able to answer it).
Given that, you don't need as knowledgeable personell behind the phones. And, since less knowledgable personel are cheaper than more knowledgeable personel, they are more likely to get hired and retained (at that level).
So, technical support personel as a group are being selected for less knowledge. They don't need it anymore, and it is a skill that can be better used (and rewarded) elsewhere.
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:3, Insightful)
So many of the younger generation really doesn't understand the TCP/IP suite but they figure they can administer a network. They don't really understand Kerberos but they think they know what they can do with ActiveDirectory. Yet I wonder how long it would take them to join a computer to a domain if I set the clock off by a day or so....
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In other news, water found to be wet, fire hot. (Score:5, Insightful)
My uncle was my mentor who is a backbone switch guy -- to this day -- for a big telco running nortel racks and keeping big stuff going -- cool as hell when he takes me to "the node." He can barely use windows and relies on me for everything, but he can build a tv and actually puts a wafer board to use and, yes, he looks like froheki. I respect the hell out of him. The guy who taught me routers and switches and cisco is now in his 60s and also can't use windows, but he'll keep your damn network running smooth. He lives in telnet and writes everything down on a legal pad. I think he's a god -- always have. The guys under me tend to laugh at anyone older, treat them like their idiots and scoff at any supposed technical aptitude -- both the nortel and the switch guy and myself. They seem to presume to know more out-of-the-box on anything that comes up, but they are windows xp centric, college guys. I love 'em and relate to them and not all are like that, but more often than not they are. They couldn't setup a netware 3.x box if they had to or bang out a quick grep command to find something, but they can play wow, explain the latest tech on the latest nvidia card and hook up a shuffle -- things that the two ancients I mentioned would and could never do, but they know they can't....
It just seems there is a loss of respect for the pioneers and the level 60 wizards that were doing technology while the new generation was in diapers or even born. Again, my personal opinion....
Re:The knowledge will be passed along. (Score:4, Insightful)
cites. Sites are places. Cites are citations, things that you write or otherwise communicate.
Sorry, but I'm a grammar troll today.
I can see his point somewhat... (Score:3, Insightful)
I have to admit, I do wonder somewhat if todays youth is at a bit of a disadvantage when it comes to the nuts-and-bolts of computing.
I was fortunate. I grew up in the generation where having a computer in your home was possible, with devices like the Apple II, Commodore VIC-20 (or 64) or original IBM PC (and later PC XT) weren't completely outside the purchasing ability of your typical middle-class income family.
For this, I count myself lucky. The level of complexity was significantly lower in some regards (the hardware and software didn't do anywhere near as much as a system can do today), however to actually use those systems you typically had to get to know the overall system better.
Today, if you can move a pointing device, you can use a computer. This is a huge step forward in usability and productivity over the old days, but it can also seductively mask the overall complexity inherent in the system. You don't need to know how to POKE a memory location to change the colour of your display's background -- a few simple clicks will do it for you.
By also having more limited possibilities way-back-when, it was somewhat easier to play around with the system, because there were a certain set of delineations as to what was and wasn't possible. Advances in both raw processing power and standard system features/capabilities means that there are so many more facets that jump at you at once, I can imagine it would be hard to figure out where to start just writing a basic program -- there is a huge explosion of options now which simply didn't exist back then. We didn't have half a dozen (or more) APIs per platform to do something, so one didn't have to waste a lot of time trying to figure out which API is best for the task at hand. You didn't have a choice, so you used what was available. And things like audio and video were severely limited by the hardwares capabilities.
There is also the fact that because storage is now cheap, and applications are expected to be more complicated, that the barriers to entry in terms of playing with source code have risen quite a bit. Gone are the days where, because storage was so expensive, you'd buy a book or a magazine with source code listings in it. I remember typing some of these things in, and playing around with them while I was doing so. It was very educational. But such facilities don't really exist today. Magazines can cheaply include a CD-ROM, and the most common platform out there doesn't have any sort of built-in interpreter that you can just type instructions into and play around with like the old systems did (even if it was BASIC).
Now as a user, I dont want to go back to those days. They're dead and gone for a good reason. But just as we give kids toy hammers and cars to play with to grasp certain concepts before we give them a real hammer or let them drive a real car, we don't seem to have a similar sort of system for learning computer software development. We seem to lack any good, common development environments for the young to learn programming concepts.
I started coding when I was 10 -- a relatively common age for my generation. But this sort of thing doesn't seem to happen anymore.
Now on the other side of things, todays 10 year old is more savvy in the way of telecommunications. They can do research on topics quickly and easily on the Internet, whereas the ability to do so when I was 10 simply didn't exist. So I don't think it's fair to say that todays youth are less tech savvy in general -- they have skills which we didn't (and many of whom in my generation still don't) possess. But I do think they are at a certain disadvantage when it comes to programming, if only because the barriers to entry have risen substantially (not to mention the fact that there are so many other cool distractions now that didn't exist back then).
Yaz.
"They" are not part of anything (Score:3, Insightful)
And in all honesty I'm not sure I'm going to care that much about Vista for example. When it breaks it will do whatever it does to recover itself, or not, or I'll go out and buy another 350 dollar e Machine. Big whoop - how many hours of your time is it worth to mess with it?
I suppose I could dink with innards of my MP3 player and solder in a new 2 dollar capacitor or something. But probably not. Probably I'll just toss it in the trash.
This reminds me... (Score:5, Insightful)
He grew up on nintendo. I grew up on Commodore 64. He thinks AIM is a killer communication app, for me it's IRC (for customers where I work it's email). We had interesting conversations about several things... we had a disagreement on how a Tivo works. I basically said
The point shouldn't be who's right and who's wrong
At some point, I had to stop and realize... wait, he's just growing up in a different world than I did. So now, it's really cool. Our individual experiences compliment each other. He brought home some C++ homework, and I said
I'm an admin for a local internet provider and we do some connections for local colleges. I don't talk to the students there all that often, but when I do, I find it easier now.
You're not better than a younger generation because you understand different things than they do. When you start to understand them, you're better than you were.
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:5, Insightful)
And the corporate environment encourages that. Naturally, nobody not in the network group is allowed to touch the networking equipment, so they'll likely never learn much beyond what they need to know for O/S support, etc etc. This silo-ing extends throughout much of Corporate IT in my experience. It discourages cross-training and encourages specialization to what imo is an excessive degree.
Re:In other news, water found to be wet, fire hot. (Score:3, Insightful)
How was the buggy assembled, piece by piece? What metals did the boiler use and now was it smithed? Where did the gas feed come from and how was it processed? Where does kerosene come from? What is the formula for the ink in the inkwell? What is actually going on in the water pump to make it pull water up from the ground?
What you're answering is how to operate. What the question was is how exactly does it work. That usually includes how to make it, where the materials come from and what they do. I can use a ballpoint pen, and I have a vague idea of how it gets the ink on the page, but I have no idea how the ink is made that completes the device and makes it work. Without that type of ink the pen doesn't work right, but does that matter to me?
I never quite understood why generations of tehnological developers get so upset when the fruits of their labor are available to regular folks while the whole time they're developing it most of them are thinking how they can make things that do more and are easier to use. The computing industry seems to be the worst of it all.
Troll rate me or whatever (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:But what's truly more complex? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm NOT arguing that they need write in assembly or binary. I AM arguing, I guess, that the traditional CS foundations of logic and math are important to understanding the bigger picture in the most meaningful way. Even if you never take a CS course, being able to go through an old compiler theory textbook and grasp what they mean is a good way to find new understanding in C at which point you understand that there was deeper meaning to Kernighan's and Ritchie's guide than just how C worked. Any language needs to base itself around those core principles and insist on the programmers understanding them.
Which is why I get that shaking head and rolling eyes thing whenever I see an explosion of interest for a new language whose very structure looks to me like spaghetti before anything is written with it and all the praise revolves around it being new, cool, object oriented, or some other buzzphrase. Maybe the languages before were'nt in need or replacement, just the people using them or at least a refresher in the basics.
Re:They were never any golden old days (Score:4, Insightful)
Five US Presidents later, I'm done waiting for it to happen.
The economy cycles, but continues to slowly rise. Priorities of morallity shift around, yet we do not decline into nihillistic anarchy, but rather we continue to gradually raise our standards regarding what offends our sensibilities. Countries around us get their shit together and look as if they will "catch up" to us in global competition, and we end up finding a way to trade with them which enhances our prosperity. Our freedoms endure troubling restrictions in some ways, while opening up more than ever before in others, and brutal dictatorships around the world continue to slip into what Reagan once called "the ash bin of history."
I've finally come to conclude that we actually have a rather robust society in place.
As a child, I grew up (like many Cold-War kids) believing that the whole goddamn world would burn up in a massive nuclear apocalypse in my lifetime.
As a young man, I was dead certain that we were living in the declining years of society... that we caught the very tail end of something great, and it will all be over soon.
Today, I've come around to see that calling our society "doomed" is about as meaningful as calling Apple Computer "beleagured."
So farewell to all the hand-wringing and furrowed brows about the future. I now firmly believe that the world will be a even better place during the rest my life than it has been so far. What's more, it will continue to improve long after I'm gone.
Re:But what's truly more complex? (Score:5, Insightful)
The sad truth of the matter is that both the oldbies and the newbies are wrong. Contrary to what the oldbies think, the field is now sufficiently large that it's not possible to understand all of the complexities, and you don't need to understand all of them. The newbies, on the other hand, are so wrapped up in their reflexive sophomoric belief that new = better that they miss the valuable point that their predecessors are making: sometimes, you can write better software if you know what's going on inside the black box.
This reminds me of the pointless flamewar that erupts from time to time between hard-core assembly language programmers and the users (but seldom the developers) of optimizing compilers. There is a popular but mistaken belief that today's optimizing compilers can outperform hand-coded assembly. Even for some fairly trivial cases, this is simply not true, but you have to be an experienced assembly language programmer to even make the comparison between human-generated and machine-generated code.
What I think the oldbies are really lamenting -- at least *I* am lamenting it, having been programming since the punch-card era -- is the declining level of skill necessary to write software. In the old days, it had to be not only good, but actually excellent code, because the hardware wasn't fast or capacious enough to handle the kind of code that's the norm these days. No one -- well, very few of us -- wrote code in assembly language because we wanted to; we did it because we had to. And from this, there was the usual pride that arises from what amounted to fine craftsmanship. Nowadays, the economics of software development have shifted so that it is just too goddamn expensive to build code that way, not that it's more expensive than it ever was, but because it's so much cheaper to throw some fresh junior college grads at it and call it good. That they come complete with the arrogance of ignorance only adds insult to injury.
This is not the first time this has happened. You heard similar complaints from all of the craftsmen who were put out of work by the industrial revolution. Fine, hand-crafted furniture is stronger, longer-lasting, and (arguably) more attractive than the particle-board and veneered junk that comes out of industrial furniture factories, but no one can afford the "good" stuff anymore, and the cheap junk is good enough.
The difference in quality is not imaginary. Compare the old MS-DOS editor, QEdit, with the trivial and ubiquitous Unix editor, PICO. QEdit, which was written in assembly language and is completely statically linked, weighed in somewhere around 48k and included vastly more capabilities as well as a fairly sophisticated macro language. PICO, which doesn't have much in the way of capabilities at all and is written in a high-level language, weighs in at 171k and then dynamically links in some more libraries, occupying over a meg of RAM before it has even loaded a file.
Would the average user notice any difference in performance if all code was written the old way? Yes, especially -- but not exclusively -- on older machines. The problem is that the average user couldn't afford to buy software built that way, any more than the average person can afford to furnish their entire home with fine handcrafted furniture.
What surprises me, however, is that in the free software world, where such economic considerations do not apply, the free apps are often not much better than the equivalent commercial apps. OpenOffice and MS Office, for example, are both big, lumbering, resource-hungry hogs whose resour
Nothing new here really (Score:4, Insightful)
Imagine a thought experiment: a modern man, a well educated one, is transported back in time, where the local population believes him to be a god, so he has endless supply of labor, but he lost the entire technological base and must rebuild it from scratch.
How many different people would it take to reconstruct the techology of the age they were taking from? I would not be surprised if one man from 1500's knew enough to rebuild his entire technology from ground up. In 1800 there were scientists who worked in a good many of the available areas of science, may be half a dozen of those could reconstruct the entire scientific and technological knowledge of their civilization. How many we would need now? How many of the best-educated modern humans would need to come together to build a car or an airplane using only what's in their heads, no books, no libraries, nobody else to ask, only them and endless unskilled labor?
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:4, Insightful)
If you understand how to step through assembly in a debugger, and how to read a network trace (or wahtever trace applies to the problem at hand) there's no problem you can't eventually pin down, and given open source, solve.
But the reality is far worse, as people don't generally even understand how their app affects the system and network. Heck, I can't count the times someone has suggested XML or XMLRPC to me on a project for which efficiency is paramount, and couldn't really understand why I'd suggest that their favorite XML package wasn't optimal. Many many programmers just don't get bits and bytes. But the fallacy is that this is something new. Most COBOL programmers didn't "get it" either.
Moving to the next level... (Score:3, Insightful)
I find this comment interesting, while it is somewhat accurate, there just may be more to it.
The 'Old folks' spent their time building a framework, a base, if you will. The young techies need not expend energy understanding how the framework was put together, rather they expend their energy building on the results.
Lets just go back a little ways... I find it somewhat interesting that some institutions of higher learning still require HTML programing... There are so many front ends for HTML development, that I would guess that it would be counter-productive to write straight HTML in a text editor...
"Well, thats riduculous, this breeds lazy coders who don't understand what they are doing, and can't troubleshoot the problems because they don't know what they are looking at"
I would somewhat agree with this philosephy, however, at some point it does become counter-productive to do things "the old fashioned way".
I beleive that in order to move into the future, you must build on the past, use the tools developed in the past and move to the next level.
In addition to all of this with regards to "riding the backs of old folks like us..", I got news for the "old folks", they rode over your backs a long time ago, the people that you are seeing in those lines are riding the backs of the people who rode over your backs 5 years ago....
Technology is moving just that fast...
Re:In other news, water found to be wet, fire hot. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but even 100+ years ago, the average Joe didn't totally know how their technology worked. For example, the Horse -- hay goes in one end, horse poop comes out the other. If the horse gets sick, take it to the local vet. When the horse needs shoes, take it to the smithy. Yes, there were people who were able to take care of their horse completely (medical care and shoeing), especially on the frontier, but that knowledge was not required for non-frontiersmen.
The same situation developed when cars were invented. Early on, anyone who had a car HAD to know everything about it from changing tires to rebuilding the motor, but as time went on, mass produced cars, service stations, and the AAA came along and the average Joe no longer HAD to know how a car worked. There still were/are amateur mechanics who can rebuild a car, but that became a hobby instead of a necessity.
The same thing is occurring starting to occur with computers now. Even though (in my opinion) we are not completely to the point where the computer is an appliance, eventually the average Joe will be able to buy a computer out of the box and use it without having to know what exactly is "under the hood." At this point, OSX is the closest thing we have to that, followed by some Linux distros, and last, but least, Windows. Win XP is better, but there is still too many problems that the user needs to address to say it is totally ready for the average Joe (a topic for another post).
Every new technology starts out the same way, the first adapters HAVE to be experts to get it to work and keep it working, then eventually the technology matures and gets to the point where anyone can use it without knowing how it works. Then a new technology comes along and the cycle starts anew...
Holy crap... (Score:1, Insightful)
Sheesh, I remember not beiong able to AFFORD a coast to coast phone call; I'd call Grandma collect (not that she could afford it either).
I was rather dissapointed in TFA. I thought it would be along the lines of that Clint Eastwood movie where he and James Garner played astronaut-engineers, where they made an "impossible" landing by shutting off the computers ("this thing's like flying a brick!") and where the young digital engineers couldn't understand any of the old analog stuff they were supposed to train the young guys on.
That said, most of my friends, both online and offline, are in their twenties (half my age).
You are the only one in the Wall Mart checkout line not talking on a cell phone to pass the time
Young men are such pussies. REAL men don't gab on any phone, landline or cell (unless there's a hot chick he wants to lay on the other end).
When you walk down the street with your friends you're talking only to them...
This guy is comparing himself to teenagers, not young adults. None of my twentysomething friends do that. And most of them consider themselves to be nerds.
You don't use IM to let all of your friends know where you are at all times
My daughter used to do that. Now that she's 18 she doesn't.
You haven't downloaded hundreds of ringtones because you think spending 99 cents per ringtone is a ripoff
Well it IS! Anybody stupid enough to pay a buck for a ring tone is too stupid to call him or herself a "nerd." If you are that dumb yet still socially awkward, you are a "dork," not a nerd.
You don't download songs every night to load on your iPod
I don't know anybody with an iPod. Jeff, a guitar player pushing thirty (his hair is thinning) says most of his CDs are ones I've burned for him.
A generation that has never known a world without cell phones, text messaging and IM have built a culture around the technology that is foreign to me
Not foreign to me, and I'm over 50.
it's not uncommon for him to sign up kids to packages that include 2,000 minutes or more of airtime.
There have always been folks with more cents than sense, and they're usually young. I was, once.
But my niece uses the away message feature in IM as a public P.A system.
Not a bad use for IM. However, I don't have time futzing with IM. I'm too busy doing more important things (like drinking beer and reading slashdot).
The technologies I've watched grow have shaped an entire culture of which I am not a part.
That's his own fault. My daughter, who works in a record store, seems to be in a race with me to collect the most CDs. The difference is, she buys hers, while I sample most of mine from LP and cassette.
I build my own computers, I had a web log before the word "blog" was coined or Google existed. You're only as old as you can convince yourself you're not.
If you liked TFA you might want to google K5 for "growing up with computers", "useful dead tech" (I think that's what itwas titled), and "Good riddance to bad technology" (again, I've forgotten the exact title).
(mind reading capcha="fuck it")
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=163790&cid= 13677983 [slashdot.org]
point to me at some point in the last 100 years where your average person knew to any degree of certainty how their tech worked
Back in the seventies if you didn't know how your car worked you were considered a sissy.
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=163790&cid= 13677999 [slashdot.org]
Who knows how things will work 30 years from now.
Who cares? I'll be dead!
It will all be magic b
Engineers vs Non Engineers (Score:2, Insightful)
The engineers in generation will too. You go back farther and include disecting animals.
It all depends on what's around & what you can learn by taking it apart. And if you need to.
I don't need to recompile the kernel anymore. (I did w/ 0.95 and Minix before that). If I was starting today I'd never add that to my skills.
The non engineers will not take things apart. If it's not working "the way it should be" they'll adapt. Engineers adapt thier environment.
Re:The more things change... (Score:3, Insightful)
If I'm near a major city, and all the infrastructure is working correctly, I don't need to know how to make my own head gasket for a Land Cruiser (tm). However, if I blow a head gasket in the middle of Kenya (happened to a buddy of mine), it may pay to understand enough of the physical characteristics necessary to fashion a temporary gasket from some chewing gum and the thick leaf from a large, nearby plant.
At every step along the way, it would seem that what's important is "relevant depth of understanding." Relevant to the context in which you work. For some, that may go no further than the key that starts the car. For others, understanding the digitally encoded key interface to the ECC may be an absolute necessity. All users don't need the same level of understanding.
It's for this reason that I am not bothered by Dr. Sagan's oft-quoted "We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology." Replace "science and technology" with "fire and sword making" or "blacksmithing and horses" and you can find periods of history where this generalized statement applies.
The issue seems to be where we establish the "relevant depth of understanding" level. As long as you can accept *some* variance between the user and the developer, I've got no argument with your point.
Tim
The more things change... (Score:4, Insightful)
The old have the experience to design reliable things that do things people actually want, but lack the energy to work 12 hours a day. So many go home to their "lives". And we need our naps.
Solution: older designers, younger workers. Every field other then technology figured this out thousands of years ago. One of these years we'll figure it out too, probably right after AI works and noone needs to write code anymore.
Re:I think the same thing every time I see this st (Score:2, Insightful)
You are also a pretentious jackass.
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:4, Insightful)
With modern programming its more like being a CEO barking out orders to my minions (makers, compilers, assemblers, linkers and such). I haven't really a f*ing clue what is really going on anymore. I suspect they do a lot of slacking off but I can't see it from my office.
It reminds me of what Richard Feynman said about the advantages of growing up with vacuum tube based radios, how you could much more easily see how they worked. Now it's just a few black boxes connected by hard to see wires, and there as so many bells and whistles, it is harder to get a feel for what is going on.
Perhaps it isn't essential to know all the details, but it is fun to learn anyway. If I had a geeky kid, I'd encourage him to play with my Atmel microcontrollers and developer board. Its good clean fun and maybe it would come in handy some day.
In emergency situations is interesting what dumb mistakes people make because they are so used to being far removed from the details of how things work. After a hurricane several people will always bring their generator indoors and die of carbon monoxide poisoning. Several will make obvious errors cutting up fallen trees and end up crushed. Many don't even seem to know how to cook without electricity or start a fire without matches or a lighter. I know of one person who couldn't even figure out how to eat from plants full of string beans, only knew how to warm them from a can. This is mostly stuff our ancestors dealt with daily.
A fundamental difference of the past ~200 years... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:3, Insightful)
Case in point: I remember a young grad programmer who was parsing a free-text address into its component parts. Early 4GL (Powerhouse). He was getting about 4 transactions per hour, and couldn't understand why. His logic was impeccable, but he didn't realise the effect of choosing a string of "Else If"'s over a string of "If - End if"'s would have (there being no case statement in that version iirc). He was forcing a huge amount of activity to happen in the the call argument stack, the worst possible structure to use on that platform at the time. Obvious to an old bit-bender, incomprehensible to someone who was never trained to look below the surface. So yes, knowledge in-depth matters.
Kids these days, can't take the pressure of a few fathoms under the object layer (grumble grumble mutter at shoes).
I think that's hardly fair (Score:3, Insightful)
The thing to do is encourage young minds. Show them what they're missing. Of course, if we're talking some warez-cracking script-kiddie who knows nothing but half of one toy language and doesn't *care* to know any more, that's hardly above consideration. We call those "lusers".
Re:Not really. (Score:3, Insightful)
To me, it has always been clear the OSI 7 layer model is a good general description of how protocol stacks go togther, while TCP/IP is one good example of a well-implemented (and minimal) protocol stack.
This is clear when the models are put side-by-side like this:
I don't follow this reasoning, I've just shown you the matchup, where exactly doesn't that matchup work?
As to how well you can model doing UDP streaming via an application under the OSI model, one can either argue the OSI model doesn't work because it's messy to model UDP streaming, or one can argue that streaming UDP is messy when the OSI model shows various software modules spanning logical protocol layers in strange ways. Either way OSI is just a model, a way of thinking about a problem, that sometimes helps categorize and understand it better. No single framework works equally for every application.
Okay, so DoD is simpler and matches the most commonly deployed TCP/IP stacks as implemented. That makes it a better direct description of TCP/IP, but not necessarily a better model for thinking about protocol stacks and protocol implementations in general. And DoD *should* be a better direct description of TCP/IP, since it is really a protocol description based on TCP/IP rather than a model for building protocol stacks based on broad experience in the first place...
Actually, my understanding was always that the OSI model broke the protocol description/implementation problem space into 7 logical and easily identifiable layers which could be implemented in any number of physical or logical modules to get the job done (These modules might span layers, break down individual layers into smaller chunks, or even be missing in some cases.) In fact, one of the original reasons for having the OSI model was so when two developers wrote different modules which had to interact with each other they'd know where everyone sat on the whole "protocol food-chain" as it were.
If we always had to have a one to one mapping between layers in our model and layers in our implementation, then inventions like SSL/TLS would require whole new models, not just new stack implementations. And yet, no one talks about the "5-layer SSL model", or at least no one I've ever heard of. Instead SSL managed to slide neatly into the Presentation Layer gap left in the TCP/IP implementation. Something we wouldn't even be able to talk about under the 4 layer DoD model. (Even better, SSL managed to keep an interface almost identical to TCP to avoid application rewriting...)