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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.""
Remember, statistically, half of the people you meet are below average.
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. =)
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.
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