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Kids, Computers And Authority
Spasemunki writes: "This link showed up on Ars Technica the other day. It's an article on Brill's Content on the sociological impact of a society where the younger generation has all the technical know-how, and parents are left to seek the advice of their kids on how to keep things running. It discusses patterns in computer use and knowledge, and the rising economic and social power of the young and computer saavy. Includes some words from Shawn Fanning of Napster fame."
In the article, it was pointed out that many people don't even have the rudimentary knowledge of whom to call if they are having a problem with their computer.
:P )
I was thinking about something like this the other day. At all ages and levels, people learn by observing and emulating the actions of others. This sort of learning is probably especially important during the early stages of learning, when people either don't know what questions to ask, or are afraid of appearing foolish by asking a really basic question.
The difficulty is that because computers have not been arround for very long, we don't have many good models to emulate. Think about a car. When you were a kid, you rode along with a parent (or whomever) and watched what they did. You got to see how to steer and how to get gas, and what to do if you had a flat tire. So by the time you started to drive, you probably had a reasonable level of functional knowledge on how to operate and maintain an automobile. Now you can take that dirt-basic stuff and ask good questions or take shop classes and extend you knowledge as far as you want.
Or take the handgun. I would bet that everyone in America has some functional knowledge of how to fire and reload a pistol. We've seen enough movies to know how to hold a gun (barrel facing away), and how to pull a trigger, and maybe even that the little lever on the side lets you change clips (or you flip out the cylinder to add more bullets).
So perhaps things will become better when enough years have gone by that we have adults competent enough to operate computers and show their kids how, and we have movies that offer accurate portrayals of how computers are actually used (no more cracking alien computer systems with Mac laptops
Of course, VCR's are simpler, and have probably had consumer penetration longer, but my mom still doesn't know how to progam it.
IMHO, CS adapts particularly well to a distance learning format. My spouse is currently enrolled in a CS program conducted over the Internet by an accredited university. Quitting *work* is not necessary. However, I have observed that the Internet course takes just as much time commitment as a traditional lecture course. The loss of *free time* has been a necessary trade-off for us.
They're game "pads" now. That's really just 4 more buttons in a cross shape so I guess it *is* all buttons now. *sigh*
Yeah. Driving and flying games have to be dumbed down to be playable on a game pad. Sigh.
Well, I'm not sure what you mean by 'cocky', but I'm mainly referring to the substitution of 0's for o's and the "I'm your master" connotation. Both of these things seem pretty common in the script kiddie community.
That doesn't mean you can't have an obscure handle of some sort, but I can see why someone might pick up a certain 'vibe' just by looking at your name.
Of course, feel free to ignore me. I'm just one person. If it works for you, you may as well keep it.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Old fart #1: "You kids have it easy! In my day, we had to toggle all our programs into the computer with switches. In binary. Hex, schmex!"
Old fart #2: "You had switches? We only had one switch, and it was in the machine room, five miles away from the terminal we had to use. We had to walk five miles uphill, both ways, to enter a single bit of our program. And we liked it that way!"
Old fart #3: "Ha! In my day, we didn't have these fancy switches. All we had was ones and zeros, and we had to bang two rocks together to get the ones!"
Old fart #4: "Ones? You had ones?!"
-----
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
"The Source will be with you... Always."
Right now the hippie/baby-boomer crowd are driving around in SUV's, drinking lattes, and buying only "organic" foods. And just think who they were thirty years ago.
Makes you sort of wonder who we will grow up to be in a few decades. I do believe there is a paradoxical reduction in socialization with use of computers/the internet. One the one hand you have the ability to communicate with many many more people, and much more easily. But on the other hand, you never really "know" these as well as you can a real physical human. I'm talking about the psychological implication of not being able to associate a face, a body, a human, with a person you are communicating with. Just as TV changed the "situational geography" I'm sure the use of computers and the net is remapping our psychological communication patterns.
My personal pet theory is that as we increase the ways in which people can communicate, the communications become less meaningful. It's almost as if one is suffocating from too *much* oxygen. If we are so completely barraged by communications, what is our ability to actually maintain meaningful state accross those communications. Our communication and social abilities are only finite. We are designed to be familiar with communicating with perhaps a clan-sized population. All of a sudden the potential population with which we can develop relationships mushrooms to millions and billions. Can *all* of those relationships maintain their traditional weight and meaning? Or will handles and personas flash by without any persistent association?
The extreme of this little hypothesis has us in some sterile world in which our real communications are limited to being a person-behind-the-counter for each other. When I go to the grocery store I interact briefly with CashierPerson. When I go to the bank I interact briefly with TellerPerson. But these are all meaningless interactions. I might as well be talking to a robot. Or requesting information from a majordomo or listserv. As the industrial revolution commoditized our physical bodies, it is scary to think that the telecommunications revolution might commoditize our minds and spirits.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Gosh, this is just like things were back in the 80's. I remember when I was about 11 or so (gasp, in 1981) and hearing about a 16 year old who had designed a VisiCalc type spreadsheet and made pots of money. And about two years later I was running the "computer system" at my high school (OK, two Apple ][ clones) with programs that tracked attendance and developed class schedules. It wasn't a Silicon Valley fortune, but it kept me in the office and out of gym class.
...".
But I digress. Even back then, there was all kinds of talk about Video Space Age Whiz Kids, movies like War Games were coming out, and every average adult over 35 shook their head and said "gawsh, these crazy kids are gonna run the world, I have to ask em how to program my VCR and
The point is, most people will look at a new technology and not try to understand how it works, they'll just use it the way they're told to. We take something like a PC and use it for doing spreadsheets, because even though the machine is capable of far more, our thinking has become limited to things we use every day. Kids don't usually yet have those mental barriers in place, so they're not afraid to take it apart and mess with it, and they don't have the mentality that things can only be used a certain way, so they come up with more creative uses for what the technology can do.
The only real difference is that today the technology is more pervasive than it was then, more people have PCs so when a teenager comes up with something like Napster it gets on the front page instead of being featured in a condescending human-interest article.
And that's generally a Good Thing. But let's not let it go to our heads: the cleverest ideas have always come from people who think outside the box, and it's always going to be easier for young people to do that.
To make a short story longer...
When I was in sixth grade, my school got its first computer, as Apple ][ (Pac Bell, black case). I was really fascinated by it. The library had one book about the computer, which was hand written, about very simple programming in BASIC. The last several pages covered the advanced topic of FOR loops, but only briefly. Whoever wrote the thing obviously stopped abruptly, but it was a start. The librarian said they didn't have any other books, and of course she was the only person at among the staff that "knew about the computer", which consisted of how to boot the computer and run the Oregon Trial game.
It didn't take long to go through the hand written book. One other guy, Will, also was really interested in the computer and read it all. There was a guy named Adam who was an expert and seemed to know everything about the machine. It turned out he had one at home. He was in 8th grade, and usually didn't want to help me and Will much. To me and Will, Adam didn't just have power and authority, he was a god, but nobody else, neither kids nor adults cared much about him.
One day I got to talk with Adam (who was working on a simple text-adventure to model an AD&D adventure module), and I asked him how he learned all this stuff that wasn't in the hand written book. He told me about the applesoft basic manual that came with his computer. He said the library had the book in the back room. The librarian lied to me... they did have another book, but they considered it part of the expensive computer equipment and not something they could check out or even let anyone read in the library. After all, we were just kids! The environment wasn't anything like what's described in the Brill's Content article.
That book was the first thing I ever stole in my life!
I started going to bed earlier, and I had a small light in my room. I'd spend all night reading the manual, and writing basic programs on paper. Time with the computer was very limited, and they had a strong policy to be fair to everyone, which meant giving everyone equal time slices to play Oregon Trial. I rarely had time to type more than a couple dozen lines in a session, and it was usually hard to remember what the code was supposed to be about. To make matters worse, Will got to the DOS (Apple DOS 3.3, long before the PC computer) manual, so access to the disk would have to wait for another couple years. Some parts of the applesoft manual, particularily the GOSUB, were "try this... now you see what it does". I couldn't possibly bring the stolen book back to the school and use it in front of the computer, so it took a very long time to really learn most of the material.
Still, it was great fun, to be able to create programs. I had been interested in electronics... I had a bunch of the kits from radio shack, with the scrings for connecting the wires. Electronic projects were frustrating, because I didn't have the parts and I didn't ever have money to buy them. With the computer, all I needed was my 5 1/4 inch floppy disk, and lingering around trying to get some time on the school's only computer.
The next year Will and I were the experts about the computer, but we really didn't end up being in a position of any authority, because for the most part nobody really needed to know anything, and "knowing how to use the computer" involved being able to boot up, type CATALOG, and RUN a basic program... almost always Oregon Trial.
In 8th grade, the school district was re-zoned, and I ended up at a much larger school, which had about 8 computers instead of one. I could almost always get time on a machine. They also had the newer Apple ][e, and they had lots of copies of the manuals, including the DOS manual the Will grabbed a couple years earlier. The larger school also had a "activity bus", intended for sports, so I could stay after school for nearly two hours and get some real time on the computer. With all the manuals, lots of time on the computer, and not having the hide the stolen property, I started really getting pretty good at writing code. Will was zoned to a different school, so I was certainly the only guru, but it really didn't matter. Only a couple other students were really interested in the computers, and they were always nervous about being a nerd. I was already there, and while it sucked, I more or less learned to brush off insults and hostility from my classmates. Back then, it was seriously uncool to be interested in computers.
Late in the 8th grade year, there was a science fair, and because computers were going to be the "next big thing", they had a computer science category. The school brought in some actual programmers, because it was well known that the one teacher who had the one and only (lame) computer class knew far less than I did, and was probably less knowledgable than some of the others as well. My little program was a tiny stats program, as I recall for track teams, simple stats for each runner per event. It loaded and saved data to the disk, had menus, data entry screens, on-screen data table display and some simple reports that went to the printer. I won the contest, and somewhere in the evening my folks talked with the programmers and they convinced my parents to buy me a computer.
I spent a lot of time with the computer... a lot of time. I finally had all night sessions in front of a real computer. My parents were concerned that I spent too much time with it. I spent a lot of time playing games, but also a lot of time coding. Like most other kids at the time, I spent a lot of time copying programs. It wasn't until much later that my parents got the clue that I really was knowledgable about programming, for a long time all their thoughts revolved around how much time I was spending on the computer. Of course, they never needed and certainly didn't want to use the computer, so they never needed any advise and never even had an opportunity to see what I could do.
High school wasn't much more accepting of being a geek, but there were more of us, and there were a bunch of people who were indifferent, so it was much easier to avoid hostility. Like before, there was one teacher that knew about computers, but much less than I did. Over those years I learned a lot, and I wrote a really nice database program, with bits of 6502 asm code, which was mainly used to track a collection of copied disks.
One summer my folks arranged for a special class about interfacing hardware to the computer... and it was a great experience. The instructor really knew a lot about both software and hardware, and the other guys (no girls) in the class were guys just like me. One guy was a master as asm code, and I learned several tricks, a couple others really knew quite a bit about electronics. I think I was the only guy without a modem. Every day at lunch they'd all talk about various BBSs. I got a printed list of phone numbers from one of them. The hardware portion of the class was a bit over my head, and it slowly sank in over last two years of high school. Like me, they were certainly gurus at versious technical subjects, but these relationships or authority that teen gurus experience today just didn't happen, mostly because adults generally didn't need to use computers and so they didn't need help.
After that summer, I had to get a modem. My folks were terrified that I'd break into banks, and they'd read some lame articles about "profiles" of hackers (I wonder it Katz it reading). It was nearly a year until I finally got a modem. A friend of mine got a 1200 baud modem, so he loaned me his old 300 baud.
Getting onto BBSs was great, and I spent lots and lots of time on-line, reading and posting in boards, and exchanging email. I met lots of people, all in the local area. The computer teacher at my school was intersted in these user groups, and together with a couple other students, we ended up going to lots of user group meetings. It all seemed very natural, and I didn't even realize I was staying out until 11pm or midnight until my parents expressed their concerns. By that time I'd learned most of the things there were to know about applesoft basic, 6502 asm, and the internals of DOS 3.3. There were some other kids, but it was really cool meeting with other geeks. Some of those times were the first times I was a guru, AND someone was actually interested. I had learned quite a few tricks to defeat the floppy-based copy protection schemes, and there were always plenty of people who really, really wanted to hear tips and tricks they didn't already know. The position of authority, though, was only with other hard-core geeks... never in my family.
In my last year of high school (1988), the school got a bunch of macintosh computers. For reasons I don't recall, a number of teachers were using them for various things, and while I quickly learned about mac (resedit, et all), there was another student who knew a lot more, and he basically took over a sys-admin role for the one server they had in the building. That was probably the first time I saw this whole teen guru thing in real action. He really did command some real authority with teachers and admin types, because he more or less controlled the network (localtalk) and was the only one who knew how to fix most of the conmputer problems.
Well, I finally got out of high school, moved to college, away from my parents, and into, for the first time in my life, into an environment where is was "ok" to be myself (a true geek, I suppose). Things have only gotten better and better every year since then, and every year it seems that more and more people need the services of geeks like me, fortunately including employers.
Now I'm an authority on many subjects technical, sometimes because I really know something, other times because non-technical people don't know any better. I'm certainly not a teenager anymore (currently 30), and now even my parents have to use computers, which I fix for them.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Well, speaking from the front lines (I'm gonna be a senior in the fall, as much as I fight it.. ), I can say that you're half right. There are two basic kinds of computer-using kids. There's the average people, those that use it for writing papers, go online and look a pr0n^H^H^H^Heducational websites. They tend to think that WordArt is the best thing since sliced bread. They also tend to mix their {their,there,they're}s, since they're totally reliant on spellcheck. Some of these folks are script kiddies. Think they're all hot with winnuke and the like. That and anarchist's cookbook. You're right, these people have no motivation to "look under the hood".. the abstraction that GUI brings them makes it unneccisary. So they'll be okay, as long as nothing serious breaks (and if it does, just reset :)
Then there's the second kind. I am a member of this group. Usually been using computers for ages (been about 14 years now for me). Can remember specific doom deathmatches from 8, 9 years ago better than prom night (I know, I know, I'm sad.. nothing happened to make it worth remembering anyways). These young'uns definantly have the motivation to look under the hood. Why? performance, largly.. but also out of pure facination.
So, I know, this is long and mostly pointless, but hell. I'd say that you'll have less people under the hood. But those that are can do wonders. Hey, at least Windoze is weeding out the idiot amatuers for us :)
Thanks for reading.
Uhuh. It's patently obvious that she still has just as much to learn as a teen ever did. She has money, apparently, and thinks that's the end of the story. Hah! She hasn't wisdom, nor maturity, nor much understanding of life. It reminds me of that other obscenity: "He who has the most toys wins." Boy, is that guy ever in for a shock! :^)
:^)
It's quite possible they'll never realise that life returns satisfaction and contentment in direct proportion to the effort and struggle and suffering put in, not in response to the purchase of a few million dot com shares. It seems to me the entire US nation is under the impression that money makes happiness. Let 'em try. Have they never seen "Death Of A Salesman"? I suppose not. For most of them, it'll make boredom and ever increasing self indulgence, none of which will satisfy them for one minute. What a bunch of fools!
Try these instead:
"Today I've still done nothing of value", and "He who has the most toys is bored the longest." They're a lot closer to the truth, and might allow some of these twits to find a little happiness in life before they're lying on their oh-so-expensive deathbed.
"We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code." Dave Clark, IETF
[*] I think the transition from game play that required skill to mindless game play happened first with the nintendo NES. Before the NES, standard joysticks had the stick on the RIGHT side and the button on the LEFT side. Since most people are right handed, this seemed to imply that player movement and skill were of paramount importance in games. Since the NES, the button(s) have been switched to the RIGHT side, implying that slamming buttons has become more important... with "autofire" controllers representing the ultimate in game de-evolution. Though, "game shark" cheater carts and their ilk sink this even lower. The next generation of game systems will probably get rid of the stick completely. Oh wait, they already did. They're game "pads" now. That's really just 4 more buttons in a cross shape so I guess it *is* all buttons now. *sigh*
You need to be careful with this subject. Knowing how to use ICQ, IRC, and Napster has nothing to be do with being in charge or being more intelligent. Anyone who buys a home knows all about mortgages and escrow, which are things that people under 25 rarely know about. Neither of these things are so-called rocket science.
:)
Second, think about what "out of touch" means. Usually, it refers to being outside the prime target for corporate-driven pop culture. Just because someone doesn't give a hoot about electronica or modern static rock doesn't mean he or she is out of touch. Pop culture doesn't make sense as it is. In the mid 1990s everyone was wearing clothes from the late sixties, early seventies (originally worn by people who are 50-60 now). Then *swing* came back a few years later. What the hell? This was music that people's *grandparents* listened to during World War II. And you heard people saying "if you don't like Squirrel Nut Zippers then you're out of touch." Recently I heard a high school kid putting down an acoustic version of "Higher Ground" with the comment "Man, he's butchering the Chili Peppers." Yikes, that's a Stevie Wonder song from over 25 years ago.
People into Linux tend to be the same way with the "out of touch" silliness. Linus's dad could have been hacking UNIX in the seventies. Heck, ESR and RMS *were* hacking UNIX in the seventies. So people who insist on using more recent developments, like the Mac and Windows, are labeled as out of touch
Personally, I avoid ICQ at all costs because I don't need another intrusion. Getting constant email is bad enough.
What you're really talking about here is "hangout places". Malls and arcades were the place in my day. Now it's on the net. No real change here.
School. If you know how to browse, you know how to cheat on research reports. All of your friends do it, so you want to learn how.
Cliffs Notes anyone? Monarch notes? Encyclopaedias? The three forbidden reference sources for any school report. Again, nothing's really changed.
Peer Pressure. You don't want to be the only person in your circle of friends who doesn't know how to use computers. And you want to keep up with
the latest trends. Your friend emails you about some new site or program, you get it. If you want something to talk about the next day, you learn as
much as you can. You might try other similar programs and learn about them.
Peer pressure. Yah. That's a new one. One's tastes and knowledge of music or video games or sports got you judged as much as "PC skilz" does now. Still nothing new here.
Jobs. Don't kid yourself. Kids are smarter than they seem. They know a good job when they see one. Gee, I can sit in front of a computer screen for 8
hours a day and get paid four times what the mechanic does, or the gardener, or my parents!
Same thing not so long ago with digital "electronics" (I'm talking discrete logic stuff here, not true 'computers'.) And before that it was the transistor. And before that the vacuum tube. Each new gen made the former look less skilled. Once again, nothing new here.
Dumb movies. Hackers probably inspired more than a few wanna-be's to learn about computers. Of course, if they got far enough in their studies, they
probably found out that what's real is more exciting than the movies.
War games anyone? Or dumber... Wierd Science? Short Circuit? Bond Movies? Mission Impossible? Star Trek (TOS)? There's no shortage of hokey tech movies/TV in the past. Still no big difference.
Overall nothing has really changed. Kids seem smarted today because they use tech that didn't exist in the past. Kids grow up to make more money today because of inflation. Hey a 2 Bedroom home in the L.A. sold for $22,000. Today, the same home costs $180,000. A new (and big, mind you) car in 1950 for under $2000? Oh yeah. As we all know, the biggest increases in salary come when you *change* jobs and *not* through merit raises and promotions. So yeah, the kid's new job pays more than mom or dad's job of 20 years. Things are more tha same than ever, IMHO.
I've owned more different kinds of computers than most people know exist, starting with a C= 16 when I was, oh, eight or so, then an Apple ][, then an Amiga 500, and oh boy did my development begin then.
My mom's a graphic artist, and when she was finally forced to get a Macintosh IIci to do her work on (Because everyone was going to digital pre-press and typesetting) I was definitely the one to tell her how to use it, the one who was getting on the 'net and finding out all the cute little key combinations (Like Command-Option-P-R) that you needed to know to keep the damn thing operating.
Amusingly, she still uses that machine to this day... but that's not what this post is about. This is about her being afraid of the computer, afraid of the internet, much like some pygmy in the rainforest afraid your camera is going to steal his soul. She won't even let me buy her an internet connection because she claims it's going to take all her time.
What, she's going to have to miss All My Children?
Don't get me wrong, I love my mom, but I have the same issue with her as just about everyone else in the previous generation, which seems to be a pattern that goes back at least as far into history as textiles (First recorded textile production is in 3,000 BC by the way... Can you tell I'm a geek?) I understand my dad okay, but then he's been learning how to use computers. My mom, on the other hand, I just don't get. The computer is a tool, how can it be malicious?
Now, Microsoft may be Malicious :) And, of course, Apple's just lame, but considering how much trouble my mom has with the mac, I shudder to think of what difficulty she'd have had with Windows 3.1 (which was what windows was when she got her mac.) Also, Mac hardware is/was pretty simple; Almost all NuBus cards self-configure down to the driver level, everything's SCSI so it follows some basic rules, though my mom doesn't really get that stuff, either. Also, back in the day the Mac could detect what kind of monitor you had plugged in, so that was one less problem to worry about. Not to mention the workstation-style way the mouse chained through the keyboard...
In any case, my mother became dependent on me to make her able to earn the money which put food on the table. If you don't think that upset the balance of power dramatically, you've got another think coming. It was the beginning of the end for any control over me, and I ended up moving out when I was fifteen, getting a job, and moving on with my life. She ended up harassing a neighbor to help her with the mac.
At least she finally learned how to program the VCR.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Heck, back in the early 1980s you'd see kids pictured on the front of magazines for writing computer games and making boatloads of money (Mark Turmell, John Harris, Greg Christensen, etc). And remember whiz kids like Jobs, Wozniak, Gates, Dell, and Torvalds? These days, you see kids on the cover of Wired for starting nebulous web-based businesses. You don't see teenagers making a fortune in games any more, because big business has moved into that field. Similarly, big business has moved heavily on the web.
BTW, there are interviews with some of those game-geeks of yesteryear over here. Ah, memories...
I'm 23 and my experience pretty much mirrors the others here, I got ahead of the game a little with that modem when I could get access to machines that would compile C, but, anyhow :). Your arguements are exactly why I didn't bother with a CS degree (bah, they still learn COBOL, YUCK) and I went for an electrical engineering degree - because I wanted to know more about the guts, I wanted to know how the IC's worked and what they were made of, I wanted to know how the power supply worked - and I just didn't want to know how to follow a schematic, I wanted to understand the basic principles involved.
I learned all that and a lot more, and the advanced math has actually proven to be a good investment more than once! Plus, having a professional certification (a few years off still) is another good career move that you just can't get any other way. Having all those computer skills got me A's in my programming and digital design classes, enough to balance out the sometimes horrible marks in advanced calculus :).
A good example was my embedded micro design class. The prof tossed us some RAM, ROM, a 8088XL CPU, some UARTS, a DAC and ADC, a book of technical specs, wire wrap tool (!!) and a prototype board. We did the rest - and I learned a lot from that course. To say nothing of the exposure to data structures (something I never would have looked at) and other aspects of analog design and power systems.
CS, No. Engineering, hell yes! We get the "learn by doing thing", at least in Canada :). So think about post-high-school studies, and from the sounds of it, think EE or Computer Engineering!
..don't panic
>At 37, I'm starting to feel old while reading Slashdot. I'm a very young "baby boomer", but still a "baby boomer". My Dad (not my
;-)
>grandfather) was a WW2 veteran. My Grandfather was a WW1 veteran! Anyway, there seems to be concern here, that as you
>grow older and get to the advanced age of 35, your skills and knowledge will become marginalized by the next generation of
>techies who are 10 years younger.
Dude, I'm 42, & when I got my Bachelor's degree my college only offered 3 computer classes -- BASIC (which I didn't bother with because I taught myself about it out of a mincomputer manual, & ran thru the excercises on the mainframe), Fortran (which I took, but never used), & assembler (which I decided I woudl never need). otherwise, your story is the same as mine.
Having gone thru the routine, I can tell you why older folks tend to shun away from new experiences:
1) Lack of time. I doubt I can recall the number of occasions that I started on a computer problem, looked up after what I thought was a little more than an hour & found that it was after midnight. And I had to be at work at 8:00am the next morning. Or started on a project on a Saturday afternoon, only be interrupted every so often with a question from my wife (e.g., ``I saw this on t.v." or ``When do you want dinner?"). Or have to put off a computer project because the yard needed attention. And if I had kids, the distractions would be even worse . . .
I have a friend a little older than me who is currently unemployed. He is using his unemployment to teach himself how to create web pages -- & using his years of experience as a graphic artist to give him an edge. Damn, I envy the fact he has the time to immerse himself!
2) Worries. Most people 15-30 don't think much beyond the next paycheck. If a job sucks, just leave it & you'll find another one in a couple of weeks.
Unfortunately, by the time you reach 35-45, you have gotten a ways up the greased pole of success. You just can't drop everything to hare after something because it looks interesting. You have to prioritize your interests, be flexible to deal with emergencies, & then when it seems to be a quiet moment you can tackle the problem.
3) Bad habits. Face it, if someone's means for solving technical problems is to ask someone else the answer, she/he is not going to change at 35+. I, for one, have always read the instructions, played with the software to see how I could break it, & always take the time to watch over the shoulder how someone solves problems. (This very practice taught me a new Unix command last week!) Too many people leave high school with a fear of RTFMing, & spend the rest of their lives finding workarounds for this.
And a last note here: Anybody who tells you all of the reasons why they can't accomplish something (especially if she or he numbers those reasons) is probably just lazy, & doesn't want to admit the fact. My stepmother -- for example -- spent my teenage years complaining that she never had any time to herself. But she never said what she would do with this time if she had any. It really got old. Thank God no one in my life does the same thing.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
Scene: Teen girl is sitting, writing into her diary.
"Dear Diary. Today I realized I'm worth more than my parents."
I hated the fact that my parents, friends, and family all had free access to my skills. As a teen I lived in a small town where everyone knows everyone so making any money under this system was practically impossible. To make money I had to offer my services to a company in a whole other country which I worked for over the Internet. Then my parents just thought I was insane and wondered why I kept getting checks when all I ever did was sit at the computer and play. LOL and kept urging me to go find a real job like working at Taco Bell.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Plus older people have a much stronger tendency to refuse any kind of change or improvement which the onslaught of computers have produced.
Possible? You betcha!
> I think it is unfortunate but I don't believe that the younger generation
> has much incentive to look under the hood. With the lack of interest in Computer
> Science that colleges are seeing as of late, I can imagine that the population
> that understands how things work, how to make them work, and how to fix them
> when they are broken is getting smaller and smaller.
I don't really see it that way. You're right that it appears that fewer people are interested in CS degrees lately, but there are really at least 2 good reasons for this.
To begin with, computers are being so thoroughly integrated into all disciplines in college and high school and elementary school that there's less need to take any computer courses at all in order to be able to understand them fairly well and use them proficiently. In college, for example, pretty much all students have to use computers in order to do their papers for any given class, and while that doesn't require more than basic knowledge of how to use a word processing program, it gets people to use computers from day 1 even if they've never before touched them. E-mail is just as pervasive and, on campus, usually requires a bit more know-how than just starting Word: my first experience with computers was my first week at college, when we went to the Computing Center in groups to learn the basics of telnetting to our campus VAX and logging in to our new accounts. Many schools now include the cost of a laptop or PC in first-year's tuition, like mine now does, and that gives all students at least a fair familiarity with computer use. Just being around computers for those two functions will give most users a slow but steady learning curve into how to use a computer, and when people learn about all the cool games and video clips you can play on a PC or Mac it usually makes them learn enough to get around fairly well. But if you expect them to learn CLI beyond maybe telnet, you're dreaming, because it's becoming obsolete for all but programmers and old-school "power users".
But it's going to be increasingly rare for college freshmen to need to learn these things, since computer labs are commonplace in high schools, and even in many classrooms. I was shocked the other day to run into an ex-neighbor who became a fifth-grade teacher--she told me that she had three iMacs and two G3s in her classroom, and lesson plans for the students to learn the basics of navigating a GUI and using educational games and an encyclopaedia program. Not bad for elementary education; beats the hell out of the one Apple ][c we had in my elementary classrooms, running useless LOGO...
Of course, what you're specifically referring to is CS type people who know all the inner workings and would be comfortable if dropped to a command prompt in Linux or maybe even VMS. But as computers with high-level user interfaces permeate other disciplines, and the general school and home experience, there is quite frankly less need for such people. The average person will know enough to do all of the things he really wants to do, like e-mail and websurf and maybe get in a few rounds of Q3, but there is zero reason for him to *need* to know how to tinker under the hood. That isn't bad, it's just fine. Not everyone needs or wants to know how everything works, and I think that's a problem with some slashdotters: they think people should have to or want to learn what works a machine, when in reality all most of them need to do is learn to use the Win32 or MacOS shell. That's why we call these people "end users"--they use the end result of programmers' hours of toiling, toiling which is done so that end users can do thing quickly and easily. It's not laziness on behalf of the average person which keeps them from learning something like the Linux CLI--it's the fact that they prefer to do other things with their time, to use software with virtually no learning curve because it allows them to have all the benefits of computers with none of the time-consuming in-depth stuff which they really don't need to know to perform the few basic tasks they ever will need a computer to do.
I think there was an upswing in CS enrollment in the 90s because of the perception that computers were the future, high-tech CS jobs would pay very well, and that the emerging Net was cool and by learning CS you'd learn more about it. But after that brief surge we're returning to a more level state of growth commensurate with the fact that you don't need a CS degree to operate a computer, just to program for one. The population of people who "know how to fix" computers isn't getting smaller, it's just settling into a post-boom level, while the number of computer users in general continues to increase.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
This shows a complete lack of understanding of the "Way things work"
Colleges are seeing a lack of interest in Computer Science because computer science classes are seen as "old school" Everyone knows that you don't learn computer skills in school. You don't learn how to program in a classroom environment. You DO learn by DOING. Staying up all night hacking. If you look at the technology leaders today, a large porton of them have never attended college. Those who have/are didn't bother with CompSci, but instead learned business management skills (something you CAN learn in school) The Computer Skills they have they learned in their spare time.
Case in point: Myself. I am a high school dropout. No college. No interest in EVER going to college. I am 27 years old, and I just got re-located (all expenses paid) to New York City to work for France Telecom as the Linux Network Administrator for voila.com. I am making upwards of $60k a year (not millions, but its a good start) and have full benefits. I get to play with Linux boxes all day, everyday, and I make money doing it! Talk about your dream job. How did I get here? No CompSci for me. I was one of those "wiz kids" back in the 80's. You know, I had a Commodore 64 in 1982, I learned BASIC on a TRS-80 Model III in first grade. I learned 650x assembly by the time I was 12. I was all over BBS's in the last half of the 80's, and ran my own BBS throughout the first half of the 90's (Till about '93/'94 when I learned about the internet.) Why would someone like me need college? What does CompSci have to offer me?
It is this attitude that is why colleges are seeing a lack of interest in Computer Science, not a lack of skill. In fact, the lack of CompSci interest shows an INCREASE in the skill levels of the younger generation. These kids are working outside of the traditional structure. They don't go to college (or if they do, it's to learn business management skills, not computer skills that they have already mastered)
-CZ
Four times what a mechanic makes? I want to know who your mechanic is (Or who your present employer is...)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This is a truly sickening quote, and symptomatic of what is wrong with the US.
If you study several languages, you might realize something: it is US English that originated that vile expression "Person X is worth Y", where Y is some amount of money. In Spanish, French, or German, there is no such expression: you have to say "Person X has Y". You can say that a person is worth a lot, but that means that he/she is a great person, and has no monetary implications.
This is deeply symptomatic of how shallow and materialistic the US has become; people are valued exactly by how much they own. What they do with their lives, their talents, the experiences they have had, their insight into life, the world, their relations with others, these are all set aside.
The other truly sickening thing about this quote is that we have a child saying that she is worth more than her own parents. WTF? This is so self evidently sick, that I find it tough to come up with words to denounce it without sounding too obvious. I mean, if one has had caring parents that worked hard to give you a life as good as they could, how could one think oneself any more than they are?
The worship of money is the great vice of the US, which costs lives daily all over the world. Please see this fact; stop that madness, that meaningless way of life.
Are you adequate?
The other truly sickening thing about this quote is that we have a child saying that she is worth more than her own parents. WTF? This is so self evidently sick, that I find it tough to come up with words to denounce it without sounding too obvious. I mean, if one has had caring parents that worked hard to give you a life as good as they could, how could one think oneself any more than they are?
I find this attitude truly disheartening. One hears of stories about parents trying to keep their kids down, because of their jealousy that their kids may be more successful than they. That sounds a lot like your attitude. If your kids become more successful than you, are you going to start berating them? "So, Mr. Big Shot is too good for this family, eh? Think you're better than your old man, eh? EH?? EH???"
If your children don't have higher goals than yourself, and don't have more success than you, then you have failed as a parent.
Quite frankly, your attitude is the sick one.
The worship of money is the great vice of the US, which costs lives daily all over the world. Please see this fact; stop that madness, that meaningless way of life.
Extremely few people "worship money", as you put it. The problem is that you define worship as any desire for financial success. Guess what? One can be successful and not be greedy. There is absolutely nothing wrong with trying to achieve great financial success. In fact, society depends on it. The pie is not limited; when someone creates more wealth, it increases the amount of wealth available to society and creates more jobs for everyone. As the saying goes, a rising tide floats all boats.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I may be part of the next generation, but, unlike most other people, I am not what I belive is a script kiddie. I learn high level and low level languages. Perl, C, C++, Cobol, BASIC, QBASIC, FORTRAN. I hope you don't automatically shun the 'next generation' as script kiddies.
First of all, I think the greater ease with which children pick up this kind of thing has almost nothing to do with emotional attitudes (curiousity, lack of fear, etc) but rather intellectual makeup. Children learn things more quickly and more in-depth than adults, it's hardwired into the brain.
Secondly, and a couple of people brought it up already, a lot of these "skills" are along the lines of a mechanic rather than an engineer. I don't think most of these kids are learning many underlying skills.
It is interesting that I keep bumping into people who feel that simply because they learned how to program (which anyone can learn on their own) outside of school, then school is somehow useless.
Computer science programs vary widely across the board. At my girlfriend's college half of the junior and senior curriculum is stuff like Intro to C++ and Creating Applications in Visual Basic. While at my school the sophomore classes are Compilers & Translators (last semester we implemented the Unix utility "make" and wrote a Lisp to C translator and they were both due the same week) and Systems & Networks (create your own RPC program and protocol). Also before graduation each student has to work on a senior project which involves shipping a live product to a company. Now with this education I am currently pulling down a decent amount while interning which by current reckoning is as much as most people in industry are making now after a few years of real world experience.
Most of the actual programming syntax I have learned has been on my own time (I know C, C++, Java, Perl, Javascript, VBScript, SmallTalk and VisualBasic). There are various aspects of software engineering and database design I would not have learned without school, either because I would never have come across them while simply hacking or because they would have been too much work and not enough fun to learn on my own. Things like how and why a database should be normalized, how to design and implement grammars, using lex and yacc, how to create a requirements document from informal specifications and then converting the requirements document to a design document with data models and UML diagrams, compiler design and implementation details, various methods of dynamic memory allocation, proper object oriented design and implementation of neural networks. All these things I have learned in school and I still have over a year to go. Before I graduate I plan to take classes in AI (I'm interested in creating Internet Agents), advanced software engineering and next generation database technology (such as OO databases). The things I will learn in these classes are things that I would probably never have come across if I was simply hacking at code and buying O'reilly books to learn what I needed about CS.
Some kids at my school like reminding the freshman students who make comments like yours that our graduates don't use tools but instead make the tools that others use. The language designers, compiler writers and internet architects of this world are college educated. If all you want to do is go out and hack code a college degree is perhaps overkill (then again it widens your marketability - I have been offered positions working on compilers for strongARM chips using C/assembly as well as doing server side integration using Java, XML, Perl, & SQL) but realize this, what seperates usually seperates a Computer Scientist from Code Monkey is usually a college degree.
Younger people have always been more in-touch with contemporary times than older people. New technologies are always emerging. Social norms are always changing. And, always, the people most able to embrace new technologies, new social norms, new ways of life, are the young.
;-)
Young people make their own worlds as they grow up, forging thier own moral and social views (sometimes similar to their parents', sometimes radically different), experimenting with new things and not being afraid to try something new or different. Older people, though, are already set in their ways, they already have lifestyles, morals, and recreations based on the things they discovered when they themselves were young. The world changes, but usually, adults don't change much at all. I'm only 23, and already I find myself annoyed whenever things I really liked are changing; I can only imagine how people in their forties must feel, since the world has moved forward 20 years since they reached adulthood and started getting their own ideals set.
The young have always been a force of change, both technological and social, while the old have always been a force of stagnation. Look at Henry Ford as an example: in his younger years he revolutionalized not just the auto industry, but every industry, by popularizing the notion of putting together standardized parts on assembly lines to drastically reduce costs over those of one-off manufacturing. And then as he got older he foolishly kept pushing the Model T even after newer, bigger, faster cars were becoming popular, and would have ruined his company if his advisors and family hadn't dissuaded him from bringing back a simplistic Model T like car in the thirties.
That's just the way it's worked, probably for the whole of history. You see it at work everywhere: in the 1950s older people instituted censorship of comic books because they had cartoonish gore, yet today the same mild gore which was prohibited in the 1950s has become a staple of comics and few older people care, because the older people of today were the children of the 50s who grew up wanting to see that comic violence which their parents thought was so bad. Elvis was considered positively satanic early in his career, because older folk thought his hip swaggering walk was sinfully provocative, yet today people don't complain about hip movements at concerts they complain about Marilyn Manson and a bandmate having oral sex on stage.
Technology is no different in that respect than forces of social or political liberalism. Older people get along just fine knowing little about computers; they have no reason to learn, they've already developed their own careers and hobbies. Thus more young people getting deeply into computers than adults who do so. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo!, and most of the other companies which have been instrumental in bringing the personal computing and Internet revolutions to the masses, were founded by young people in their twenties or teens. The Information Age is a revolutionary thing, and revolution is the pursuit mostly of the young. Old people and companies have established ways and markets, and don't want change--thus the RIAA vs. Napster mess, the MPAA vs. DeCSS affair, and the USPTO's complete inability to handle Net-related patent claims in a reasonable manner. They're just old and out of touch, and it's time to get rid of their outdated foolishness. But, I digres...
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
I tend to agree with the posters who have said that the computer is more of a communcations appliance to most kids, rather than a tool for learning and experimentation. Part of the reason it is probably like this is due to a couple of things: a) It is "uncool" to know a lot about computers, and b) Computers are easier to "break" today, to a point where they seem unfixable (to a newbie).
When I was younger (I am 27 now), I had a TRS-80 Color Computer 2 and 3 - it is what I learned to program on - both in BASIC, and a little 6809 assembler (actually, I still have them - sitting right next to me right now, in fact - and yes, they both work - 15 years later!). The thing was, no matter what I did, I couldn't "break" the machine. POKEing here or there would "crash" it, but hit the reset switch on the back, everything is okay - back to BASIC. Rarely did a disk fail, or did I overwrite something, or did the machine crash while typing in a 150 line machine language data statement hunk of code from a magazine.
Today, wiping a DLL from the Windows system directory can cause a lot of pain - Linux is little better if you are a newbie running as root (although there is a better chance of fixing it in the end after a reboot).
Do I think all kids are simpletons who use the computer, rather than learn about it? No... I think there are plenty of really bright kids, who code with either copies of software their dads bring home from work, or with copies of gcc or other Free Software from the net - kids who are unafraid of crashing their machines (indeed, they may even love doing such a thing).
Reason is the Path to God - Anon