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.""
Grumpy Old Man (Score:5, Funny)
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:Grumpy Old Man (Score:4, Interesting)
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:Grumpy Old Man (Score:3, Insightful)
So many of the younger generation really doesn't understand the TCP/IP s
History Lesson (Score:5, Informative)
In order to appreciate why this model deserves to die, you have to look into its history. OSI was a large ISO attempt at creating a standard networking system which would have been a direct competitor to TCP/IP. They spent a lot of time writing specifications and engineering things, and not time actually building anything. So while TCP/IP was evolving, OSI was being overengineered.
OSI was intended to be the perfect networking system. With it you could transport Voice via virtual circuits (similar to the cell allocation in ATM), data (via packetswitching), etc. with QOS enforced end-to-end. OSI, had it been implimented would have meant the complete convergence of the PSTN and Internet backbones. Consequently they spent far too much time hashing and rehashing problems and not nearly enough time actually prototyping anything. Eventually everyone walked away from the endevour and conceded that TCP/IP had in fact become the standards through altenate standards bodies and that nobody was going to move from TCP/IP to OSI. OSI therefore serves as a serious history lesson on what *not* to do in both standards and software design and development.
However, someone came up with the not-so-great idea that the basic 7-layer model if stripped down made a good way to teach TCP/IP. Good instructors teach it as "well, a bunch of telecom companies thought that networks were supposed to work this way" but far too many try to teach that TCP/IP follow that model which they don't. A few differences:
1) TCP/IP is entirely packet-switched. OSI was designed to allow packet-switched and circuit-suitched connections travel over the same system (an idea that survives in ATM today, however).
2) TCP/IP is designed around a set of very conceptually simple issues that need to be solved, with network tasks being implimented flexibly in different layers. OSI tries to break down network tasks hierarchically and assign every task to a single layer.
3) OSI was designed to be all things to all systems, while TCP/IP was designed to provide "simple" packet-switching services to get information from one system to another.
Hope this helps.
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:Grumpy Old Man (Score:3, Funny)
It's "ring and tip" , young'un :)
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:5, Informative)
I used to know all the memory locations in the Atari 800 and how to use them to do all sorts of things. I knew 6502 assembly and a slew of other languages for the Atari. It was a good platform at the time, but I wouldn't want to go back to the hardware or even the software of yesteryear.
I don't know as much about any of the platforms I use now. However, I now have a ton of other tools available that make what I'm doing easier. I'll take a modern Unix system over an Atari 800 any day of the week. I believe I can emulate the Atari under Unix, as a testament to the progress we've made. I can also appreciate that I don't have to solve as many problems as before, because others have already done it and made their programs available.
I've been using computers for 25 years now. I think I count as a geezer. I don't think my kids will lack any of the opportunities I had. In fact, I think they'll be better off because I can give them my old hardware running Unix. They won't have to mess around with a bunch of proprietary systems before they can discover the One True Way. =)
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.
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:5, Informative)
It's actually a quote from Issac Newton...
now if you know anything about the real Issac Newton this quote seems remarkably out of character, the rest of his career he was an insufferable arrogant bastard (probably made even worse by being right a lot of the time) but he was never one to thank others for their contributions to his work... just look at calculus [wikipedia.org]...
but if Newton disliked Leibniz he hated Robert Hooke [wikipedia.org] (you remember hooke's law for springs?) with a passion. (Hooke had demonstrated flaws in newtons theory of light)... hooke also had ideas about and inverse square law for gravity nearly 10 yrs before newton, but lacked the maths to prove it.
Hooke was also very very short, so newtons reference to standing on the shoulder's of giants was not some magnanimous gesture on his part, but rather an act of sarcastic bile directed at hooke.
after hookes death, when newton was president of the royal society, newton systematically removed as much of hookes work as he could from the records, which is why now most people can only remember the thing about springs if he's lucky.
Its a great shame really, because by all accounts Hooke was the much more interesting person.
his book micrographia was the first "best seller" the coffe table book of its day, everyone had to have one, the first time the microscopic world was made available to the masses.
He was very fond of attractive young women, having scandalous affairs and 3 in bed sex romps with his house keepers until late in his life.
he made a small fortune after the fire of london, being good mates with wren, as he was london surveyor. Basically he was the one that went round to assess peoples compensation claims regarding the amount of land they lost, and obviously the more money you gave the surveyor the more likely he was to agree with your definitions of your land boundry.
oh yeah did i mention he and wren designed the royal observatory at greenwich?
ultimately hooke was the cool scientist a lot of us would like to be, and newton was the insufferable wanker a lot of us wind up being...
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:4, Informative)
I agree with your main point
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:3, Funny)
He wasn't reading. He was just looking at the pictures then.
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:Grumpy Old Man (Score:5, Funny)
And how many hardware engineers does it take to change a light bulb?
We'll fix it in software.
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: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 ta
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:3, Interesting)
A classic example of this shows up in Java alot, wher
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:3, Funny)
And when we didn't, we made do with A!
Re:Grumpy Old Man (Score:5, Funny)
We had no zeros at all and had to use twigs for ones!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, the above quote... (Score:5, Funny)
Dana Carvey, Grumpy Old Man
Sounds more like my wife...and you have no idea how much trouble I'm in for saying that (not to mention how depressing it is to discover that your wife is a grumpy old man)
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: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
Re:They were never any golden old days (Score:3, Funny)
The computer systems from the mid 1990s will have retired long before the High Priests who know how to maintain them (re: paper MCSE's and Bachelor-degree holding *nix geeks) are gone.
Old retired COBOL guys got a little "bounce" during all the panic over Y2K, but that "crisis" merely provoked a lot of companies to realize the need to move on from those old, cobweb-covered "big iron" mai
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.
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...
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.
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: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.
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
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: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 m
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.
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: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.
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 d
The more things change... (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmm... how is that any different from today?
Tim
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 d
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
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...
The knowledge will be passed along. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Re:Obligatory Simpson Quote... (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re:Old people are just as stupid. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Old people are just as stupid. (Score:5, Informative)
No, statistically, half of the people you meet are below the median, not the average.
Re:Old people are just as stupid. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Old people are just as stupid. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Old people are just as stupid. (Score:4, Informative)
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...
Re:Stupidity? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Old people are just as stupid. (Score:3, Interesting)
I disagree. Even if you select for distinct people within the generation, you DO see an increased number of people who don't understand.
Take for example a small group - technical support folks. Since I started doing technical support, things have changed. Back when I first
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 s
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?
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
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...
Re:But what's truly more complex? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:But what's truly more complex? (Score:3, Insightful)
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:That's how it's supposed to work (Score:5, Funny)
Depends... are the sticks USB-enabled?
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.
real tuff questions (Score:5, Funny)
Steam Locomotion -- easy: burn something to heat water resultant expansion pushes piston/turbine to make motion
Similar to above except uses small amount of gas which is ingited with a spark, or diesel fuel which is ignited through pressure and the resultant locomotion is powered through the driveshaft to turn the wheels. All the accessories are run off of a belt system from the driveshaft: water pump to keep the motor cool, alternator to keep the battery charged and the sparkplugs popping...
Electricity -- similar to above except instead of turning a wheel or drive shaft a magnet is spun inside a coil of wires and the electricity is produced and transmitted across a grid of wires and transformers to your home. Alternately, running water, nuclear fusion and wind can do this too.
Telephone: it's basically like pulling the tail of a cat and at the other end the cat screams.
over the air broadcast system -- same as above, but without the cat.
Wheel of Fortune -- Vanna White is the oracle of the goddess Fortuna and the wheel intereprets your fate.
any other smart questions whippersnapper?
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.
Other way around actually (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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:Screw new technology... (Score:5, Funny)
1. User drops load into toilet
2. User operates flush lever
3. Water gizmos and channels create various bits of suction
4. Shit clogs stupid low-flow toilet, lacking sufficient water to lubricate and push/pull it through
5. User applies plunger, which fails to seal over odd-shaped low-flow orifice
6. Unsealed plunger in angry user's hand, while not pulling shit back up, does manage to push shit through the toilet, resulting in complete flush.
Optionally,
7. Angry user in fit of rage operates flush lever again before step 6 is completed, resulting in shit raining down in basement onto clean laundry
That's a sufficiently detailed technical explanation of the flush cycle. Tell me again why residential toilets can't go "WHOOOSH!!!!!" like commercial toilets?
It's not just the users who don't know. (Score:4, Informative)
Why do we need to know how things work in the US?! (Score:4, Insightful)
I sometimes envy the young. (Score:5, Funny)
One such time was at work, probably around 1995 or 1996. In order to increase the productivity at our firm we installed several Internet-enabled workstations for various managers, secretaries and workers.
After a while we noticed some rather work-unrelated web sites showing up as being accessed from a particular workstation, which happened to be in the office of one of the young guys in finance. They were rather peculiar fetish sites. In any case, some of us in IT thought that we should alert this worker's higher-up to what was happening.
It was decided that several of us would discuss the matter with him. So we headed up to his office, and knocked on his door, and opened it. Much to our surprise, he was there with a massive boner, ejaculate all over. He must have been in the middle of it when we knocked, because he was quickly trying to clean the mess off of the keyboard and his pants.
It didn't bother me that he was whacking his cock in the office, or that he got his semen on the computer's keyboard. What bothered me was that he was able to get an erection, and I wasn't. So even though I knew far more about technology than he did, he was able to get a boner and I couldn't. I was trumped.
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.
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.
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.
Social issue not a tech issue (Score:5, Insightful)
System performance tuning (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:System performance tuning (Score:3, Interesting)
Down with ageism. (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah? Well in myyyyy day.... (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah? Well, in my day, on the way to my punchcard programming job, I'd have to walk to work in 6 feet of snow, in my bare feet, only stopping to warm them in fresh cow-pats along the way!
Re:Yeah? Well in myyyyy day.... (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Troll rate me or whatever (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
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...
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.