Slashdot Mirror
Tech Geezers vs. Young Bloods
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.""
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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...
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Back in my day we had the Apple ][+. And it was good.
Then the IBM came out. It was gay.
Then we started getting complex components we couldn't just buy at Radio Shack when one died. That was really gay.
and now I have to listen to punks on their cell phones saying "like" every 4 seconds. They like talk like like this like.
Eventually the knowledge will be passed along to the younger generations. They'll pick up where us oldies have left off. Indeed, it is often said that it is more difficult for them. We have left them with systems that are far more complex than were left to us when we all started. I trust in our younger generations. They'll be able to advance our technological knowledge. And the best thing is that we're now drawing from the most creative and brilliant minds of India, China, Korea and many other nations. We're bound to make tremendous discoveries just because we now have so many talented people working in the technology field.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Abe: I used to be with it, but then they changed what "it" was. Now, what I'm with isn't it, and what's "it" seems weird and scary to me. (Episode: 3F21 Homerpalooza)
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.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
"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.""
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.
-Bill
"You are the only one in the Wall Mart checkout line not talking on a cell phone to pass the time while waiting for your turn to pay"
Yeah whatever, I've seen people talk on the phone when it's suddenly calling THEM. So many are obviously bullshitting the "I'm popular" thingie.
Full Tilt
I feel kind of odd watching flamewars about who is tougher and more hardcore, C++ or some other language group, and I think to myself, "maybe they should have to actually deal with assembly, logic, and bits for real before they start talking hardcore. I remember when we were putting together kits out of catalogs with hex pads and light up bulbs and calling it computing.
Oh well. I think all this excitement has gotten to me. I'm going to go take a nap now. Where's my cane?
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
... and I understand alot more than the younger generation does for the most part, but I still wish I had been born 30-50 years later or 10 years earlier.
Shadus
How many people can produce a fire out of just sticks?
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.
Ask some of the geezers how things communicate/interoperate with other systems. I have found that the problem is that people that historically worked on isolated systems have no clue how modern interconnected systems work. They may know how the old systems work but they sure don't know how the new systems work.
This issue really transcends age. Curious people tend to find out how things work and some people don't care how things work.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
My comment in a friend's JE a few days ago explains exactly what this guy is grumping about. Unfrotunately, I don't know if this trend will change. We're breeding Eloi at a faster rate every decade. Wells' fears may well come true in shorter time than he predicted in The Time Machine.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
This should be no surprise. It's always been this way. The AVERAGE teenager uses IM and doesn't know how it works. Then again, the average teenager isn't going to be growing up to learn to build an IM client.
We will always need new inventors to create new things. These people will be young, and they will know how things work. They, however, won't know how to market their product. Here's where that teenager that used IM but doesn't know how it works comes it.
Specialization is the key to our efficient progress. The teenager using IM to communicate more efficiently is great. However, not using tools just because you don't know how they work is just ignorant.
Trust me, there are plenty of young people who know how things work. They may not know how alot of older technology works, but they will create new ones to replace them.
Yes, I am a geezer (I'm 43). I have a bunch of VAXen in my basement, I run OpenBSD on them, and I still don't understand why I need more than 32MB of memory to run Windows (or any OS for that matter)
...and I'm on Slashdot, so I must be 733t.
I don't have a cell phone because the quality just sucks, and I've never Instant-Messaged anyone.
However, I also have a Mac Mini, an MP3 player, I don't listen to traditional "broadcast" radio anymore...streaming radio all the way, baby! I've been testing out the latest Ubuntu release this week
So? What am I? A Geezer or a Young blood.
TDz.
Being "with-it" and on the phone all the time and available online al lthe time and being CONTROLLED by others is not much different. I do not answer my cellphone or not talk on it because I choose not to, i do not want to be bothered by you. Same goes for when I turn off my crackberry on a regualr basis.
If the younger crowd likes being slaves to their peers and friend then they can enjoy their slavery. I choose to be in full control of contact. and fortunately by 13 year old daughter does the same. she always has her cellphone off when she does not want to ttalk to anyone because it keeps her friends from controlling her time.
same as IM.. she get's on talks and then shut's down. she finds her friends that broadcast what they are doing with their away settings "creepy-needy". her words for it.
it sounds like the out of control "hip and younger crowd" tries to act that way. but then I find lots of the 15-20 somethings faking that they are on the phone at stores and in their cars... trying to look hip.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
they have MTV, Jackass, and reality TV.
As 25 year old computer science graduate, I resent the comment "HOW the things work, and they have no idea" The fact of the matter is, the geezers barely understand how the internet works or the potential there.
Geezer speak: iPod, iWuh?
Youngling: dumb ass.
That's what repair shops and 1-800 numbers are for.
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.""
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.
you can take the road that takes you to the stars...
Let's take your example of assembly versus C++ versus some other language. Consider the software that was written in assembly back in the 1950s and 1960s. Sure, there were some pretty impressive pieces of work. Various compilers, OS/360, and whatnot. But compared to software today, such items are of a level of complexity often expected from first or second year undergraduate Comp. Sci. students.
.NET runtime. Those are fairly complex motherfuckers. Far more complex than anything that was even conceived a few decades back.
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
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
What's the world coming to?
Please don't stereotype a younger generation of software developers into a class of lower intelligence and we won't yell at you for driving too slowly in the left hand lane during the morning commute.
Be sure to remember the Programmers Prayer
Many people use things they can't explain. I can't explain the chemical reactions to cooking for example. All I know is when I boil an egg it goes white and hardens so I can eat it.
We live in an era of ignorance, "It just works" as MS put it. Us geeks are the exception and want to see how things work. Let them become more ignorant and we'll become smarter, make more money off them and maybe we can change the world in 20 years or so because of it.
Humanity has always revolved around what it knew. The more we know the better chance we have of making the next generation with power. Knowledge is power for a reason..
I like muppets.
" Remember, people are stupid. "
Excluding CyberBill of course. He's smart. So all you stupid people should agree with him.
We do know "how things work", and worse, we're building new things that they don't understand.
It would be gracious of baby-boomers to hand over the keys to our generation, as I plan to do to the next generation when they completely usurp my power, but we won't see that from them. Remember, they got the additional name me generation for a damn good reason.
They'll hold on with as much grip as their tired aging hands, covered in some "revitalizing cream", can muster. Prepare to be belittled and insulted by them again and again until they disappear.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
New technology gizmos and gadgets are exceedingly easy to use...after a break in period.
Its very analogous to the Windows vs. Linux arguments. Yes, Linux does stuff great, it can even play windows games via various routes, but learning how to use these new tools is prohibitive to most because there is not a succinct base of knowledge expressed in windows-esque terms. So people don't switch (self-included! *ducks*)
If you want to be 'hip' to the new technology, buy it, goof around with it. When you get sick of it, goof around for another week, if it still sucks, http://www.ebay.com./ If not, enjoy.
Aren't we /all/ riding on the backs of those who came before us?
Let's see your notes on how to lay down paths on silicon, or construct logic gates on silicon, or see your first homemade tube transistor, or the source code you have for harddrive firmware.
I'm an expert in my field. Yet I am a very long way from understanding all the fundamental intricacies of that which constructs the framework upon which I earn my living. I can write a TSR, yes, but know little about what all the paths are for inside of a CPU, and how they all interact to form a functioning whole.
The knowledge base the we each posess is reliant upon the discoveries and developments of those who came before us, and has been built-up through years of learning and discovery.
To mock the next generation for their lack of understanding is akin to mocking a child for not understanding the full complexities of the world. To ridicule that child for knowing that daddy's car can get him to school, yet not knowing that steam is required to force the crude from the shale, into a pipeline, off to a refinery, ad neaseum.
To tell you the truth, I've actually seen the knowledge difference the other way around. Many of the older "technology experts" I have known and met, had to learn their computer knowledge as the technology came out. They were true power users, able to maintain and upgrade emerging equipment when Moore's Law actually meant something. But because of my Computer Engineering Education, I've had training in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and everything in between. The people I work for don't know about pipelining and load management, etc. Ask THEM how things work and you get a very accurate generalization, but ask some of my peers how things work and you could get a very boring two hour lecture on modern computing from processor to compiler and beyond.
To Dinosaur's quote:
Of course we're riding on the backs of the older generation; just as the older generation rode on the backs of their elders who designed the technology that made computers possible in the first place. Older generations tend to like to trivialize the accomplishments of the younger generation because "it wouldn't be possible if we hadn't done X" first.
Of course, nothing you did would be possible unless someone decided to create before you. Thus is the cycle of progress and the older generation trying to trivialize the work of the "new generation" is really self-deprecating; they are basically saying that they would have preferred that their work not spur further innovation.
Embrace the innovation cycle; recognize that one day, a new generation of people will come along and build further upon your ideas and enjoy the fact that you helped lay the foundation!
This is typical for most people. The knowledge will be preserved by those who need it, until it is no longer relevant. An example would be how hard it is to find AmigaBASIC hackers.
You are not the customer.
After all, SciFi writers have been predicting this for many years, haven't they?
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.
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
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...
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
"I'm oooooold! And I'm not happy! And I don't like things now compared to the way they used to be. All this progress -- phooey!"
:(
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)
A goal is a dream with a deadline
I _am_, however, still cool enough that I walk around wearing a new-school ski jacket with an MP3 player pocket. I just need to remember to put the iPod into it...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I'm only 23 years old and I can see the difference. When i first got my feet wet with technology, it was in the days of the 386. I've grown with the times for the most part. The kids today are going right to their pc and playing world of warcraft, not knowing the kind of technology that backs something like that up. It's pretty incredible how far we've come. ---- don't tell mom she's a palindrome
Many of those comments have little to do with generation. They are more lifestyle choices. I am a younger person (23) for whom the rush of technology wasn't something I had to adapt to as much as it was simply there by the time I matured. When I was 12 years old I was playing DOOM and sending e-mails with no idea how it worked. (although I was very curious)
But I do not talk on my cell phone all the time (or hardly at all), I am rarely logged into instant messenger, I don't have very many MP3's and I don't own an iPod. I don't use a vast majority of the shiny technology gadgets available to us. I just recently got my first PDA, which gets only light use. And yet, I do consider myself tech savvy. I used to work as a computer programmer (MSSQL, C#.NET, ASP.NET), I program simple NES level video games for fun in my spare time (C++, SDL), and I am a physics undergrad at Baylor University.
I just like a simple, straight forward life and I don't have the time or the interest to surround myself with a multitude of gadgets. Thus, I know very little about how many of them work. I think that what you attain, you maintain, and right now I'm content to own a guitar and a computer. The only thing I have to do is change my strings, polish the guitar, and learn shell commands. It's nice and comfortable.
Talk about ignorant... You do know there are kid geeks as well? Most of us probably know more than most regular adults (average), or well atleast I know I do.
And this older generation, they did everything themselves, from scratch! They started out by learning how to mine and refine metals, to create copper wire. Then they discovered electricity. They invented the resistor and the capacitor. They learned how to machine parts....
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.
Lameness filter won't let me post the "O RLY" bird, which is really needed here.
pooptruck
An old man has.
"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.""
1. Invent useful, "it just works" tech using specialized knowledge.
2. Get useful, "it just works" tech adopted by tons of people who lack the specialized knowledge.
3. Profit.
4. Complain that the users to whom you marketed the useful "it just works" tech don't know how it works.
5. ???
6. ???
7. ???
8. What was I talking about, sonny?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
.. most people still don't know how a flushing toilet works. It's something most everyone uses every single day. It's a very simple machine. But apparently I was some sort of female plumber superhero in college because I knew how to fix it.
Some people will just never become curious about the things they use from day to day. Others will. That's the difference.
You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We'd all love to see the plan
(The Beatles)
While it doesn't hurt to know the inner workings, you don't need to know the principles of internal combustion to know how to drive a car, either.
This sig no verb.
The channels that a person uses to communicate depend on who they want to communicate with. For example, if most of my friends use IM to communicate, then I'll use IM to talk to them. If they used email, I'd use email (I said email was outdated for anything but formal communication since the 90s, and as I've learned, others were saying it long before me).
I'd like to ask one question though, assuming that VoIP is the next big thing in communications, how many teenagers do you know that use it? Compare that to how many adults in business.
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
Early-childhood "How things work" books are great for mechanical devices but it's hard for an 8 year old to grasp the intracacies of what goes on in a computer chip.
Heck, even a 38 year old has a hard time understanding how a modern cell phone works. I mean, to really understand it you have to understand operating systems, digital radio, and a host of other things. Compare that to a rotary phone on a crossbar switch.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Back when I was doing Tier II support for an ISP, I was almost the only senior there who actually knew what an IRQ was, and what the significance was. I once had another Tier II tech tell me he had no idea what they were, or why they were important. Maybe that's part of the reason he was no good with modem issues and I was the team's resident specialist in them. Today, even people who think they're techs have no understanding of things like IRQs, Base Addresses, FIFOs and so on. If they even know to check them, all they do is set them according to the cheat sheet, and assume the sheet's right. (I almost wrote "hope it's right," then realzied that most of them haven't a clue that the sheet might be wrong.) Not only don't they know anything about the inside workings, they don't want to know either. That's the scary part; they want to be ignorant, but consider themselves techs.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
no contest really. it's just a matter of time.
'vote' with (what's left in) yOUR wallet. help bring an end to unprecedented evile's manifestation through yOUR owned felonious corepirate nazi life0cidal glowbull warmongering execrable.
some of US should consider ourselves very fortunate to be among those scheduled to survive after the big flash/implementation of the creators' wwwildly popular planet/population rescue initiative/mandate.
it's right in the manual, 'world without end', etc....
as we all ?know?, change is inevitable, & denying/ignoring gravity, logic, morality, etc..., is only possible, on a temporary basis.
concern about the course of events that will occur should the corepirate nazi life0cidal execrable fail to be intervened upon is in order.
'do not be dismayed' (also from the manual). however, it's ok/recommended, to not attempt to live under/accept, fauxking nazi felon greed/fear/ego based pr ?firm? scriptdead mindphuking hypenosys.
consult with/trust in yOUR creators. providing more than enough of everything for everyone (without any distracting/spiritdead personal gain motives), whilst badtolling unprecedented evile, using an unlimited supply of newclear power, since/until forever. see you there?
"If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land."
See article. It probably didn't help things that companies stopped hiring and training younger workers in the "legacy" systems as a cost savings measure. They think they can just hire experienced workers when they need them. HR probably can't figure out why they can't find experienced younger workers now.
Apparently, you are a teet.
-Doug
... when SW people who are are supposedly coding applications that interface directly to hardware (eg samplers, data acquistion modules, GPS modules, etc) know so little about what's going on at the operating system level. More alarming is that they don't seem to care much.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
We had to program in the snow, up hill both ways!
I'm old enough that I like to concentrate on the person I'm with, whether in person, on the phone, or in email. Such a geezer that I enjoy time alone and use it well, in production or reflection. So boring that I'm perfectly secure when I'm not communicating with other people, though I do make and confirm appointments, then followup. People know where they stand with me, and expect quality communications, even when lower in quantity. I must be over the hill, but who wants to chatter endlessly with kids who've got nothing better to do?
--
make install -not war
It's not like we actually PRODUCE anything over here. Let the Chinese figure out how things work while we enjoy all the benefits of US society and culture. Like reading a magazine about celebrities while we wait in the unemployment line.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
%DCL-W-INCREDULITY
I hate to break it to you, but you've been dead for some time now.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I think the more important point is that old farts like me (45 yrs old, 20 yrs since my B.S.C.S.) are still useful, but since I'm not fluent in the 100 different web technologies (I don't recall all the acronyms), I'm not employable. My salary is too high and I'm not a JBoss guru (and I have a real dislike for Windows). My options are to find a new profession or become a PHB. Yeah, that's it. Get stupid and become a manager.
That new career in woodworking is looking real promising.
There is a big difference in the people that have using Linux for ten years and people just starting. It is depth of knowledge. Sometimes it is best to have worked with a system with millions of problems and be forced to get under the hood and figure out how it works. People today run into a problem and don't know what to do, where some old-timers go, "Oh yeah, problem #3506 with that software."
I see it often in networking too. Anyone knows how to hook up machines to a switch, but not many people know how machines communicate via switches, or how switches speak with each other. The same with anything computer-related really.
It is just like I think kids should be forced to learn to drive a stick shift car. Not only will they learn about what the tachometer is for, but they will be more conscious drivers. Who knows when an emergency might pop up and they have to move a tractor truck out of the way? Well, likewise, computer programmers need to learn assembly, to understand how the software interacts with hardware. If more programmers today had an understanding of software profiling, addressing, and tightening code, maybe we wouldn't have such bloatware out there.
Click here or here.
We're all getting overwhelmed by increasing complexity in the devices we use. Back in the days before electronic ignitions and the like, I was able to maintain my own car. Tuned it, changed plugs, cleaned out the carb, even changed the water pump on it. Now, I'd no more attempt to work on my car's engine than do my own brain surgery. Come to think of it, brain surgery looks easier.
"Ask them [members of the younger generation] HOW the things work, and they have no idea."
Duh.. obviously they've never heard of This Site!!
Do what I say, cuz I said it.
-Meatwad
"They are really riding on the backs of the 'old folks' like us that built the goodies they enjoy."
If we built it right, then the next generation doesn't have to concern themselves with the details. I guess we did good.
For being so technologically behind, he sure knows how to use a blog and pollute the internet with his opinions.
Ok, so he's complaining about new tech fads... on his blog. Does anyone else find this inconsistent?
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
Come on, I expect better reading from you SlashDot!! This is one of the most lame articles I have read yet on /.
I dont care how your AS400 works or your Tandy 64k or ... Of course all this 'old technology' is/was important for the younger guys to build off of but we are moving forward, period. Its very hard to uniquely creative in a high tech world thats moving at such a fast clip. Its about running lean and traveling light...I need brain power to focus on new development, not use my brain power to try and figure out why you coded something in FORTRAN one way or the other.
--Tell you what come over and help me getter better data transfer speeds out of my gaming router and I'll sit on your lap and listen to stories of the IBM punch card good ol' days...deal?
Indeed, I'm nearing 70, and have worked in the computer industry for a very long time. There have been a number of times that I have envied the young.
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.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
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.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The article was short, had no substance, said nothing that hasnt been said a million times before and was completely unrelated to building the gadgets that the kids use! BOO! - How do I mod the article down?
Combining Digg.com and slashdot would be great!
--------- I have no signature
When we are posthuman, we can look back and see how it all works. Why bother now? We need to start engineering our bodies and brains.
GOOD!
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.
it is because i have stood on the shoulders of giants. -- isaac newton
being on the cusp of the Baby Boom and Gen X I, when younger, often wished I had been born earlier (I could have been a hippie) or later (I could have been a slacker). At some point that goes away, probably when you realize that being in such a position allows you to make fun of the younger AND older generations.
"The world of the future will be an evermore demanding struggle against the limitations of our intellegence, not a comfortable hyammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves."
-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.
Pessimists.net - as if life wasn't depressing enough.
didnt some jerk say something along the lines of "If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants." in a letter to Robert Hooke?
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.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
I work at a news organization. What shocked me one day was that a guy coming out of college arrived at the building one day. He had a disk with an MS Works Word processor doc (not a Word doc). It was his resume and cover letter. For whatever reason, it wouldn't print on his computer w/ MS Word. So he came to our building looking worried. We have guards and metal detectors (this is Wash, DC) so he couldn't get in the building. I felt some pity that day, so I helped him get into the HR dept.
Frankly, I can't imagine going to a building on the deadline for a job app with only a disk on it thinking that would make a good impression. While the HR person could open and print the document for him, I asked him if he had at least tried to print it out with Openoffice (I don't know if it will open an MS Works doc myself, but it would be worth a shot). He looked at me like I was from outer space. I'm 30 and I can't believe what college grads don't know.
I wasn't required to take any CS/IT classes in college 10 years ago, but suprisingly, neither is anyone coming out of school today. China and India should be afraid... very afraid!
why back in my day all we had were zeroes and ones and gosh darn it we liked it!
sic transit gloria mundi
Take me and my coworkers. I'm more or less "fresh out of college". They're older than my parents. They've been maintaining this Army sim for about as long as I've been alive. Allegedly it's written in C++ but closer inspection reveals that it's written in Modula that's just been "C++ized". SQL? That's for bad programmers. Roll yer own, they say (in other words, linear search through an array of 5000 things). Visual Studio saying "I know what you're trying to do; please don't, it will make all of our lives suck"? Do it anyway; nothing could possibly be wrong with their design. CVS/Subversion? No, you can't trust the computer to merge, you can't trust humans to resolve conflicts, and if you don't get someone's bleeding edge code the very instant they check it in then your copy of the project will asplode.
Funny thing is, they hired me straight out of college thinking I'd be the "new idea guy". If you're not willing to honestly evaluate new ideas and let go of faulty or outdated assumptions, you're a burden, regardless of your age, regardless of your field.
A quick scan of ages says that only people in their 20's and people in their 40's are writing. Ok, its not a good sample of 4 people.
I've just turned 30 and this issue just doesn't seem like a real issue. There is too much information for any one person to absorb right now. Even within your own field you'll have to pick an choose. Remember the term "Renaissance man"? Anyone trying to be that now would go insane.
This isn't anything new. 20 years ago teenage girls would spend all night on their families landline. They would also make radio mix tapes. The only difference is they can now take all of this stuff out where you can see them doing it. How many minutes you spend on your cell phone doesn't equate to tech culture. I don't use many minutes on my cell phone either, but it isn't because I am old school. It is because it is a tool for me, not a social outlet.
honestly...
kids these days don't even know the difference between average and median.
You are the only one in the Wall Mart checkout line not talking on a cell phone to pass the time while waiting for your turn to pay. When you walk down the street with your friends you're talking only to them instead of multitasking - talking or text messaging with someone else on your mobile phone while talking to them at the same time. You don't use IM to let all of your friends know where you are at all times. You haven't downloaded hundreds of ringtones because you think spending 99 cents per ringtone is a ripoff. You don't download songs every night to load on your iPod.
Well, I'm a seventeen year old geezer then!
And people are surprised when I tell them I'm a senior.
Now that the web is popular and PHP and perl are popular with web development a web developer can call themselves a computer programmer without understanding the memory management and low level optimization that happens underneath whereas before you had to know all that to program anything at all. The same thing aplies to new script based viruses. The old-school virus writers were annoyed that the hobby was taken up by script kiddies who don't need to know as much about the guts of the OS and yet they were equaly or more effective at getting in the news.
As long as McGuyver is up on all the latest technology so he can save random people from domestic terrorists, I'm satisfied.
Geeks as gods? That was the writer's fantasy. The fact is that we all have to choose a line of work, and that means we have specialized knowledge. Even the best engineer is useless without construction workers.
In primitive societies, one person might be able to know everything the civilization knows. Now it's impossible. If a modern geek were dropped off naked on an island and told to start over, he'd never get to the point of smelting iron in one lifetime. The microprocessor would be a long time coming.
Geeks are important, but what about the factory workers who make your gadgets? What about the teachers who help the next generation learn to read? What about the farmers who grow your food? Technology isn't the point of life, and it can't exist without lots of "non-technical" support. The fact that someone doesn't know how their gadgets work doesn't mean they don't know something crucial for your continued happiness.
I once witnessed a labor strike of garbage workers. Believe me, it's a good lesson in whose services we can't live without.
...well, not with light bulbs, but sometimes we end up using LEDs.
I'm a computer engineering student (and likely will be for decades to come). One of the senior-level courses has us design a 68000-based microcomputer board with a breadboard, individual RAM and ROM chips, TTL logic gates, an ACIA controller, a line driver/line receiver (for serial output to a terminal) and various other components. And, of course, we have to write the software (in 68000 assembly) to run on this microcomputer.
Now, we're not building the processor itself from scratch, but I'd say that it's pretty low-level.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
you've got the cause and effect backwards. it's not that we know people don't understand technology, so they're stupid.
it's just that, lets face it, we all know people are basically stupid. look deep inside your soul, to your inner sarcastic bitter pessimist. don't worry, it's in there. he knows what we're talking about.
as such, how could they possibly understand cell phones?
So? What am I? A Geezer or a Young blood
... What is your UserID?
Depends
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
There has never in history been anytime which could be described as better than now. The founding of the U.S of A. - hardly golden, it's success was only made possible by the exploitation of thousands of slaves. Historically again, in the Edwardian times and around the time of WW I in Britain, the population longed for the age of the British Empire and her colonial glory. Again, this was just an occupation of foreign land with no regard for the indigenous peoples. The times of 1945 to 1990 can be excluded because the world was ever close to nuclear war. And if the 60s were a time of peace and love, then how did the world allow South Africa to impose the Apartheid? And 90s atrocities were commited in Eastern Europe. When we think we're enjoying ourselves, we more than ever need to check everyone else is. Things only get better.
There may seem like times of civilization and collapse say the Romans, followed by a thousand years of dark ages. But the peasants in the feudal system were more free than those slaves taken by the Romans.
Things may be getting worse for those highest in society, but they have to accept this sacrifice if it 's to help the global redistribution of wealth and we're to rectify centuries of injustice.
That is the point these whiners miss.
People shouldn't need to understand how things work. They just should.
In fact today it is nearly impossible for someone to actually know everything about any non trivial item.
But that's a good thing, we've gotten to the point where the infrastructure and exisitng technology is so reliable that we can basically ignore it and move on to new areas, and expand our knowledge rather than continuosly reinventing what we know.
Cotton Gin -- basically, pulls the cotton from the unwanted plant parts by pulling it through a filter with, and I haven't seen one since I was a kid, a brush of needles.
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?
Damn kids, cruisin' the strip in their fancy aquamarine '57 Chevys, I bet they've never designed an internal combustion engine from scratch in their life! I bet they couldn't maximize the efficiency of an assembly line if their life depended on it!
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
In ten years a few engineers will be designing new classes of electronics based on quantum principles... It will all be magic by then.
I hope you're right. My fear though is that the current generation will be so busy IMing each other and playing video games that they will never learn how to create IM clients or make video games, let alone completely new technologies.
I'm a big tall mofo.
this is an article made specifically for grumpy young men, you young whippersnapper.
skateboards are the devils monkeybars! or something equally insane!
One thing I have noticed over time, is that fewer people (I'll leave age out of the equation) seem to understand how to tune a system or how to identify where the bottlenecks are. More frequently, I see sysadmin-types say that we need a new computer computer when what we need is more memory or faster I/O.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Somehow, this doesn't seem very revolutionary. Sufficiently advanced technology breeds several layers of people: the people who use it, the people who sell it, and those who make it. Consider planes. Do you expect a pilot to understand the inner workings of some part of the electrical system? A pilot needs to know how a plane behaves and how to control it, but at some point, there's electromagnetism that goes over their head.
y'know, I'm almost 20, and now that I think about it, I have a general idea of how all those things work. does that make me really smart? sadly not. but those are all really really simple compared to a pocket calculator, and most people still don't understand them in any detail.
You BLOG about being so far behind the times that you're complaining about in a BLOG. If you wanted to make your point, you should have mailed this out USPS. Your bitchfest is just the same crap your parents said when they were making fun of the folks down the street with indoor plumbing and electricity for being too modern. You are old, a good measure of figuring out how old you are is how much you bitch about new stuff you don't understand.
So, if I can explain how IM works starting with electrons in a transistor making logic gates all the way through WAN protocols and all of the software crap, am I worthy? I mean, I expect everyone who uses IM to be able to lay out a CPU in silicon before they know enough to use it. That only took me two degrees and 6 years of engineering school, but hey that's reasonable right?
P.S. Hey smart guy, I make my own ringers for FREE! That's how smart you're not. 99 cents is rediculous.
Most kids don't understand how computers and cell phones work on a basic level.....just like a lot of middle aged people don't understand how planting crops and raising cattle works....just like most old people don't understand how metal working, or how to make stone tools to defend your cave.
Maybe when I'm old, I'll want to complain about how "kids today don't appreciate...."
I am often put into the role of teaching others how things work. I am 29 years old and have no CS background (I am entirely self-taught). I talk to most techies and they have no idea how things work behind the scenes. I am not talking "this IM client sends the message to the server which sends it to the other IM client." I am talking an in-depth understanding of how things like TCP, IP, and UDP work. They generally have no clue. I actually had one student who had several years of IT experience tell me that he thought UDP and ICMP were the same thing...
;-)
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
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
"Never memorize anything that can be looked up." --Albert F-ing Einstein
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
I don't even see why this is a problem. If anything, this is beneficial for the producers of technology, as their skills become more valuable as a whole culture develops around it. The art of being rich is getting people to depend on you and consuming less than you produce.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
How much of this "instant/continuous communication" world drops away as the pressures (and opportunities) of the real world increase? I've got enough on my plate to worry about where my cats are at this instant, etc.
who read "Tech Geezers vs. young blondes"?
Guess that's part of being a geezer.
Coal fired boiler... Did they understand what was going on at a molecular level? What? They didn't NEED to know to that level?
Hmm... how is that any different from today?
Tim
So he is upset because he's not with it, as all 14 year old girls are.. solely because they talk on their cell phones to all of their other teen friends and waste time by IMing? I'm 20. I use my cell phone as my main means of communication but probably dont talk on it more than 2 hours a month. I use IM to stay updated at work and check homework for school..
If he were clever he'd stop complaining and start capitalizing on stupid teen trends.
>> ...I have a bunch of VAXen in my basement...
>%DCL-W-INCREDULITY
>I hate to break it to you, but you've been dead for some time now.
This is, quite possibly, the funniest thing I have read in months.
Good job.
-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
NT
Comment of the year
After racism and sexism die out, maybe we can go after ageism. Making arbitrary distinctions based on age is just as bad as doing so based on race or sex.
Sad isn't it. I'm only 21 yet I feel a technology divide with the younger generation. I cut my teeth on IRQ conflicts in the DOS days. While I can't build a tranciever from scratch without instructions, I do my own volt-mod soldering in order to overclock my computers even further. I am a technology enthusiast in the purest form. I keep up with everything from nanotech to cellphones to the newest processor fabrication techniques. The thing is, I don't really take advantage of the technology I know exists. I have a cell phone(Moto V551, upgrading to a ROKR), no land line, but I don't play games or text unless I feel texting would be better than a voicemail. I average about 5 texts per month and 300 peak minutes per month. At work I don't leave people voicemails, I walk upstairs and talk to them face to face. Partly because this ensures that I am not ignored by the guy talking with me on the phone, talking to a coworker, and sending an e-mail all at the same time.
What amazes my the most is the total lack of interest kids have in how their computer works. Most kids who call themselves hardcore gamers these days don't even know what an AGP Slot is much less an Interrupt. I guess we have Dell to thank.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, or maybe I'm just old. The thing is, I'm the one they come to when they have computer problems and I'm the one who explains why this service does not work on that particular model of cell phone, and why Cingular has better coverage in this area because they have 850MHz/1900MHz towers whereas T-Mobile only uses 1900MHz towers.
-Dan
It's the modern dilemma: there is too much to know. Two or three hundred years ago, you could read every book ever written.
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.)
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
It happened to me once, anyway.
:-)
In 1987, just after I graduated from college, I bought an equalizer from the Sound of Music store near the Ridgedale shopping center in Minnetonka, MN (for the curious, Sound of Music was a Twin Cities stereo/electronics store that later grew a bit bigger and changed its name to Best Buy), and it came with two huge sheets of schematics. The unit was made by Audio Reflex, and it's still working, although I've disconnected it for the time being.
Not bad for an $80 component.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Completing quote.....=)
If a modern geek were dropped off naked on an island and told to start over, he'd never get to the point of smelting iron in one lifetime.
Only if said geek hadn't read Caveman Chemsitry. The book covers everything from making fire, through making gless and smelting copper, to producing plastics.
Things to do today: See list of things to do yesterday
I seriously doubt a large part of geeks are seen as demigods from their technology-impaired peers. Some strange technofreaks, yeah, but demigods?
Hell, just look on our paycheck and decide if this is worthy for someone of the ranks of Hercules.
Screw the FSM - Real geeks believe in the Invisible Pink Unicorn
Nice post. Something I've thought for a long time. But, at the same time, I think you may be seeing malice where there is none.
There are certainly those who belittle the "younger generation" for their own self-aggrandizement. But there are also those who are genuinely concerned for the future. I see them every day. Unfortunately, from a distance, the two tend to look alike.
The real old farts to be worried about, though, aren't the ones blogging about the demise of universal technical knowledge. Those who are really "out to get you" are the ones that sit quietly in the corner, bemoaning the rise of the "Clinton generation" and cheap, open communcations, and, of course everybody's favorite running jokes, "hackers" and "terrorists". They quietly work to bring back the days when "old men send young men to die in war". They push for the end of universal computing and widespread access to knowledge. They will happily ruin the economy via outsourcing, immigration, and dependence on foreign energy rather than give an inch to their own children.
Those are the ones that will have to be dragged into the streets and shot when the time comes, not old geeks that want kids to understand how microprocessors work.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
It's simply not necessary for people to know how everything they use works. I know how to series-wind an AC motor, but there's no reason why everyone who wants to vacuum their floor should have to. It's called the social division of labor. I don't really know how to make clothes, operate a bottling plant, or weave a carpet, but there are people who do.
Back in the days when most people lived on farms and made most of the things they used by themselves, we all lived in rather squalid conditions. Let's hear it for specialization!
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The fact that I can hand someone a core memory board, or a 16 bit adder made with individual transistors. That I can hand them a chipset like the 4004. Or that I can show that with the right algorithm and code, that I can solve the same problem set on an old Unix box in less time than it takes for them to get their solution to run on their GHz laptops. That's when the light goes on. That's when they begin to see that they can do a hell of a lot more with a hell of a lot less than they thought. That's when they begin to realize that quality makes a difference. That's when they begin to see that they can save themselves a lot of time and trouble, save their companies a lot of time and money and become the next shining star in the IT department.
We live in a world where a lot of stupid things are not just possible, but down right idiotically easy. Or at least they appear that way to those with shallow understandings of how things work, until the day when they fail to meet expectations and the 'Old-Geezer' call is made. And sure enough, he can take a look, pinpoint the problem and fix it. Because he knows what is really happening. Because he was using 'Data-Blocks' before the authors of XML were born.
The history is important. Today we are incredibly lucky. If we were talking philosophy, we could never actually talk to Plato or Socrates. If we were talking Medicine, we could not speak with Hippocrates or Galen. And while we have already lost pioneers like Vannevar Bush, we can still actually hear Knuth, Ritchie & the like because almost everything they did happened in our lifetimes. Real code written by real human beings with a true calling and a passion for their art. Not some company pushing a library of a million lines of buggy, over generalized code asking "Where Do You Want To Go Today."
Clear Quality Understanding --> Clean Tight Code --> Problem Solved.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
This reminds me of when I was at a family reunion and took some pictures with my digital camera. I burned them onto a CD and I labeled it "Family Reunion Images" and handed it to my grandpa. He looked at the CD and said "Images?! You take Images of Mars. You take PICTURES of your family."
Okay, when you old geezers were teenagers, in the era of VAC20 motherboards, did you know how semi-conductors actually *work*? A few teenagers did, a few teenagers do today, but you didn't need to know that, so most people who messed with computers didn't. A lor of you went to college and learned the QM, metallurgy, whatever there, so that's okay.
Fast forward to when I was a teenager - could I assemble a circuit board from scratch, did I know machine code or assembly language? Mostly I knew higher level languages - it was sufficient for what I wanted to do. And there were an order of magnitude more teenagers in my generation messing with computers than in the generation before, and that was a good thing. After I went to college I learned most of what I would've needed to know to mess with computers 20 years prior, so it isn't as if the knowledge is being lost; furthermore, the total number of teenagers who knew how to sotter a board together was probably higher in 1995 than it was in 1985, even if it was a smaller proportion of the total teenagers who had computers.
Nowadays you have these kids and they know html, they know how to use mIRC even if they don't even know what raw IRC instructions even are - they know how to use all this stuff that prior generations painstakingly built for them. It's sufficient for their purposes, that's great. And kids today - an order of magnitude more of them are using computers than ten years ago. When they go to school, if they're serious about it, they'll learn C, they'll learn some assembly, they'll learn how to build circuitry, they'll learn how semiconductors work.
The next generation may start out talking to their computers, whatever - I won't pretend to be able to predict the direction computers will take over the next decade, b/c I can look back in time and see that the predictions I would've made would've been pretty lousy. But, whatever it is, the skill sets of the young people will be suited to what they want to do, the minimum skillset to achieve any given end will be simpler to obtain (which is GOOD), and if they want to understand how all this stuff really works they'll go to college and they'll learn it there.
There's a core group of teenagers today who know just as much as I did - and in fact I think that group is probably larger than the similar cohort ten years ago, but as a proportion of total users, even total *skilled* users, the percentage of people who really know what is going on is dropping like a rock, okay, that's true. But it is healthy and good - a sign of ongoing progress.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
without using a median and prove your "scale" is linear in order to make an arithmetic average meaningful.
From TFA:
"I'll arrive in my Ford Bronto "
Freudian slip, or intentional humor?
....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.
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!
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
While a general decline in math and science is obviously not good, I don't think this is neccessarily evidence of it. Technology is best when the user doesn't need to think about it. I don't have to question how they get that graphite in the middle of a piece of wood to use a pencil. I pick it up, use it, and it works pretty well. I definitely don't think phones, transportation, or computers have "arrived" in that sense, but it's clear it's heading that direction.
For those of us who enjoy understanding "how" and have capacity/willingness to learn, we're in for better paying jobs, and improving or supporting existing tech. So all in all, I don't really mind it...
I think the inevitable is taking place - the man on the street is seeing ever decreasing cost on the consumer technology items and it's cheaper to just run out and buy a new item than try to repair the old stuff, no one is learning the guts of the new technology and the result is our dependence on low cost retailers to keep our communications, entertainment and home needs met. I'm starting to understand the dinosaur's like book publishers and music industry moguls. They're just making their last stand look good. Cmdr Taco! - since when is a blog entry news????!!!
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs back 123456789
It will be pretty funny when all of us oldtimers are gone and no one knows how to even change a lightbulb, let alone how it works.
No appreciation or understanding of what it took to get here will be the death of them all someday.
Am i a grumpy old man that doesnt see the value in what people today call 'progress'? Damned right i am.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
I think most of us know how to operate a steering wheel. Many also know how to connect a car radio. I suspect few of us (myself included) can write a page off the cuff on the construction of our car's alternator cap, or know the gear ratio of our transmission. Or, for the matter, the workings of an automatic transmission and the torque converter.
However, we do understand the Han Solo School of Repair (whack it and see if it works). Good tech eventually becomes seamless enough that you only need to understand the interface to operate it. Design of good tech, well, that's why I'm after a professorship - education = good, and that's the step that takes some learnin'.
Be careful of your thoughts; they could become words at any minute...
Sounds like a fun book! But my point is it takes more than knowledge for civilization to work - it takes workers and infastructure.
Without an infastructure, you have to devote all your energy to survival. Edison was able to concentrate on the light bulb because somebody else had built his house, somebody else farmed wheat and baked his bread, somebody else had birthed and raised and taught him, etc.
I just think it's easy to become arrogant when you say, "I know how stuff works and these idiots around me don't." We all need each other, regardless of who knows what.
"They" don't know shit about how their own technology works. They don't care. That's the real divide; you do.
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.
... of some of the fantastic conversations I've had with my stepson. At first I was a little put off. But now I'm kinda fascinated by his generations' point of view.
... uh you can make one of those with a linux box, it's a computer that saves video data to a hard disk, and that disk only has so much capacity. When the Nintendo DS came out, he was thrilled about this new "802.11 technology from Broadcom" ... I said ... like the Linux based Linksys router we have, the one I've customized firmware for? At that point we've had the router for a few years.
... or who knows what and who knows "HOW" things work. But we can learn from each other.
... look, you can compile this on linux by changing one line!
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.
FLR
When are you going to release your old skool fusion technology?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
When I was a young tech, we had slide rulers, and we were grateful. None of these fancy dandy multifunction calculatin machines. We actually had to know what a log was.
Heck and tarnation, you kids got it easy!
But this is the weakest story I've ever seen on Slashdot.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
I AM a geezer, at the ripe old age of 28. Shit, I remember when FTP was the dominant way to download warez, back when I entered college. The web was shiny and new. Only a third of the population had cell phones. P2P filesharing was still a few years away. IRC was the way people chatted. The N64 was high technology. Pop-ups and spam were not yet horrible irritations. etc...
I typically use less than 200 minutes per month on my cell phone and I only use it as a telephone (or to play tetris when I'm dragged out shopping). I'm never on IM. I like to fire up Doom every once in a while. I can use a command line. And yet, I still think I'm tech savvy. I'm cool... right?
Could it be a sign of maturing technology? I think so...
Yes, thanks to modern technology it is now possible to argue with your nagging spouse ALL DAY LONG, instead of only a couple of hours.
Proverbs 21:19
I don't think the story hits it quite right. I'm 22, and I feel the same way as the writer. It's not that technology is somehow outstripping old folks' ability to use it to the fullest potential... it's that a lot of people who grow up with the tech have no sense of boundaries with respect to it. The sales rep who says they routinely sell 2000 minute packages to teenagers illustrate it well; who actually NEEDS that much time? Nobody. And it costs an extra $50-$100 a month for the luxery. Our consumer culture invites people to throw away money on more and more things that people got along without just fine for the rest of history, but have suddenly become indespensable to the easily amused. So many people today would never voluntarily pick up a book and read it for fun. Is that somehow an indication that books are no longer necessary? Of course not. It just means that commercial technology invites you to waste time in pointless networking when you could be learning something useful, or expanding your intellect. So it's not that somehow people who are glued to their phone are more technologically advanced than those that have a sense of proportion... it's just that they don't realize that there are more valuable things they could be doing with their time and money.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
From the Hagakure:
A certain swordsman in his declining years said the following:
In one's life. there are levels in the pursuit of study. In the lowest level, a person studies but nothing comes of it, and he feels that both he and others are unskillful. At this point he is worthless. In the middle level he is still useless but is aware of his own insufficiencies and can also see the insufficiencies of others. In a higher level he has pride concerning his own ability, rejoices in praise from others, and laments the lack of ability in his fellows. This man has worth. In the highest level a man has the look of knowing nothing .
If you have a college-aged daughter, by Slashdot standards you *are* a geezer.
I think the defining characteristic of the younger generation now is two-fold:
1) They all seem to wear headphones when walking between classes
2) The vast range of social to anti-social is far greater than any generation before them, and there are more individuals on the extremes.
US Centric, but:
High school kids can't really be broken up into EMO, Goth, Sk8rs, Preps, and Jocks anymore. None of the defining characteristics seem to apply to any single kid. At the same time, they all espouse a certain conformity and know next to nothing about US law. This is compounded by the fact that they all *think* they know it. Many of them don't understand the concept that government used to be a constantly changing and always evolving concept. They think of morals in terms of laws. For example, I had a conversation with someone about welfare for New Orleans the other day. They couldn't grasp the concept of *not* rebuilding an area that is prone to have future flooding problems. They were certain that it would be nothing but cold-hearted to provide anything but a reconstruction of the original area. When I proposed splitting 100 billion (half the 200 billion) and cutting it directly into checks and giving it to Katrina victims, I was told I was callous and not being very considerate of the culture of the area.
I don't know about you, but I *NEVER* remember it being okay to speak with authority about something I knew so little about. This same individual thought that New Orleans was the capital of Louisiana. How far and uneducated our kids have become. What better time to educate them about obvious things such as this!
This has been going on for many generations before us, and will probably continue long after we are gone. When we were young, we all remember the "why I can remember back when..." stories told to us by our parents and grandparents. They got set in their ways and didn't keep up with the times. As we get older, we slowly fall off the bleeding edge, and eventually no longer care to be up on the latest and greatest. In fact, sometimes the latest tech is annoying to us (people talking on cell phones in lineups, etc). Perhaps it would be more useful to ask "What is it that causes us to not want to keep up with the latest and greatest like we did before?" When we were kids, we simply adapted to whatever came along, but as we get older, we become more resistant to change, what purpose does this serve?
http://bike.stu.ph/rides - free GPS routes available for Garmin, Magellan, GPX and Google Earth
It's geek vs. non-geek. The main thing that separates us (the common geek) from them (everyone else) is that we want to know how our stuff (cars, phones, computers, water filtration plants) works, while they just want to know how it can help them.
The good news is those annoying people on their phones in the grocery checkout line will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
People learn the stuff they feel they need to know. I know almost nothing about the car I drive; I just use it to get from A to B. But in the early days of the automobile, that observation wouldn't have made sense: to get from A to B, you had to know how your car worked, because there was a pretty good chance it would break down en route. Of course, we still need some people who know how cars work, but unless that's your job or some kind of hobby, you don't need to be one of them.
Computers are similar. We've passed the stage when you need to know how they work in order to make them do something useful. Result: way more clueless people using them. And even among the technical types, increasingly reliable hardware means fewer of us need to know much about it. Just replace the appliance every few years, and you're fine. Most of the time.
"I think that the baby boomers have a better quality of living than any generation since."
I STRONGLY disagree.
From what I know about anyone that has been around for more than 50 years, I have it much better. (Society-wise, not personal finance-wise, but that's because I'm just starting out.)
That's not to say that there aren't problems now.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
WTF???
What I find disappointing is to run into someone with a technical or scientific degree of any kind who has no interest in or knowledge of any are that is not directly related to their own.
Most people with science degrees that I know do have broader areas of interest than just their area of expertise.
I've run into much wider variation of people with engineering degrees. Some have extremely broad knowledge many fields, and most have a very respectable range of knowledge. But there are a number who know nothing of areas beyond their limited range of interest.
When all the tech stuff started, the people who knew how all of it worked guarded that knowledge like it was the holy grail. Computer Labs were kept locked, when something broke they would rush in, move you away while they fixed it. And when asked what they did to fix it, the answer would be some roundabout gobbledy gook designed to make themselves look like geniuses while keeping the user in the dark. After a while, people stopped asking how and why.
But now the complaint is that the next generation is ignorant? Thats how you wanted it. Now it's time to deal with the consequences.
D
The first, last, and only tech news site on the net
I do all that stuff that makes him feel old, and I still feel old compared to teenage girls who *use* that shit.
Although really. Comparing yourself against younger people will, by definition, make you feel older.
There is a problem when the technology that a civilization is built upon is beyond the comprehension of most of its users, and more importantly, those charged with its maintenance.
Going back a long way, I remember the days when people understood how the technologies they supported worked.
In a previous life I spent some time working for a company that did TV rentals, and being a lowly apprencice was forced to go out repairing broken TVs when the real TV engineers were home celebrating Christmas, or sitting on a beach sunning themselves. In the very early days these TVs used tubes, and were built on a chassis - so when it went wrong, you had to know how to repair it, which meant understanding the principles it operated on, and the practical implementation. As time progressed TVs moved to having replacable printed circuit boards, one dedicated to a particular function. The generation of field TV techs that grew up with (as a gross exageration) these knew no more than to identify which functional area was giving trouble and how to swap the board - the older guys who knew how this stuff worked repaired the boards back at the workshop. From there, it moved to transistorised and then IC based TVs, and the techs (even thouse in the workshop) knew less and less and just swapped boards, and threw the old ones away because it cost more to fix them than to buy new replacements.
I see similar things happening with cars. The days of the auto mechanic understanding how things work, and being able to fix it when it goes wrong are long gone - they swap parts, and when it comes to the modern electronics, they are told which part to swap by diagnostic equipment, that they understand as far as knowing which cable to plug in where, and how to navigate the menus.
As the knowlege of how things really work becomes concentrated in a smaller and smaller part of the population, and especially when that part of the population is more and more often found overseas, the culture/civilization becomes more and more fragile.
Getting back to the subject line, I believe this is related to education. The general population no longer gets an education matching the technological state of the world in which they live. In fact, I would probably go so far as to say that its probably a less complete education (in that respect) than it was 100 years ago.
Same applies to the education level of the techs who keep the technology spinning. They no longer understand it sufficiently to be able to do more than be told what to do by diagnostic tools, and swap components -- and "we" want it this way, since its cheaper than employing people sufficently educated to understand, in depth, the technology they are supporting.
There was a comment earlier about this being the beginning of the development of a Morlock/Eloi world. I'm more than a little concerned that may in fact be true.
For the past few years I've been giving out my ICQ # to students so they can (try to) msg me at weird times when I'm not at the school but might be willing to help.
Well, first day of classes last year I go through my usual welcome bit then give out my contact info. I got as far as "And you can reach me on ICQ at..." and then got cut off as one girl blurts out "ICQ??! Wow, that's old school!"
sigh.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
I'm 21, a Mechanical Engineering major and Comp Sci major. I know how things work, and I love to play with them. Where do I belong in the Technology/Age heirarchy?
I'm an in-between in the tech world. I started my career some 13 years ago managing a DG MV9600. Since then I've experienced the joys of Windows 3.1, 95, NT 3.5, NT 4, Novell 3.20 and 4.11, Windows 2000 workstation and server, W2K3 server, MS-SQL, MySQL (Which I prefer over all others) and several variants of Linux/Unix. Did I mention phone systems? Done those too.
I loathe what has happened to cell phones with the exception of text messaging. Who the hell needs a camera or even web access on their cell phone? I don't. Of course I can get IM's and emails via SMS so it's not a total loss.
And I also refuse to consider the quality of current cell networks as acceptable. That is precisely why I prefer to be texted as opposed to called.
There is one more side benefit to text messages. You can ignore them. It is a bit harder to igone a ringing phone.
You! Einstein! Back to work! That shit ain't gonna shovel itself!
I think the main issue though is that there is less need for program efficiency and more need for programmer efficiency. You tell a low-level programmer to write you an email client, a month later you get an amazingly fast client that does amazingly little. Tell your average microsoft .NET programmer to write an email client, he probably plops a little "Email Reader" activex control into his form and gives it a name, done in 5 minutes. Those old time programmers had better be writing device drivers or something where their talents are useful, otherwise that would be an awful waste of resources.
At some point, you'll be unable to get a job because they'll assume you're too old to know about technology.
Actually, from your post I'd bet you're under 30 years old, so don't really know what you're talking about.
Also when you say you know "how ALL of {your) technology works" you're probably talking out your ass anyway, since you probably can't fix your own TV set, or grind the valves in your car, or make asphalt from scratch, or... Nobody knows how ALL their technology works these days.
Have you read my blog lately?
We're becoming specialists. The old geezer knows how tech works and the kids don't? Ask an even older geezer who knows how several different areas of tech work. Do you know how to make gunpowder or rubber, how to build an elecric generator, and how the telephone works too? What about how to saddle a horse? Every next generation is more specialized than the previous one, and for every previous generation the things they don't know "are just there" and things they do know are "basic education".
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?
The scary part is that there are LOTS of ppl who have convinced themselves that they DO know how it works. And they are writing laws and making business decisions based on their own (often incorrect) understanding.
Just look at some of the bills that have been proposed in the last 10 years (and prolly many more before that time). Look at some of the stupid business moves made in the last 10 years. Hell, look at the entire dot-com bubble.
We, technies, know that we are living in a superficial "fluff" time. There was a time and place when you had to know your shit in order to talk about a given subject. Those days are long gone. Anyone with an opinion can now speak as a "subject matter expert". You know it. I know it. We see it every single day (especially in IT) at work, on TV, and in society. And it's not discouraged, rather, it's encouraged by our society. He who crafts the best "story" gets the most gold.
geezer to ipod wearing youngling: dumbass sez what?
Younging wearing ipod? WHAT!?
hmm, this is an interesting topic of which i have always thought ever since i was in my early twentys(i'm in my late 30s)
when i was in my early 20s i use to work at a supermarket part time and i would see the older people not being able to do basic stuff, and then i would see my dad and grandfather who where in some cases older then them and they where perfectly fine.
i have see many "techs" on my way up the "tech/geek" ladder over the years let there skills slide to the point where they are barely compatent.
and i think thats the case, it goes both ways, some of the youngins do it "puters" as a job, the come in, and work. period they dont do anything extra to learn anything new period.
whereas "geeks" puters and tech is not jjust a job but also a hobbie..
and there is the big difference, i will explorer and learn stuff on my lunch at home on my free time etc, so i am the "head geek" where i work.
its a matter of perspective.
-Nex6
"...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"
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...
And the the average medieval serf knew how a trebuchet worked.
I mean, most software people have a vague understanding of how the hardware works and vice-versa. But people only learn what they need/want to know. Not everyone cares how it works. I understand hardware, but networking/software is where I feel comfortable. I don't feel above anyone because of my preference. And I doubt most people do, the problem is people who feel lower because of their preference.
I think that its kind of sad how ppl forget what was. I think we can throw part of the blame on schools. I took a multimedia systems course and it was mostly theoretical with the only hands on stuff being done in MATLAB. I was being taught by a TA. We were learning about JPEG compression, and he was outlining the steps: huffman encoding, cosine transform etc. And then I asked how how does it actually work? I can do it on paper, but how would I go about actually implementing it. And he didn't really know.
A similar scenario occured with my Networking class, the teacher was boggling us with new technologies like CORBA, Java Spaces, RMI, JINI, SOAP etc, and in the end, the student gets overwelhmed and confused. How about starting out with a simlple socket program?
The point I'm getting at is, everyone seems to be trying to learn new stuff and complex stuff and in the end we don't know the basics on how it actually works, other than, oh I used that library. But if we want to innovate and improve, we need to constantly go back to basics and re-evaluate how things were done.
> Why should the average person understand how their cell phone works?
Prince Charles and Newt Gingrich apparently didn't understand that a cell phone is a radio. If they had, maybe they wouldn't have been embarrassed by people with scanners and tape recorders.
There are things you need to know to use a technology safely ("close cover before striking", "don't assume that VBS attachment is from your boss", etc.) You need to know fewer things in a well designed system but we have only a few of those.
Maybe he's just comparing himself to young girls too much. Most of the people I know who I would consider 'plugged in' don't do most of the things he mentioned, either.
My little sister (who can barely work the iPod I got her for Christmas) and her pack of 15 year old friends all do, though.
Game... blouses.
I'm in the relatively new field of Computer Animation and I've worked with a few older people who've had dozens of years of experience under their belt. I don't have much respect for many of them. Maybe it's just relevant in the artistic field, but most older people got into the industry when big studios were snapping up anyone who could move a mouse around. Lots of the older guys didn't know anything about animation when they started, and didn't have much incentive to learn or progress over the years. Once they spent a little bit in the big studios, they could stay there based solely off their resumes.
The barrier to entry right now is a lot higher, and there are students out there who are way better animators than people who've been in the industry for a long long time. Don't get me wrong, there are amazing old animators and I've worked with quite a few of those too, but there are just as many bad ones who want the respect without the talent.
The guy is younger than me, but damn he's old! "I still recall paying 35 cents per minute for a coast-to-coast phone call when I was 20."
Sheesh, I remember not beiong able to AFFORD a coast to coast phone call; I'd call Grandma collect (not that she could afford it either).
I was rather dissapointed in TFA. I thought it would be along the lines of that Clint Eastwood movie where he and James Garner played astronaut-engineers, where they made an "impossible" landing by shutting off the computers ("this thing's like flying a brick!") and where the young digital engineers couldn't understand any of the old analog stuff they were supposed to train the young guys on.
That said, most of my friends, both online and offline, are in their twenties (half my age).
You are the only one in the Wall Mart checkout line not talking on a cell phone to pass the time
Young men are such pussies. REAL men don't gab on any phone, landline or cell (unless there's a hot chick he wants to lay on the other end).
When you walk down the street with your friends you're talking only to them...
This guy is comparing himself to teenagers, not young adults. None of my twentysomething friends do that. And most of them consider themselves to be nerds.
You don't use IM to let all of your friends know where you are at all times
My daughter used to do that. Now that she's 18 she doesn't.
You haven't downloaded hundreds of ringtones because you think spending 99 cents per ringtone is a ripoff
Well it IS! Anybody stupid enough to pay a buck for a ring tone is too stupid to call him or herself a "nerd." If you are that dumb yet still socially awkward, you are a "dork," not a nerd.
You don't download songs every night to load on your iPod
I don't know anybody with an iPod. Jeff, a guitar player pushing thirty (his hair is thinning) says most of his CDs are ones I've burned for him.
A generation that has never known a world without cell phones, text messaging and IM have built a culture around the technology that is foreign to me
Not foreign to me, and I'm over 50.
it's not uncommon for him to sign up kids to packages that include 2,000 minutes or more of airtime.
There have always been folks with more cents than sense, and they're usually young. I was, once.
But my niece uses the away message feature in IM as a public P.A system.
Not a bad use for IM. However, I don't have time futzing with IM. I'm too busy doing more important things (like drinking beer and reading slashdot).
The technologies I've watched grow have shaped an entire culture of which I am not a part.
That's his own fault. My daughter, who works in a record store, seems to be in a race with me to collect the most CDs. The difference is, she buys hers, while I sample most of mine from LP and cassette.
I build my own computers, I had a web log before the word "blog" was coined or Google existed. You're only as old as you can convince yourself you're not.
If you liked TFA you might want to google K5 for "growing up with computers", "useful dead tech" (I think that's what itwas titled), and "Good riddance to bad technology" (again, I've forgotten the exact title).
(mind reading capcha="fuck it")
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=163790&cid= 13677983
point to me at some point in the last 100 years where your average person knew to any degree of certainty how their tech worked
Back in the seventies if you didn't know how your car worked you were considered a sissy.
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=163790&cid= 13677999
Who knows how things will work 30 years from now.
Who cares? I'll be dead!
It will all be magic b
Actually, he was standing on the shoulders of other men, who were standing on the shoulders of still other men, and so on. Shoulders all the way down.
The same applies to any generation; they see the previous generation's work mostly, not the long chain stretching back to that first guy that set his forest on fire and noticed that he wasn't as cold anymore.
Have you read my blog lately?
I imagine many of us here, growing up, took things apart. We took apart radios, bicycles, computers, legos, train tracks, games, the kitchen stove, the toilet, etc. Basically anything we can get our hands on.
The engineers in generation will too. You go back farther and include disecting animals.
It all depends on what's around & what you can learn by taking it apart. And if you need to.
I don't need to recompile the kernel anymore. (I did w/ 0.95 and Minix before that). If I was starting today I'd never add that to my skills.
The non engineers will not take things apart. If it's not working "the way it should be" they'll adapt. Engineers adapt thier environment.
Go on. Explain how fire works. Yet we've been using it for thousands of years. It doesn't matter that everyone knows how everything works, it only matters that they know how to use it and there are some people who do know how it works.
Deleted
The young are great for working 12 hours a day on implementing stuff, but lack the experience to know WHAT to spend that time on. How many IM clients in sourceforge? And they are dirt cheap.
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.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
I'm a smart, technically savvy individual, who generally knows how ALL of his technology works.
You are also a pretentious jackass.
Is this really a new phenomenon? How many of you can spout out how a color TV works? I recall a 30 year old sci-fi story where they time-teleport someone from the future back to the present. They talk about all kinds of wonders, but can't say how they work anymore than we can say how a TV or radio works. (And yes, many of us do know how it all works, past and present, but we are the statistical minority -- the point is this minority is nothing new.)
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
There is a difference between knowledge and intelligence you know -- or maybe you don't know. At any rate, you know now -- now understand it. (QED)
Required reading for internet skeptics
The first time I did it, it took about 8 hours, plus more time to carve the tools. The second time, with tools already built, took me five minutes.
All the scientists were banned from Earth on a space ship. They headed toward Alpha-Centari or something they thought had a chance of being inhabitable. This trip was to take a very very long time so the older generation was trying to teach the younger generation how to keep the ship going. They didn't do too well and by the time they got to the planet, the ship was falling apart and they didn't know how to stop it or get down to the planet.
IIRC, there was one old timer( 2nd or 3rd gen oldtimer ) still alive in the zero-G section of the ship. He told them what they needed to know.
Until Bush or his party declares all science inconclusive, the Church of Bush, the new science of the planet and sends anybody with an IQ in the triple digits out into space,,, I think we can count on the current education system to educate the youth.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I don't know about irrelevant, but the "Jack-of-all-Trades" is certainly a lot harder to find lately.That's because WE'RE HIDING.
Geezer Tech: They can have my sliderule when they pry it from my cold dead hands.
Young Blood Tech: --Looks at watch-- That shouldn't be too long from now.
Geezer Tech: Did I tell you we use to use punch cards and magnetic tape? Boy, those were the days.
Young Blood Tech: About a thousand times. Careful, you're getting drool in your pocket protector.
Geezer Tech: You want to see my floppy disk?
Young Blood Tech: --looks alarmed-- That's Okaaay! While I may be curious, I'm not into that kind of tech.
Geezer Tech: I've got this really keen FORTRAN program that can calculate the drag coefficient on a brassiere.
Young Blood Tech: Yes, I'm sure you do.
Geezer Tech: Some of the guys at the company I worked for was really dissappointed when they no longer needed live models for the wind tunnel.
Young Blood Tech: I would be too. --looks at watch-- Well, time flies when you are having fun. And it's time for me to do a Starbucks run.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
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.
How many 'old folks' know those old technologies? I'm pretty young and I have a better understanding of some underlying concepts (TCP/IP, x86 arch, etc) from ages ago than most of my 40 year old coworkers. This particular guy might be smart enough to where he notices younger people "riding on his/their technology" but he just hasn't met the right young people yet. Unless the 'old folks' were the people who built the TCP/IP spec or something, they probably don't know much more than many techy youth.
Well...ermmm...gramatically, he could be saying that it is just the "classes" of electronics that are new, not that they are based on some new quantum principals. But leave it to /.ers who pretty much know he meant quantum computing and blow it way out of proportion.
I just went back to school, and am shocked at what seems to be a wholesale cluelessness when it comes to technology. In one class, a teacher asked, "who here will admit to watching Star Trek?" I was thinking to myself, "Since when isn't it cool to watch Star Trek?" Despite being raised with computers in their homes, it seems programming or even web development knowledge is still strictly for the nerds. I remember going to computer camp learning on RadioShack Tandy computers, and sometimes Apples. I thought that kids today would by now take basic tech-literacy skills for granted. Instead, all they know how to do is surf the web, use email, type in Word, and play games. I don't even think many know how to get pr0n on usenet (and now that the RIAA has every prof mentioning the evils of file-sharing, many don't even do that)! I was thinking that by coming back to school I'd be put to shame by all these young bloods, but it seems geekiness is still dominated by the Jedi, holed-up in their engineering and computer science classrooms. The masses remain blissfully unaware.
# 1. Even if you do everything correct, if you do it in the wrong order, it's still wrong. KNOW the sequence.
# 2. You take precautions BEFORE you take risks. There's no "just reboot" to fix a problem of 1,000 scattered cards.
Punch cards were great for really grinding those two lessons into your soul. If you can learn them & live them on your own then don't be too concerned about the old geezers' bragging.
We all know it's coming.
Take a look at whats coming for the bleeding edge.
40-50 years from now, most "people" won't leave their pod. Why would they when they get round the clock nutrient feeds and the constant companionship of the ever present web/matrix. Why would anyone ever "jack out" to engage bodies that have become sullied from non-use? "People" won't expose themselves to the extreme atmospheric conditions that will exist, caused by climate change and rampant pollution.
Robots will do most if not all labor that requires any physical movement.
While virtually aware in the web/matrix, minds won't waste their time on pondering that their bodies used to actually "get up" in "the morning" to go to "work".
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Back before the industrial revolution, there were very few things (biological "devices" aside), if any, that people didn't basically understand how they worked. Anything that they didn't understand was practically "magic". But since the industrial revolution, people have been becoming less and less aware of how the parts of their daily lives work in comparison to the past (cathode ray tube, scan lines, IR remote, is only a basic understanding of how a TV works, and even the most knowledgable people [even in the field] probably can't grasp the entire workings of a TV down to all circuits and technology in use). It makes a person wonder what kind of long-term affects this "it just works" attitude may have on society.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
Old - few people knew or worked with computers, punchcards, BASIC and FORTRAN yay! Slow computers, limited use, limited functionality. New - digital media, internet, wikipedia, instant information....everyone has a PC or uses one, not everyone is an expert, find your niche and run with it! Don't sell out to the lowest common denominator. Invent, innovate, design...most of all, think positive...anything can happen +++
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
It's one of the whole points of society. Guess what? I don't *want* to do my own plumbing. I'm prefectly happy to not know the intricacies of how the SEC works, all the details of the IEC, and the intricacies of corporate law in Botswana (hint: I don't live in Botswana and will likely never incorporate there). I kind of wish I could do more work on my car, but really, most of the time I'd take it to someone else, anyway. At the same time, if I'm interested, I'll learn as much on these or any other topics as I want or need to.
And that's true for many people of the younger generations today. Others are stupid, lazy, drugged out or whatever. But guess what? That was also true whne I was their age, and when my parents were their age (substitute booze for drugs back then, but the point is the same), and so on, all the way back Cain and Abel (whether literal or not).
There will always be something of a generation gap, but how much of one, and how it applies, is defined as much by the adult's attitude as by the youth's attitude. If you're truly worried about the youth of today, get to know them, spend time with them, take an interest in them and what they're interested in, and you'll find opportunities to make a difference. But be prepared to be made different. (For instance, be prepared to find out there's still good music being made today, and I don't mean by people emulating whoever you liked in high school or college.)
I'll be 50 in December. I have lots of teenage and kid friends. (No, I'm not Michael Jackson!) I listen to them, and they listen to me. Pretty simple, really. It just takes a decision not to be an old fart, and to try.
As a teenager, I took the "other" Peter Pan Pledge (I'll never grow up!) Like almost everyone else, I broke it. But eventually I remembered, and decided life was too short to spend it working so hard to be an adult. There are definitely advantages to being an adult. The world needs adults. But it needs adults who arent obsessed or consumed with their adulthood.
As necessary knowledge fields are depopulated, the renumeration for their skills will increase, slowing or reversing the depopulation. Supply and demand. How much did FORTRAN programmer get during the "Y2K crisis"?
You reminded me of one of my own "geezer"-ish peeves. People who abuse compile times by trying something (anything), and compiling it to see if that one worked, and if not they just try something else (usually by adding.) I almost wish compilers still took hours to build code so that you had to actually *think* about what it was you were changing or else you wasted an entire hour on each mindless change you did. Watching the uninitiated program today makes me feel like a carpenter watching someone hammer yet another nail into a board that just won't stay up. Scripting languages can exacerbate that problem, I think.
People who quote themselves bug the crap out of me -- Me.
Tell me again why residential toilets can't go "WHOOOSH!!!!!" like commercial toilets?
Because most builders are cheap and install crappy (pun intended) gravity-fed toilets. This is the type of toilet you're looking for.
back in the old days, we had to telnet in to the slashdot server and read the MOTD to see the articles! Comment were through talk(1). I knew things were going downhill when on that fateful day Taco "upgraded" ./ to gopher.
Yet the immediate feedback that one gets from modern environments tends to change the way that one thinks about things... It's a very different mental experience to program today than it was in the olde times.
What I do agree with, however, is that many programmers lack "intent" -- they make changes without understanding the intent behind them. Kind of like how some people blurt out things they don't mean in regular discourse.
-Stu
I'm a 16-year-old highschooler in Australia, and - not to mean any offence - am annoyed by people who think messing abount on their xboxen is l33t. I agree with the original poster who said that less people are understanding how things work, but for me, the problem seems to be accessing all that information. I mean - I'd love to be able to understand each part of a (vintage) computer, write in assebmly, and put two and two together to make a valve radio, but it feels like it's an 'oral tradition' that is only accessible if you know the right people...
elynnia
The thing to do is encourage young minds. Show them what they're missing. Of course, if we're talking some warez-cracking script-kiddie who knows nothing but half of one toy language and doesn't *care* to know any more, that's hardly above consideration. We call those "lusers".
Would that be the same OSI that is the 7 layer model of which TCP/UDP/ICMP is the fourth layer and IP is the third?
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.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Oh, I used to think that as well. But with nothing left but ignorant people around you, which of them will know what you're good for?
Know a guy near 60. Wont call him old because he doesnt act it. Good physical shape and quite hot with tech. You're only old if you want to act old. What the hell is this article's gripe? Why doesnt this writer just get with it and enjoy the technology like cell phones. This is unlike my great grandma that was 70 something when TV came out. Jesus, I guess she should have been overwhelmed and never watched a program. And when the first jet travel came out she was hotdoging every month from east coast to west coast to visit her sister. People recall her loving the new jet age. Every older generation thinks the younger ones are punks. Doesnt sound like this writer exposes himself to young people to find out how smart a lot of them are. The barriors that exist, I think, are his own. Granted lot of generation x and y dont want to talk to people over 40. But that's because of all the spiessers they meet in that age group. Who wants to hear some old dummy reading the riot act at you, like NateTech. And then there was my great grandma. Was she special, or has the US changed that much that the old folks have become more negative and closed minded.
and have to clean up all the years of sloppy work that the "old guys" did. Spaghetti code, custom craplications, rewritten interpreters, bah. If knowing "how things work" means that you can narf it up better, then I'll go with my common sense and off the shelf software.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Am I the only one that thought binary math was the coolest class ever? Just think.. the way we learned math in elementary and highschool was totllly wrong. It's like finding a new demension.
Zoid.com
i guess i'll go put up my teeth now and go to bed. reading all the responses has kind of worn me out.
Doesn't, but some people are interested. There was a fascinating program on Nova about engineering feats such as the pyramids, where the methods used to build them have long been lost. In fact it is even a bit embarrassing to discover how hard some of this stuff is. Stealing a bit from the reality shows, they would have a couple of contestants, with various theories of how the darn thing was built, and then they would follow them in their triumphs and travails as they attempted to replicate, on a much smaller scale, what some of the ancients had done a millenium or two before. One of the interesting shows was ideas on how the Romans built an awning across the Coliseum.
Suddenly it strikes me a picture of a friend of mine, top high school student, math club and programming wiz, later to study for a Phd in CS and graphics at Stanford, gazing at an ancient PDP-7, staring down at a roll of punch tape in hand, then at the switches on the command panel, and wondering how in the world the 'grumpy old men' got this thing to run...
But it has nothing to do with generational differences. I still want or need to know everything there is to know about it.
God knows, enough people who think they understand TCP/IP are woefully missing details on the lower layers; a bit of OSI understanding goes a long way, especially on the IP side of things.
Of course, there's no point saying that here, but I will do... old fart that I am.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
I'm a 38 year old who has worked in IT for 20 years now and have a fair idea about how a lot of technology works.
Having said that if technology was limited to ONLY what I understand then the current "tech-tree" would not be any near as large as it is today. I would consider myself expert in some fields but in others, I'm just a user.
I think "techno-geezers" may be over estimating exactly how much of the technology they understand. You get the impression from some of these comments that us old guys built the Internet and all related technologies with our bare hands.
The world moves on, feel great about contributions you have made in the past and then go make some more. Wishing for things to stay the same is like hoping your own achievements will remain the pinnacle of technology, well they won't be. Whinging about how things were better in the past is only an excuse to let yourself live there. Continue to learn and continue to try new tech, you never know it might be useful.
Appreciate the past, but don't live there.
Wow, dang wow.... Now I've had some conceited thoughts, but not like this. Just getting to the iron age would be a bit of a push. Locating (and recognizing) a suitable ore that is fine enough to work, but not so large that you need to crush it. Building a vessle that can handle the temperatures that are needed to reduce Iron. Hacking up enough wood to do this without real tools. Working iron without an anvil (you gotta pour the first anvil). Taming wild animals over the course of years. Determining the correct time of year to plant crops. Determining the years that locusts will swarm so you can plan accordingly. Finding proper medicines for common ailments (infected burns when you'll be playing with fire might cut down that lifetime). Managing to get survivable clothing (a dead carcass isnt leather till it's tanned, otherwise it decays in short order). Sure building a shelter isnt too harsh, but making it animal proof might be harder. Getting storage of food down can be a bear too. Salt is a trick to find if your in a non-costal reigon. Oh and some diplomacy might be in order if some tribal elder thinks that your corrupting the youth too much with your unholy shiny metal ways. Plus being the only guy that uses soap, you might come off as a bit of a priss.
Storm
Young people are not as educated as old people who have had much more time to educate themselves.
How the hell is this news?
At the same time, does this mean my grandpa is now a reliable news source?
And now the Grandpa forecast: "Screw your newfangled doppleganger alien radar crap! Me doppleknee says there's a storm a-brewin!"
"What worries me is not that society can't handle a few bumps but that the vast majority of people can't even list the core institutions critical to the function of western civilization, let alone explain why they are needed. The rampant ignorance reguarding the underpinnings of civilization presents a disturbing problem. Absent a drastic change in public demeanor, it seems we are likely to vote ourselves gradually into barbarity."
That worries me too, and has since at least Grade 9 when I read Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. It made me realize that widespread blindness would cripple the world, since there would simply be too few people left to care for the blind ones until they could become mostly self sufficient again. Our society depends on such complex technologies to provide us with the most basic of essential supplies. We need water purification, pumping, and drainage. We need food growing, harvesting, transporting, and even pre-preparation. Never mind climate control for extreme weather locations too.
What would you list as society's most basic institutions? If you claim the 5th, I'll understand as you might not want to give any terrorists reading some bad ideas, but I'd like to hear a bright person's view of what we can't live without.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
No one outside the field has ever known shit about metallurgical techniques. This goes back to... about 4000, 5000 BC or so, if I'm remembering the most recent archeological estimates right.
All of the stuff you name is ridiculously simple to understand from a practical standpoint just by looking at the device. Show me someone who can extract copper and tin from ore and treat them properly into a hardened alloy just from seeing a chunk of bronze and I'll eat my hat. And don't even get me started on iron. Even your engineering professionals (the ones not actually working in metallurgy) from the last century or two who use(d) steels all the time couldn't tell you how the stuff is made or what exactly the difference between two alloys is, beyond listed things like hardness and euler's ratio. It's all delegated to 'materials science' departments now.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that most of you computer sciency types don't know how to refine silicon either.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
"They are really riding on the backs of the 'old folks' like us that built the goodies they enjoy." I bet he knew how to make microprocessors, physically and schematically. In addition, I bet he knew how to make the plant that manufactured the silicon. In addition, I bet he independantly discovered the semiconducting properties of silicon as a youth. I also presume that he knows exactly how the language he speaks was formulated, and how to build the copper smelters in plants that give him wiring. What a jackass. Nobody in the world could build us back to this level of technology if we suddenly lost it all. That's how we work.
I'm willing to bet a consideribly larger percentage of our generation has a greater understanding of how modern technology works then theirs (assuming "our generation" is the 20-30 age group). So what's the story? It takes a whle for people to understand complex ideas (like how technology works), and no matter what generation we are talking about, only a small percentage are in a field that requires them to know a lot about the inner workings of technology.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
I share your belief in human resilience, but there's a big test coming for the industrialised world when oil starts running out. To paraphrase the Chinese curse - there are interesting times ahead.
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
Dude, leave me alone, I'll pull an all-nighter, and you will have an *awesome* new light bulb in the morning. Or by Friday, at the latest.
(The downside: after the software engineer changes your light bulb, you discover that your washing machine doesn't work quite right any more).
#2 a. Always draw a line with a felt-tip pen across the top of your deck, from one front corner to the opposite back corner.
Saved my butt a couple of times...
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
I've learnt this lesson by using floppy disks as a backup medium (in the beginning of the 90's).
Do not try to win time by taking a bunch of floppies and doing a backup, because somewhere down the road there will be faulty floppies. First format them to weed out the bad ones, then do the backup.
"Also when you say you know "how ALL of {your) technology works" you're probably talking out your ass anyway, since you probably can't fix your own TV set, or grind the valves in your car, or make asphalt from scratch, or... Nobody knows how ALL their technology works these days."
Well, knowing HOW it works isn't the same as being able to fix it. That being said, I know how all of the things you listed work, and am able to do two of them (grinding valve in my brother the engine builders workshop, making asphalt with my dad the general contractor).
Why be such a jerk about it?
"You are also a pretentious jackass."
Why? Because you're so unfailingly ignorant that you can't go to "howstuffworks.com" to find out about something you don't understand?
You can't name ANYTHING technology related that I don't have an understanding of. And EVEN IF YOU COULD, I would research it to gain understanding.
Not everyone in the world chooses to remain stupid like you. Some of us seek to do away with our ignorance.
Perhaps if you spent less time insulting others when they know more than you, and more time actually learning, your petty insecurities wouldn't rule your life.
no not that goblin, i've been a goblin of one form or the other on the net for 15yrs now, and am glad i took the safety in numbers approach to online identity. there are just too many needles in the goblin haystack, to identify which ones are me now.
edinburgh... you think a city that is the most radioactive in europe is somehow greatest? this a measure of culture and history you know... not how quickly it can mutate the local inhabitants into mekons!
"But with nothing left but ignorant people around you, which of them will know what you're good for?"
The ones who need their crap fixed when it breaks.
Funny that YOU ever thought anyone else was ignorant...
It's more about culture and individual habits. When I was a kid 25-30 years ago my sisters would spend hours on the phone almost every day. Meanwhile I would use the phone for maybe a couple minutes to find out where everyone was meeting and then we would actually get together in person. Usually we would figure it all out before hand during school. How strange. ;-)
I know plenty of people of similar age that spend a ton of time on their cell phones, chatting on IM, etc. It's more a matter of how social you are and how you communicate.
One day you will learn humility, and this will come down on you. Until then, yes, presume that everyone that tells you that having such a huge ego obviously envies you (even though I know nothing about you but your pretentious remarks).
i think what u r talking about is the rural/urban dichotomy: few (sub)urban dwellers know anything about how anything works, from food (if it's not in the store...) to hot water (call the super;-)
and now humanity's reached the point where more people live in cities/urban areas than outside...reminds me of an old sci-fi novel (title/author lost in the mists;-) about humanity living exclusively in mega-towers...
I honestly have to agree with him. The only thing that I see that changes this is the actual seeking out of knowledgable educators in order to truly understand the technology that is being released, changed, and/or upgraded. I'm 28 and I don't understand how alot of my tech actually works, so I'm going to school to learn @ Full Sail. I'm getting more than I bargained for and it's totally worth the effort to learn the material. Sooner, or later those kids who don't understand won't be kids anymore and still won't understand. Theu will have no more "old timers" to ask for an explanation. So ya gotta be proactive in order to get over that hump and continue tech's progress for the next "next-gen".
The best such a person could do would be to provide the general principles and set up a research system. That's pretty much what you'd have to do for today's technological base, the only difference being that it would take longer to build the tools to build the tools.
In terms of actuallly finding someone who knows the general principles behind technologies, I suspect that it would be easier to find such a person nowadays (hint: look for avid fans of hard science fiction) than in the 1500s, when the people who had the time to learn much about them tended to spend that time on other pursuits, e.g. theological speculation.
Honestly, fire is nothing more than a chemical reaction which uses rapid oxidation to create massive amounts of heat and light. Steel, in the presence of oxygen and hydrogen, rusts. Apply enough of both, plus a little "starter" heat to get things going, and steel will BURN. Steel rusting is nothing more than a really turned-down version of fire. Controlled oxidation, whatever the source, generates heat - which is why we have a body temperature (probably also why we need elemental iron in our diet, too). This is a very, very, VERY simple explanation, and it really is more complex than all that - but at base, all fire is, is rapid oxidation.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Removal of seeds from the cotton "boll"
Basically, cotton, like almost any other vegetable that hasn't been nutered by Monsanto, has seeds. These seeds reside in the "fruit" of the plant. In that case of cotton, that fruit is the "boll", or the white, fluffy, fibrous thing prized by the cotton farmer. The seeds are in the "middle" of the cotton boll, and being that they are surrounded by a tangled mass of white fluffy fiber, they are very difficult to remove (I know - I used to live in Bakersfield, California, right across the street from a cotton field - which is now a park).
In the past, before the cotton gin, removal of seeds was done via a method of combing and carding, very similar to what was done for wool - basically a manual method of using various "combs" to comb the seeds and fibers away from each other. The main problem with this method was the labor intensiveness and slowness of the method. In addition, the manual methods also tended to cause waste of the cotton (ie, cotton stuck on the seeds) - it was practical to get every bit of cotton off because the process was already a problem to begin with.
Numerous inventors tried to build machines to alleviate these problems, but it was Eli Whitney's which won the day. His machine relied on a few simple mechanisms (most involving spinning wood rollers studded with a myriad of small metal spikes/nails along with steel "combs" to separate the cotton from the seeds) which worked amazingly well, were easily driven by water, wind, and steam (or human and animal power), and was a cheap machine to manufacture. Not sure on the patenting of the device, but I seem to recall that it wasn't well protected, IP wise, and the ideas in the device spread quickly. Seemingly single-handedly revolutionizing the cotton farming and processing industry (not to mention the fact that the now large and steady supply of seed created a nice animal feed and vegetable oil business)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Basically, instead of mechanical elements providing all the timing, a computer takes inputs from a variety of sensors (accelerator position, air flow, oxygen, knock, camshaft/crankshaft position, etc), mashes them through a complex real-time algorithm, and spits out commands to advance/retard spark timing, adjust the fuel/air mixture (after all, a fuel injector is nothing more than a very fancy solenoid valve driven by pulse-code modulation techniques), valve opening/closure (in some high-end cars the valves are driven by solenoids to allow very precise timing - I expect this to become more mainstream), etc. Other computers control when/how to shift (in an automatic transmission system - sometimes - others just use standard load/hydraulics to control this - which is nothing more than a fancy hydraulic analog computer), how to apply the brakes (anti-lock brakes and traction control via monitoring wheel slippage/etc via toothed magnetic hall-effect sensor packages)...
In the end, though, it is just an piston moving in a cylinder connected to a crankshaft spinning a flywheel connected to transmission (composed of either an "inline" manual gear train with a clutch or an automatic with torque-convertor and two to four inline planetary gear devices - or, on certain Hondas and others, a CVT using conical devices and belts or similar) connected to a driveshaft connected to a differential which spins the wheels. Some of these may be front wheel drive vehicles where all of those packages are packed tightly into one case, or in a rear-wheel drive vehicle, spread along the length of the undercarriage. But honestly, cars are simple, and always will be. I think as long as Chilton and Haynes continue to do complete tear-downs and rebuilds, fixing your own car won't be that big of a deal (unless the horror that is those "electro-mechanical" fasteners become vogue - and even then, nothing a cutting torch can't get through). I imagine cars will become more complex - hybrids are pretty advanced - but all they do is throw a generator/motor/battery package in the drivetrain mix, so if you know anything about electric cars, charge controllers, motor controllers, etc - no real big deal.
Personally, I think most of the problems with today's vehicles don't stem so much from seeming complexities of the vehicle themselves, but rather from the lack of information about how all the systems work together from the manufacturer. Basically, the control system (the computer, sensors, etc) of the system is "closed source" - it was like pulling teeth to get the manufacturer to give out information about the codes the ECU throws when there is a problem, to regular joe mechanics and engine scan-tool makers - and that took an "act of Congress" - quite literally! Manufacturers are doing everything it can to keep the home mechanic (even - and maybe especially - those who understand the computer side of the equation) from repairing their own cars. Audi even has a vehicle out there without a hood - just a little door on the fender to put fluids in. To get to the engine, you have to remove the whole front body work of the car, and there is an "interlock" mechanism that flags the computer when this is done, so even if you got it off and had access, the computer won't let you restart the car unless you trigger the proper sequence (which is probably only known by Audi and their dealers - thus requiring you to take it to the dealer for maintenance and pay big $$$$!) - now, this wouldn't be so bad if this just stayed on "rich people's cars" - but it probably won't, it will trickle down to normal vehicles quicker than you realize - I expect within 10 years, maybe sooner, for it to be like this.
It is getting to the point where I am seriously considering building my next car from "scratch" (actually, a combination of scratch and "junk" parts)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon