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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.""
On top of that, I don't get the sense from reading the article that the author knows how any of this stuff works either. How is he any different from us except that he was around when some current techs didn't exist?
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.
Remember, statistically, half of the people you meet are below average.
Funny mods don't count towards Karma, you stupid fuck.
Disconnect from the internet, please. You're wasting bandwidth that intelligent people could be using.
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, statistically, half of the people you meet are below the median, not the average.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
[...] Two or three hundred years ago, you could read every book ever written.
... but dude ... This went on in the 200's B. C., and it is interesting to note that there were already so many works in existence that obtaining a copy of each would have been an impossible undertaking even then. Even just in English around the early 18th century you would have been in trouble.
I agree with your main point
yes, we have no bananas
In the bad old days, it was necessary to understand the hardware if you wanted to write interesting software. It may not be possible to understand everything about modern systems, but don't forget that we learned it about the old systems because we had to, not because it was always fun.
I used to know all the memory locations in the Atari 800 and how to use them to do all sorts of things. I knew 6502 assembly and a slew of other languages for the Atari. It was a good platform at the time, but I wouldn't want to go back to the hardware or even the software of yesteryear.
I don't know as much about any of the platforms I use now. However, I now have a ton of other tools available that make what I'm doing easier. I'll take a modern Unix system over an Atari 800 any day of the week. I believe I can emulate the Atari under Unix, as a testament to the progress we've made. I can also appreciate that I don't have to solve as many problems as before, because others have already done it and made their programs available.
I've been using computers for 25 years now. I think I count as a geezer. I don't think my kids will lack any of the opportunities I had. In fact, I think they'll be better off because I can give them my old hardware running Unix. They won't have to mess around with a bunch of proprietary systems before they can discover the One True Way. =)
Except that IQ follows a normal distribution. In a normal distribution the mean is the average.
AccountKiller
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. Like the old saying goes... "If I've seen farther than others, it's because I've stood on the shoulders of giants."
Why does the fact TCP and OSI were once competitors matter in modern discourse? Further, what is more dead and broken about the OSI 7 layer model versus the DoD 4 layer model? Finally, how exactly are the basic assumptions of OSI and TCP so different?
If we ran a 7-layer network stack based on the OSI model you would have a point. But TCP/IP is designed around a 4-layer model. Trying to fit it up against the 7-layer OSI model doesn't work because it doesn't give you an accurate picture of what is going on.
The main problem is this: OSI was designed around the assumption that every layer would handle very specific types of problems (such as error detection) while TCP/IP is a much more flexible model where only 4 functions are required and the rest can be implimented wherever makes the most sense in your environment. For example, UDP doesn't handle restreaming the way TCP does, so if you want to handle streams over UDP (i.e. as in TFTP), you impliment this in the application layer. The OSI model doesn't really model this in any way which matches what is going on.
The 4-layer DoD model is really simple. You have 4 layers which handle specific problems (from the bottom up):
1) network access layer: How do we transmit over the wire?
2) Internetwork Layer: Now do we get the packet to the right computer over a heterogenous bunch of intermediary networks?
3) Transport Layer: How do we make sure that the data being sent gets to the right program?
4) Application Layer: How do we apply this data?
This model matches what is actually happening. The OSI model does not, though it might have had the OSI protocol suite ever been fully developed (all we have are a couple of protocols like HDLCP or whatever it's called and some concepts never covered in classes (like virtual circuits) which have made their way into convergance protocols such as ATM.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Like the old saying goes... "If I've seen farther than others, it's because I've stood on the shoulders of giants."
It's actually a quote from Issac Newton...
now if you know anything about the real Issac Newton this quote seems remarkably out of character, the rest of his career he was an insufferable arrogant bastard (probably made even worse by being right a lot of the time) but he was never one to thank others for their contributions to his work... just look at calculus...
but if Newton disliked Leibniz he hated Robert Hooke (you remember hooke's law for springs?) with a passion. (Hooke had demonstrated flaws in newtons theory of light)... hooke also had ideas about and inverse square law for gravity nearly 10 yrs before newton, but lacked the maths to prove it.
Hooke was also very very short, so newtons reference to standing on the shoulder's of giants was not some magnanimous gesture on his part, but rather an act of sarcastic bile directed at hooke.
after hookes death, when newton was president of the royal society, newton systematically removed as much of hookes work as he could from the records, which is why now most people can only remember the thing about springs if he's lucky.
Its a great shame really, because by all accounts Hooke was the much more interesting person.
his book micrographia was the first "best seller" the coffe table book of its day, everyone had to have one, the first time the microscopic world was made available to the masses.
He was very fond of attractive young women, having scandalous affairs and 3 in bed sex romps with his house keepers until late in his life.
he made a small fortune after the fire of london, being good mates with wren, as he was london surveyor. Basically he was the one that went round to assess peoples compensation claims regarding the amount of land they lost, and obviously the more money you gave the surveyor the more likely he was to agree with your definitions of your land boundry.
oh yeah did i mention he and wren designed the royal observatory at greenwich?
ultimately hooke was the cool scientist a lot of us would like to be, and newton was the insufferable wanker a lot of us wind up being...
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
You apparently aren't familiar enough with the technical details behind the y2k issue to realize that your kind of thinking is exactly what got everybody into the whole Y2K mess in the first place. Never underestimate the enduring nature of properly maintained computer software and hardware. I'll give you the 'paper MCSE's' might be history, but the COBOLers won't.
"I could probably read every childrens book ever published since the invention of the printing press in a few months if I wasn't working..."
l
http://www.booktrusted.co.uk/nestle/factsheet.htm
"More than 10,000 childrens titles were published in the UK last year, up 2,000 on 2002. (source: BML Ltd Books, Books And The Consumer survey.)"
If you spend 5 minutes on average on each book reading 12 hours each day it would take you 70 days just to read all children's book published in 2003 in the UK.