Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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!
I've got socks older than you. What are you gonna do when you really get old?
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.
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.
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.
" 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
As utterly useless as this saying is, because it is so general I would say at least keep your wits. Because a moron reacts to changes moronically.
Such as buying a gadget without anyone fully understanding its usage or potential (tablet), or perhaps buying something because others have it (rasberry pi).
The Tablet is a niche market that exploded, because the niche is pretty large (all sales people and children under 12). it will settle down, and will not take away the desktop or laptop. It wont take away servers or networking, and it wont do anything to programming.
Evaluate items based on what they are and what they bring. Fearing technology? no... fearing things that lock you down or keep you walled in some sort of garden preventing you from reaching your potential or the devices potential... yes, very much yes.
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)
"Because a moron reacts to changes moronically."
This.
In recent years I have seen so much change for the sake of change, it sometimes disgusts me.
Let's get something straight, folks: Change is only good if it's an improvement. Otherwise, change is BAD, even if it's just as good as the old thing. There are a number of reasons for this.
First among those reasons is that change has definite costs involved. Whenever you change something, people have to learn new ways, use something differently, etc., etc. If anybody can find some kind of major change that doesn't have a cost associated with it, I'd be delighted to hear about it.
Second, things are usually the way they are for good reasons. There are generations of people who came before who tried different things and arrived at their ways via hard-won trial and error. Changing something "just because" probably means you don't know your history and, as they say, will likely be doomed to repeat it.
When I think a change is GOOD, on its own merit, I am happy to jump on the bandwagon. But I don't drool over things just because they are new or in fashion.
We're just returning to dumb terminals and renting compute time. The terminals aren't so dumb and we pay with ads or personal information usually but, really, for everything that has changed we've really stayed the same.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I enjoy change -- sometimes even for its own sake.
You and I have come a long way, buddy
I do not change, for change sake
But I do enjoy trying out new things, and only then, I get to decide whether or not there is a need for me to change
For example, when Facebook first came out, I gave it a try, and decided that it wasn't for me
No matter how much stuffs FB has added since then, I won't force myself to change, just for the sake of changing
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Office365 was created for exactly one reason. It was created to convert customers from a pay-once model to a pay-as-you-go subscription model.
Who do you think Office2013's biggest competitor is? Open Office? Hardly. They're competing against the installed base of Office2010 users. They are competing against themselves. Long ago they ran out of truly useful features to add - how many users were clamoring for the ribbon bar, or Clippy? Once they improved their software engineering skills and drove out most of the bugs and security flaws, they removed all compelling reasons to upgrade. And that is cutting into their revenue stream. Subscription based software rental will keep the money taps open, but only if they can connive people into "upgrading" to it.
This change improves one thing only: Microsoft's cash flow. It was not changed out of a desire to improve upon a working product.
And you're helping sell it.
John