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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.""
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.
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.
"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
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.
You always get this kind of attitude when a technology reaches a divergent point. I would hazard that many people know how to build CPUs and how the internal workings of a system function as ever, it's just that the hardware and the software have slowly diverged over the past twenty years. No longer do you need to know the particulars of a video card to communicate with it, etc. It isn't necessary for software people to know hardware, and visa versa. Both fields have become complex enough to function independently.
Thanks to standardization of system design and function, this isn't really a problem. And I'm certain that AMD and Intel take very careful consideration of the software demands their hardware will face (as do Crucial, ASUS, et al).
There may be a few remaining niches where the software and the hardware remain inextricably intertwined, such as small consumer devices, (iPod Nano, palmtop computers, etc).
It's the modern dilemma: there is too much to know. Two or three hundred years ago, you could read every book ever written. Now you can't even read every book ever written about computing.
It's the old joke: How many software engineers does it take to change a light bulb?
That's a hardware problem.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
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.
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 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!
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.
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.
.. 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)
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.
More then that, it is now impossible to completely understand a computer. I used to program in assembly, and I understood how every chip on the motherboard worked, and all of their little quirks. That is now impossible, and programms must rely on the makers of the chips to make them accessable through drivers.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
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's the modern dilemma: there is too much to know. Two or three hundred years ago, you could read every book ever written. Now you can't even read every book ever written about computing.
But you can read most of what's been written about computing. By eliminating redundant books/passages, you can probably reduce the amount of material by an order of magnitude or two.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
THe problem though is that IT guys often don't have conceptual concepts of the software they are using that work. This is not a problem of either divergance or commoditization but rather the fact that there is so much legacy crap out there that refuses to die (OSI model, for example) but only lives on in the minds of marketeers that in order to be buzzword compliant, you have to learn all sorts of useless crap that doesn't really work.
So many of the younger generation really doesn't understand the TCP/IP suite but they figure they can administer a network. They don't really understand Kerberos but they think they know what they can do with ActiveDirectory. Yet I wonder how long it would take them to join a computer to a domain if I set the clock off by a day or so....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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."
I have to admit, I do wonder somewhat if todays youth is at a bit of a disadvantage when it comes to the nuts-and-bolts of computing.
I was fortunate. I grew up in the generation where having a computer in your home was possible, with devices like the Apple II, Commodore VIC-20 (or 64) or original IBM PC (and later PC XT) weren't completely outside the purchasing ability of your typical middle-class income family.
For this, I count myself lucky. The level of complexity was significantly lower in some regards (the hardware and software didn't do anywhere near as much as a system can do today), however to actually use those systems you typically had to get to know the overall system better.
Today, if you can move a pointing device, you can use a computer. This is a huge step forward in usability and productivity over the old days, but it can also seductively mask the overall complexity inherent in the system. You don't need to know how to POKE a memory location to change the colour of your display's background -- a few simple clicks will do it for you.
By also having more limited possibilities way-back-when, it was somewhat easier to play around with the system, because there were a certain set of delineations as to what was and wasn't possible. Advances in both raw processing power and standard system features/capabilities means that there are so many more facets that jump at you at once, I can imagine it would be hard to figure out where to start just writing a basic program -- there is a huge explosion of options now which simply didn't exist back then. We didn't have half a dozen (or more) APIs per platform to do something, so one didn't have to waste a lot of time trying to figure out which API is best for the task at hand. You didn't have a choice, so you used what was available. And things like audio and video were severely limited by the hardwares capabilities.
There is also the fact that because storage is now cheap, and applications are expected to be more complicated, that the barriers to entry in terms of playing with source code have risen quite a bit. Gone are the days where, because storage was so expensive, you'd buy a book or a magazine with source code listings in it. I remember typing some of these things in, and playing around with them while I was doing so. It was very educational. But such facilities don't really exist today. Magazines can cheaply include a CD-ROM, and the most common platform out there doesn't have any sort of built-in interpreter that you can just type instructions into and play around with like the old systems did (even if it was BASIC).
Now as a user, I dont want to go back to those days. They're dead and gone for a good reason. But just as we give kids toy hammers and cars to play with to grasp certain concepts before we give them a real hammer or let them drive a real car, we don't seem to have a similar sort of system for learning computer software development. We seem to lack any good, common development environments for the young to learn programming concepts.
I started coding when I was 10 -- a relatively common age for my generation. But this sort of thing doesn't seem to happen anymore.
Now on the other side of things, todays 10 year old is more savvy in the way of telecommunications. They can do research on topics quickly and easily on the Internet, whereas the ability to do so when I was 10 simply didn't exist. So I don't think it's fair to say that todays youth are less tech savvy in general -- they have skills which we didn't (and many of whom in my generation still don't) possess. But I do think they are at a certain disadvantage when it comes to programming, if only because the barriers to entry have risen substantially (not to mention the fact that there are so many other cool distractions now that didn't exist back then).
Yaz.
"They" 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
Also, in the Corporate IT field at least, there is strong selection for specialization. Most of our network guys are clueless about operating systems, and most of our O/S people are clueless about low level networking. Hell, most of them wouldn't even know how to do subnet math.
And the corporate environment encourages that. Naturally, nobody not in the network group is allowed to touch the networking equipment, so they'll likely never learn much beyond what they need to know for O/S support, etc etc. This silo-ing extends throughout much of Corporate IT in my experience. It discourages cross-training and encourages specialization to what imo is an excessive degree.
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 was under the impression that Western Civilization has been on the verge of colapse, or at least decline in decay, for a long time now.
Five US Presidents later, I'm done waiting for it to happen.
The economy cycles, but continues to slowly rise. Priorities of morallity shift around, yet we do not decline into nihillistic anarchy, but rather we continue to gradually raise our standards regarding what offends our sensibilities. Countries around us get their shit together and look as if they will "catch up" to us in global competition, and we end up finding a way to trade with them which enhances our prosperity. Our freedoms endure troubling restrictions in some ways, while opening up more than ever before in others, and brutal dictatorships around the world continue to slip into what Reagan once called "the ash bin of history."
I've finally come to conclude that we actually have a rather robust society in place.
As a child, I grew up (like many Cold-War kids) believing that the whole goddamn world would burn up in a massive nuclear apocalypse in my lifetime.
As a young man, I was dead certain that we were living in the declining years of society... that we caught the very tail end of something great, and it will all be over soon.
Today, I've come around to see that calling our society "doomed" is about as meaningful as calling Apple Computer "beleagured."
So farewell to all the hand-wringing and furrowed brows about the future. I now firmly believe that the world will be a even better place during the rest my life than it has been so far. What's more, it will continue to improve long after I'm gone.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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?
Except, of course, that you cant actually fix the *hard* problems with the new stuff unless you know the old stuff. If you're writing a web portal in a managed language, and there's a bug in some platform-specific code in language itself (or the virtual machine), who's going to fix it for you? Who's even going to find it and prove it's not a bug in your web code?
If you understand how to step through assembly in a debugger, and how to read a network trace (or wahtever trace applies to the problem at hand) there's no problem you can't eventually pin down, and given open source, solve.
But the reality is far worse, as people don't generally even understand how their app affects the system and network. Heck, I can't count the times someone has suggested XML or XMLRPC to me on a project for which efficiency is paramount, and couldn't really understand why I'd suggest that their favorite XML package wasn't optimal. Many many programmers just don't get bits and bytes. But the fallacy is that this is something new. Most COBOL programmers didn't "get it" either.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"...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...
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
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.
No dispute. However...
If I'm near a major city, and all the infrastructure is working correctly, I don't need to know how to make my own head gasket for a Land Cruiser (tm). However, if I blow a head gasket in the middle of Kenya (happened to a buddy of mine), it may pay to understand enough of the physical characteristics necessary to fashion a temporary gasket from some chewing gum and the thick leaf from a large, nearby plant.
At every step along the way, it would seem that what's important is "relevant depth of understanding." Relevant to the context in which you work. For some, that may go no further than the key that starts the car. For others, understanding the digitally encoded key interface to the ECC may be an absolute necessity. All users don't need the same level of understanding.
It's for this reason that I am not bothered by Dr. Sagan's oft-quoted "We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology." Replace "science and technology" with "fire and sword making" or "blacksmithing and horses" and you can find periods of history where this generalized statement applies.
The issue seems to be where we establish the "relevant depth of understanding" level. As long as you can accept *some* variance between the user and the developer, I've got no argument with your point.
Tim
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.
I sort of miss the old days sometimes. As a kid doing assembly (and machine!) code on my C64 I felt like I knew almost every little detail of how it worked. I felt like a god in total control of my little universe.
With modern programming its more like being a CEO barking out orders to my minions (makers, compilers, assemblers, linkers and such). I haven't really a f*ing clue what is really going on anymore. I suspect they do a lot of slacking off but I can't see it from my office.
It reminds me of what Richard Feynman said about the advantages of growing up with vacuum tube based radios, how you could much more easily see how they worked. Now it's just a few black boxes connected by hard to see wires, and there as so many bells and whistles, it is harder to get a feel for what is going on.
Perhaps it isn't essential to know all the details, but it is fun to learn anyway. If I had a geeky kid, I'd encourage him to play with my Atmel microcontrollers and developer board. Its good clean fun and maybe it would come in handy some day.
In emergency situations is interesting what dumb mistakes people make because they are so used to being far removed from the details of how things work. After a hurricane several people will always bring their generator indoors and die of carbon monoxide poisoning. Several will make obvious errors cutting up fallen trees and end up crushed. Many don't even seem to know how to cook without electricity or start a fire without matches or a lighter. I know of one person who couldn't even figure out how to eat from plants full of string beans, only knew how to warm them from a can. This is mostly stuff our ancestors dealt with daily.
http://www.marxist.com/
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.
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?
Why UNIX?
Case in point: I remember a young grad programmer who was parsing a free-text address into its component parts. Early 4GL (Powerhouse). He was getting about 4 transactions per hour, and couldn't understand why. His logic was impeccable, but he didn't realise the effect of choosing a string of "Else If"'s over a string of "If - End if"'s would have (there being no case statement in that version iirc). He was forcing a huge amount of activity to happen in the the call argument stack, the worst possible structure to use on that platform at the time. Obvious to an old bit-bender, incomprehensible to someone who was never trained to look below the surface. So yes, knowledge in-depth matters.
Kids these days, can't take the pressure of a few fathoms under the object layer (grumble grumble mutter at shoes).
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
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".