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.""
Obligatory Simpson Quote... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's only going to get worse as the pace of change continues to accelerate. In ten years a few engineers will be designing new classes of electronics based on quantum principles. Or totally new types of devices based on photons or magnetic spin vs. electron charge. Ten years later, that will be passé and maybe we'll be doing something with neutrinos. Who knows how things will work 30 years from now. It will all be magic by then.
It is somewhat true (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh well. I think all this excitement has gotten to me. I'm going to go take a nap now. Where's my cane?
Re:Old people are just as stupid. (Score:3, Interesting)
Take for example a small group - technical support folks. Since I started doing technical support, things have changed. Back when I first started, most people DID understand the underlying mechanics of what was going on. They COULD do things command-line and know precisely what to expect to receive back. They also often had knowledge of a wide range of systems and levels of technology from the front end, to the server, to everything in an entire corporate network. Today, technical support folks know how to click mouse buttons and change graphical settings without having any clue as to what exactly is happening to the system or why. Furthermore, they're specialized down to the point of knowing only a few systems, instead of the broader range.
I agree technology has changed how people use it. I agree that the masses have technology in ways they never could have back then. I agree that most people who use it don't and shouldn't need to know how the underlying systems work. I also agree that there are people who SHOULD understand more about the systems they work with and don't. I sum it up to DOT-COM frankly when floods of people came into the tech world and lingered too long knowing too little.
Re:The knowledge will be passed along. (Score:4, Interesting)
Conversely, and this relates to the parent post, when population numbers decline inventions are sometimes lost. He sites examples of societies that had acquired and then subsequently lost, writing, the wheel, and other technologies.
This is new?? (Score:3, Interesting)
As a "geezer" of 40 years old, most people have NEVER cared about "how" things work, they just want them to work. And thought I'm someone who loves to know how things work, it drives me crazy that technoids thing it's a problem that not everyone is passionate about how things are done. You know, not everyone's brain is wired the same way, and it's OKAY that not everyone is the same.
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:4, Interesting)
Reminds me of a quote. . . (Score:3, Interesting)
-Norbert Weiner (1894-1964)
Each suceeding generation begins a couple steps ahead of the old. That shift in point of origin allows the younger generations to view the old's accomplishments as the beginning of something more, while the old can only see the tremendous effort it required.
They were never any golden old days (Score:2, Interesting)
There may seem like times of civilization and collapse say the Romans, followed by a thousand years of dark ages. But the peasants in the feudal system were more free than those slaves taken by the Romans.
Things may be getting worse for those highest in society, but they have to accept this sacrifice if it 's to help the global redistribution of wealth and we're to rectify centuries of injustice.
Re:Stupidity? (Score:0, Interesting)
No kidding (Score:5, Interesting)
How did I understand how these things worked? I started by reading the oldest documentation I could find. Part of the problem is that computer professionals have become very good at confusing eachother (using the OSI model to discuss TCP/IP for example) and the other part is that the document writers in general don't understand what they are writing about. Then I could go and read newer documentation and have some sense of what it is worth. Good documentation in this industry is a rare thing.
Maybe it helped that both of my grandparents on my mom's side were writing programs before I was even in diapers
The more things change... (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmm... how is that any different from today?
Tim
Re:In other news, water found to be wet, fire hot. (Score:4, Interesting)
The only people I can think of who wouldn't are a few of the people I know who have learned the technology trade, not grew up with a passion for the machine. (Note when I say friends above i mean the latter. I make friends with similar people.)
So yeah, I think anyone who has a real interest in computation studies knows with some interest how circuits are arranged, how Turing machines work, is at least afraid of the y-combinator, and knows that language fights are dumb. :) I think once the pay starts decreasing again, then things won't be taken for granted *quite* as much.
One mild caveat to all of this, however. Managing complexity means abstracting. As we continue to add complexity there's a point at which some people just won't want to understand how a machine works inside. They blackbox it and move on. Hopefully they'll still get a top-level from it.
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll bet the people who maintain or design and build the Tesla turbines know how they work. That's what I mean by divergence versus commoditization.
With commoditization, as you describe it, the common fear is that all the knowledge will one day be lost because no one has to use it anymore. You see this in a lot of B Sci-Fi movies set in the distant future, often leading to religious-based uprising (religion being the clear enemy of science, what?)
Whereas, with technological divergence, you end up with the breakup of a field into two, like "computers" into "hardware" and "software." There are plenty of electrical engineering students who know what NPN and PNP mean, and haven't a clue about, say, the pros and cons of classes versus structs re functional programming and modularization.
Thus I say it is a point of divergence, because the field has broken into component fields. Commoditization is a realistic fear, which was certainly described somewhat in TFA, but I think it is somewhat narrow-minded at this point. Most people don't know a carburetor from a transaxle, or what ring and tell have to do with traditional land-line telephones. That doesn't mean that knowledge is lost.
I, being a believer in meritocracy, ignore the actions of the end-users, who know not what they do.
Re:In other news, water found to be wet, fire hot. (Score:3, Interesting)
When my peers carry on like Ellen Feiss ("And then it was like, 'bleep bleep bleep'"), I've often said, "I know exactly why that happened, but I don't think you really care to hear the explanation," to have them carry on as if I hadn't spoken. They really don't care, and frankly I don't want to bother trying to explain it to them.
It seems the rub is that consumer electronics are fashion accessories these days, whereas the consumer tech of yesteryear was largely appliances (washers, stereos, televisions, etc). That stuff stayed at home by necessity. Nowadays I have to deal with my friends' nonstop IM conversations on their camera-phones when they're supposedly hanging out with me. They bounce along, listening to the latest NiN album on their iPod Nano, oblivious to me and the world around them. It's not just shallow and bourgeois, it's downright offensive if you're trying to carry on a conversation with one of these little hummingbirds of the iGeneration.
My uncle is an awesome coder, but he doesn't have the ability to instantly look at an application interface and grok how it works that is second nature to those who grew up with GUIs. He started working with computers in his 20's.
As implied above, I find a lot of this gadget fetish depraved. I suppose I am a bit of a hypocrite in that I own a lot of gadgets, including a cel phone and an iPod. I largely understand how they work, but I don't know that that really makes it better.
Re:System performance tuning (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:3, Interesting)
People don't need to understand everything about every mundane detail in life to be able to be a functional and productive member of society, and indeed we shouldn't strive for this. Honestly, I don't know how to change my own oil in my car, but I doubt that the dude at Jiffy Lube knows anything about software development. We all have our own absolute and comparative advantages in life. For me, and for society, it is better for me to take my car in and get my oil changed rather than me taking up more time doing it myself. This allows me to save time which I can spend doing things which I have an advantage in (like developing software).
It's a basic "Jack of all trades, master of none" issue. The guy at Jiffy Lube could spend all his time learning to program, but his time is better spent serving society with something that he has a comparative advantage in. I could spend much of my time learning about raising crops for food and changing my oil, but it is more efficient to allow others who are better at this to specialize while I work within my own area of expertise.
In summation, the opportunity cost of changing my own oil is higher than taking it to Jiffy Lube. Simple economics...
Re:In other news, water found to be wet, fire hot. (Score:3, Interesting)
For me it was the emergence of object models and frameworks. When I started (1978), each language had about 100 commands and functions that you had to string together to make the logic of the application. You could literally have the entire grammar of the language in your head to build whatever you wanted.
Now, you have to know the object model, the APIs, the various tools and debuggers. The programming experience is a lot more about how to look up the existing thing you need to invoke out of thousands of possibilities, not counting Googling around for something to download that solves some of the problem at hand. So, it's less about having everything in your head and applying creativity than it is about knowing the framework and how to interact with others on the same framework.
Not really trying to create a rant about the good ol' days ("just give me ones and zeros"), but it feels to me that most software development has gone from computer science to vacational training. This creates the disconnect where users of the thing don't care about the magic that makes it work.
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:2, Interesting)
The prof. further went on to make a current comparison with respect to the magnitude of published materials. He stated that, if as an undergrad today you decided to start studying, without exception, every piece of extant Canadian children's literature, by the time you were 60 or so you might be able to claim a fairly comprehensive knowledge of that particular sub-genre, not counting everything that had been published since you started reading.
Re:They were never any golden old days (Score:3, Interesting)
I've finally come to conclude that we actually have a rather robust society in place."
We'll see what you think about that when nearly everyone who can maintain a computer ssytem from the mid 1990s has retired. I think NASA is going to learn a thing or two about this phenomenon when they try to go back to the Moom. They're going to have to reinvent the rocket/wheel, figuratively, instead of building on the experience of the Apollo missions.
When things get too complex, it is harder to make them robust, as any little thing can bring the whole shooting match tumbling down. If a sound card died in a 486, you replaced it. If it dies in a new computer where it's integrated into the motherboard, then you might end up needing to reinstall the OS too, to fix things.
Our society is the same way, if you removed the Internet today, thousands of businesses would be thrown into chaos. I you stopped air travel for a week..
If you run out of gasoline for a few days.
If you have a power outage that lasts 24 hours.
Any number of things aside from purposeful terrorism can bring our "robust" society to its knees, by accident.
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:3, Interesting)
A classic example of this shows up in Java alot, where large amounts of data are loaded into memory (undoubtedly swap) for manipulation later. Those of use with good understanding of the underlying system realizes it's a pretty big waste to read from disk only to have it swap right back to it and instead maintain references to portions of the data that we need to rereference. This is a basic example, but a fairly solid one. That fact that many modern languages do not even allow you access to the underlying registers, operations and other processing structures (excpet through other languages like using JNI in Java) makes true optimization pointless.
Most modern software is highly pessimized, using layers of abstraction for development convenience rather than optimized for performance (include system requirements). The idea that you can always through more hardware at a problem has lead to software bloat and this unneeded pessimization. The only bright side is that there are atleast a few people out there still considering the hardware and how it can be used by the software, leading to things such as the use of GPUs for general vector processing and not just graphics. If we loose the few of us that do have knowledge of both ends of a system we will run into a stagnation of technology. When I began programing on commodore machines many years ago I had to learn how to use the processing power of each sub component and not just hope that a pre existing library knew what it was doing and could some how optimize for what I am trying to do exactly.
I would like to see more people try and teach the values of understand what your system can actually do and not allow the inner workings to behiden by unneeded abstraction.
Re:In other news, water found to be wet, fire hot. (Score:2, Interesting)
i've always been the type of person who has to understand how something does what it does, even if i'm not capable of fully understanding, i still like to ask...so it really gets me when i meet or see people who aren't the least bit interested in discussing how something might work. it seems that if you show any interest in something like that kids tend to want to say "who cares" or "stop being such a geek".
maybe i would feel different about kids curiosity towards tech if i had more exposure to them. but alas, i've probably just lost perspecitve.
dude.
Re:In other news, water found to be wet, fire hot. (Score:3, Interesting)
And yes, abstractions will hide knowledge, keeping people from needing to learn what's in the box. But a lot of boxes in computer science are still troublesome enough that there is still be a need for the deeper understanding.
The key to survival is to know when a particular box can be ignored. For example, I've stopped worrying about drive controllers, and now trust someone else to determine that SATA is "faster" than IDE. Since I've recognized that I've become a generic consumer of drives, I no longer have to keep current on the technology, how commands are transmitted, cylinders, heads, encodings, etc. And it's a good thing: the field is now so broad and so deep that keeping up across the board is too tough. I still retain my old working knowledge of drives: magnetic coated platters are spun fast, heads go back and forth, etc., but unless I have a reason to dive into a particular technology, it's adequate for me just to know the basics. I can mostly ignore drives and focus instead on my specialty.
Re:real tuff questions (Score:3, Interesting)
What was all that about cats???
Albert Einstein [wikiquote.org] when asked to describe radio, replied: "You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."
In recent years no cat has become slang for wireless communication networks.
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:In other news, water found to be wet, fire hot. (Score:3, Interesting)
I have no sympathy for the tech geniuses of the past who can't use the ever simplifying crop of current technology. They are, in fact, not geniuses at all, but glorified car mechanics who have oodles of information on procedures to perform, but no true understanding of technology in the broadest sense.
I am not a kid, nor am I in my 60's, but I'll never be that stupid or clueless about anything. I may not know all the cool shit like the latest ring tones, but I sure as hell know more about cell phones then a 20 year old kidiot, and I will always keep that advantage. When I am 60, you can bet I won't be stymied in the LEAST by the latest OS, gadget, whatever.
Those of us who are in between being true old school and the new kids on the block have the greatest advantage, because we aren't following memorized procedures, nor are we using whatever the latest web fad is, but we understand it all. The old guys are from a generation where technology was marble tower knowledge. The kids just have it it handed to them with easy interfaces. We are the ones who got our hands on a computer at 13 and learned to program. The old foggies never had that because they couldn't buy one, the kids simply have no desire because they are brain dead.
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:2, Interesting)
What kind of digital system is the one you don't understand. IT's all registers and interruptors, buffer's cache's..zeroes and ones orquestrated in different fashion...sort of lame fashion compared with more sophisticated data processing like molecular bonding dna sequencing...emergent system's !!now we are talking..not this crude boards with geometrical nano-scaled circuit-grids.
A computer, by definition, is decomposed in a very structured and sequential fashion. Come to think of it computers, from ENIAC to DeepBlue, share the same digital technolgy. The are just adding machines.
Young bloods with the right education..physics, logic deisgn,numerical analysis and authomata theory should be able to describe and understand with great leisure any digital device in existence.
Accessibility (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm a 16-year-old highschooler in Australia, and - not to mean any offence - am annoyed by people who think messing abount on their xboxen is l33t. I agree with the original poster who said that less people are understanding how things work, but for me, the problem seems to be accessing all that information. I mean - I'd love to be able to understand each part of a (vintage) computer, write in assebmly, and put two and two together to make a valve radio, but it feels like it's an 'oral tradition' that is only accessible if you know the right people...
elynnia
Re:They were never any golden old days (Score:3, Interesting)
Those instances were a speed bump in the grand scheme of things, but they demonstrated just how much people depend on society to be a smooth running machine to do every day tasks like using the washroom, and having clean drinking water. The events in New Orleans put a bit of an exclamation point on the example, since it wiped out and/or strained the first responders to the disaster. Now imagine a tsunami on the west coast? Do you think Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, San Fran, and LA would all be able to be hit, and there'd be enough international [anything] experts to keep society functioning west of the Rockies?
We'll know more in a few weeks I'm sure, but if Rita had hit Houston directly, would there still be a cleanup team in New Orleans?
There will probably always be at least some part of North America unaffected by a widespread disaster, at least unaffected enough to go on as normal, but once police, doctors, and the power/food/water supply is disrupted in a widespread area... well you saw what happened in New Orleans.
We can't live without electricity. LIVE, not "get online". It's not a luxury anymore here. If you don't have power you don't have a fridge. You don't have water. You don't have a stove probably, to make drinking water. You don't have any way to pump gas at a filling station to get the heck out of Dodge. [No traffic lights too.] And if it's winter, some people don't even have heat, [or A/C in summer]. You don't have a bank machine to get cash anyway, and you don't have any on hand because you used your credit card or debit card all of the time. Stores can't sell anything quickly because they don't have cash registers. And if its snowing, the snow plows have trouble starting because they can't be plugged in to warm up. I hope your manual release on your garage door works too, because otherwise your car is trapped anyway.
Do you see what I mean now, if there's a prolonged power outage even in a city of 2 million, you can multiply those woes listed there by 2 million or so, and add in sick people in hospitals and old folks homes who might need electricity to breath.
We're losing touch with how to do the most basic survival tasks like making clean drinking water, or finding food, because someone else does it for us and we pay them. In a day when money means nothing, or there are no supplies, we'll regret that.
Re:History Lesson (Score:4, Interesting)
Prototyping is fantastic. But sometimes people just never bother to finish a job. TCP/IP seems to be one example. How many systems have ported original TCP/IP stacks? Why is it that I see the same unimplemented methods in stack after stack? Someone had enough wit to realize they'd be handy, but the guts of a TCP/IP stack are no trivial matter. And the protocol went out and became ubiquitous long before it was complete. And now, bits of it never will be.
You can damn OSI for being slow off the mark, and that's typical of standards bodies. But for all you say about TCP/IP, I've also written an OSI prototype over TCP/IP as a proof of concept and a goodly portion of the services can be easily delivered (the parts that map well together). And the OSI semantics are probably more intelligible than the TCP/IP ones. (That's an opinion, YMMV).
The OSI model, on the other hand, is a perfectly good *model* for understanding the role of a tiered networking stack. Why is this so useful? Sure people abuse it in the real world and many apps span several layers of the stack, etc. But the conceptual idea of encapsulation of function and also the conceptual ideas of what the layer's functions should be is a good start. This lets you look at real world divergences and then realize where they might be good, bad and what the tradeoffs might be. If you never had the reference model, you'd have a harder time quantifying these differences between real world implementations and understanding why they might be good or bad.
I ran across one instance of this not long ago where someone had taken a shortcut in a networking stack and not exposed some lower level service primitives. Sure, as long as all you wanted to do was the basic subset of tasks as imagined by their developers using their higher layer interfaces, you were okay. But if you wanted to do something a bit different, you didn't have access to some key lower level primitives. This is a case where the developers didn't think beyond their own application and they didn't obviously have much of a concept of a tiered set of functions. And lo and behold, a less useful result.
OSI isn't the holy grail, but it is an instructive learning tool. All standards are produced in some ivory tower and where the rubber meets the road things are different. Yet at the same time, those standards and those theoretical models have great value, especially as individual implementations come and go (TCP/IP has got a lot of traction and has had a long life with no end in sight, but the same cannot be said of many other technologies and even TCP/IP may one day see the a twilight of its days).
To blindly say the OSI model must be killed because TCP/IP got out there and did some things is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Re:Critical technologies are? (Score:3, Interesting)
These are the traditional British/American institutions on which all of modern western civilization is based. Starting in Prussia in about 1850 a reaction against these institutions developed. Since then they have been attacked and seriously undermined by adherents to those reactionary views. Unfortunately, those views seem to dominate the public perception and are simultaniously presented as "traditional" and as "progressive".
It may be instructive to consider some of the relevent literature. Good starting points would be Mises's Socialism [econlib.org] and Hayek's Constitution of Liberty. Mises's latter book Human Action [mises.org] and Hayek's follow up to Constitution, Law, Legislation, and Liberty are also relevent, but between Socialism and Constitution, the vast majority of the relevent works will have been cited.
Re:Critical technologies are? (Score:3, Interesting)
There is reasonable cause for concern reguarding America's future because of recent events. Over the past 60 years, #s 2, 3, 4, and 6 have been seriously undermined. #s 5 and 9 are now practically non-existant. #7 is presently under attack. The reactionaries are demonstrably winning. Given sufficient economic and legal knowledge, a strong case could be made that these developments are the cause of a majority of the problems facing America today.