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

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.

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?

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: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.

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?

[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?

[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

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...

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?

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.

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.

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?

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: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

[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...