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Ask Slashdot: Dealing With a Fear of Technological Change?
An anonymous reader writes "Despite the fact that I am fairly young at twenty-four years old, people see me as rather 'old school.' I regularly use Lynx, IRC, Pine, have many consoles open, and am currently typing this on an older plain black laptop that has a matte 4:3 display and no chiclet keys. As the days progress, I am coming to the realization that the 'old school' computing world that I grew up in is slowly fading away and a new world of Windows 8, Web 3.0, tablets, smart televisions, and social networking is starting to become fairly common. If there is anything I have learned, it is that most humans have a desire to throw out the old and accept the new without any sort of hesitation. Like many Slashdot users (I am sure you know who you are), I do not accept the new as easily as I probably should. How have you learned to adapt and accept things that are new and different in the world of technology and computers? If not, what are some effective strategies to utilize to keep these kids off my lawn?"
Stay cool, don't be a fool.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Having gone through some of the same things, the best advice I can say is to ignore those feelings publicly. At work I'm riding the wave with the rest of them. At home I'm back on my happy train. The last thing I want is to be marginalized at work because I'm "that guy" who is a roadblock instead of a guy that moves things forward.
In the tech industry, you do NOT want to be the enemy of the executives.
Definitely point out real problems when they're there, and nix projects that are bad, but try not to let your bias lead you to make irrationally bad arguments. And who knows, you might learn to like some of the stuff, which will help you in the future as well both because you know more, and also because your attitude will be more open. It's worked for me so far at least - I just bought an iPad and a Surface Pro today for testing, will be getting a Nexus to validate very soon as well. It's actually pretty fun.
In any case, good luck, and long live lynx!
Just a thought...
I've got socks older than you. What are you gonna do when you really get old?
If the current tools you have are getting the job done, I don't see a need to change.
If you want to force yourself into getting started with new technology, I'd start with a rootable Android smartphone, or a Nexus 7 if you don't want to spring for a phone plan. Then just jump right in to exploring it.
You'll learn a lot of the new interface tricks that are shared with tablets/phones, there's a lot of devices and web services they can integrate with, and you can still get your hack on and put SSH and all that other fun stuff on the device.
Umm, no. That is the exact opposite of what most humans have a desire to do. We hang on to things that we know. Why do you think Windows 8.1 will have a "Start" button? By and large, people hate change.
it's not about the tools, but how well you use them. If you're more productive with old tools than your peers are with new ones, why worry? It's easier to move forward than backward, so you'll always have a bigger tool belt than those who didn't bother learning/understanding the capabilities of "old school."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
yet all you've said is "I use Linux and I have a ThinkPad from before the brand was sold to Lenovo."
Captcha: coaxial
Personally I'm dealing with many of the same issues. I try to push past them when it's something I feel is a fault in myself, but my resistance to a number of current trends is because I think the trend itself is *bad*. I find Facebook an excellent example. I've never understood the desire other people seem to have to take all their personal and confidential information and throw it up online for others to see. When people were upset that employers were asking for passwords to check their Facebook stuff my reaction was "Sure that's wrong, but what did you think was going to happen when you posted drunk pics of yourself online?"
I'd suggest you examine *why* you resist some trends. If you have a good reason why the newer trend is bad, then I say keep resisting. If you're only pushing back because "I've always done it this way" then it's probably time to try something new.
The same is as true of technology as it is of engineering. If what you have works, fine. If it takes effort to make it work, share the result. Just remember to keep your head up and your eyes open, because new technology often brings surprising opportunities when meshed with something old and familiar.
And above all else, be wary of the phrase "but this is the way it's always been done."
the story of Mel and then about Real Programmers of ages past.
it is that most humans have a desire to throw out the old and accept the new without any sort of hesitation.
Not really. Most humans like to stick with what they're comfortable with. Superficial newness chasing exists, sure, but it's usually about the packaging more than anything else. People tend to like what they grew up with. The stuff mentioned - social networking, tablets, etc. - are not becoming common because everyone jumped ship, they're becoming common because enough people grew up with them. Social networking and tablets are both decades old.
You're actively regressing when you stick with a text mode browser in the modern world. You aren't "old school" -- you're stubborn. Old school would be sticking with what you learned to start with, not specifically choosing something from the late '70s or early '80s to work with.
Your big problem is you need to grow up.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
"If there is anything I have learned, it is that most humans have a desire to throw out the old and accept the new without any sort of hesitation."
When did Slashdot start accepting submissions from Bizarro Earth? Or in Bizzaro Speak, When did orgDotSlash start rejecting admissions from Normal Earth?
> How have you learned to adapt and accept things that are new and different in the world of technology and computers? You just have to be a little smart about it. I usually embrace things that make my life easier. But conscience about safety. It's been years since I've used "pine" because the tablet/smartphone has made email much easier and enjoyable for me. But I'm in no way doing any on-line banking...
Karma: Bad
There are 2 ways to do new things: jump in head first, or tipping one toe at a time. When I was younger, the first option was my default choice. Now I'm transitioning to the second option. Ex: With Facebook, I created a barebone account, visit it every once in a while. Sometimes even posting. That allows me to be in the "in" with my Facebook contacts without taking up too much of my time. Ex: With Win8, I use my older Win7 machine as my primary machine and my newer Win8 as my secondary one. That allows me to gradually acclimate to the new brave world. Just like eating bad food, eat as fast as you can, or chew a little at a time. The first option makes sense if there is an end to the bad food. If there is no end to it (technology never stops moving forward, for better or for worse), then the second option becomes very very attractive.
twenty-four years old... keep these kids off my lawn
- let me be one (maybe first right at this second) to say: ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haaa! nice troll
You can't handle the truth.
"If there is anything I have learned, it is that most humans have a desire to throw out the old and accept the new without any sort of hesitation."
I guess you haven't learned anything, then.
Maybe try again?
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
If you don't have a desire to change and accept the inevitable progression of technology switch careers. I hear the amish are making wonderful fireplaces.
Those that embrace the past, learn from it often don;t choose to move on because it's a 'security blanket' for what works and what keeps working for them.
The move to newer, better, faster things is not in everyone's genes. Anyone who has been burned by an upgrade knows the pain that it is to get things working just the way you like it and/or recover from that dreadful data loss. This is a bit of the fear of the unknown.
This is the way a lot of large corporations work and mitigate risk by sticking with the older more stable technologies for longer than most do.
While this is an OK way to proceed, take a look at the technology that is passing you by. There's actually a lot of value in the way things areachitected, choose your steps wisely to optimize your workflow and don't choose new things solely for their newness.
If there is anything I have learned, it is that most humans have a desire to throw out the old and accept the new without any sort of hesitation.
In what alternate universe did you encounter alleged humans behaving like this? I don't think that your problem is a fear of technological change,I think your problem is that you're smoking too much dope.
Life needs more saving throws.
If you're 24 and you've ever used IRC, then you might be a hipster. Just sayin'.
I'm old enough to be your parent, and I've never used lyx, irc or pine.
I use pine (well, alpine) daily. I'm typing this with an IBM Model M keyboard made in 1988, hooked up to an old, re-purposed Dell with parts from all sorts of sources. I don't keep a lot of xterms open, but I do love xfce's tabbed Terminal Emulator app. I still use things like job control and screen, even though I could have 100 ssh sessions going if I wanted to. When I need to make some quick-and-dirty HTML, I probably use tables more often than not. I still look at usenet. I write (gasp!) perl scripts from time to time.
So why use all those "old" things? Because they work. Why not switch to something new, or stop using screen when I can hit shift+ctrl+t and get a new session? Because there's no compelling reason not to use screen. It still works. Sure, you don't see things like rlogin, rsh and (maybe) ftp anymore, because those things no longer work sufficiently well. Why don't I bother with things like a "semantic desktop" that can sync all manner of social media and such right there in my WM? There's no compelling reason to do so. I just don't have a need for any of that. Why not carry a tablet around? Because a laptop is far mroe flexible for my needs. It still works for me, and that's my primary concern.
But the bottom line is this: If it's ugly and it works, it's not ugly. Keep your eyes out for new stuff, but just keep using what both appeals to and works for you.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
That XP, IE6 and IE7 will still be around for an other decade o_O
"If there is anything I have learned, it is that most humans have a desire to throw out the old and accept the new without any sort of hesitation."
So then you haven't learned anything?
Most of the new stuff is just eyecandy piggybacking the known systems you already know. And if you are really concerned you can work with industrial systems, usually made up from serial ports and xmodem type of protocols.
<yorkshire-accent>
When I was young we had to telnet to port 80 and format the HTML stream in our heads.
</yorkshire-accent>
Koans and fables for the software engineer
No idea what planet you've been living on (or rock you've been living under), but if anything, most humans prefer to keep the old - not discard it. If that were not the case, then you wouldn't hear so much about people being resistant to change, having a hard time adapting, or being stuck in their ways - and there certainly wouldn't be nearly as many funny-yet-accurate jokes about old people and their familiarity with technology.
Get a reality check before you post more nonsense like this anywhere!
There's no easy answer to your conundrum. On the one hand, I bet you that even if the statement "there's never been as exciting a time to be alive as now" has always been true (to the extent we can agree that it's a good thing, and not exciting as in that "interesting times" Chinese curse kind of way) it must at least be possible to more acutely feel it these days than ever before. We're literally seeing quantum leaps in just about every avenue of innovation and development.
On the other hand, besides your other fingers, there's the issue, so seldom pondered, of whether every step forward is really a step in the right direction. I'm not sure that came out right, as I'm not about to argue in favour of being a Luddite, but for quite some time now, it has seemed to me as though people felt that progress was something that was happening to them, not something they were themselves driving. (Perhaps that's just telling of the kind of people I've been around, but even so, I'm making a point here). Now clearly unless you're in the top tier and at the very forefront of the cutting edge, you'll probably be able to relate, or at least know someone who can, whenever you hear something uttered along the lines of this: "I don't know why they're changing all this, the old system was working just fine." In some cases, the people saying that just have trouble letting go. In other cases, they're perfectly right.
Yeah, no, I don't have an answer for you. It troubles me greatly that the very definition of progress is advancement, and our tendency to narrow things down leads us to see that as linear progression along a vector that we've tagged as "good" or "beneficial", when in fact there are times when it feels like the next-gen implementation of what was once a great idea feels for all the world as though it's really a step back. And sometimes, the reason it feels that way is because it is.
A 24 year old thinks he's an old timer on the internet because he likes text-based tech? Moronic.
However, the bigger question of "fear of technological change?" That's one for business everywhere -- Especially the media industries.
At 24 you're over the hill. If you haven't sold your first app at 12, and made $1m by 15, forget it, boy - you're a failure.
How have you learned to adapt and accept things that are new and different in the world of technology and computers?
The girls I talk to want the new features. If I want to keep talking to the girls, I stay reasonably current on features.
If you want to, you can replace "girls" with "users", "customers", etc. Really, though, this is nothing new, since about Windows 95 and AOL.
you tell them! i am on a pdp-11 terminal and i have to run my data stream trough a translation code that puts everything into lower case so that slashdot's filter doesn't tel me that im yelling or somethng- so iguess i'm whispering now? i have 12k of ram and a hole kilobyte of disk space. my factorite game is star trek in basic. I don't have any spiel chk ither. my power bill is about $1,000/ mo for the computer and ac. sometimes - aside from marketing hybole - technology imporovments are a good thing, sonny.
and stop being a little bitch.
Many new technologies are mostly old wine in new skins. Your knowledge of the old school way is not obsolete, unless you refuse to apply your knowledge to the new vocabulary. Keep trying new stuff, find ways to make the new technology do what you want it to do. New trends in technology are usually created when a need arises. Find out what that need is. For example, what's the difference between virtualization and the cloud? What is the need that cloud computing tries to satisfy? Look for something impressive (which will inevitably be something that you don't fully understand, otherwise why would you be impressed?) and learn how it's done. This teaches you about the new aspects of the technology and it should be easy for you because you don't need to learn everything from scratch.
My advise is to keep your hobbyist goals (idealism) separate from your professional goals. In other words, do not limit yourself to what you are comfortable with.
Car analogy: I have a buddy who is a mechanic at the Lincoln dealership. He is certified to work on the latest twin-turbo Ecoboost engines that they have been releasing the past few years, but he still drives a carbureted '79 pickup (in awesome shape, by the way), because that is his ideal truck and that with which he is most familiar.
I am the same way with computers: I'm an OpenBSD purist, typing this on a 4:3 Thinkpad with WindowMaker. My cell phone does not do data and has a physical QWERTY keyboard. These are my daily drivers. Yet I am still employable because I have a current RHCE and support both Linux and Win7 devices at work, as well as a plethora of tablets and smartphones. I keep a small Scientific Linux/Fedora "cluster" around so that I can maintain my RHCE credentials and prepare for EL7, and I take full advantage of my company's "Microsoft discount" to keep the latest Windows Server / Exchange / Windows 8 on virtual machines to play with even though I loathe the OS.
Keep using what whatever tech you want to use and stop obsessing over what you "should" be using. If a compelling reason to start using something new develops then...start using something new. This isn't rocket science.
The thing is, these new fancy technologies you speak of are layers on top of old, and old-school thinking will remain relevant, because it's necessary to some degree.
In my case, I like cheap underpowered machines because they're cheaper and more rewarding to tinker with with less risk. I don't know shit about fancy new buzz technologies, but have a solid career in C, C++, Unix, Linux, embedded development and some amount of electrical design work.
C programmers and firmware people will be in-demand for a very long time to come. I have very little competition from new college/university grads, because they don't teach the stuff that I know any more, and it is still important. Few young grads can write makefiles, C macros, or work in complex cross-development environments using Linux or some RTOS. Someone, somewhere will always have to write interface code and middleware, and that's not going to be done by people who have only ever known app development and Java.
Don't worry too much. Just focus on what you're good at and specialize at something that will always be in-demand.
" If there is anything I have learned, it is that most humans have a desire to throw out the old and accept the new without any sort of hesitation"
The above quote is in stark contrast to my own experience in life. I'm not much older than you (29) and I have found that people often require extremely powerful motivators in order to accept "the new" otherwise known as "change". There are different personalities of course, but the personality "I want to learn it once and be an expert forever" is pretty common in my own workplace. A lot of people don't push themselves to learn. I don't mean outside the workplace, either. I just mean learning the proprietary in-house tech we have. Folks learn it as much as they absolutely need to then kind of check out when it comes to the more in depth stuff. Not all people of course, but not an insignificant part of the population either.
Other examples abound. How many 60 year olds were texting a decade ago? It certainly isn't that they are too stupid, because a lot of them do it now. Old people are just as smart (smarter?) as young people with the unfortunate disadvantage of poor reaction time. It's that they had methods of approaching the world which were well worn and change is scary.
The tech crowd is not plagued with the "change is scary" mantra to the same degree as other crowds. I've found that it accepts change faster than most other demographics I've been a part of.
If you're into programming, think about moving into the embedded. I work for an embedded company, and I recently got the company to realize that remote gdb works pretty well.
When your connection is only over ssh, telnet, or *gasp* serial, your old school will be very handy.
Slashdot is like Playboy: I read it for the articles
Me. I'm "old school", I manage, architect, support storage subsystems...
Parallel SCSI ... done that...
ESCON then FICON... yep.
NFS/SMB... yep
SSA (IBM's Serial Storage Architecture) yep.
Tape... LTO is "new" compared to the stuff I've done.
FibreChannel.. now FC over Ethernet... yep...
Object Storage... yep
Hadoop/MapR... here today...
I still manage and architect storage environments for customers...
I just adapted to what was coming... the requirements for my clients or employers didn't change. They wanted high performance, easy to manage, cheaper than the previous solution and most of all reliable..
Just keep adapting, keep educating yourself on what is here today and what various vendors are working on... All this server virtualization that people are deploying now... nothing new... I did LPARs on mainframes in the 90s. Dumb terminals... The "cloud" today is nothing more than a 1000 cheap x86 servers with software running over them to enable you to dynamically configure VMs on the fly. I did that with OS/360 years ago on a Parallel Sysplex on the mainframe. Concepts are the same, implementation is different. Requirements haven't changed that much.
Don't be afraid to evolve. Keeps you young, interesting and relevant. Plus you can apply all that you've learned to what's coming...
Is this a real post? You think you're old school because you use pine lynx and the command line? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? The fact that you call yourself "oldschool" belies the truth that you want and need someone to think that for some sort of self identification or satisfaction. You're not "oldschool", you're just a hipster. You're the same kind of person who chose their own nickname in highschool. One kid tried to get called "blade"; the rest of the school decided it was fair to just insult him and call him "butterknife".
So no, you're not oldschool. You're a techno hipster who needs to find some other way to define him/herself than they tech you use.
Oldschool is a typewriter. Which would be better for us if you used one so you wouldn't get your bull posted on the internet it can't connect to.
Who put this on the page anyway?
This is the most ridiculous post i read in a long time, you are a fucking hipster, no more, no less.
Don't worry. In 30 years, you'll have been replaced by a robot. It will happily deal with all the technology worries, while a T-800 will have dealt with all of yours.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
When the geezers yell "get the hell of ma lawn!", they are shouting AT YOU. NOW GIT.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I thought the web has already been upgraded to HTML 3.2, hasn't it?
Ezekiel 23:20
1. Pick a Tablet (I suggest notApple unless you need Apple for work... well, or if you are rich and don't mind being a wastrel.)
2. Make sure the tablet has the following things:
Mini-HDMI Out (For when you have access to a decent sized monitor.)
Ability to connect Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse
BSSH
Ghost commander
Remote Desktop
Wifi
Some kind of case that doubles as a stand
bigger bag to carry tablet and accessories
3. Suggest buying 16gb and rigging up personal server for external storage.
4. Buy the tablet
5. set up tablet screen with stand, connect bluetooth keyboard and mouse, BSSH to linux box. (Or remote desktop, depending).
6. Use use Lynx, IRC, Pine.
You are now the coolest kid on your block.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
He uses a laptop brand you've probably never heard of.
The whole "article" smells of trolling.
<yorkshire-accent>
You were lucky! In my day we didn't have the H, or the ML for that matter. The best we could manage was the T, and it was cold too!
And you try and tell the young people of today that ... they won't believe you.
</yorkshire-accent>
Approaching 60
I have seen many technologies come and go
I look at something new and ask, can I use it? do I need it?
If so, I learn it or buy it
If not, I ignore it
...Haven't found a need for a smartphone yet
Are you the sort of person who changes your toothpaste every time some new whiz-bang marketing feature is invented? Or do you stick with a working basic toothpaste because it really makes no difference (brushing does most of the work anyway). What has changed in computing at the core level in the last few years? More parallelism, a few newer languages and technologies ... not much else. The rest is just the interface. If you want to work on interfaces, you need to be up to speed on this. The rest can be manipulated just as well (or better) from a console. If your core knowledge and abilities are sound, then you are in a good place to tackle anything, interfaces included, according to the needs of the job at hand.
All those things you mentioned (web 3.0, tablets, etc.), those are things that from an IT prospective are regressive. They are just inefficient. Now I am sure you could do some neat network vizulizations, that are interactive and convieniant, however I am pretty sure no one does this, and I am pretty sure a scrypt could get you the information faster.
You're not afraid of technological change, you're a pragmatist.
Technology has become about fashion--chiclet keys, the latest display resolution (1080p is so last decade, now its 4K), and ultra cool apps. You're just ignoring the fashion trends and sticking with what works. People will still use text consoles for the next several decades, long after today's apps are forgotten.
I am so much cooler than you. I am currently typing this email by manually creating punch cards which are hooked to a morse code machine which then relays the electrical signals into a decoder I built from weet-bix and leeches and straight into the copper cables which connect my phone.
You shoot them with a black powder firearm and you bury them with a shovel.
Have a taste of the new technology. Grab Windows 8.1 when it comes out and try to make it a home and swim in its waters. Use open-mindedly Windows Mail, PowerShell, Visual Studio and all the jazz. Or go with Ubuntu 13.04 with Thunderbird, Firefox, Unity. Hell, if you have the money, become a Mac fanboy. Then after a couple of weeks or months, compare the experience with what you had and, decide what you liked and what you didn't.
After much thought and research, I've found that I cain't keep the kids of my lawn. All the really effective methods are either clearly against the law, think shotgun with rock salt, or too much of an insurance liability, think low clothesline wires and blind ah-ha' or small retaining walls. Very effective but once someone gets hurt they'll come back at you with a whole mess of lawsuits.
Only thing that keeps the blood pressure down is to wall the rest of the world out and deny it exists.
...slowly fading away and a new world of Windows 8, Web 3.0... ...Like many Slashdot users (I am sure you know who you are), I do not accept the new as easily as I probably should.
hmmmmm. me thinks we smells a troll
Luxury! We had to swallow poison before welding girders into a functioning CPU and if we didn't we 'ad to weld them into the antidote too! Uphill both ways!
You're not "old school," you're a dumbass.
It's one thing to hold onto (and be familiar with) the use of old tools that can get you out of a jam, it's another to be so retardedly regressive that you actively avoid better tools simply because they're "new." It'd be like a contractor today insisting on going out to chop down every tree and surface his own lumber to build every house, and doing it all with hand tools from circa 1856 - and doing it not because the tools are better, but doing it because the tools are "old, and therefore make me feel cool."
There's a phrase to describe people like that, it's "artisanal hipster douchebag."
Lynx? Seriously? You're really burning lean tissue trying to invent new ways to waste your time accessing graphical information that could be trivially displayed in any browser made in the last 15 years? Grow the fuck up. If you're a command line user, and occasionally use curl or similar to grab a file or test something, that's fine. If Lynx is, in your opinion, "the best of the web," then that's only because you're actively avoiding accessing something like 50+% of the web by insisting on a text-based interface.
Pine? I used it in college in the early 90's, and it sucked then - I suspect it's not much better now.
IRC? This is the one thing I'd say could still have a useful and current use as a 'free/easy' chat/support type of tool, especially if you work with a distributed group of people. But even still... there's plenty of software that does the same thing with richer sharing tools built right in.
Or at least so reverse-hipster it's wrapped right round to being douchey again.
You don't need to modernise, you need to grow up.
... technological version of a hipster? 24 years old, and you grew up with lynx? When did you first use a browser, when you were 3? No offense, but you sound more like a conrarion for the sake of being a contrarion, but if I'm wrong, if the tech works for you, keep at it.
You're looking back at and holding onto an idealized 'old school' that never was.
Us geeky engineers didn't use the old school tools because they were awesome, we used them because it's what would work with the technology of the time. 33Mhz CPUs with 1MB of memory. 40MB hard drives. 2400bps (bits per second!) modems.
Lynx, Pine, and IRC have never been mainstream. They were used by early adopters before the web 1.0 exploded in the early 90's and mainstream folk picked up the graphical web browser (Netscape, etc), gui email (outlook, eudora, etc), and the many web based chat services (AIM, Yahoo, etc). Today, the PC centric apps are being replaced by mobile computers versions.
Today, those tools survive in various sized niches, used by engineers who work on the unix innards behind the web (one could argue IRC has gained a wider audience and is somewhat mainstream, and as a useful communication channel it will continue). In the webscale data center, those tools are obsolete. I used to log onto a server and use pine to read automated admin emails, and lynx to grab patches to apply. You can't do that for hundreds or thousands of machines, automated data center tools now exist to do that.
Consoles have their place, but I'm not going to give up Eclipse's gui based debugging and code completion and go back to dbg and vi. I can be so much more productive using today's tools.
If you try to hold onto the past, you'll fall out of sync with what the rest of the world is doing. The future is fun! What are we going to build with all this new stuff? It's up to you to find out, and to build it!
I was too busy reading the RFC drafts via Gopher to bother with "formatting".
sPh
Huh. I didn't know that RMS was a "conservative". He'll be so surprised.
Luxury !
In my day I had to whistle into my phone at 1200bps and do the encoding in my head. I can decode audio and video files in real-time now, but decrypting PGP files slows me down a bit...
Paraphrased from Guy M
real computers running real operating systems are command administered. It's how I make my living. You'll make more money if you can administer a computer by command line rather than just clicking and pointing
And everything you claim to have learned on was outdated when I was a fucking teenager. I have a really hard time believing that this "old school" computing world is what you grew up with.
.. you don't have to try this hard to be different. As someone who has done production in many industries, please let me reassure you that we wouldn't have adopted today's tools if they weren't better than yesterdays.
.. oh fuck I just convinced myself this was a troll submission, fuck off.
You just sound like a computer "hipster" to me. Come crack open a PBR with me and relax
Your mashup of what would also be considered old (social networking) and new (Win 8)
Nobody gives a shit what browser, text editor, or whatever else you use. Nobody.
If you're trying to appear 'interesting' can I suggest you get yourself a hobby?
Just wait a bit - I'm sure the technohipsters will decide that Lynx is the web equivalent of a fixie any day. You'll know it's close when you see douchebags in tight jeans lugging VT220 terminals to the coffeeshop.
Pine, lynx and command line terminals were old before the poster was born. These aren't technologies grown up with (unless the OP is from some technological backwater). This sounds less like a case of sticking with what works and more like intentionally trying to stick with niche technologies. Perhaps the poster likes these technologies, perhaps he gets a kick out of being different?
Technology is a field which requires people to move forward or get left behind. Either grow and expand and try to make the most out of modern tools or make sue you have other job options.
The best engineers focus on the pros and cons of their available choices and how well they match the needs of their situation, rather than focusing much on whether something is old or new. However, for your own professional growth, you should occasionally experiment with new technologies or its going to be hard for you to take advantage of new technology that is truly superior when it arrives.
Try to adapt what is available and economical to accomplish what is needed.
It's that you were able to do the job well and efficiently that counts.
Whether you do it with the newest raddest paid-too-much-for-that is of a lot less consequence.
There are times when the newest and best is what's needed, either due to performance constraints or user desire. But often the way to tell compulsive pioneers is the arrows in their backs.
That said, make sure you're up to date on being able to use the new. Knowing how to, but using the tried and true is a choice. If you don't know the new technologies, then you really are locked in to the old and growing stodgy.
Don't be tempted by their toys. If you're used to working with actual computers, you will find these devices disappointing. I've had to do quite a bit of testing and read a lot of feedback. No one who uses real computers for production work (you know, the kind of work involving typing) can stand these things. If you MUST dip your toe in the water, get an ultrabook. Also, these users are fickle. Without Jobs at the top of a solid imitative marketing structure always spinning up the next cool thing before the previous shiny ones cool off, this whole market of overblown Nintendo DS's is going to erode away. The functionality that's so tempting now will be the equivalent to a free solar-powered LCD calculator built in to the end of a ruler.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
TFA doesn't include the terms "L33t" or "cool" -- stop projecting.
Moreover, the "new" that TFA describes are not analogous to old "tools". "Windows 8, Web 3.0, tablets, smart televisions, and social networking" (note the more proper use of quotes) are not the new "command line tools", they are consumer technologies. You want the author to release the death grip on the terminal and . . . watch HDTV on demand?
If the author has a problem at all, it stems from the fact that some people think that playing XBox and smearing their grubby fingers around a tablet screen makes them a "geek" just like those people who used to do it the hard way by building their own f$sking computer from parts with a soldering iron.
It's obvious from your post that you suffer from a sort of bigotry that the technologies you have chosen are somehow better than other technologies because they are "old school", for your own definition of "old school". It will not serve your professional or social life well.
Things like IRC, console windows, and a plain black laptop can all be used to do quite cutting edge things. They are not old school the way most people would define the term. Browsing using lynx in a console when you have a perfectly good GUI and graphical web browser? That's just being a technological hipster, trying to show off to people that you're different. What you're doing isn't new either, back in the early 1990's I remember people complaining that X terminals were killing vt100 terminals, that the new squishing DEC keyboards were worse than IBM's mechanical ones, and that those new fangled web browsers were a total waste of resources, after all gopher and archie worked just fine.
What you'll find is that people trust the opinion of those who have actually used different systems far more than those who have simply developed a prejudice against anything that isn't their supposedly superior choice. The systems engineers I respect the most can sit down and just get work done on a Windows, OS X, FreeBSD, or Linux box. The great ones can also work on a VMS box, or a System/360 box, and tell you what was cool about OS/2 and BeOS. They can work in a GUI, or at the command line. They can do basic editing in both vi and emacs. They understand the right tool for the job depends on the job and is not an absolute. Most importantly they will tell you the areas in which their favorite technology needs improvement , usually by pointing out areas in which tools they don't prefer surpass the ones they do prefer. They are open minded enough to understand other peoples situations, understand their use cases, and test the tools in ways that make their recommendations meaningful.
The most important though is what others have pointed out. The technology industry is all about face paced change. I remember when pine did not exist. Seriously, if you wanted to be old school you need to ditch that new junk and use elm, or mh, or mailx. You're destined to be eternally grumpy if your reaction to every new technology is "the old thing works just fine", and you should get out of the industry right now. It's fine to chose to work on technologies you love, but it's not fine to think other technologies and the people who use them are beneath you. It's bigotry. It's nearly the same as looking down on people because of their race or religion. It's arbitrary, capricious, rude, and uninformed.
Of the things you mentioned, very little of it has made our lives better (arguably, they've made our lives worse)
Chiclet keyboards? Godawful, malformed, unworkable, cheap pieces of shit. My keyboard's not a fashion statement, it's for typing, damn it. They might not be so bad if the layout wasn't a literal clusterfuck.
Tablets? One-way consumption devices that pacify us, make us dumber and spy on us by default. Basically cable TV for the 21st century.
16:9 screens? My laptop used to be something I could comfortably put on my LAP (get it??), now it's this oversized, unwieldy slab that's difficult to balance and requires delicate handling (but, hey no black bars while watching the occasional movie, whoopdie-fuckity-do). Oh, it also used to NOT be a shiny thief magnet (my non-techie brother told me the other day that my $1400 ThinkPad didn't look like a high end machine ... and that's a *good* thing)
Smart TVs ... have you actually used these things? Badly, lazily, half-ass engineered, restricted crap.
Social networking? Yeah, I want to see every bit of minutia and inanity of everyone I know (and everyone I don't). Bonus, the service provider will creep on you and rat you out to the applicable authorities without hesitation!
Web 3.0? What the fuck does that even mean? Other than the a semantic minefield of buzzword bullshit, that is. The web is still just servers talking to clients, with some nice bolt-ons like AJAX, CSS3, etc.
Windows 8 ... do I even need to explain?
You do not have a fear of technological change. Like me, you probably see new things and weigh their worth rationally, taking the time to decide whether it's change for the better or just the next great gimmick.
When I was younger, I adopted new technology as soon as I could save up the pennies to buy it. It was exciting to be using the latest tech and there were often big advancements with each iteration (early sound and graphics cards spring to mind). Twenty years or so on, I wouldn't say I'm reluctant to change, but I move forward at a much steadier pace. Maybe it's just seeing things through an older and more cynical pair of eyes, but I do not think there are as big advancements in new products today as marketeers would have you believe.
In everyday life and work, I generally use what I know well and does the job well. Operating systems, utilities, hardware, etc; I'm in no rush to upgrade or change them unless what I'm using now becomes unsupported, deficient in some way, or there are very real benefits to making a change. That kind of approach has served me well; my systems are robust, efficient, and I know the insides well enough that I can fix things if and when they go wrong.
For fun though, and to keep on top of emerging technologies, I do 'play' with a lot of new stuff when I have the chance. Test new operating systems, software, etc, in virtual machines. Evaluate new hardware if you can get your hands on it cheaply or for free (on loan, in store, or from friends). That way, you're always going to be aware of what the choices are and you'll be continuously building a picture of where technology is moving, and whether it's something you should think about adopting for yourself.
So, be careful to not get stuck in a rut and set in your ways, but don't rush out and buy every latest widget for widget's sake.
"If not, what are some effective strategies to utilize to keep these kids off my lawn?"
Do your work faster and better than them. You already know you can do things with a cli that can't be done with a gui, and that you can do many many things faster with a cli than could be done with a gui. As long as you can do whatever it is your peers can do just as effectively, you'll make out fine in most environments; if you can *also* do things that no-one else can do, you'll do better than your peers. On the other hand, if your 'resistance' to the new bright-shiny means you can't do key things that your peers can do, or do them far slower, you need to either change what you do in the world or re-examine your unwillingness to change.
> mutt /.
> not god-tier yahoo webmail interface
Get the fuck off my
I can't really think of a reason to use Lynx for day to day browsing. And I find it hard to believe anyone (yourself included) really does.
On the other hand there are a few "old" command tools that are much faster than pointy click.
Mutt for instance cause I want a quick peak at email and don't like keeping a client open.
Takes a couple of seconds to pull up my gmail just a few seconds to click through messages. Much faster than browser.
Soma radio from cli is awesome. So quick to pull up.
And some things are just more efficient from command line. File transfers for instance.
I use Zsh, Vim, I have no desktop environment installed on my machine but a bare X11 with xMonad to surf between virtual ttys, if only because it handles the occasional graphical app better than GNU Screen. I have a ThinkPad t43 that I both cherish and brutalize; I have yet to find a better keyboard than what I have on that thing, and to be fair, 4:3 just displays more code than 16/9. I always grep the man pages before Googling. I use IDEs from time to time, and it is amost always a pain in the cadr. I despise those kids who swear by their father's dusty vinyl collections, but I have little music from this millenium.
Ironically, I see that a lot of my school mates who like to use cutting-edge hard and software also cling to hopefully dated languages, with a particularly generalized fondness for C++, while my weapons of choice are usually a tad younger than me and are usually part of the Functional programming revival that started around that time; I despise OOP like any good post-Lisper. I know it's fashionable to enjoy dynamic typing; I personally folded so far left towards it that I folded back on the right ;)
I am terminally pissed off at modern touch-inspired and mouse-driven interface; I detest so-called "skeumorphics"; computers are discrete, integer. Trying to make them real is just irrational.
Either time I have to get off the keyboard to find my mouse is a waste of time; so are animated widgets. Plus they strain my Bush administration-era graphic chips.
Other forms of Hipsters usually a rich social life because they hang OUT. I've met a ton of fellow digital hipsters online, but I have yet to find one in the Big Room.
Though we have Git for that sort of stuff, so I guess it's all right.
I still use links (not lynx) in very select cases (basic navigation from a shell on a server), but mostly I accept that modern browsers have little downside.
I gave up pine because just too much content I receive cannot be rendered without it in my professional correspondence and integrated calendaring becomes a must. However, for a lot of cases it is hard to beat the simplicity of pine or mutt.
Terminals have always been and will continue to be a fact of life *if* you are going to go into IT/programming as a profession. A critical focus area of MS has been making cli/scripting more competent, so even they recognize it.
As new technology comes along, you have to eye it critically. It may be empty hype or it may carry value. Sometimes it is worse than your favorite approach, but the reality is clear that your favored strategy *will* lose. In that case it may be best to go ahead and try to improve the inevitable winner. Sometimes its better to not assume what everyone thinks to be the winner is inevitable and push hard for what you believe to be better and make the case. Sometimes even if the new thing is objectively a little better than what you have in place assuming you didn't have either implemented, the worse solution winds by being good enough, already done, and risks an faults known.
Basically, if you want to be in the industry, you have to be constantly monitoring change, assessing whether it will be good as-is or perhaps is amenable for your guidance to change, or sometimes rejecting it even as everyone around you *thinks* otherwise. A career in the industry is a career of unending vigilance.
Of course, I strongly hope my own child will not want to get into this field. It can be rewarding but it is frankly exhausting never knowing if the next bend in the path will leave you hopelessly irrelevant. You have to know everything about anything so that you can jump on the next opportunity should it dry out.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It's not hating change if the option is to "upgrade" to a piece of crap.
It's interesting to see what people think after they've introduced a change. They will say that there are two types of people: geniuses and those who hate change. The idea that their change may not be good does not enter the equation.
...but not much about the shape of the bones, OP.
If you use old school tech for its own sake and it's really a cultural affectation then there's no real reason not to switch.
However, if you use them because you're interested in the raw stuff that makes the modern world work and you're not content to just accept that every new toy is a magical box controlled by Apple or Microsoft or Samsung... you should probably both stick to the old stuff and branch out into finding out how the new technologies do what they do.
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
You already said it: throw out the old and accept the new without any sort of hesitation.
The reason this works so well for "most" people is that they don't care about computers. They approach them much like a five years old: They just consume what appears on the screen, they click some place pursuing curiosity, and if something happens, cool!
But if you actually need to get something done, you will always despair when things change: I don't have the time to explore this! Where is the damn button to get bold text?
In other words, what you call "most people" are those who only seek entertainment. Those who don't, don't throw out the old and accept the new. They pull their hair out.
There is no substitute for common sense. Especially, no body of rules will do.
It's much easier than you think to adopt new platforms. PUTTY runs on Windows, and so does Git and CURL.
The interface doesn't matter -- The guts haven't really changed all that much, and where they have it's been abstracted to provide the same interface again. I used to just LOVE programming a PDP-11, it was Cool, had spinning tape drives and a noisy paper terminal, you could really mess things up big-time! (I'm not that old, it was my step-dad's hand-me-down, but I loved learning to program on old tech as a kid). Then I fell in love with x86 ASM, and now I love ARM.
With each advancement comes limitations and platform growing pains, so we've been limited and had to go back to doing things the old way, until the platforms get fast enough that I don't need machine level optimization, then I write in C, and soon after it's scripting and interpreted languages and VM languages. About that time another platform comes out that does some crazy new thing, like multi-threading, multi-core processors, or the Playstation 3's cell processor, or GPU shading languages.
With the hardware GPU acceleration we initially started off doing pixel overlay math to pull off tricks with the fixed function pipeline -- I used the pixel blending math as my ASM, and colors as my variables -- Reminded me of flipping switches to load accumulators and playing bitwise games with adds to pull off different mathematic operations like multiply and divide on the limited interface, just like in the old days, but now with pixel buffers... Then came pixel shaders, and we got back some more control, it was back to a more ASM like interface, then vertex shaders. Now we're now set to have integrated 'heterogeneous' computing with shared memory architectures to drop the RAM latency back down to where it's like having one big block of RAM again. I still write algorithms in make-shift assembly with pixel values and carve logic and datasets out of a huge slab of RAM, just like in the 16 bit era, before OSs had virtual memory... Although there's languages like OpenCL, you can still be very low level. Soon that'll be high level and we'll have Perl and JavaScript running around inside GPUs. Soon we'll have quantum computers and affordable ASIC -- I'll be programming in NAND gates again, and multiplying by 5 by shifting left two and adding it back to the original number, just like when I used to 'write' programs with a wire twister.
All the while the new tech comes out, goes through its paces, I still have my trusty text editor and multiple terminals. Hell, with GNU screen I have many terminals within terminal tabs within terminal windows -- All color coded, and searchable, with speaker sounds for alerts, spread across multiple monitors all running different OSs with one keyboard and mouse (cross platform or bust). Just like in the good old days with KVM switches and terminal servers. The point is, everything that's old is new again, so there's no reason not to keep reliving the good old days today. If you haven't been keeping up, then you've been missing out -- At the bleeding edge, It's just like way back when!
If you're talking about adopting gadgets like tablets and phones and stuff like that, Well, my phone and tablet have video out and blue..teeth? I use a rechargeable wireless keyboard and mouse with them, and use *nix no matter what OS is in the way of the UI I like... For all the advancement we've done in computing, you still program the damn things by compiling text files. I even twisted a wire on a post the other day to get LIRC talking to my home theater setup. :-)
3rd rule of /g/ -- Always do opposite of what /g/ says.
anon OP obviously failed.
>2013
>buying into thinkpad propaganda
I am still wating on the Amiga to make a meaningful comeback
. .
In my (old phart) opinion, change for the sake of change is what sucks.
For instance, I really hate the MS ribbon, it actually gets in my way... There was nothing wrong with classic menus. They're efficient - especially for "I don't know what I want, but I'll know it when I see it"... the Ribbon makes me have to hunt for everything. That was change for the sake of change. It was MS trying to make Office seem like it was somehow new and exciting... because, let's face it, their flagship product has been feature complete since Office 97 - sure, there have been a few improvements here and there, but Office XP wasn't that big of an improvement worth shelling out big bucks for the upgrade from 97... and 2003 - well, in retrospect, it was MS Office's finest hour, but it was an incremental improvement...... 2007 added the ribbon to some stuff, and 2010 completely replaced the menus. Yeah, it works just as good and has a few nice features, but I fight with the UI so much that my general perception is that it stinks. I use it cuz I have to (at work).
Be careful not to get labeled as a stick in the mud. Work with the stuff that you get stuck with, but always keep an eye out for actual good change - accept those good changes wholeheartedly, and laugh as others spin their wheels on the thing of the moment... but only to yourself - when nobody's looking. :p
The Digital Sorceress
I noticed some of the high-end programmer types keep stripping down their systems and going for simpler solutions, "less is better" if you will. If they use GNU/Linux, their GUI will be XMonad or DWM instead of KDE or Gnome. Richard Stallman uses Emacs as his GUI and he does not use a cel phone. For him, a pretty GUI is unnecessary. If an older piece of equipment or software achieves the objective, then stick with it. The concern, of course, is if a significant change occurs and you do not embrace it out of objection to change, but I suspect the poster does not have such an issue. I also see dedicated programmers use the old IBM Thinkpads not because of coolness, but they feel most comfortable with the keyboard. I hear the old IBM desktop keyboards are also sought after by contemporary programmers. As long as your "old school" (I may use "pragmatic") tendencies do not get in the way of the pursuit of knowledge, then embrace it. I think of Max Cohen from the movie, Pi, who build his computer from discarded components. Cool.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
It's hard to find common ground when the other party is still using Lynx. I can understand and strongly promote the idea of not upgrading just because it's the latest gadget or technology but rather consider the actual benefit of a upgrade and whether the marginal cost is justified, not to mention the harm to the environment by discarding last year's smartphone, tablet etc. However when you open the conversation by saying 'I use Lynx, do you think I have a problem?'. Fuck yea you have a problem. You should seek help. To paraphrase a pop culture saying - If you are still using Lynx in 2013, you might be a Luddite!
I still use Lynx, etc. I also use Firefox, Chrome, and IE. I haven't abandoned things so much as I've added things. It's not an all or nothing proposition. I love my Asus Transformer Prime, but I also love my old Linux box that doesn't even have a graphical display. Both have their place.
Then you have not learned anything, padawan. It may be commonly true of your peers, but it is not true of most humans in middle age or later, especially those of less tech-friendly varieties.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Use the tools that make you happy and keep you productive.
Lots of us drive old cars - manual transmission, dim lights due to old corroded 6v electricals, always hunting for a good supplier for non-E added gas (eats the gaskets, etc), hunting for parts, living with 0 to 60 times measured in the 15-20 second range, hard starting on cold mornings, no AC, no radio, or AM only radio (or AM, FM, and Shortwave, which is kinda cool). No seatbelts, or lap belts only.
But with out all the mod cons, the old cars are still fun to drive and driving them puts a smile on our faces.
But... when it comes to work place... do what the paycheck signers want you to do. Keep others productive, don't let your enjoyment of the old stuff get in the way of getting the company's business done.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
I see a lot of comments about "just join the 21st century." And a few that say "well if it is good enough..." When the truth (as I see it of course) is something in between. There is no need to jump on every fad that comes along. On the other hand, how will you *know* it is a fad if you don't at least learn a little? As is often the case, balance is required.
Note: I am considered the dinosaur in the office but they often say it with envy; I still use tried and true tools (like emacs... flame away!) and yet get things done in half the time that it takes others. People tease me about my mega-long command lines but they all have come to me at one time or another to find out how to do things more quickly than they can with their GUIs. It is all about balance, using the right tool for the job and all that. Just because some vendor has convinced the boss that the latest is the greatest via some article in a trade rag doesn't mean that it is the best. And just because you have always done it a certain way doesn't mean that some other way isn't better. Balance.
-Anon
You have to solve your problems, though. If you think all GUI libraries currently suck, you could just write your own. You don't have to be satisfied with existing software, if you can just make your own.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Adopt new technologies that make life easier and reject the ones that don't.
All too often, software designers fail to realize that people just want to get their work done. They don't want to have to constantly waste their time learning new interfaces just because the latest fad has changed, especially if the latest fad is poorly designed crap like the Microsoft Office ribbon, Unity, or Metro.
I often find myself going to the command line because it's the fastest and easiest way to get something done. If other people think that makes me an old fart, screw em. I don't care what they think.
do not be worried that you're not embracing all the stuff that the masses embrace.
True, argumentum ad populum is usually a fallacy. But sometimes it isn't. Economies of scale in manufacturing is one case. As the masses have moved from "netbooks" (10" laptops) to tablets, it has become more difficult for a happy netbook user to find a new replacement for failed hardware. Communication platforms are another case. If people aren't willing to make their writing available through an open technoloby such as an Atom feed but instead prefer to lock their communication inside the closed systems of Twitter and Facebook because everyone else is doing it, one has to join what everyone else is doing in order to be able to communicate with everyone else.
there is a huge difference between text mode and graphics mode.
Not as much as you might think. Quick: Guess what mode the third and fourth generation game consoles, such as the NES and Super NES, always ran in. Answer: It was text mode, just with customized colored fonts.
You should no longer expect people to mark up with alternate text mode.
The markup that makes a document accessible to the user of a text terminal is also likely to make the document accessible to users of speech interfaces or braille displays.
I has Alpine and elinks on my TF101. I am happy. You?
It deals with UTF and other stuff you get in email nowadays... (I forget when this was added, but the A toggle to toggle between viewing the plain & rich/html parts of the message is handy too.. since I prefer to view the plain text, but sometimes have to view the rich/html part.)
http://www.washington.edu/alpine/
mean like me not wanting to give up my IBM T43 laptop for a cheap Walmart Compaq with a crappy junk keyboard, crappy junk mouse pad, and crappy wide screen monitor? The 4:3 screen width to height ratio was found to be the most comfortable for viewing back in the black and white TV days. That hasn't changed. I have a tablet, and I like it, but it will never replace my laptop or my Lenovo Thinkcenter Desktop computer with 4:3 Thinkvision flat screen monitor. Quality never goes out of style!
BTW I have a cell phone that only makes calls and does texts. I am happy with it, and I am not about to pay several hundred for a smart(fart)phone!
Go get yourself a real computer.
Reeses
People have been predicting the death of Unix and the command line for ages. Most people don't care about long term because they're accustomed to a constant cycle of upgrades to make money for large corporations - it's what they're conditioned to do. If we don't want to run browsers that can get infected, email clients that render whatever they're told to render and systems that have poorly written third party software (I'm talking about you, Flash and Java), then who's the smart one?
I keep wondering if I'm doing old school things just because, but every time I try something new, I find that there aren't enough compelling reasons to modernize and at the same time there are enough good reasons to use what works well.
Seriously stop pining for a past you never experienced. Open up your windows and open up the source of X gen deadlock. Take the next step and let out a mighty "yahoo!" and embrace and extend your time to live. Burn the black T-shirts and stop being a java sucking wannabe. Run level 1 or run level 5. The rest is just silly.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
People -- especially Americans -- are quite eager to cast off the old and embrace the new because marketing and advertising professionals have for decades trained them to KNOW that the old stuff is utterly useless and the new stuff works miracles. Although new stuff does in fact occasionally (and often accidentally) work better than old stuff, this is mostly bullshit, of course. Marketing and advertising professionals' jobs depend upon this deception.
What I would advise is for you to use whatever technology is comfortable to you, and enables you to efficiently and effectively do what you do. Anything else is probably just seeking more licensing fees from you.
You don't. If your happy working in this way, keep doing it.
Learn new stuff, sure. But.. do what you enjoy and enjoy the speed boost from new hardware designed to be slowed down and crippled by modern junk OS v8.1
I do.
*hugs*
I see the recent college graduates have been unleashed like a pestilent plague upon the world. He's either a complete jackass or a troll, or both.
I say we feed him RMS toe cheese and water board him until he confesses.
Expand your knowledge, of the old school there's a lot of it and its the stuff that has the niche features that you need to do trixy things. Your skills of the old school are the things that impress knowledgeable people, that know how effective those tool are. The web X.0 crap is for the trendy crowd unless your a web developer, its OK to let it pass you by because many times its toilet paper tech until it becomes established.
Good leaders run toward problems, bad leaders hide from them.
Well, that depends on where you want to be. Do you want to be on the bleeding edge of technology, the leading edge of technology, the middle of technology, the 'value' of technology, or behind the curve of technology? Each position requires different investments.
Bleeding edge means you are using stuff that probably no one else is using, and can rock the market / world / whatever, but you are also bleeding cash like a hemophiliac who has been hit by by a cannon.
Leading edge means you are using stuff that only a handful of others are using, and others look to you being now where they want to be in the future if only they had the money / talent / executives with vision / techs with the rights skills.
The middle of technology means you are not quite leading the pack, but you are also not in the value area either. If the value people were running Windows 2000, you'd be running Windows XP, the leading edge people would be running Vista, and the bleeding edge people would be running 7 betas.
The value people are in the proverbial sweet spot, but also dangerous place, of getting really great deals on hardware / software for pennies on the dollar, but being incapable of moving out of there without paying a lot. They are also in danger of becoming obsolete very easily.
And then there's the behind the curve people who are behind the curve. These are the people still running Windows 98 SE, and do not see the utility in upgrading. They may realize excellent ROIs, but their skills are not being upgraded, and if / when the hardware / software they rely on proves inadequate, they may have a steep learning curve / bill ahead of them.
Don't believe me? Look at Google, Microsoft, etc. -> these companies bleed cash at times. Their employees are given access, if stories are correct, to the tech armory and the company safe, and told to, within certain guidelines, be on the bleeding edge. If they want a SSD, chances are they will have one. If they want the latest video card, it's there. And so on.
As for you, perhaps the best recommendation might be a LUG. Social groups, even for techs, allow for updates of methods and designs.
I am John Hurt.
Lynx and Pine are certainly not for everyone, but I'm glad to hear that some young people are still using this stuff. Pine rocks. I remember getting reprimanded for chatting at work while at Apple in the late 90's. I dragged my ignorant boss into my lab and showed him that what he assumed to be chat was actually an e-mail program, and he changed his tune when he realized that I was not only not-chatting, but using a highly-efficient e-mail program to get my work done. In the early 90's I developed a website for a public science center. My boss thought I was wasting time optimizing web pages for Lynx as well as Mosaic but changed his tune when he started receiving thank-you e-mails from public library administrators throughout the U.S. At the time, web browsers were not ubiquitous so it was important to implement solutions with old-school tools as well as new-school tools. In these two cases, using old-school technology raised skepticism from key stakeholders: management. But note that in order to please all stakeholders I also had to reduce my own skepticism of emerging technologies.
-- Jimtown Kelly
[Reason #5643] - Section N, Sub-paragraph (7), Line (534). ) Convenience - I find studying with a tablet far easier than sitting at a desk.
im 14 and doing all of these above, my age is better than yours AND im smarter than you HAHAHAHA
I have been using mutt, vim and links (upgraded from lynx recently) since 1998 on Linux. I run them all in Fluxbox with customised keyboard shortcuts. The main reason I use all of them is speed, focus - and gets the job done. Choose the right tool for the job, and it will become a habit. Some habits are good.
in your t16 back home?
There is nothing wrong with choosing an older tool because it does the better job. But claiming to have an emotional attachment to it is attention mongering. This guy is just a technological hipster - he's using Lynx to be different. He probably can' t bear to be separated from his straight razor or manual typewriter either.
It is insane to think that a 24 year old somehow grew up with Lynx and just doesn't want to change, unless this narrative involves a village in Somalia or something. We're supposed to be in awe of how special he is, but as someone who actually used Lynx when it was the only game in town, all I have to say is "get a fucking life".
Support microSD: in a post 9/11 world, it is unwise to carry your data on media that you cannot comfortably swallow.
Despite the fact that I am fairly young at five years old, people see me as rather 'old school.' I regularly use a keyboard, mouse and decent size monitor. Lorem ipsum badda boom badda bing.
He is only 24 and he uses shit from before he was born?
I use Mutt, Tin, Windows XP Pro. SP3, analog speakers, analog bone conduction hearing aid (don't want digital with implants), Casio Data Bank (DB) 150 calculator watch, don't own a mobile phone, VCR to connect my desktop Windows PC to my 19.5" Sharp CRT TV from January 1996, PS/2 clicky keyboards and optical mice, etc. Why? Because they still work for me. I will upgrade when I need to replace them or whatever. It also helps to save money. I don't care about the latest expensive and buggy stuff. Frak them.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I am trying to move to your set-up, from my Web 3.0 fanciness.
The 1984 Mac was my first computer, with all its GUI wizardry. I got into programming from the top down, HTML first, then PHP and SQL. My strength is user interface design (although I'm mastering databases more and more and loving it).
The command line is text. But what you forget is that most GUI's are also text, just with a fancy box around it.
The GUI's for n00bs, the command line for l33ts. Seriously. The whole attraction of the GUI is that you can discover how it works by clicking around, by reading the menu choices, etc. You can't do that with the command line. Your chances of happening upon the right command by trying different key combinations are practically zero. There's simply no substitute for reading --- either the man page or googling it.
But the advantage of the command line is that, once you've learned it, you work faster. You have great power at your fingertips. Chances are you can do more things, faster, than even a power user of a GUI.
To ram home the idea that I was not predisposed to favor the command line, before I even did HTML I was into graphic arts. My college major was film production. But I can draw a parallel between the command line and professional cameras. At first blush, professional video equipment is a step back. It's bulkier, with fewer niceties. There is no professional camera with autofocus. They all prefer manual-focus lenses. Why? Because after a few weeks of practice you can manually focus faster and more accurately (and more artistically) than any autofocus system.
This is kind of a bad example because digital photography has made everyone, even professionals, buy new equipment. But back, say, in the 90's, when your choices were film or film, professional photographers often held onto --- and preferred --- a Hasselblad from the 1960s. Little more than a box that pulled film. But it did it reliably and simply, and everyone knows that the difference is in the operator (and great lenses don't hurt, manual focus of course).
... based on what works best for them. It should not be about conforming to the expectation of others ... except when getting a job is involved.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I think, in many ways what you are doing by holding on to 'the old ways' is the right thing. A lot of these 'next big thing' gadgets are only fads, and anyway, what do you think lies under it all? The next big thing won't happen unless there is a lot of good old-fashioned computer skills happening somewhere, just out of sight. Hold on to what you are doing well, and keep yourself up to date with some of the new stuff, but don't let it take over - it is not worth it.
I find that it's a really good idea to try to understand why people prefer the systems they do. Be sympathetic, get inside their heads, and you'll be better able to both defend your own choices and sympathize with theirs.
This part really should be obvious, but on Slashdot it's not: if you ever conclude that anyone likes any system because "they're stupid", go back and try again. For non-techies, a dirt-simple, friendly, easy-to-use system that does the tiny set of tasks they need is genuinely more useful than a powerful, complex system that they don't have the time or inclination to learn about. Not everyone derives pleasure and satisfaction from figuring out complex systems, and many people simply have other things to do with their time.
Work with what suits you best. Though what you have sounds like a severe case of the Hipster
" I am coming to the realization that the 'old school' computing world that I grew up in is slowly fading away and a new world of Windows 8, Web 3.0, tablets, smart televisions, and social networking is starting to become fairly common. "
Come and work in the "old boys" finance world! "Snail's pace" is not the word, the front-end may be all shiny tablets and Web 3.0 but the back-end, where I work, is still all huge beasts, multi-petabyte datastores and lots and lots of teminal consoles on lots and lots of Unix servers that are shut down maybe once every 2-3 years and database \ O/S upgrades are on 5 year cycles! Suits me just fine, the more managers terrfied of upsetting their managers, and their manager's manager's managers, the more I get to keep my job patching hardware and software that should have been deleted yonks ago. Oracle 6 was desupported about 15-20 years ago, it's still in use! We finally dumped our last Oracle 8 database 2 years ago, it was desupported 10 years ago! My current shop is quite forward looking, compared to some places I've worked.
Have no fear there's still plenty of mindless managers, to scared or no brains to put on their on socks, to ensure there'll be plenty of work for us "old school" techies who could survive with a VT100 plugged in the back of a server if crunch really came down!
... NEED confirmation by popular opinion (and an easy one at that, since it's admittedly easier to find an agreeing crowd in Slashdot rather than anywhere else).
I don't know you and I realise that I might be wrong, but: If the tools you use suffice for what you want to do, good for you. If, however you're actively resisting experimentation or even simple familiarisation with newer technologies just because the majority use them, that's not something that gives you any kind of status now, is it? Perhaps that of a luddite variation of some kind?
Things change, I am said to be good at dealing with change, but I DO NOT like it. Yet what I am used to and like, now, was unimaginable when I started my path (life: 1948; computers: 1965) a few years ago. Viva la difference. But it's a MIND shift I think anyway - its not a tool on my job or an appliance in my home or a major corporate asset...it's getting so it's more like a door knob (famously held to be the total example of what computers WERE NOT). And I'm beginning to see it that way myself - dislike for the small expensive doodad that likely will be lost or stolen, beginning to be replaced by a feeling that my net and compute comnection is a basic sense, that I wish always to have everywhere and when.
This should be posted up on the walls of every office in Microsoft.
"Windows 8, Web 3.0, tablets, smart televisions, and social networking is starting to become fairly common. If there is anything I have learned, it is that most humans have a desire to throw out the old and accept the new without any sort of hesitation"
Surely Windows 8 is pretty clear evidence that most people - Joe Random Computer User - will refuse to have anything to do with The New unless it's actually easier for them to use.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Read it
I like that description but think it needs to be wound back a bit more - wasn't the light pen abandoned due to "gorilla arm" before MSDOS was badly copied from a few ideas in CP/M ?
Nethack has vi keybindings for movement.
If there is anything I have learned, it is that most humans are lemmings who will play follow the leader towards the new shiny object without any sort of hesitation.
There - fixed that for you.
Yeah buying a new car or pc is usually easy. Changing your ways is something people aren't in a hurry with.
You just realised that you need what you need and no more.
There's nothing wrong with using an old laptop. If you don't need the features of Windows 8, why should you use it? If you don't need a Smartphone, why should you buy it?
People don't have "a desire to throw out the old and accept the new", they have been told they need to.
Look at any discussion where someone says "I will not buy a game that needs online activation". Told "You will have to: that's the way everything is going". Or "you can't! You're missing out on $GREAT_GAME" (which can be entirely true: I HAVE missed out on some games I was REALLY looking forward to) or "Nobody cares, you're nobody and everyone else isn't a troglodyte old fogey like you".
People are even themselves DEMANDING that you get the newest thing, accept the latest change and are somehow deficient or irrelevant if you don't agree. THAT is how brainwashed they are. You're NOT ALLOWED to refuse. Possibly since they didn't and do not want to know that it was not necessary to capitulate. You know, much the same way as people project their failures on others so that they aren't "bad", they're "what everyone does, so I'm not a bad person, just a normal human, no worse than anyone else!".
http://xkcd.com/378/
"Quantum" means "discrete", as opposed to continuous. A quantum leap is a sudden leap as opposed to a gradual one. A discrete quantity does mean that there is such a thing as a smallest possible unit, and a quantum leap is a change by exactly one such unit, but the intended connotation is the suddenness of the change, not the magnitude of it.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
The "old" technology - UNIX, Emacs, terminals, Perl, etc - will be here long after the "new" stuff is gone. After a while, you'll be experienced enough to realize the "new" is either a flash in the pan, or a new wrapper on an old package. The more time you invest in learning Emacs, command-line tools, Perl and Python, etc, the more quickly you'll be able to pick up new stuff. After all, anyone who introduces a new programming language makes an Emacs editing mode for it or not one will take it seriously. The real work gets done by people using Emacs. I've seen so many "IDE" software come and go that I'm not sure why anyone wastes time learning them, because in a few years you'll have to throw out everything you know and start over with the next one. Emacs has been the same for the two decades I've been using it. I've never had to relearn anything.
Tablets? UNIX with a new wrapper. iOS? Decades-old Objective-C and NextStep libraries. Android? You can tell what Google added to Linux, because it's an overengineered mess that barely works. Windows 8? New, but dying a flaming death.
These days, everything is coming up closures! LISP had it long before it was reinvented by C#, Java, JavaScript, etc.
Regular expressions - people love to hate Perl for its inline regular expressions, but any language that processes text gets them and they're ugly in any language, but they're a powerful tool.
Etc.
It's all about creating problems and solving problems. Companies make money by creating problems, convincing the customers they have a problem, and then getting them to buy the solution. Bling bling! $$$$$
To date myself, I took a "unit record" business course in High School, because I wanted to program an IBM 402 accounting machine before they disappeared from the planet.
I keep current by reading, talking with younger colleagues and investigating interesting things (like Arduino) on my own time. Sometimes, my ancient knowledge comes in handy (neither my boss nor my lead software co-worker had read Brooks' Mythical Man-Month). I offer soldering lessons and have been asked to repair older gear here at work.
My independent investigations of new tech have made me the go-to guy (well, I am the only hardware guy here, now) for quick mockups, because I can hack together stuff for demos. Years of valuable experience in making mistakes help me know what not to do, which I try to pass on to the younger people who work here. Linux is new to many, and the command line is scary, but a former employer dropped Sun workstations on our desks and told us to set them up, so I learned "survival UNIX" the hard way. It still pays off today, the Linux system on my desk lets me do things that aren't as easy to do on a Win7 system.
If you stay curious, you won't be outdated. And some of that ancient knowledge can come in handy -- it's called "experience" and passing it on, in a low-key way, is a good thing to do.
People freuqently are impressed by the clarity I produce in mutt using vim as compared to all my outlook-weilding cavemen.
PROTIP: Vim has spell check.
All above things are considered true...but change is the requirement of successful business or in anything!
The old: "This is old and therefor good!"
The young: "This is new and therefor better!"
Honestly: on what do all those new shiny things run, like Web 2.0 or your Web 3.0 (what is that?), social networks and and and?
The run on unix/linux. As long as there is no Plan 9 or Hurd replacing them there won't be any new OS in big computing.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Feel good you've NOT gone to chiclet keyboards. As a software engineer working in a UNIX/LINUX environment, and part-time pianist, I appreciate the superior ergonomics of battleship keyboards. The tactile sense of a mechanical keyboard doubles my productivity when using Emacs or composing emails. In the olde days I used a Gateway keyboard with programmable keys. Now I've got a Razer Black Widow mechanical gamers keyboard (great feel and light keys but difficult to get the keyboard drivers to work via Citrix). Don't assume everything old is substandard - JS Bach is still the greatest composer after 300 years.
The world is not changing as much as you think. I am 28, and priviledged to have worked in several corporate environments. In a workplace that has 4 generations of employees, you have much bigger headaches, such as dealing with different generational value systems. Leave your area of knowledge and you will quickly find you are not "old school". Most of the world is not even technology-based. Leave the country and serve humanitarian efforts in Honduras or Haiti (I've been to the Philippines myself). Study different cultures. Actually, people do not tend to throw things away in favor of the new and different - quite the opposite. Culture is the basis of humanity, and cultural heritage is not new, and you'd better not throw it away. Our generation and those younger still are growing up hungry to culture, hungry for those things that are so carelessly thrown away because we listen to television instead of our grandparents.
And over there we have the labyrinth guards. One always lies, one always tells the truth, and one stabs people who ask t
Let me just plug the original of the genre; FUTURE SHOCK by Alvin Toffler. And then, after you've read the ePub for that on your smartphone, please consider picking up THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER by John Brunner, a book that was way ahead of its time, then, and is still relevant (and a great read) today.
Just because its new, does not make it better. Most tech companies "innovate" to drive new product sales.
Case in point is Win 8.
Desktop Computers simply are the best at most business and even creative apps. Touch screen tech is useless for entering invoices and editing MIDI files etc.
What really needs to happen is for companies to realize that there is a huge market for stable technology, sure new stuff is good, and the best of it will live on it's own merit, but jamming new stuff down our throats only for the sake of sales is a bad business model. Ask MS, win 8 will have to adapt or die.
All the new toys don't change the fact that Computer Science Professionals will be most productive using a real programming language and a command line. GUIs are actually a very imprecise, un-productive and error-prone way to operate a computer. Their main benefit is that users can "explore" the functionaity of a system without a large upfront training investment.
But if you operate computers as your main job, learning all the intricacies of the command line, Perl and maybe C++ is well worth the effort. That's because these tools are easily 10 or even 100 times more productive than their GUI equivalents. They are way more flexible and precise. In short, use the right tool for the job at hand and in any real computer operation, there are plenty of jobs which require highly skilled people.
What do you think makes the Googleplex and Facebook run ? GUIs ? No, real experts and masters of their trade using professional-grade tools from grep to gcc. Surely the Windows folks will dispute this, but actually M$ already acknowledged the power of the command line with their latest "headless" server and powershell.
I have worked on Linux in the past, I currently work in a large global corporation on Windows, programming in C++. But I certainly also have cygwin and plenty of Unix tools installed. I know a guy who develops in Cobol for his entire life and will probably retire as a Cobol/mainframe guy. That's because mainframes are simply the right tool for the job in that case (insurance industry). Many if not most of the problems that were "discovered" on the midrange and PC systems during the last 15 years were solved on the mainframe circa 1978. For example, virtualization is quite old on the mainframe, but the PC and Unix people try to sell it as a novelty these days.
Exactly the same will happen with all the smartphone technologies.
This is by far the best looking beast I've ever seen. Maybe its blood is only half-trollish, but still.
Look at technological progress not technological change. There's nothing wrong with rejecting technological progress whenever it also happens to be technological regression. And technological progress has nothing to do with what's newer or older than what. It's about what's more capable or cheaper than what. There are some ways the ancients really might have been more technologically advanced than you; you can't always just take it for granted that since you're later, you're more advanced.
And always remember, when evaluating the technology of something you use, "more capable" should always be viewed as subjective utility to you. That doesn't mean you should remain closed-minded about reaping new rewards, but it does mean that if something is truly useless to you, then it's to fairly be rated as such.
(That's why media consumer don't think of DRM as a "technological advance," for example, even if old media didn't have it but new media does; and yet if someone else sees DRM as a way to make you buy a certain player they make, they can rightly view DRM as a technological advance, since it gets their electronics division more sales thanks to the lock-in. Both parties can be honest here; it's just that you're in conflict so you're obviously going to disagree on some things.)
You've enumerated a few "oldschool" things that you use in preference to newschool. How do the two alternatives really compare to each other, from a technological viewpoint? Look at them and think about it.
If you find that you're actually using higher (or at least equal) tech than the newschool posers, then you have nothing to worry about, other than being out of touch with the lame memery du jour. I wouldn't worry about that; when someone says "WUZZZUUUUP" and some people smirk and you don't get it, you're really not missing anything. I promise.
OTOH if you find that you're actually using lower tech, then you're the poser.
You can and should include tradeoffs in your technological evaluation. Someone might tell you strip mining is higher tech than stream panning, but you're allowed to point at costs when you tell them they're full of shit. The same goes for when someone tells you that iOS built in mailreader is better than mutt, and you have to explain to them that iOS mailreader doesn't have convenient encryption support; the cost of a two-decade technological regression on crypto is arguably (this part will always be subjective) higher than the benefit of being able to hold the mail reader in your hand (which is pretty cool, just probably not as cool as being able to decrypt the email so you can actually read it).
There are a few things which are nearly impossible to evaluate in that manner, but for most of them, it'll work out fine. Some (like the ideal shape of a monitor) really are arbitrary and while we all may have our preferences, anyone who says 4x3 is objectively better or worse than 16x10 is truly full of shit and can be ignored.
Graphics is the one big thing that has driven the development of technology away from the command line. You apparently use character-based technology exclusively, so it stands to reason that you wouldn't have much need for tablets, smartphones, Facebook, etc. etc., or even a graphical user interface for your computer.
So, if we combine your very verbally-based, non-visual cognitive structure with a low social aptitude (i.e. how many 24-year-olds are so far from their own childhood that they want to "...keep these kids off my lawn"), then we have a person who needs to stay in control of their very narrowly-defined world, rather than suffer the anxiety caused by participating in society.
There's no rule that says you must "adapt (to) and accept" anything if you don't want to. The first step is really just to define what you really want to do. Build a fence around your yard, perhaps? Or maybe look into the source of that anxiety. Or maybe just spend some quality time trolling...
I laugh at your perception of "old". in my day we had to load unix-like systems using vt100 terminals and no not the vt100 terminal "emulation" actual physical dec equipment terminals. virtual terminals would have been a god sent. sill kids, now GET OFF MY LAWN!!
Pretend you are like a super-hero, maybe LinuxMan, EmacsMan, LambdaMan, etc.
During the day you are Windows Kent, but at night you put on your EmacsMan suit and save the day from the unsuspecting clueless minions below you without thanks or recognition except for a handful of fans who realize you have kept Joker Ballmer from ruling the entire world.
Table-ized A.I.
There's nothing wrong with being selective in which technologies you adopt. You simply can't adopt all of them. Not all of them are worth the effort. The nature of technology is only 1 out of 10 new technologies will survive and be relevant long term. Only an idiot blindly embraces it all just because it's new. Better to know a little about them; maybe try them out, but then drop most of them and only use those that give YOU value.
you just shoot off a message to "J. Doe" on your list of contacts and can be reasonably sure that you're talking to the right Doe (because you can click their profile to look it up) but also not send it to the wrong Doe (your boss, say).
So one service that Facebook provides is identity disambiguation. I never thought of it that way.
I still see [10" laptops] for $300, but they aren't movers anymore as for $100 more, you get a glitzier tablet with larger screen
And a limited application selection. The advantage of a netbook is that it runs pretty much every PC application, up to and including developer tools, and I use my Dell Inspiron mini 1012 to work on hobby coding projects while riding the city bus to and from work. With the iPad, on the other hand, it has come to my attention that Apple maintains a list of several categories of application that it will never approve. Such applications can be used only remotely, and having to connect to the Internet to do so defeats the purpose of mobility unless you're willing to pay hundreds more per year for cellular broadband. A lot of other Slashdot users have given Apple a free pass on this, claiming that "nobody" needs any of those applications, but if even 1 percent of the population wants each of 15 things that a policy bans, the policy has hurt 15 percent of users. (Incidentally, that's why the feature creep in Microsoft Office has continued: though people tend to use only about 1 percent of the advanced features, each user has his own 1 percent.) Even Android, which is far more open about where the user can get applications, lacks a 1 percent that I use regularly: the ability to split the screen down the middle and see two different things.
But for personal stuff? Outlook requires a corporate server to be effective (as would most office productivity suites which want to integrate properly), which puts it at a disadvantage over stuff like facebook where it's available everywhere and the "server" is provided.
Microsoft recently rebranded Hotmail as "Outlook.com", probably to overcome just that disadvantage.
That's all you really need to do.
But I leave you, twenty years younger than I, with a small history lesson:
2014: Stick with Sony Reader, migrate to Kindle, or go with an iPad or Droid tablet?
2013: Implement Office 2010 (because 2013's licensing costs make no sense to our organization) or stay with 2003?
2007: Buy a Sony Reader, wait for a Kindle, or stay with all paper?
2006: Married now.... need new computer for wife's dead desktop. Desktop or laptop?
2004: Stay with 90s Chevy Caprice, or buy 2003 Chevy Impala?
2003: Stick with my Windows XP Tablet PC, or go back to a traditional laptop?
1998: Buy a cell phone after abandoning the car phone years ago? Or stay with ham radio in car? Or both?
1997: Go with an independent ISP, or stay with CompuServe?
1995: Buy replacement desktop for the dead AT, or buy color screen laptop with hard drive and sell monochrome floppy laptop?
1993: Stay on dial-up BBSes, or sign up with CompuServe?
1991: Stick with my Model 100 TRS-80, or buy an monochrome XT laptop as adjunct to my AT Clone?
1989: Buy an AT clone or stay with Model III TRS-80 (now with Disk Drives, 48K RAM)?
1988: For emergencies, ham radio or analog cell phone in the car?
1981/2: Model III TRS-80 as birthday present!!!!!!! 16K and cassette tape and not 4K RAM only!!!!!! OMFG!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Went with a couple of years older than you... Sometimes yes, sometimes no, never had to tell anyone get off my lawn outside of a business context; always familiarize with new technology but only adopt that which helps in a price range I can afford. Sometimes I'm right, sometimes I'm wrong... All I can say is I try to
Think.
Substance over surface?
I have more windows open than you... but then, I'm in Linux, at work and at home. Even my non-computerphile wife has no more trouble with it than she does with Windows....
And don't sweat Win8 - they've already as good as admitted they blew it, and from what I see in the trade press and from other folks, corporations, and possibly the government, will treat it like Vista... that is, wait for Win9, and keep running 7.
Tablets are great... for the people on the sales floor, like at Sears the other night. To do work? To actually get something *done* that doesn't involve clicking links? Don't be absurd. Pay a bit more attention to folks your age and older, and let the k3wl k1dz play... because that *is* all they're doing.
mark
I don't think I understand the point of this question. Use the new technology or don't. What's the difference? It's really a personal choice that everyone has to make. Does it make you feel superior to use a text-based email client? If so then great. Personally I will never use pine anymore because that kind of interface is ill suited to work on a mobile device and good luck getting it to work with your company's MS Exchange server, etc. The technology is all about the application of it. If you need the technology or if you like it then use it. If not, then don't. It's as simple as that.
fff
The Pash project, an open-source reimplementation of Powershell, was recently resurrected: https://github.com/Pash-Project/Pash.
Just because a new interface comes out for Windows, Android, and Ubuntu, doesn't mean you have to use it. Seriously, check this out instead: http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&type=submission&id=2669311 You and others will be very glad you did, instead of settling for a slower interface, and OS. Please Please Please I beg you !
Dont accept the fads - like social networking - if they aren't your style but surely you can accept the improved interfaces, standardisation of packages, large app base etc. OK
What is missing on the above is the willingness to try out the new stuffs
Yeah but there are billions of us, so there isn't even enough new stuffs worth trying. I wouldn't expect EVERYBODY trying out new stuff all the time and instead just watch smarter people be the ones to make their mistakes first.