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.""

Comments

Grumpy Old Man

[TripMaster Monkey]

Jeez...this whole story reads like one of Dana Carvey's Grumpy Old Man segments on Dennis Miller's 'Weekend Update' on SNL.

"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

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[biryokumaru]

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.

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[j_kenpo]

"Back in my day, all we had was 640KB, and it was enough. And thats the way we liked it!!!"

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[James_Aguilar]

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?

Re:Grumpy Old Man

['nother poster]

I don't know anything about diverging fieldds and such, but it's simply a sign that the technologies have become commodities. At the early part of a technologies lifecycle only the early adopters and geeks get into it and have to know the nuts and bolts of how it works because you have to make it and maintain it. Then some others come in and you have to maintain it for them. Then the tech gets matured to the point that it becomes a commodity and they still need many of the originl geeks and adopters to maintain it, but they don't do nearly as much down in the guts of the tech anymore. Very few tech geeks nowadays could tell you all the parts that go into a working steam turbine electrical generating system, but they can sure plug in a gadget and use the electricity. This allows the next generation to focus their efforts on the next new technology, which will eventually become the next commodity, ad infinitum.

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[Monkelectric]

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.

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[Fulcrum of Evil]

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.

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[TweakMe]

Try 8KB ...and it was UP HILL, BOTH WAYS!

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[Chris6502]

Put me in mind of the 4 Yorkshiremen.. "I used to get up a 10 o'clock at night, 2 hours before I went to bed. Ate 2 pieces of cold gravel, drank a cup of sulphuric acid and paid mill owner for privilege of going to work........ Tell that to the kids today...."

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[xappax]

KB??? You had KB? Boy, we thanked our lucky stars if we had a couple B back in my day!

And when we didn't, we made do with A!

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[xsbellx]

and should end "...ad nauseam"

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[the bluebrain]

[...] Two or three hundred years ago, you could read every book ever written.
 
I agree with your main point ... 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.

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[biryokumaru]

I'll bet the people who maintain or design and build the Tesla turbines know how they work. That's what I mean by divergence versus commoditization.

With commoditization, as you describe it, the common fear is that all the knowledge will one day be lost because no one has to use it anymore. You see this in a lot of B Sci-Fi movies set in the distant future, often leading to religious-based uprising (religion being the clear enemy of science, what?)

Whereas, with technological divergence, you end up with the breakup of a field into two, like "computers" into "hardware" and "software." There are plenty of electrical engineering students who know what NPN and PNP mean, and haven't a clue about, say, the pros and cons of classes versus structs re functional programming and modularization.

Thus I say it is a point of divergence, because the field has broken into component fields. Commoditization is a realistic fear, which was certainly described somewhat in TFA, but I think it is somewhat narrow-minded at this point. Most people don't know a carburetor from a transaxle, or what ring and tell have to do with traditional land-line telephones. That doesn't mean that knowledge is lost.

I, being a believer in meritocracy, ignore the actions of the end-users, who know not what they do.

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[qwijibo]

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. =)

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[superid]

luxury!

We had no zeros at all and had to use twigs for ones!

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[adavies42]

It's the old joke: How many software engineers does it take to change a light bulb?

That's a hardware problem.

And how many hardware engineers does it take to change a light bulb?

We'll fix it in software.

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[einhverfr]

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....

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[xs650]

don't know what ring and tell have to do with traditional land-line telephones. That doesn't mean that knowledge is lost.

It's "ring and tip" , young'un :)

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[mrbooze]

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.

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[utnow]

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."

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, this is a basic economic problem relating to specialization.

People don't need to understand everything about every mundane detail in life to be able to be a functional and productive member of society, and indeed we shouldn't strive for this. Honestly, I don't know how to change my own oil in my car, but I doubt that the dude at Jiffy Lube knows anything about software development. We all have our own absolute and comparative advantages in life. For me, and for society, it is better for me to take my car in and get my oil changed rather than me taking up more time doing it myself. This allows me to save time which I can spend doing things which I have an advantage in (like developing software).

It's a basic "Jack of all trades, master of none" issue. The guy at Jiffy Lube could spend all his time learning to program, but his time is better spent serving society with something that he has a comparative advantage in. I could spend much of my time learning about raising crops for food and changing my oil, but it is more efficient to allow others who are better at this to specialize while I work within my own area of expertise.

In summation, the opportunity cost of changing my own oil is higher than taking it to Jiffy Lube. Simple economics...

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[limber]

In one of my English lit. classes at university this topic came up and the argument was made that John Milton (~1600s) was potentially the last person who could credibly claim that he had read "everything of importance". (He somewhat famously spent several years post matriculation in intensive private study, basically just reading.) (He also famously went blind later on in life...)

The prof. further went on to make a current comparison with respect to the magnitude of published materials. He stated that, if as an undergrad today you decided to start studying, without exception, every piece of extant Canadian children's literature, by the time you were 60 or so you might be able to claim a fairly comprehensive knowledge of that particular sub-genre, not counting everything that had been published since you started reading.

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[lgw]

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.

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[xero314]

I have always been of the beleif that the seperation or hardware and software has actually been holding the computer industry back. I am one of the few "young bloods" that actually have a good understanding of the hardware (most of the people I work with don't even know what a register is, let alone how to use it). This lack of knowledge by newer software engineer has caused many programs to be much slower and more memory intensive than they need to.

A classic example of this shows up in Java alot, where large amounts of data are loaded into memory (undoubtedly swap) for manipulation later. Those of use with good understanding of the underlying system realizes it's a pretty big waste to read from disk only to have it swap right back to it and instead maintain references to portions of the data that we need to rereference. This is a basic example, but a fairly solid one. That fact that many modern languages do not even allow you access to the underlying registers, operations and other processing structures (excpet through other languages like using JNI in Java) makes true optimization pointless.

Most modern software is highly pessimized, using layers of abstraction for development convenience rather than optimized for performance (include system requirements). The idea that you can always through more hardware at a problem has lead to software bloat and this unneeded pessimization. The only bright side is that there are atleast a few people out there still considering the hardware and how it can be used by the software, leading to things such as the use of GPUs for general vector processing and not just graphics. If we loose the few of us that do have knowledge of both ends of a system we will run into a stagnation of technology. When I began programing on commodore machines many years ago I had to learn how to use the processing power of each sub component and not just hope that a pre existing library knew what it was doing and could some how optimize for what I am trying to do exactly.

I would like to see more people try and teach the values of understand what your system can actually do and not allow the inner workings to behiden by unneeded abstraction.

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[StalinsNotDead]

He also famously went blind later on in life

He wasn't reading. He was just looking at the pictures then.

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[Thud457]

I've read every single post on /. , does that count for something?

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[the_duke_of_hazzard]

And before you, they understood every transistor, then every valve, then the innards of every valve, then the mathematics behind the theoretical Babbage machine...

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[Raven_Stark]

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.

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[fandog]

No, he was reading it for the articles. ;)

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[sparc_mepronet]

Actually that is not only the case with hardware. Without wanting to start a flame war of mine is better than yours, but the number of people that know how to run eg. sendmail is getting smaller (in younger age-groups practically no one does). So there you have it, the defacto mailserver that shaped email as we know it is becoming voodoo knowledge. Only old geezers like me (age 30) know how to run it. If this is good or bad, I'll leave that open. But there you have it...

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[Random_Goblin]

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...

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[eneville]

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?

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[Nefarious Wheel]

I'm a GOM myself, and also believe that in-depth knowledge of what you do will lead to more successful outcomes, despite the need for specialisation.

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).

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[cabazorro]

I believe there are levels of understanding.
What kind of digital system is the one you don't understand. IT's all registers and interruptors, buffer's cache's..zeroes and ones orquestrated in different fashion...sort of lame fashion compared with more sophisticated data processing like molecular bonding dna sequencing...emergent system's !!now we are talking..not this crude boards with geometrical nano-scaled circuit-grids.
A computer, by definition, is decomposed in a very structured and sequential fashion. Come to think of it computers, from ENIAC to DeepBlue, share the same digital technolgy. The are just adding machines.
Young bloods with the right education..physics, logic deisgn,numerical analysis and authomata theory should be able to describe and understand with great leisure any digital device in existence.

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[The Lion of Comarre]

"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..."


http://www.booktrusted.co.uk/nestle/factsheet.html

"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.

In other news, water found to be wet, fire hot.

[Skyshadow]

The average 15 year old doesn't know how his IM works behind the scenes? Well no fucking shit -- 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.

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...

Re:In other news, water found to be wet, fire hot.

[dlefavor]

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

I don't think it's the average user, the author is bothered by, it's the average technology person.

I'm often unpleasantly surprised with some of my supposedly technical colleagues' ignorance as to how computers work.

Re:In other news, water found to be wet, fire hot.

[GMFTatsujin]

Regardless, I think there's value in knowing *how* technology works independent of why you use it. The more convenient things become for you, the more is going on behind the scenes that can potentially screw you.

The way to keep from getting screwed is to know what's going on. The author of TFA is in danger of not knowing how the next-gen tech is going to screw him. The next-gen users are in danger of not knowing how their tech works so that they can fix it or live without if it breaks. Or even recognise a better alternative when they see it. (I guess that last one depends on your definition of "better", which is part of that generation gap thing. . .)

Maybe it's old-fashioned or apocalyptic of me, but I still see a burgeoning Morlocks vs. Eloi dystopia in the making here, especially when insubstantials are involved such as data access and communication methodology.

Re:In other news, water found to be wet, fire hot.

[nekoniku]

I don't think it's the average user, the author is bothered by, it's the average technology person.

None of the examples from TFA involve technology people; no engineers, designers, etc. All his examples are Just Plain Folks(TM). The recurring theme in his rant is that there's a culture of technology use that he's not a part of. Welcome to the generation gap, dude.

Re:In other news, water found to be wet, fire hot.

[garcia]

I'm often unpleasantly surprised with some of my supposedly technical colleagues' ignorance as to how computers work.

You only need to know about your own little world. "Jack of all trades" are irrelevant in just about every other community these days what makes computers different?

Yeah, I like to know a little bit about everything but I'm not a guru in anything. I can putter along in whatever I'm faced with (PHP, perl, Linux, BSD/OS X, Windows, networking, DNS, SMTP, whatever) but I'm not a guru in any. That's not a good thing. I'd be better paid (and possibly less happy) if I was.

I know plenty of geniuses in multiple fields that don't know shit about other stuff and you know what? It doesn't matter in the long run.

What I'm more bothered by is that the average tech person still desires to be above everyone else in some way or another.

Re:In other news, water found to be wet, fire hot.

[Dan D.]

I sometimes think that's related to the influx of people who do it for the money. I think I still count as young blood (under 30.) And I know my friends and I all know the history of the machine (if we haven't necessarily done punch cards, I have respect for the fact that I don't have to carry a stack in a particular order carefully from one end of campus to the other.)

The only people I can think of who wouldn't are a few of the people I know who have learned the technology trade, not grew up with a passion for the machine. (Note when I say friends above i mean the latter. I make friends with similar people.)

So yeah, I think anyone who has a real interest in computation studies knows with some interest how circuits are arranged, how Turing machines work, is at least afraid of the y-combinator, and knows that language fights are dumb. :) I think once the pay starts decreasing again, then things won't be taken for granted *quite* as much.

One mild caveat to all of this, however. Managing complexity means abstracting. As we continue to add complexity there's a point at which some people just won't want to understand how a machine works inside. They blackbox it and move on. Hopefully they'll still get a top-level from it.

Re:In other news, water found to be wet, fire hot.

[happyemoticon]

The average 15 year old doesn't know how his IM works behind the scenes? Well no fucking shit -- 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.

When my peers carry on like Ellen Feiss ("And then it was like, 'bleep bleep bleep'"), I've often said, "I know exactly why that happened, but I don't think you really care to hear the explanation," to have them carry on as if I hadn't spoken. They really don't care, and frankly I don't want to bother trying to explain it to them.

It seems the rub is that consumer electronics are fashion accessories these days, whereas the consumer tech of yesteryear was largely appliances (washers, stereos, televisions, etc). That stuff stayed at home by necessity. Nowadays I have to deal with my friends' nonstop IM conversations on their camera-phones when they're supposedly hanging out with me. They bounce along, listening to the latest NiN album on their iPod Nano, oblivious to me and the world around them. It's not just shallow and bourgeois, it's downright offensive if you're trying to carry on a conversation with one of these little hummingbirds of the iGeneration.

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.

My uncle is an awesome coder, but he doesn't have the ability to instantly look at an application interface and grok how it works that is second nature to those who grew up with GUIs. He started working with computers in his 20's.

As implied above, I find a lot of this gadget fetish depraved. I suppose I am a bit of a hypocrite in that I own a lot of gadgets, including a cel phone and an iPod. I largely understand how they work, but I don't know that that really makes it better.

Re:In other news, water found to be wet, fire hot.

[Himring]

I don't know. Personally, it seems things are changing a bit regarding how my generation is viewed vs the now-young. I "grew-up" in the era of up-and-coming personal-computers. My first was a ti994a wherein I learned basic at age 13. DOS, Wolf3d, Doom, Windows 3.x, Netware, Lotus Notes administration, NT, Sendmail.... Now, I'm in a half-tech/half-paper-pusher role where I still have my Linux box here, my unix there my windows (terminal) ... here, and I have a team of younger techs, in their early and mid-20s, that I work with and lead.

My uncle was my mentor who is a backbone switch guy -- to this day -- for a big telco running nortel racks and keeping big stuff going -- cool as hell when he takes me to "the node." He can barely use windows and relies on me for everything, but he can build a tv and actually puts a wafer board to use and, yes, he looks like froheki. I respect the hell out of him. The guy who taught me routers and switches and cisco is now in his 60s and also can't use windows, but he'll keep your damn network running smooth. He lives in telnet and writes everything down on a legal pad. I think he's a god -- always have. The guys under me tend to laugh at anyone older, treat them like their idiots and scoff at any supposed technical aptitude -- both the nortel and the switch guy and myself. They seem to presume to know more out-of-the-box on anything that comes up, but they are windows xp centric, college guys. I love 'em and relate to them and not all are like that, but more often than not they are. They couldn't setup a netware 3.x box if they had to or bang out a quick grep command to find something, but they can play wow, explain the latest tech on the latest nvidia card and hook up a shuffle -- things that the two ancients I mentioned would and could never do, but they know they can't....

It just seems there is a loss of respect for the pioneers and the level 60 wizards that were doing technology while the new generation was in diapers or even born. Again, my personal opinion....

Re:In other news, water found to be wet, fire hot.

[MayonakaHa]

"1905? Horse & buggy... yup, know how that works... Coal fired boiler... yup, know how that works... Gas stove, yup... Kerosene Lamp, yup... Pen & inkwell, yup... Water pump, yup... ..."

How was the buggy assembled, piece by piece? What metals did the boiler use and now was it smithed? Where did the gas feed come from and how was it processed? Where does kerosene come from? What is the formula for the ink in the inkwell? What is actually going on in the water pump to make it pull water up from the ground?

What you're answering is how to operate. What the question was is how exactly does it work. That usually includes how to make it, where the materials come from and what they do. I can use a ballpoint pen, and I have a vague idea of how it gets the ink on the page, but I have no idea how the ink is made that completes the device and makes it work. Without that type of ink the pen doesn't work right, but does that matter to me?

I never quite understood why generations of tehnological developers get so upset when the fruits of their labor are available to regular folks while the whole time they're developing it most of them are thinking how they can make things that do more and are easier to use. The computing industry seems to be the worst of it all.

Re:In other news, water found to be wet, fire hot.

[Mr. No Skills]

I sometimes think that's related to the influx of people who do it for the money.

For me it was the emergence of object models and frameworks. When I started (1978), each language had about 100 commands and functions that you had to string together to make the logic of the application. You could literally have the entire grammar of the language in your head to build whatever you wanted.

Now, you have to know the object model, the APIs, the various tools and debuggers. The programming experience is a lot more about how to look up the existing thing you need to invoke out of thousands of possibilities, not counting Googling around for something to download that solves some of the problem at hand. So, it's less about having everything in your head and applying creativity than it is about knowing the framework and how to interact with others on the same framework.

Not really trying to create a rant about the good ol' days ("just give me ones and zeros"), but it feels to me that most software development has gone from computer science to vacational training. This creates the disconnect where users of the thing don't care about the magic that makes it work.

Re:In other news, water found to be wet, fire hot.

[i7dude]

its not a big deal that people dont know how a lot of things they use work...what troubles me, is why so many younger kids are not interested in asking why.

i've always been the type of person who has to understand how something does what it does, even if i'm not capable of fully understanding, i still like to ask...so it really gets me when i meet or see people who aren't the least bit interested in discussing how something might work. it seems that if you show any interest in something like that kids tend to want to say "who cares" or "stop being such a geek".

maybe i would feel different about kids curiosity towards tech if i had more exposure to them. but alas, i've probably just lost perspecitve.

dude.

Re:In other news, water found to be wet, fire hot.

[Gonarat]

Yes, but even 100+ years ago, the average Joe didn't totally know how their technology worked. For example, the Horse -- hay goes in one end, horse poop comes out the other. If the horse gets sick, take it to the local vet. When the horse needs shoes, take it to the smithy. Yes, there were people who were able to take care of their horse completely (medical care and shoeing), especially on the frontier, but that knowledge was not required for non-frontiersmen.

The same situation developed when cars were invented. Early on, anyone who had a car HAD to know everything about it from changing tires to rebuilding the motor, but as time went on, mass produced cars, service stations, and the AAA came along and the average Joe no longer HAD to know how a car worked. There still were/are amateur mechanics who can rebuild a car, but that became a hobby instead of a necessity.

The same thing is occurring starting to occur with computers now. Even though (in my opinion) we are not completely to the point where the computer is an appliance, eventually the average Joe will be able to buy a computer out of the box and use it without having to know what exactly is "under the hood." At this point, OSX is the closest thing we have to that, followed by some Linux distros, and last, but least, Windows. Win XP is better, but there is still too many problems that the user needs to address to say it is totally ready for the average Joe (a topic for another post).

Every new technology starts out the same way, the first adapters HAVE to be experts to get it to work and keep it working, then eventually the technology matures and gets to the point where anyone can use it without knowing how it works. Then a new technology comes along and the cycle starts anew...

Re:In other news, water found to be wet, fire hot.

[plover]

Definitely the profession was watered down by all the moneyseekers in the 90s. And those people are already moving on to other fields. Everyone's discovered that a rote-learned task is the easiest to outsource.

And yes, abstractions will hide knowledge, keeping people from needing to learn what's in the box. But a lot of boxes in computer science are still troublesome enough that there is still be a need for the deeper understanding.

The key to survival is to know when a particular box can be ignored. For example, I've stopped worrying about drive controllers, and now trust someone else to determine that SATA is "faster" than IDE. Since I've recognized that I've become a generic consumer of drives, I no longer have to keep current on the technology, how commands are transmitted, cylinders, heads, encodings, etc. And it's a good thing: the field is now so broad and so deep that keeping up across the board is too tough. I still retain my old working knowledge of drives: magnetic coated platters are spun fast, heads go back and forth, etc., but unless I have a reason to dive into a particular technology, it's adequate for me just to know the basics. I can mostly ignore drives and focus instead on my specialty.

Re:In other news, water found to be wet, fire hot.

[Suicyco]

You know, the inability to use simple tech is what makes the old folks so damn crusty and stupid, IMO. You are telling me, that a guy who can rebuild a telco switch from a telnet prompt, can't point and click in something as simple and dumbed down as windows? He couldn't plug something into a USB port and hit OK?

I have no sympathy for the tech geniuses of the past who can't use the ever simplifying crop of current technology. They are, in fact, not geniuses at all, but glorified car mechanics who have oodles of information on procedures to perform, but no true understanding of technology in the broadest sense.

I am not a kid, nor am I in my 60's, but I'll never be that stupid or clueless about anything. I may not know all the cool shit like the latest ring tones, but I sure as hell know more about cell phones then a 20 year old kidiot, and I will always keep that advantage. When I am 60, you can bet I won't be stymied in the LEAST by the latest OS, gadget, whatever.

Those of us who are in between being true old school and the new kids on the block have the greatest advantage, because we aren't following memorized procedures, nor are we using whatever the latest web fad is, but we understand it all. The old guys are from a generation where technology was marble tower knowledge. The kids just have it it handed to them with easy interfaces. We are the ones who got our hands on a computer at 13 and learned to program. The old foggies never had that because they couldn't buy one, the kids simply have no desire because they are brain dead.

The knowledge will be passed along.

[CyricZ]

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.

Re:The knowledge will be passed along.

[Catamaran]

I recently read "Guns, Germs, Steel" by Jarad Diamond, in which he explores the different levels and rates of technological development in ancient peoples. One of the many interesting points that he makes is that there needs to be a certain population size and density before invention can take place. The society must be stable enough to support a leisure class to do the inventing.

Conversely, and this relates to the parent post, when population numbers decline inventions are sometimes lost. He sites examples of societies that had acquired and then subsequently lost, writing, the wheel, and other technologies.

Re:The knowledge will be passed along.

[benjamindees]

He sites examples

cites. Sites are places. Cites are citations, things that you write or otherwise communicate.

Sorry, but I'm a grammar troll today.

Obligatory Simpson Quote...

[It doesn't come easy]

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.

Re:Obligatory Simpson Quote...

[Daverd]

Quantum computers to be obselete by 2025. You heard it here first.

Old people are just as stupid.

[CyberBill]

"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.

Re:Old people are just as stupid.

[MPHellwig]

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

Re:Old people are just as stupid.

[M00NIE]

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.

I disagree. Even if you select for distinct people within the generation, you DO see an increased number of people who don't understand.

Take for example a small group - technical support folks. Since I started doing technical support, things have changed. Back when I first started, most people DID understand the underlying mechanics of what was going on. They COULD do things command-line and know precisely what to expect to receive back. They also often had knowledge of a wide range of systems and levels of technology from the front end, to the server, to everything in an entire corporate network. Today, technical support folks know how to click mouse buttons and change graphical settings without having any clue as to what exactly is happening to the system or why. Furthermore, they're specialized down to the point of knowing only a few systems, instead of the broader range.

I agree technology has changed how people use it. I agree that the masses have technology in ways they never could have back then. I agree that most people who use it don't and shouldn't need to know how the underlying systems work. I also agree that there are people who SHOULD understand more about the systems they work with and don't. I sum it up to DOT-COM frankly when floods of people came into the tech world and lingered too long knowing too little.

Re:Old people are just as stupid.

[Reality Master 101]

No, statistically, half of the people you meet are below the median, not the average.

Re:Old people are just as stupid.

[nine-times]

Not necessarily. Consider if you have 5 people. 4 people have an IQ of 100, and 1 has an IQ of 80. In that case, only 1/5 are below the median.

Re:Old people are just as stupid.

[zippthorne]

Two posts, one of which is correct, one of which is overly simplified. I think he proved your point.

Re:Old people are just as stupid.

[Daniel_Staal]

Your technical support example is just economics, not overall comprehension. Put quite simply: a technical support person only has to be able to solve or re-direct the calls they are expected to get.

In the mid-80's or so, a technical support person could be expected to be one a very few people doing that job at a particular company, and was most likely to handle calls from people who knew a fair amount about the system they were using. So, the person had to be able to answer questions on a wide range of systems (because there was no one to re-direct the calls to), and answer complex problems (because simple problems would be solved without their intervention.)

Today a technical support rep is likely to get "Why doesn't the cupholder work anymore?" calls, and is likely to be part of a large team. So, they only need a little information about a few topics: Anything else they can refer on/over, if needed, or assume is unanswerable (because the cost of answering the question is greater than the cost of not being able to answer it).

Given that, you don't need as knowledgeable personell behind the phones. And, since less knowledgable personel are cheaper than more knowledgeable personel, they are more likely to get hired and retained (at that level).

So, technical support personel as a group are being selected for less knowledge. They don't need it anymore, and it is a skill that can be better used (and rewarded) elsewhere.

Re:Old people are just as stupid.

[jcr]

(let's just ignore the fact that "IQ" is stupid and "intelligence" (whatever that means) is a multi-variable function)

Oh, IQ can be very handy: anyone who brags about their score can be immediately dismissed as a worthless putz.

-jcr

Re:Old people are just as stupid.

[Vellmont]

Except that IQ follows a normal distribution. In a normal distribution the mean is the average.

It is somewhat true

[suitepotato]

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?

That's how it's supposed to work

[gamer4Life]

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.

Re:That's how it's supposed to work

[Spy der Mann]

How many people can produce a fire out of just sticks?

Depends... are the sticks USB-enabled?

Cry me a river.

[doubleyewdee]

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.

But what's truly more complex?

[CyricZ]

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.

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 .NET runtime. Those are fairly complex motherfuckers. Far more complex than anything that was even conceived a few decades back.

Re:But what's truly more complex?

[MankyD]

Not to flame a fire (you are correct of course) but that's not the original posters point. If anything, you add to his point. Programs written in assembly (and other low level languages) were very simple, but that's because it was a monumental undertaking to write them.

Just because CS1 students are expected to write programs that were once at the pinnacle of computer science doesn't mean that programming the same applications in assembly is any easier.

Just wanted to point out the obvious...

Re:But what's truly more complex?

[suitepotato]

You're missing my point (and maybe I wasn't clear). The core of all higher languages is in the end the basic logic of binary circuits. Understand AND, NAND, OR, NOR, XOR, etc., and binary math, and that everything devolves to those foundations and you have a better grasp on what you can do with the higher concepts. I rather think the explosion of applications on every platform with crappy memory management and bloat is directly related to this. Coders of today do not understand anything about stacks and registers and limitations. Frugality, Occam's Razor, and other important principles are ignored and heck, never even learned. Just throw everything you want in there and since you don't know why any of the snippets does what it does in machine code, you won't know when a compiler is going to do its designed thing and result in problems. If you did know, you would have written things differently. The law of unintended consequences can be hemmed in by understanding the finer grained lower levels of any complex system. It isn't for nothing that the people who design and build engines have to know something of metallurgy, mechanical engineering, materials engineering, machining, etc. What the little tiny bits of metal will do in response to the doings of the big complex engine is important. So too is it with programming.

Re:But what's truly more complex?

[suitepotato]

Exactly. In the same way that BASIC programmers had bad tendencies to not combine their loops and do the math to make it so and thus created nine thousand repeats of essentially the same routing, today's programmers on C++, etc. tend to look at the coolness of what they are doing and not at the things that code represent to the machine. Instead of their code generating the smallest most correct executables, they generate massively wonky ones which unnecessarily replicate basic operations over and over, which may generate stack, register, buffer, etc. issues in concert with other processes, etc.

I'm NOT arguing that they need write in assembly or binary. I AM arguing, I guess, that the traditional CS foundations of logic and math are important to understanding the bigger picture in the most meaningful way. Even if you never take a CS course, being able to go through an old compiler theory textbook and grasp what they mean is a good way to find new understanding in C at which point you understand that there was deeper meaning to Kernighan's and Ritchie's guide than just how C worked. Any language needs to base itself around those core principles and insist on the programmers understanding them.

Which is why I get that shaking head and rolling eyes thing whenever I see an explosion of interest for a new language whose very structure looks to me like spaghetti before anything is written with it and all the praise revolves around it being new, cool, object oriented, or some other buzzphrase. Maybe the languages before were'nt in need or replacement, just the people using them or at least a refresher in the basics.

Re:But what's truly more complex?

[Angst Badger]

The difference is that in Ye Olde Days, a programmer had to understand all of that complexity because he had to code it himself. Today's systems are more complex, but the average programmer only has to understand the interfaces presented by various pre-packaged APIs and components that hide the complexity -- which was presumably understood by the specialist programmers who designed those components.

The sad truth of the matter is that both the oldbies and the newbies are wrong. Contrary to what the oldbies think, the field is now sufficiently large that it's not possible to understand all of the complexities, and you don't need to understand all of them. The newbies, on the other hand, are so wrapped up in their reflexive sophomoric belief that new = better that they miss the valuable point that their predecessors are making: sometimes, you can write better software if you know what's going on inside the black box.

This reminds me of the pointless flamewar that erupts from time to time between hard-core assembly language programmers and the users (but seldom the developers) of optimizing compilers. There is a popular but mistaken belief that today's optimizing compilers can outperform hand-coded assembly. Even for some fairly trivial cases, this is simply not true, but you have to be an experienced assembly language programmer to even make the comparison between human-generated and machine-generated code.

What I think the oldbies are really lamenting -- at least *I* am lamenting it, having been programming since the punch-card era -- is the declining level of skill necessary to write software. In the old days, it had to be not only good, but actually excellent code, because the hardware wasn't fast or capacious enough to handle the kind of code that's the norm these days. No one -- well, very few of us -- wrote code in assembly language because we wanted to; we did it because we had to. And from this, there was the usual pride that arises from what amounted to fine craftsmanship. Nowadays, the economics of software development have shifted so that it is just too goddamn expensive to build code that way, not that it's more expensive than it ever was, but because it's so much cheaper to throw some fresh junior college grads at it and call it good. That they come complete with the arrogance of ignorance only adds insult to injury.

This is not the first time this has happened. You heard similar complaints from all of the craftsmen who were put out of work by the industrial revolution. Fine, hand-crafted furniture is stronger, longer-lasting, and (arguably) more attractive than the particle-board and veneered junk that comes out of industrial furniture factories, but no one can afford the "good" stuff anymore, and the cheap junk is good enough.

The difference in quality is not imaginary. Compare the old MS-DOS editor, QEdit, with the trivial and ubiquitous Unix editor, PICO. QEdit, which was written in assembly language and is completely statically linked, weighed in somewhere around 48k and included vastly more capabilities as well as a fairly sophisticated macro language. PICO, which doesn't have much in the way of capabilities at all and is written in a high-level language, weighs in at 171k and then dynamically links in some more libraries, occupying over a meg of RAM before it has even loaded a file.

Would the average user notice any difference in performance if all code was written the old way? Yes, especially -- but not exclusively -- on older machines. The problem is that the average user couldn't afford to buy software built that way, any more than the average person can afford to furnish their entire home with fine handcrafted furniture.

What surprises me, however, is that in the free software world, where such economic considerations do not apply, the free apps are often not much better than the equivalent commercial apps. OpenOffice and MS Office, for example, are both big, lumbering, resource-hungry hogs whose resour

Other way around actually

[doombob]

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.

Not so bad...indicative of progress!

[Kaellenn]

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!

It isn't like this is unexpected

[PReDiToR]

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.

Re:It isn't like this is unexpected

[Kyru]

Demigods huh, where do I sign up for this lucrative and no doubt enjoyable lifestyle?

Stupidity?

[Skyshadow]

Why should the average person understand how their cell phone works?

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...

Re:Stupidity?

[Olix]

I must say I disapprove of this wave of user friendly technology. Normal people shouldn't be able to use technology, no. They should pay me £70 an hour to do it for them.

Actually, the above quote...

[StressGuy]

"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) :(

Riiight...

[Rallion]

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.

Screw new technology...

[Morgalyn]

.. 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.

Re:Screw new technology...

[thc69]

Why, that's silly. Everybody knows how a flush toilet works:

1. User drops load into toilet
2. User operates flush lever
3. Water gizmos and channels create various bits of suction
4. Shit clogs stupid low-flow toilet, lacking sufficient water to lubricate and push/pull it through
5. User applies plunger, which fails to seal over odd-shaped low-flow orifice
6. Unsealed plunger in angry user's hand, while not pulling shit back up, does manage to push shit through the toilet, resulting in complete flush.

Optionally,
7. Angry user in fit of rage operates flush lever again before step 6 is completed, resulting in shit raining down in basement onto clean laundry

That's a sufficiently detailed technical explanation of the flush cycle. Tell me again why residential toilets can't go "WHOOOSH!!!!!" like commercial toilets?

It's not just the users who don't know.

[techno-vampire]

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.

Why do we need to know how things work in the US?!

[Anita Coney]

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.

I sometimes envy the young.

[CyricZ]

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.

This is new??

[Reality Master 101]

As a "tech guy" for over 20 years, I'm amazed at how out of touch this "tech savy" generation really is. I realize that things may be better in some ways, but I have to agree with Techni-Veteran. Ask them 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.

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.

I think the same thing every time I see this stuff

[ifwm]

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.

Reminds me of a quote. . .

[exi1ed0ne]

"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.

Ah, the joys of an object oriented universe...

[Asprin]

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.

Social issue not a tech issue

[p7]

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.

They were never any golden old days

[matt me]

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.

Re:They were never any golden old days

[Golias]

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.

Re:They were never any golden old days

[saskboy]

"
I've finally come to conclude that we actually have a rather robust society in place."

We'll see what you think about that when nearly everyone who can maintain a computer ssytem from the mid 1990s has retired. I think NASA is going to learn a thing or two about this phenomenon when they try to go back to the Moom. They're going to have to reinvent the rocket/wheel, figuratively, instead of building on the experience of the Apollo missions.

When things get too complex, it is harder to make them robust, as any little thing can bring the whole shooting match tumbling down. If a sound card died in a 486, you replaced it. If it dies in a new computer where it's integrated into the motherboard, then you might end up needing to reinstall the OS too, to fix things.

Our society is the same way, if you removed the Internet today, thousands of businesses would be thrown into chaos. I you stopped air travel for a week..

If you run out of gasoline for a few days.

If you have a power outage that lasts 24 hours.

Any number of things aside from purposeful terrorism can bring our "robust" society to its knees, by accident.

Re:They were never any golden old days

[Golias]

We'll see what you think about that when nearly everyone who can maintain a computer ssytem from the mid 1990s has retired.

The computer systems from the mid 1990s will have retired long before the High Priests who know how to maintain them (re: paper MCSE's and Bachelor-degree holding *nix geeks) are gone.

Old retired COBOL guys got a little "bounce" during all the panic over Y2K, but that "crisis" merely provoked a lot of companies to realize the need to move on from those old, cobweb-covered "big iron" mainframes.

Re:They were never any golden old days

[saskboy]

"They were nothing more than a little speed bump in a parking lot."

Those instances were a speed bump in the grand scheme of things, but they demonstrated just how much people depend on society to be a smooth running machine to do every day tasks like using the washroom, and having clean drinking water. The events in New Orleans put a bit of an exclamation point on the example, since it wiped out and/or strained the first responders to the disaster. Now imagine a tsunami on the west coast? Do you think Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, San Fran, and LA would all be able to be hit, and there'd be enough international [anything] experts to keep society functioning west of the Rockies?

We'll know more in a few weeks I'm sure, but if Rita had hit Houston directly, would there still be a cleanup team in New Orleans?

There will probably always be at least some part of North America unaffected by a widespread disaster, at least unaffected enough to go on as normal, but once police, doctors, and the power/food/water supply is disrupted in a widespread area... well you saw what happened in New Orleans.

We can't live without electricity. LIVE, not "get online". It's not a luxury anymore here. If you don't have power you don't have a fridge. You don't have water. You don't have a stove probably, to make drinking water. You don't have any way to pump gas at a filling station to get the heck out of Dodge. [No traffic lights too.] And if it's winter, some people don't even have heat, [or A/C in summer]. You don't have a bank machine to get cash anyway, and you don't have any on hand because you used your credit card or debit card all of the time. Stores can't sell anything quickly because they don't have cash registers. And if its snowing, the snow plows have trouble starting because they can't be plugged in to warm up. I hope your manual release on your garage door works too, because otherwise your car is trapped anyway.

Do you see what I mean now, if there's a prolonged power outage even in a city of 2 million, you can multiply those woes listed there by 2 million or so, and add in sick people in hospitals and old folks homes who might need electricity to breath.

We're losing touch with how to do the most basic survival tasks like making clean drinking water, or finding food, because someone else does it for us and we pay them. In a day when money means nothing, or there are no supplies, we'll regret that.

real tuff questions

[woodsrunner]

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?

Re:real tuff questions

[spoonyfork]

What was all that about cats???

Albert Einstein when asked to describe radio, replied: "You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

In recent years no cat has become slang for wireless communication networks.

System performance tuning

[winkydink]

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.

Re:System performance tuning

[m50d]

It's because system performance has got more complicated. Write-behind caching is good enough these days that more ram or just a software tune might sort an I/O bottleneck just as easily as a replacement drive. If it's a USB drive the problem might actually be the processor, depending on who makes your chipset. Don't even get me started on the number of different I/O modes available for a hard disc these days, just software changes can make a huge difference in speed.

No kidding

[einhverfr]

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 ;-)

The more things change...

[TimTheFoolMan]

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

Re:The more things change...

[TimTheFoolMan]

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

He complains about not acting like a 14 year old?

[ThyPiGuy]

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.

Down with ageism.

[Pinback]

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.

Not really.

[einhverfr]

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.)

Re:Not really.

[einhverfr]

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.

Re:Not really.

[ebyrob]

To me, it has always been clear the OSI 7 layer model is a good general description of how protocol stacks go togther, while TCP/IP is one good example of a well-implemented (and minimal) protocol stack.

This is clear when the models are put side-by-side like this:

OSI . . . . . .TCP/IP . . . .DOD
Application . .Application . Process
Presentation . Application . Process
Session . . . .TCP . . . . . Host to Host
Transport . . .TCP . . . . . Host to Host
Network . . . .IP . . . . . .Internet
Data Link . . .Ethernet . . .Network Access
Physical . . . Ethernet . . .sub-network access

Why does the fact TCP and OSI were once competitors matter in modern discourse?

Trying to fit [the TCP/IP model] up against the 7-layer OSI model doesn't work because it doesn't give you an accurate picture of what is going on.
...
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.

I don't follow this reasoning, I've just shown you the matchup, where exactly doesn't that matchup work?

As to how well you can model doing UDP streaming via an application under the OSI model, one can either argue the OSI model doesn't work because it's messy to model UDP streaming, or one can argue that streaming UDP is messy when the OSI model shows various software modules spanning logical protocol layers in strange ways. Either way OSI is just a model, a way of thinking about a problem, that sometimes helps categorize and understand it better. No single framework works equally for every application.

what is more dead and broken about the OSI 7 layer model versus the DoD 4 layer model?

The 4-layer DoD model is really simple. You have 4 layers which handle specific problems (from the bottom up):
...
This model matches what is actually happening. The OSI model does not...

Okay, so DoD is simpler and matches the most commonly deployed TCP/IP stacks as implemented. That makes it a better direct description of TCP/IP, but not necessarily a better model for thinking about protocol stacks and protocol implementations in general. And DoD *should* be a better direct description of TCP/IP, since it is really a protocol description based on TCP/IP rather than a model for building protocol stacks based on broad experience in the first place...

Finally, how exactly are the basic assumptions of OSI and TCP so different?

OSI was designed around the assumption that every layer would handle very specific types of problems

Actually, my understanding was always that the OSI model broke the protocol description/implementation problem space into 7 logical and easily identifiable layers which could be implemented in any number of physical or logical modules to get the job done (These modules might span layers, break down individual layers into smaller chunks, or even be missing in some cases.) In fact, one of the original reasons for having the OSI model was so when two developers wrote different modules which had to interact with each other they'd know where everyone sat on the whole "protocol food-chain" as it were.

If we always had to have a one to one mapping between layers in our model and layers in our implementation, then inventions like SSL/TLS would require whole new models, not just new stack implementations. And yet, no one talks about the "5-layer SSL model", or at least no one I've ever heard of. Instead SSL managed to slide neatly into the Presentation Layer gap left in the TCP/IP implementation. Something we wouldn't even be able to talk about under the 4 layer DoD model. (Even better, SSL managed to keep an interface almost identical to TCP to avoid application rewriting...)

This isn't a problem.

[jcr]

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

Yeah? Well in myyyyy day....

[stimpleton]

....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!

Re:Yeah? Well in myyyyy day....

[narcc]

You spoiled kids, getting everything handed to you on a silver platter. Punchcards? HA! A Luxury! We had to program the computer by physical reconfiguration. And only six miles in the snow? I had to walk from Princeton, NJ clear to Boston, MA in the snow, up hill both ways, with no shoes!

I can see his point somewhat...

[Yaztromo]

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" are not part of anything

[gelfling]

"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.

This reminds me...

[Cytlid]

... 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.

  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 ... 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.

  The point shouldn't be who's right and who's wrong ... or who knows what and who knows "HOW" things work. But we can learn from each other.

  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 ... look, you can compile this on linux by changing one line!

  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.

Re:This reminds me...

[solipsist0x01]

What are you like 5 years older than your stepson?

Troll rate me or whatever

[nightsweat]

But this is the weakest story I've ever seen on Slashdot.

Nothing new here really

[BobaFett]

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?

Moving to the next level...

[pgnas]

"...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...

Engineers vs Non Engineers

[tbuskey]

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.

The more things change...

[Duncan3]

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.

Re:I think the same thing every time I see this st

[Carlos Laviola]

I'm a smart, technically savvy individual, who generally knows how ALL of his technology works.

You are also a pretentious jackass.

A fundamental difference of the past ~200 years...

[ShyGuy91284]

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.

Why, I remember when...

[E-Lad]

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.

Accessibility

[elynnia]

Just my opinion -

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

I think that's hardly fair

[Hosiah]

It is not at all fair to condemn an entire generation as "having no idea how things work". At some point, you *have* to know the internal workings of the system you're fritzing with, or it'll fritz you. Thus delving deeper than the program you're good at using leads to a scripting language, and the scripting language leads to a hybrid language, and the hybrid language leads to a compiled language, and compiled language leads to assembly, and assembly leads to hexadecimal and binary, and binary leads to assembling your own hardware, and the hardware uses the same electronic concepts as the radios of half a century ago. If you're looking for blame, blame the disaster that is our education standards. Kids can't help not learning what nobody's bothered to teach them (or even actively prevented them from finding out about).

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".

History Lesson

[einhverfr]

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.

Re:History Lesson

[kaladorn]

Although I agree with some of what you say, I have to disagree in places. (disclaimer: I taught TCP/IP and OSI at a technical college and have been a programmer of mobile and more classic network-enabled software for about 12 years now).

Prototyping is fantastic. But sometimes people just never bother to finish a job. TCP/IP seems to be one example. How many systems have ported original TCP/IP stacks? Why is it that I see the same unimplemented methods in stack after stack? Someone had enough wit to realize they'd be handy, but the guts of a TCP/IP stack are no trivial matter. And the protocol went out and became ubiquitous long before it was complete. And now, bits of it never will be.

You can damn OSI for being slow off the mark, and that's typical of standards bodies. But for all you say about TCP/IP, I've also written an OSI prototype over TCP/IP as a proof of concept and a goodly portion of the services can be easily delivered (the parts that map well together). And the OSI semantics are probably more intelligible than the TCP/IP ones. (That's an opinion, YMMV).

The OSI model, on the other hand, is a perfectly good *model* for understanding the role of a tiered networking stack. Why is this so useful? Sure people abuse it in the real world and many apps span several layers of the stack, etc. But the conceptual idea of encapsulation of function and also the conceptual ideas of what the layer's functions should be is a good start. This lets you look at real world divergences and then realize where they might be good, bad and what the tradeoffs might be. If you never had the reference model, you'd have a harder time quantifying these differences between real world implementations and understanding why they might be good or bad.

I ran across one instance of this not long ago where someone had taken a shortcut in a networking stack and not exposed some lower level service primitives. Sure, as long as all you wanted to do was the basic subset of tasks as imagined by their developers using their higher layer interfaces, you were okay. But if you wanted to do something a bit different, you didn't have access to some key lower level primitives. This is a case where the developers didn't think beyond their own application and they didn't obviously have much of a concept of a tiered set of functions. And lo and behold, a less useful result.

OSI isn't the holy grail, but it is an instructive learning tool. All standards are produced in some ivory tower and where the rubber meets the road things are different. Yet at the same time, those standards and those theoretical models have great value, especially as individual implementations come and go (TCP/IP has got a lot of traction and has had a long life with no end in sight, but the same cannot be said of many other technologies and even TCP/IP may one day see the a twilight of its days).

To blindly say the OSI model must be killed because TCP/IP got out there and did some things is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Re:Critical technologies are?

[the morgawr]

Parital list of most basic and nessessary institutions:

1. Division of Labor
2. Stable Money
3. Price System
4. Lex, Rex ~ "rule of (uniform, abstract) law"
5. Natural Rights legal philosophy
6. nulla crimen, nulla poena sine lege ~ "no penalty without law"
7. basic principles of the Common Law:
   1. stare decisis
   2. right of property
   3. right of contract
   4. responsibility for tortious action
8. transferance of power by democratic process
9. limited government:
   • use of coercive power of government solely to prevent coercive acts by others
   • actions bound by the law

These are the traditional British/American institutions on which all of modern western civilization is based. Starting in Prussia in about 1850 a reaction against these institutions developed. Since then they have been attacked and seriously undermined by adherents to those reactionary views. Unfortunately, those views seem to dominate the public perception and are simultaniously presented as "traditional" and as "progressive".

It may be instructive to consider some of the relevent literature. Good starting points would be Mises's Socialism and Hayek's Constitution of Liberty. Mises's latter book Human Action and Hayek's follow up to Constitution, Law, Legislation, and Liberty are also relevent, but between Socialism and Constitution, the vast majority of the relevent works will have been cited.

Re:Critical technologies are?

[the morgawr]

As a side note, Rome colapsed when a similar system came unraveled over several hundred years. 8 went first. Several hundred years later, 2,3, and 4 went. Consequently 5-9 couldn't be continued. And 1 disintigrated as a result.

There is reasonable cause for concern reguarding America's future because of recent events. Over the past 60 years, #s 2, 3, 4, and 6 have been seriously undermined. #s 5 and 9 are now practically non-existant. #7 is presently under attack. The reactionaries are demonstrably winning. Given sufficient economic and legal knowledge, a strong case could be made that these developments are the cause of a majority of the problems facing America today.