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?"

Comments

Old School B-)

[GameboyRMH]

Stay cool, don't be a fool.

Re:Old School B-)

[jhoegl]

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.

Re:Old School B-)

[hendrikboom]

Tablets won't take away servers or networking -- tablets need the servers and the network.

Re:Old School B-)

[Jane Q. Public]

"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.

Re:Old School B-)

[KGIII]

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.

Re:Old School B-)

[PCM2]

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.

I don't agree with that. I enjoy change -- sometimes even for its own sake.

Want proof? On this computer, right now, I am running Windows 8 and the "streaming" version of Office 2013 from an Office 365 subscription. If that's not change for change's own sake, I dunno what is.

Now, part of this is because it's my job to be familiar with the new stuff. But in general, unless something actively hinders what I used to be able to do with the old stuff, I go along with the new stuff just fine. Generally speaking, new stuff is built by people who genuinely wanted to improve on the old stuff, and often they get that right, if only in minor ways. I say bring it on.

But bring it on for everybody? Obviously not. If you don't feel the way I do then don't do as I do. Simple as that.

For as much as the media likes to say that the world is changing forever every five minutes, I honestly don't see it. I run headlong into just about every new thing that comes along, if only just to check it out, and I honestly don't think I have lost anything worthwhile in the process.

Yes, there are Windows 8 laptops on the market that are more or less locked down. Others aren't. Yes, to do anything worthwhile with an iPad you pretty much have to play by Apple's rules. So if you want a tablet, get an Android one and root it. And if you don't want a tablet, don't get one! The submitter seems to be looking for a problem where none exists.

Re:Old School B-)

[johnsnails]

sack*

Re:Old School B-)

[Anonymous Coward]

The tablet is a niche market that exploded, because Apple was the first company to realise what a tablet was for.

It's not a computer replacement, it's a TV replacement. And which do you think there are more of in America - desktop computers, or TVs? It's a big market.

Re:Old School B-)

[Pentium100]

Generally speaking, new stuff is built by people who genuinely wanted to improve on the old stuff, and often they get that right, if only in minor ways.

And often they get it wrong - the example is the Windows 8 Metro interface. One program window at a time, really? That's like DOS, since Windows 1 had the ability to display multiple windows at once (the windows could not overlap though).

Also, often the target for improvement is different than what I (or someone else) considers an improvement. An example would be Apple phones and their non-removable batteries. Yes, the phones are a bit smaller, but I'd like to be able to replace the battery when it inevitably dies (and not pay additional money for someone to replace it for me). Currently the primary target for improvement is power consumption, size and lower price instead of higher quality. What is the point of making the TV really thin but at the same time making it run hotter and (when the caps blow up sooner because of the heat) harder to repair? There really isn't that much difference whether the (1m diagonal) TV is 5cm or 15cm thick.

Re:Old School B-)

[unimacs]

When it comes to specifics we probably agree. I will add some caveats though. Technology moves quickly and career wise if we want to be relevant in our 40's and 50's we need to move with it. It's not only good for your career, learning new skills is good for your brain.

There's been plenty of times in my career where I've chosen to use a particular technology for a given project primarily because I wanted to learn it or I wanted a member of my staff to learn it. Yes, it costs more, but it pays off down the road.

My current example is a backend text processing system for one of our data analysis applications. I started it about 12 years ago and chose perl. Python seems to be the language of choice now for scripting and I'm contemplating doing a conversion. It will be time consuming and expensive. Further there's nothing I foresee needing to do with this system that I can't do with perl. The problem is that the system continues to grow and as expensive as it would be to convert now, it will be even more expensive in 2 years.

Re:Old School B-)

[Taco Cowboy]

Change is only good if it's an improvement. Otherwise, change is BAD, even if it's just as good as the old thing.

What is missing on the above is the willingness to try out the new stuffs

Giving the new stuffs a try out does not mean throwing out the old things altogether - but we need to have the willingness to try out the new stuffs, get a taste of it, and only after that, we can make up our own mind whether or not we need to change

If we do not even try out the new stuffs, how are we to know if the new stuff is better, or worse ?

Re:Old School B-)

[Taco Cowboy]

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

Re:Old School B-)

[Jane Q. Public]

"Generally speaking, new stuff is built by people who genuinely wanted to improve on the old stuff, and often they get that right, if only in minor ways. I say bring it on."

You missed my point.

Of course new stuff is built by people who genuinely wanted to improve on the old stuff. And that *IS*, as you say, how we improve.

But the fact is that most of them fail, and many of them -- many that I've seen in recent years, at any rate -- fail because they did not know their history. If they did, they would have known that it had been done before and failed then, too. Often for very good reasons.

If you're trying to improve something, make sure it's an actual improvement, yes? Rather than a reversion to something that we already knew doesn't work well.

Re:Old School B-)

[Jane Q. Public]

"What is missing on the above is the willingness to try out the new stuffs"

No, it isn't. My comment has nothing to do with trying out new stuff. I try out lots of new stuff... that's how I learned about all the stuff I was commenting about.

My comment was about people who put stuff out there they think is new, when it isn't.

Re:Old School B-)

[Big Hairy Ian]

it wont do anything to programming.

I disagree the need for cross platform support has changed how systems are designed. In the olden days you would normally have had all the business logic on the client app with perhaps a little with the back end DB. Now with apps having to run on so many different technologies (Thin/Faqt Client, Web, Android, Apple, Atom, Kindle etc) it's changed the whole design paradigm to everything working off of web services and just the presentation aspect being handled in the client technology.

Re:Old School B-)

[Sockatume]

The Tablet is a niche market that exploded [...] 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.

While desktops and laptops will continue to be necessary for work tasks, and will always have that niche, the overwhelming bulk of computers sold today are being used as little more than glorified web browser and Facebook kiosks in people's homes. The tablet and smartphone market is completely devouring that. I bought a smartphone three years ago - I'm still using the same one - and since then I've found myself browsing the web on my laptop less and less because the benefits don't outweight the cumbersome nature of the machine. It has reached a point where I only use my laptop to write, perform actual work, or play games. I'm even using a streaming box when I want to watch videos on a screen larger than a postcard.

So I'm on my laptop at home for about five hours a week, and even that's because I'm doing things most computers don't do most of the time. That should scare the everloving shit out of everyone who's making PCs. I'm not going to pony up for a $1500 Ultrabook to replace it if it breaks.

Re:Old School B-)

[AmiMoJo]

Problem is that it is rather hard to determine which changes are good and which are bad in the long run. Worse than that many changes are good for a lot of people but bad for some.

Take motorcars as an example. Better than horses and carriages in most ways, but put buggy whip manufacturers out of business and helped bugger up the environment.

Re:Old School B-)

[plover]

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.

Re:Old School B-)

[Anonymous Coward]

But....but....THE CLOUD!!!!

Every time I hear that I want to facepalm. "You mean clients connected to servers?" It's like the patent office allowing everything already patented to be re-patented with the words "with a computer" and "on the internet" as if those are suddenly new things.

Yes, I am now further from "the server room" than I was 20 years ago. And "the server room" is now a number of buildings filled with racks of servers hundreds to thousands of miles away. And my "terminal" is now a glossy portable device.

PARADIGM SHIFT!!!!! THE CLOUD!!!!

Re:Old School B-)

[starfishsystems]

Agreed in principle, and supported by observation.

We have to look critically at any promising new technology, if only because the odds are strongly in favor of it failing to take root. Sometimes the underlying ideas are not entirely sustainable, sometimes a competing technology takes the lead (whether or not due to merit, the result is the same), sometimes there isn't enough market uptake to sustain it.

I'm happy to learn that most of my technology bets have paid off, but that's at least in part due to betting conservatively. This isn't cynicism, it's a recognition that when faced with an abundance of choice, one way to reduce the flood to manageable levels is to have good rejection heuristics. What's left can then be examined in depth.

The point you make about the inherent cost of change is valid as well, though if anything you understate it. There are secondary effects which make technology change particularly expensive. Technology rarely stands alone; more often it has to be integrated with current systems and practices as well as emerging ones. What happens during the transition are many small but pervasive changes to accommodate both the old and new technologies. If your existing app has required a lot of apache customization, it will take time to transition it to nginx. Meanwhile the requests for customization don't suddenly come to an end, so now you find yourself tracking twice the number of changes while also managing the platform transition. The net effect is combinatoric.

Make yourself be part of "the solution"

[neye_eve]

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!

Re:Make yourself be part of "the solution"

[TWX]

I've found that very little is actually new. There have been tablet computers for some time. There have been wearable computers. There has been "social media" since the days of Fidonet. We had "SMS" fifteen years ago with bidirectional alphanumeric pagers and TAP.

Very little is new, it's just reinvented again and again and again. And again, and again. Accept this and just do what you need to do. Eventually you'll come to understand it and won't be stuck with some weird, antiquated version of Firefox running on your Debian 2.4 box because you refuse to change. It doesn't friggin' matter.

Re:Make yourself be part of "the solution"

[Desler]

We had "SMS" fifteen years ago with bidirectional alphanumeric pagers and TAP.

The SMS specification was completed in 1990 and the first commercial implementation came out in 1993 which is 5 years before your "fifteen years ago".

Re:Make yourself be part of "the solution"

[Darinbob]

The problem with the OP is the attitude that there's something wrong. There isn't. It isn't "fear" of new stuff, but the logical realization that new stuff is not necessarily better, and in many cases is worse. In other words, do not be worried that you're not embracing all the stuff that the masses embrace.

Most humans don't embrace the new and throw out the old, it only appears that way because marketing has control of what you see and hear. Very often there is a fad that dies out because the masses realize that the new wasn't actually worth switching to. New ideas that do take hold are often old ideas that are scaled up or made more practical.

Re:Make yourself be part of "the solution"

[Ghaoth]

I'm 64 years old (shock horror!) I began with vacuum tubes, discrete transistors, etc. I learned UNIX on an IBM1130 and went through many incarnations of many OS's. I now use Linux and reluctantly Scumsoft Windows (in a VM) have Android phones and tablets. Don't stop learning and evolving. If you can't beat them with code, beat them with experience but never give up.

Re:Make yourself be part of "the solution"

[jimmydevice]

I'm 57 and worked as an operator on Portland State's IBM 1130 system in 1975.
The 1130 I worked on had 16 KW of core and two 5 MB disk drives.
I ran APL from the console, breaking the selectric mechanism with a broken type ball and pissing off the CE.
FORTRAN, RATFOR and applications on 80 Col cards in batch mode were the style of the day.
If you had UNIX running on an 16 bit 64KW 1130, I'd love to see any proof.

I also collect and restore antique computers.

Re:Make yourself be part of "the solution"

[cubex]

Yes, we don't really have a lack of choice. We have more choices now than ever. Many of the old computer manuals have been scanned and converted to pdf. If you wanted to still program on an IBM 1130 computer you can via the simh emulator. I'm not as old as you (only 47), and I started using computers in what I would call the "middle era" which was in the late 1970's. What I've noticed since then is that the toolchain keeps changing and of course one has to shift with it. One thing has remained constant: the programmer needs a full sized keyboard. You just can't get that with these new-fangled hand-held computers. Could you imagine anyone trying to program in APL on one of those hand-helds? I should point out that there was no Unix for IBM 1130. The 1130 ran an OS called Disk Monitor System which I used when I learned APL\1130. It's definitely from the pre-Unix era.

Re:Make yourself be part of "the solution"

[Concerned Onlooker]

"(shock horror!)"

More like shock and awe. Nice post. :-)

Re:Make yourself be part of "the solution"

[D1G1T]

I've found that very little is actually new.

While this is mostly very true, there is a huge difference between text mode and graphics mode. Reading modern email and web pages on text interfaces, you will most certainly miss important information at least once in a while. You should no longer expect people to mark up with alternate text mode.

Re:Make yourself be part of "the solution"

[KGIII]

Pardon him, perhaps he has a LISP?

Re:Make yourself be part of "the solution"

[KGIII]

Okay, so that was bad. I guess I'm not sorry for it. I probably should be though.

Re:Make yourself be part of "the solution"

[unimacs]

Great advice and I will add that as far as your brain and career goes, sometimes change for change sake is good. You really should be ensuring that you're learning new stuff on a regular basis. Keeps your brain healthy. I've seen too many posts on Slashdot from tech folks in their 40's or 50's wondering what they should learn in order to have relevant skills again because the demand for the skills they had dried up.

Re:Make yourself be part of "the solution"

[xystren]

I've found that very little is actually new. There have been tablet computers for some time. There have been wearable computers. There has been "social media" since the days of Fidonet. We had "SMS" fifteen years ago with bidirectional alphanumeric pagers and TAP.

YooHoo/2u2 from 1:340/17 - long since down, but Greetings!

Re:Make yourself be part of "the solution"

[jimmydevice]

You can run a Cray, a cyber, all the DEC, General data machines, big IBM iron, most of the 70's era
mini-computers and almost every home computer and "entertainment system" built.
There are other obscure machine architectures that will disappear into the ether.
The OSU nebula, Computer automation naked Mini. The advanced Symbolics systems and Xerox Machines?
I don't know if that is important.Is it the hardware? or the software?

Re:Make yourself be part of "the solution"

[Kozz]

It feels SO awkward to observe geeks flirting with each other like this.

Re:Make yourself be part of "the solution"

[pmontra]

More choice yes with the exception of displays for laptops. I'd love a 4:3 matte screen. Maybe I'll get a matte one with my next laptop but it's going to be 16:9, which is way worse unless the laptop is much wider to compensate the reduced height.

Re:Make yourself be part of "the solution"

[Nivag064]

I am about 2 years younger.

I remember learning FORTRAN IV on an IBM 1130 (64 KB & less than 1MHz!), never realized they could run Unix!

Now I am learning to program SPARQL in Java run on a Linux box with 16GB and a 64 bit quad core processor chip running at 3,400MHz.

Re: Make yourself be part of "the solution"

[dexomn]

Do you restore other garbage? Or just computers?

Re:Make yourself be part of "the solution"

[TWX]

I don't remember enough about the Fidonet nodes that I had access to, but the local BBSes were Stonehenge BBS and Magrathea BBS, both in the Phoenix area.

Stonehenge ran on Wildcat, and was interesting in part because it had the longest un-rolled Tradewars game going, with only two real players left, and not enough resources in the universe left for one to defeat the other.

24 yo?

[Cornwallis]

I've got socks older than you. What are you gonna do when you really get old?

Re:24 yo?

[Mitchell314]

Get a bigger 'get off my lawn' sign?

Re:24 yo?

[femtobyte]

Become indistinguishable from all his peers, who are hip young technofetishists today, but will be fellow crotchety luddites complaining about the new kids on the lawn (and their pointless faddish brain implants and stupid music) in another 30 years?

Re:24 yo?

[oodaloop]

Let me just say, and I think I speak for everyone on Slashdot, change your damn socks already!

Re:24 yo?

[ModernGeek]

Don't listen to him. Stick to your ways and keep contributing to F/OSS. If the "old school" tools are used and maintained, then they are still alive. Keep coding, and keep using your computer.

One day when all those iDevices are obsolete, and can't be upgraded or used because of their proprietary lock in mechanisms, you'll be laughing from your throne as you did not allow yourself or your utilities to become useless.

The best advise I can give to you is to not give into proprietary hardware just because it is shiny and new. You'll find yourself replacing everything every two years, and pouring money into the coughers of corporations. You'll become more dependent on the grace of other companies, and at the mercy of others.

Don't try to be hip, and don't run with the crowd just because it's there.

Re:24 yo?

[verifine]

I just spent 3 days at a HP-sponsored event. Can you say Windows? I happened to mention I use Emacs as my editor. Everything was fine up until then, using Linux is "geeky/cool," but for a couple of listeners, using Emacs equated with being ancient. Bizarre. I don't GAF (think about that) what people use to create files. The created file and what it does in the grand scheme of things has always seemed to me to be the more important aspect of it all, and if you like vi, yay for you. I've used Emacs since before many IT people today were born.

People are mostly awed when they enter my office, get behind the "wall o-monitors" and see just how many xterm windows I'm running. More disturbing for them, since several are running tails, they move. My visitors are intimidated, though that is never my intent. I imagine them thinking, "How does he manage so much information at one time!!!"

When command line is history, I hope to be history

Re:24 yo?

[girlintraining]

I've got socks older than you. What are you gonna do when you really get old?

Considering how fast new things come (and go) in this field, anyone with more than five years of industry experience can claim to be "old". Anyway... Can I just say -- you need to update your wardrobe if you have 24 year old socks. My car isn't even that old, and it's falling apart; If I kept socks for that long, they'd be like... sock molecules, held together only by determination and a fierce desire to not be trendy.

Re:24 yo?

[rnturn]

``The best advise I can give to you is to not give into proprietary hardware just because it is shiny and new. You'll find yourself replacing everything every two years, and pouring money into the coughers (sic) of corporations. You'll become more dependent on the grace of other companies, and at the mercy of others.

All I can say is: Spot F**kin' On. If it isn't broken why am I constantly being reminded that I need to replace it. Are these hipsters who always have the latest technological doodad going to be able to retire after having spent their entire working lives shelling out their paycheck for the next cool toy that Corporate Marketing has convinced them they need?

Hell... I thought it was now the definition of "lame" to be standing outside the Windows or Apple store waiting to be milked for the newest shiny and over-priced toy. Now we have another generation worried that they'll be left behind or somehow unemployable if they aren't seen with the newest smart phone.

Re:24 yo?

[rnturn]

``I've used Emacs since before many IT people today were born.''

I learned by accident. My first IBM-clone (Columbia 1600) shipped with a software suite that used the Emacs keyboard mappings. Later when I wound up using a Tektronix workstation, the standard editor was Emacs and I was right at home.

(Remember: We hide because we use Emacs and they use vi.)

Re:24 yo?

[jez9999]

I just spent 3 days at a HP-sponsored event. Can you say Windows? I happened to mention I use Emacs as my editor. Everything was fine up until then, using Linux is "geeky/cool," but for a couple of listeners, using Emacs equated with being ancient. Bizarre.

To be fair, at least Windows has a decent text editor.

Re:24 yo?

[sphealey]

Assuming the parent is (1) not kidding (2) referring to wool socks, it is quite possible. Wool clothing was far better made 25 years ago than it is today, and far more durable than almost anything on the apparel market now. Not all change is "progress".

sPh

Re:24 yo?

[tnk1]

I agree that if something is not broken, you don't need to fix it. Using terminals and lynx and other stuff is completely valid, although using a text browser is starting to have more and more limited applications once you start seeing more and more functionality where Javascript manipulates a bunch of icons to get functionality. I'd almost say that for anything you can still use lynx for reliably, you should probably just use curl or wget for.

On the other hand, whether he likes to use older stuff or not, it is in his best interests to at least understand how some of the new-fangled stuff operates. Someday, people will stop supporting what he is using, and he'll need to know what the alternatives are and be able to use them.

I remember being just fine with Microsoft Word 5.1a on my toaster Mac, and liking it much better than a lot of what Word turned into with later versions. Presumably, if I still had my toaster Mac and a printer, I could still use it today. The problem is that, eventually, the toaster Mac breaks, or they finally add a feature that 5.1a doesn't have, which you absolutely MUST have, and it's all over. You better hope that when that day comes around, you figure out how the dreaded "ribbon" works.

Also, while a lot of this stuff is a fad, sometimes, the new stuff you can't think of a use for actually has a use that you just hadn't thought of. I wouldn't have bought my tablet unless there were things I could do with it usefully, and I've found even more useful things to do with it now that I have it.

Don't get the new toys just to have new toys, but don't scorn new things just because they are new either. That's one way to find yourself in trouble and your skills suddenly obsolete.

Re:24 yo?

[adisakp]

I've got socks older than you. What are you gonna do when you really get old?

My first published computer program came out YEARS before he was born and I continue to learn new things all the time. I've been programming video games professionally since the 80's and full time since 1993. Every few years, I have to learn entire new OS, new hardware for console, direct low level programming on completely unique custom chips, new IDE's or debugging tools, SDK's, TRC's etc... even new computer languages. Often when the next console comes out, anything I've learned in the previous round is "obsolete" and I have to start over.

But learning and embracing change is a way of life for a good developer. Heck, when I first started programming C wasn't even a certified language. I taught it to myself. Then C++ came our and I taught myself. And template programming and C++11 etc. etc.

In my industry, you have to be driven and constantly researching and teaching yourself new skills. It's good to at least examine some of what is "shiny" to everyone and see what it's about in many fields but in mine it's a matter of survival.

If he's afraid of learning new things now and embracing trends or even disruptive changes, there's no way he'll have a competive skill set in 20 years. If I was stuck on old trends that were around when I started, I'd be programming legacy database code in COBOL and PL1.

Re:24 yo?

[Cryacin]

I'd vote for getting a new pair of socks.

Re:24 yo?

[lennier]

Using terminals and lynx and other stuff is completely valid

And don't forget that in the Microsoft enterprise-backend administration world (which appears to be following a tech trajectory diametrically opposed to the shiny-flashy-broken all-Surface-no-substance Windows 8 world), there is a very strong trend back toward the console, via Powershell.

Things go round and round and round again, but even on Windows, the command line endures and conquers.

By the way, Powershell does some things much, much better than any current command shell on Linux. When are we going to get a bash-alike that is based on piping arbitrary objects? (And Powershell objects are pretty neat, they're not just raw .NET objects - they're dynamically reconfigureable-at-runtime things much more in the old Smalltalk spirit than anything that came after C++). Ruby would probably do it, if someone could add piping support to it and hack up the libraries to make it interface with all the various incompatble object OS and object systems under the Linux/X hood.

Re:24 yo?

[Darinbob]

Stenographer, is that like a stegosaurus? Are you calling us dinosaurs?

Re:24 yo?

[Darinbob]

You don't have to wear them all the time either. A nice pair of dress socks can last a very long time if you only wear them once a year. I don't think I have 25 year old socks, but I most definitely have 10+ year old socks. Doesn't mean they don't get washed, it just means they don't wear out. And because they're socks, they still fit even if my 20 year old tee shirts and jeans do not.

Re:24 yo?

[WillKemp]

Have they added something better than notepad? Notepad is simply awful, it just does not work with plain text files with non-Windows linebreaks [......]

Yes they have - it's called Wordpad. I avoid Windows like the plague, but i was pleased to find (when i had to use it recently) that wordpad copes with the unix line ends in my text files.

Re:24 yo?

[KGIII]

Careful. Wordpad adds its own markup to it (or it used to at least) that wasn't readable until you opened it up with a real text editor. I don't know if it still does this or not.

Re:24 yo?

[PCM2]

I've got socks older than you. What are you gonna do when you really get old?

I'm going to guess he's going to look back on his life and realize that he was dumb to think he'd seen it all at age 24. He talks as though the Third Age of Middle Earth is ending -- and you wanna know why? Think about it. When the original iPhone came out, he was 18 years old. For his entire adult life, there have been iPhones, and the iPhone was the first real major technology shift he'd ever seen. For those of us who have been through all sorts of booms and busts and cycles and trends in the computing industry, things look a lot different -- as they will for him, when he really gets old.

His whole submission reminds me of those things that pop up on Buzzfeed every now and again -- "Twenty things that will make you feel old" -- and half of them are photos of the all-grown-up-now former child actor from some kids' show on Nickelodeon that you've never heard of because the first episode aired in 1994.

Re:24 yo?

[Paul Carver]

It's doesn't come preinstalled, but you can download the installer .exe from www.vim.org

Re:24 yo?

[grcumb]

I'm going to guess he's going to look back on his life and realize that he was dumb to think he'd seen it all at age 24. He talks as though the Third Age of Middle Earth is ending

In some important ways, it is. The process isn't complete, but there is a fundamental change happening, and it will discomfit some of us.

The days of 'Homesteading the Noosphere' (as ESR put it), are coming to a close. Scale, network topologies, business models and legal encroachment on the principles of individual online freedom are all conspiring to make the technological world we live in substantially more constrained than it's been since the internet became part of our lives.

The land rush is over, the cowboys are gone (either buried or rich) and the homesteaders are being bought out by the speculators and tycoons. Community-based governance is under siege by national and international interests.

And this is being reflected in the tech world. The craftsman's approach to software (always greater in repute than in reality) is decidedly more difficult to practice as a trade than it was. Toolkits are giving way to frameworks and apps replace applications. Backyard-mechanic roadsters and dirt-track races are swallowed up by Nascar - VCs get us excited by the prospect of building only big enough to sell out to someone bigger.

The physical networks themselves are being taken back by the telcos and proffered to governments for surveillance in exchange for ever more egregious rent-seeking behaviour. What we used to call sharing is now piracy. The word 'copyright' now means 'don't copy at all, ever.'

And in the midst of it all, we're grateful to lockin-vendors who make Free software difficult, if not impossible, to use. We rent what we used to own. Even our identities are no longer our own.

I grieve to say it, but unless there's a sudden and immense resurgence of the DIY spirit, especially in peer networking and distributed data, we're going to fall back into the bad old days of the dumb terminal and the smart network. And that network's smarts will not exist for our benefit.

I'm pushing 50 now, and do I fear change? Not really. I just regret the lost freedom, the creative anarchy of the '90s, the ability to hack something cool and new, the chance to achieve things never before possible. It's not gone yet. We could still turn things around. But every day we don't brings us a day closer to the day when we can't any longer.

Re:24 yo?

[antdude]

What is wrong with his pair of socks? They smell and look fine to me. I'd rather be barefoot/naked. :P

Re:24 yo?

[laejoh]

To be fair, at least Windows has a decent text editor.

But Emacs is a better OS!

Re:24 yo?

[Nivag064]

Up until yesterday, I could wear a leather belt I made 40 years ago! Mind you, I did not use every single day...

Re:24 yo?

[nateman1352]

We already have that in the UNIX world... its called Python with the dbus-python package.

Re:24 yo?

[Hypotensive]

When are we going to get a bash-alike that is based on piping arbitrary objects?

Hopefully never. There is a good reason that UNIX standardized on intermediary representations always being text, which is that you can use a huge variety of text processing software that already exists on your system to process it, rather than having to write a new tool for every purpose.

Re:24 yo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but piping objects is exactly that typical "missing the whole point of it" thing Microsoft likes to do. The point of the whole pipe processing is that you can use absolutely _any_ tool and automate it. If you instead use objects you can only combine those programs that were developed to work with each other. Not to mention things like the pain of debugging things when something goes wrong with one of those "magic objects".
Sure it's so much simpler when all you want is to get information from one specific program A to one or a few programs B1, B2, B3. But why exactly do you need to use a pipe for that? A GUI with an extra radio button has the same flexibility...

Re:24 yo?

[6Yankee]

You'll find yourself replacing everything every two years, and pouring money into the coughers of corporations.

Then you die and they put you in a coughin'...

Re:24 yo?

[dbIII]

In some important ways, it is. The process isn't complete, but there is a fundamental change happening, and it will discomfit some of us.

Seems to be happening too slow to me. Battery tech that was mostly working in the lab when I was at University a couple of decades back is only just becoming available for example.

Re:24 yo?

[MouseAT]

Considering the fact that PowerShell still lets you output a textual representation of an object, that's still possible. On the plus side, being able to pipe one object directly into another without having to do a load of text processing in between is useful, and would make Unix scripting a lot easier and more concise in the cases where it's supported. I don't like PowerShell's syntax, but its design goals are solid.

Re:24 yo?

[fisted]

The only reason for "PowerShell" is that they failed to improve cmd.exe.

Re:24 yo?

[serviscope_minor]

Up until yesterday, I could wear a leather belt I made 40 years ago

What happened this morning?

Re:24 yo?

[CAIMLAS]

What's ironic is that there's actually a lot of push back against all the PowerShell exclusivity MS is peddling. "Why would I pay huge gobs of money to have to use a command line? Wasn't that the whole point of Windows in the first point?" I'm sorry, but there is little point in removing functionality from a GUI just to put it back into an arbitrary and vague typed command you've got to dig through documentation to find. That's what MS has been doing.

The fact that PS "pipes" (not technically) arbitrary objects between themselves is interesting, but the implementation of the language is, for the most part, a clusterfuck. (And people say perl is difficult to learn/use/etc.).

Re:24 yo?

[tnk1]

I hope you're not comparing Perl to PowerShell.

Perl is not at all difficult to understand if you're trying to do something with it, it's the part where *someone else* is trying to figure out what you did which is the problem.

Re:24 yo?

[Misagon]

You mean ... the MINGW version of Emacs?

Re:24 yo?

[Darinbob]

I think it finally snapped.

Re:24 yo?

[Nivag064]

Where the belt goes around the buckle spindle it splits in to 2 narrow parts and each part is then riveted back. One of those narrow parts finally snapped due to wear. Was my favourite belt.

Probably the saddest part is not keeping a copy of the first belt I made with a lot more elaborate design. I almost throw the original away, as I had made so many mistakes in the design I had put on it, but I sold 6 copies making it my most successful design.

I made belts for a couple of months before Christmas in the summer holidays while at University in Auckland, about 1970. A friend had set up a workshop and had all the gear. Unfortunately, he never continued after Christmas. I made very little money, but I really enjoyed making the leather belts, starting with a strip of leather!

Re:24 yo?

[spiralx]

The design of Powershell was heavily influenced by Perl...

Re:24 yo?

[CAIMLAS]

Yeah, it had nothing to do with the fact that Perl was one of the languages which more heavily influenced PS...

Perl is easy to write and, if written by someone who is lazy, difficult to read (due to how easy it is to write terse, functional code in perl). PS doesn't have this benefit; it's long-typed as well as cryptic/difficult to read.

Do you need to?

[Galaga88]

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.

Re:Do you need to?

[idontgno]

Hear hear.

It's good to focus on what works.

But explore at the edges if you can spare the attention and time. Treating it as play is a good approach for this. Like Galaga88 said, a rootable Android toy is a good start. It'll get you used to touch interfaces and show you some of the power of portability. (To use an example.)

I always made a point of getting a slider keyboard phone. SSHing into a server is pretty sweet with a physical keyboard, even if the teensy tiny on-screen font makes me take my glasses off sometimes. (160x38 on a 4.3" screen, yo!)

Re:Do you need to?

[n1ywb]

Seriously. Do what works for you. I mostly do my email in gmail. But I do all of my real paying work at a shell prompt or in VIM. Because it works. When I have to use a windows box for whatever reason I install cygwin so I can keep doing my work in bash & VIM.

The thing is more and more people are using computers every day. As computing becomes commoditized it moves towards the lowest common denominator. This is to be expected. Don't feel like you have to stoop down to that level, but don't be all high falutin' either. Do your thing, be true to yourself, be respectful of others. You might even convert a few people to IRC.

It's not like your skills are stale if you don't use tablets. It's not like iPads are hard to use or something.

Re:Do you need to?

[Austerity Empowers]

If the current tools you have are getting the job done, I don't see a need to change.

This, and I might add there are plenty of lines of work that are still growing and in need of people, where you can work and never have to change. Most forms of hardware design (except, unfortunately, PCB), systems and device level software...

Smartphones really are a boon to the world and add value in spite of their oversold trendiness. In addition to SSH, there's also VNC and IRC. The smartphone has increased my productivity, so it's a piece of fad tech that I think will stay.

I haven't figured out the tablet...every scenario calls for either a smartphone or a laptop (or both).

Re:Do you need to?

[DrCode]

Yes, true. I'm *really* old at almost 60. And I've found that you can't keep up with everything; but you don't have to. Some things go away before you get a chance to feel foolish for not using them (like MySpace, and just about anything that Microsoft makes:-)).

In my case, I'm still using Emacs/gcc/gdb to write C code where I work. But I've ported my old open-source project to Android using Eclipse with Java, and my Android phone is my main internet and entertainment device when I travel. And I'm an avid Facebook user, but don't feel I'm missing anything by avoiding Twitter.

After a while, you'll develop a better sense of whether something is a fad (or marketing ploy), or a useful development worth pursuing.

Re:Do you need to?

[Grishnakh]

If the tools you have get the job done well enough for you, there is no reason to change.

However, it can be beneficial, if you have a little spare time, to occasionally check out what's new to see if it's better than what you're using now. This doesn't mean you need to adopt it, but if you don't look at new stuff now and then, how will you know if there's something better around or not?

Re:Do you need to?

[naich]

Exactly. Most people here use a web interface to do their emails, while I use Pine in a terminal. I can knock off an email in about 1/4 of the time it takes them to fart around clickety clicking away at their browser. Don't just do change for change's sake, and don't let peer pressure force you into doing something the stupid way,

Umm, no.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Re:Umm, no.

[Nrrqshrr]

Out of mod points so posting this to support parent. I am jealous of the submitter anyway, he clearly didn't have to deal with too many conservatives in his life.

Re:Umm, no.

[rnturn]

``By and large, people hate change.''

Technology corporations love change, though. That's why they have such big marketing budgets: to convince us that we need their latest and greatest toy and to be parted from our cash for the privilege of owning it.

Re:Umm, no.

[dgatwood]

People love certain types of change. They love cool new features. People hate when existing functionality that they’re used to using goes away, or when those new features get in the way of doing what they’ve been doing, forcing them to do something different right now. For a consumer, an ideal app upgrade does exactly what the old version does in exactly the same way, but lets them try new things at their leisure. They like new features and new technology, so long as they are free to adopt them on their own schedules, rather than when the manufacturer decides that it is time to make a few extra bucks off of them, or when a hardware upgrade forces them onto a new version of the OS or whatever.

The fundamental disconnect between tech companies and their consumers is that tech companies like to get rid of old features and functionality, because maintenance has a cost associated with it. They don’t care if the new way forces new usage patterns, which is something consumers almost universally hate. This is why any well-designed app has means for disabling major UI features and rolling back to the old behavior. It’s not that consumers aren’t willing to change or hate change, but rather that they want to be able to enable those new features on their schedule, not on the software manufacturer’s schedule.

Re:Umm, no.

[WillKemp]

Why do you think Windows 8.1 will have a "Start" button?

Because it's virtually unusable without it. Hopefully Gnome will follow suit - Gnome 3 isn't unusable, but a start button would make life a lot easier!

Re:Umm, no.

[Fallen Kell]

Windows 8.1 will have a start button because all Microsoft ignored all the usability studies of the '70s and '80s when they first started testing computer interfaces and found that people hated touch screen interfaces for normal computer interactions because a) their arms got tired b) their screens got dirty and c) the interface was not as precise or fast as a mouse pointer for the majority of the tasks. Two of those three are still VERY valid points even today, with the third having only somewhat been partially fixed with better touch screen technology (including multi-touch systems and the newer interface mechanics it allows). People's arms still get tired, and the screens still get very dirty.

Re:Umm, no.

[tftp]

Why do you think Windows 8.1 will have a "Start" button?

For the same reason that doors in our buildings are made different from the walls - so that they can be seen.

Technically, there is nothing stopping you from making a building where doors are smooth, painted to the wall color, and the gaps are all but invisible. If you push on the door it will open, just as the real one does. But to see a door you need to stand on your head. Will you like to work in such a building?

Win8 does exactly the same. Its primary facility for starting programs is hidden, and cannot be revealed until you do something very special, something that nobody have ever done before because the gesture was meaningless. But if you do that, everything in front of your eyes changes. It is called change of context. In an instant you lose your email, your documents, your pictures, your whatever it was you were working on, and you now see something completely different, that is navigable by a different set of rules.

Since Win 3.1, many launchers were developed by ISVs to make it possible to start programs with as little distraction as possible - with a little toolbar in a corner, or with a little menu, or with a little search bar, all of which are quick to get out of your way. The Win8 start screen is equivalent to putting an empty metal bucket onto your head and then hitting it with a brick, that much it intrudes into your work.

Re:Umm, no.

[epyT-R]

Critiquing the new is not the same thing as hating change.. I wish people like you would quit parroting out the old 'hater' fallacy every time something new is bashed. A lot of new things these days deserve the bashing they get.

Re:Umm, no.

[epyT-R]

Sorry to break apart your public school taught black and white world, but things are much more complicated than "democrat good 4 change, neocon bad." RMS is anything but a conservative, by nearly ANY definition of conservative, neocon, socialist, communist, or liberal.

Re:Umm, no.

[serviscope_minor]

Umm, no. That is the exact opposite of what most humans have a desire to do. We hang on to things that we know.

Yes, I agree with that.

However, there is a continual influx of brand new humans. They do not like change any more than existing humans, but the new humans have a tendency to dislike things already put in place by the existing humans.

Zawinski (?) described it in the FOSS world as cascade of atention deficit teenagers. Rember they're coming into it, and they see what's already there. What's there is made by old people who are duffers and therefore couldn't understand why the new stuff is so achingly cool so they like nothing better than to trash it and replace it with their own thing.

To them it ISN'T change since they are not used to/are not invested in the existing things. From the outside it looks like people like change.

Individuals hate change. Society as a group seems utterly addicted to it however nonsensical it is. Curiously, being part of the collective human condition, that won't ever change.

Re:Umm, no.

[doom]

People love certain types of change. They love cool new features.

I fear you're missing the actual driver. People love getting into the same crap that everyone else is getting into, and it barely matters what it is. The "cool new features" are just fig-leafs they use to justify being trendy crowd followers.

I have two favorite examples: I grew up during what now appears to be a fad for "high fidelity" audio equipment, and people competed for large speakers, loud amps, and "clean" sound. After a number of odd flips and flops, everyone switched to competing to see how many mp3s you could squeeze into a gadget (and never mind what they actually sound like). Many households no longer have anything like a half-way decent sound system at all, and hanging around the house you probably listen to music on whatever speakers came with your TV (if you don't get by with whatever came with your laptop). So: what happened to "HiFi"? Did everyone get into HiFi because of what it could do, or just because it was The Latest?

Second example is more recent, which means it'll get a lot of pushback from slashdot quibblers: digital cameras. Remember when everyone wanted more and more megapixels? And then they all switched to crappy cellphone cameras, didn't they? So did they care about image quality, or could it be that was just The Latest?

(Responses I expect: "But I have a MegazillaPixoid for some purposes, and the cellphone camera for others." But the MegazillaPixoid has been sitting at home gathering dust for a year, and you aren't even thinking about upgrading it.)

Where things get interesting though, is even once you know all this, once you learn to recognize yet another deranged fad, you still need to keep half an eye on the fad, because economies of scale and competitve pressures are driving the evolution of some technology that might actually have some utility to something you really do care about -- e.g. in my case I suspect I've got multi-core ARM processor servers in my future, even though I couldn't care less about those smart phones everyone is stupified by.

Re:Umm, no.

[dgatwood]

I don't agree on the megapixel thing. As far as I can tell, consumers as a whole never cared about megapixels except as a means of helping them choose between two cameras that were otherwise basically indistinguishable. I don't know anyone who ever said, "I want to buy a new camera because it has more megapixels." They bought new cameras because their old ones started having problems, or occasionally because they saw photos from other people's digital cameras that looked better. Indeed, this is the norm when it comes to hardware. People buy new hardware when the old hardware stops working or starts to look worn out.

Now the marketing people pushed megapixels because it was the only thing they had to differentiate one cheap camera from the next, but in the end, that didn't matter because as far as consumers are concerned, there's a point at which it becomes "good enough". When cell phone cameras got to be "good enough", almost everyone stopped buying and using low-end cameras. As a result, the most popular cameras currently on the market, at least as far as the number of pictures taken, are all either some model of iPhone or some model of DSLR. Everything else is very nearly lost in the noise (or at least the long tail).

What this says is that the people who actually cared about picture quality before still do (and use DSLRs), because their goal is to take photos. Everyone else takes photos using whatever they have handy, same as they always did, and they upgrade when their old cell phone breaks or when they see somebody's new cell phone and realize that it is much better than theirs was. The only real difference is that they now carry one fewer devices than they did before.

As for the Hi-Fi thing, that's pretty much the same situation. It's not that it was a fad so much as that good quality sound takes up a lot of space, so a lot of folks switched to smaller speakers once they got "good enough" even if they didn't sound quite as good. The audiophiles still take the time to tune their rooms, buy good quality speakers, etc. Everyone else buys whatever is cheap at the time because they need something to do a particular job. It just so happens that whatever is popular tends to also be cheap, because of economies of scale. :-)

Re:Umm, no.

[BasilBrush]

Actually, RMS does qualify for most definitions of communist.
ESR on the other hand qualifies for most definitions of swivel-eyed right-wing libertarian loon.

Re:Umm, no.

[doom]

So then, people never replace their phones unless they break? Those things are flimsier than I thought.

Keep your eye on the goal...

[msauve]

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."

You aren't refusing to change

[msobkow]

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.

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[msobkow]

Let me rephrase that:

Using the command line tools does not make you "L33t". It does not make you "cool".

Using archaic tools for modern jobs is just flat out asinine. You didn't grow up with those tools -- those tools are from my university days. And I'm 49, not 24.

Stop fooling yourself that you're special and use the right tool for the job instead of being stubborn.

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[plover]

And what, in your expert opinion, is the right tool for the job? Back in the day I never bothered moving to pine, because I figured elm was good enough for me. (And it was.) Now I seem to spend half my workday in Outlook, and it makes me exactly every bit as productive as elm did. It's worse, actually, because these days everyone has email and it's now far too easy for the unwashed masses to cc: a status report to a hundred people who simply don't care.

If a newer tool doesn't provide a demonstrable or measurable improvement, what makes that new tool "right"? What makes the old tool "wrong"?

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a bit unfair... some of the older tools are actually better for the job. The Linux CLI is usually faster than a GUI filemanager (because of globbing and tab-completion). Pine may not be pretty, but again, it's faster than Thunderbird. And 16:12 is definitely better than 16:8 for a laptop, even if the movie-tail is wagging the productivity-dog. Use the best tool there is, for you.

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[Aguazul2]

Who says the console isn't the right tool for the job? Even Windows has PowerShell, and Windows 2012 can be installed without any GUI at all, relying on remote shell access for maintenance. If you do this all day long, the shell is often the best tool for the job. Point and click and GUIs are for getting things done when you have little previous experience with that task (or for things that obviously require graphics).

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[Anonymous Coward]

bad advice. real computing done on real computers uses the command line. GUI tools for systems administration largely pander to a sort of person you'd never want on a serious computer. If you master the command line way of systems admin on real operating systems, you'll make much more than a windows click and point ween0r.

The command line is not archaic any more than programming with text is archaic.

Re: You aren't refusing to change

[Anonymous Coward]

When I browse the web I do so for information, it is almost exclusively in text form, with occassional pictures and video. Elinks can render images, and videos are best played in a dedicated player.

Text based browsers get rid of all the useless information like CSS. And you can write user scrypts for them in any language you want, with out needing to download an add-on.

Text is the universal interface. Use it.

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[techno-vampire]

Using archaic tools for modern jobs is just flat out asinine. You didn't grow up with those tools -- those tools are from my university days. And I'm 49, not 24.

I'm 63. If I'd kept with what I first learned, I'd still be using punched cards and batch processing. Now, I use a GUI for most things, but hardly a day goes by that I don't open an xterm for something because there are some things that I just find easier that way. Personally, if I need a CLI editor, I like Mork's editor: nano.

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[Anonymous Coward]

Using the command line tools does not make you "L33t". It does not make you "cool".

I still use a water hose to determine level. Other use their fancy laz0rs and GPS sensors costing thousands of dollars, yet "my" Egyptian-era technology remains more accurate.

Just because something is new and expensive, doesn't make it better. Frankly, not being able to use a water hose do determine level is a little asinine.

As to computers, I write almost everything with Qt Creator these days, but then there is xterm, irssi, mutt. Then again, not using GUI web browser is a little "out there".

Best tool for the job and all that. Latest is not always the greatest.

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[Immerman]

Ah, but a secondary 9:16 monitor is actually *extremely* nice, even if most monitor stands don't gracefully support portrait mode. Sometimes stupid new trends can be an improvement if you actually step back and look at how they could be harnessed to serve *your* purposes.

I would suggest that if you find the CLI faster than a GUI filemanager for "most things" then your usual use-case is probably very atypical. I will agree though that, when applicable, the Linux CLI completely blows away any GUI tool in existence.

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[Darinbob]

Very oftne the archaic tools are the most advanced tools. Command lines are very efficient. The right tool for the job may indeed be a terminal running a Unix shell. Even when I'm home and not working, I may open up a bash command line on Windows just to get something simple done fast than to deal with the clumsy UI, and sometimes I use a command line to fix up what the GUI tool got wrong.

I still use hammers, but those are from the stone age! Should I throw away the outdated hammer and hit the nails with a modern iPad instead?

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[n1ywb]

Sometimes I wistfuly dream of the days when I could do useful work in a text mode browser.

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[epyT-R]

Or maybe he prefers the simplicity of pine over the convoluted mess that is outlook? Choosing a different path does not automatically imply a superiority complex.

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[epyT-R]

or maybe he did view the image with another util, and he's smart enough to know the 'critical error' isn't really critical, and the rest of the office is losing it over nothing? I've seen it go down this way before.

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[Deltaspectre]

I agree about the 9:16 monitor, but have had difficulty finding monitors that actually have a decent viewing angle when used that way

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[plover]

Maybe he's the guy who gets all the emails that Exchange is down, and needs a reliable email client?

Re: You aren't refusing to change

[fartrader]

No it was well said. I use lynx on a raspberry when I need to install a window manager. To use it on purpose is just utterly stupid. It's a fine tool to use when you are on the command line by necessity, not on purpose.

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[Osgeld]

there is a model of effecency, how many archaic applications does one have to remember to do a task that a coworker simply uses a double click for?

I like old stuff, I was a kid of the 80's and a big retro nut, but at work, I have work to do and not fart around a CLI manually operating multiple programs to view a simple email

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[Immerman]

Agreed, something I realized though is that most monitors have a pretty good viewing angle from "above", just not from "below". So if you orient the "down" side just slightly away from you the viewing angle works okay. Strategically oriented it can also make for a decent privacy filter so that it's not immediately obvious to anyone who walks in on a slow day that you're killing time on Slashdot ;-)

Also - I've noticed the panels used in TVs usually have much wider viewing angles than monitors, even if you do pay a little extra for the receiver and crappy integrated speakers. Of course it can be a bit of a challenge finding non-huge 1080p TVs, but they do seem to be getting much more common than a few years ago

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[tftp]

If Exchange goes down, this does not stop other accounts (POP3, IMAP) from operating normally.

Outlook today is a decent MUA, primarily because it supports rich text communication. I'm using embedded images all the time when I discuss technical solutions with other people. It is essential to be able to highlight passages, to clearly show quotes, to include screenshots of things...

On the business side of things, Outlook is required for scheduling of meetings, and for reservation of shared resources (if your business is set up this way.) It is simple, and it works. You can share your calendar and you can see other people's calendars. If you want to schedule a meeting with ten participants, you simply cannot do that with Pine; you cannot call everyone fifty times and ask "how about hh:mm on ddd?" - they'd get mad at you.

I used Thunderbird before, and it is also pretty decent. But it does not integrate with Exchange... and there is no Exchange replacement in F/OSS world. If there were, many smaller businesses would drop Exchange instantly - it doesn't support DKIM, it doesn't support DMARC, its autoreplies break Google's SPF checks... but here we are; it's the lesser evil.

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[plover]

I was afraid someone like you would reply.

It. Was. A. Joke.

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[tftp]

Sorry, but your intent was entirely unobvious, especially in the context of this thread. Exchange servers do go down, after all, and the question that you posed is entirely valid.

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[Anonymous Coward]

You just described a problem with people and their usage problems based upon volume. Your complaint has nothing to do with the tool. Yet you blame the tool. Maybe you should put some more thought into your point of view?

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[epyT-R]

I guess it depends how he has it set up. The cool part of those 'archaic' applications is that they can be automated any number of ways.

The modern email client also allows embedding of pictures and scripts which made it one of the primary vectors for viruses.

Re: You aren't refusing to change

[Hypotensive]

Absolutely, he should be using elinks. I mean, lynx! It doesn't even do frames!

Seriously though, a browser that you can run in a terminal is a great advantage when you want to be able to browse on a system that you're not currently at the console of (or many such systems).

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[dbIII]

Sometimes it's just useful and easier than the alternatives. For instance Lynx is a quick and easy way to download video drivers when setting up systems (you've started the download before another browser would have finished loading the pretty graphics and given you the first level of menus), and pine is a quick way to get wrongly quarantined email attachments out to where they should go. Then of course there's sed, awk, grep and a pile of other things to get just the text you want out of things instead of a laborious search in a limited GUI.

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[serviscope_minor]

Using the command line tools does not make you "L33t". It does not make you "cool".

No, but in many cases, they make you more productive and more effective.

Using archaic tools for modern jobs is just flat out asinine.

Yes.

You didn't grow up with those tools -

yes

those tools are from my university days. And I'm 49, not 24.

You know it's an interesting fact: open source tools that were started 20 or 30 years ago actually haven't received any updates in the meantime. It's quite incredible really.

I'll stick with Linux, thanks even though that predates my university days by a number of years.

Stop fooling yourself that you're special and use the right tool for the job instead of being stubborn.

Stop pretending you're more grown up than you really are. A true grownup(or Scotsman if you prefer) would realise that it doesn't matter if someone likes using unusual looking tools if they are productive. Using Firefox (oh no, that's outdated since that comes all the way from Nutscrape which also predates my university days) I mean using Chrome which was ah shit that (KHTML) was started 14 years ago bloody hell, which damn browser am I allowed to use which isn't archaic?

Using firefox doesn't make you stubborn. Using lynx doesn't make you stubborn. You know, elinks actually supports CSS and Javascript these days? That's pretty modern. But is that stubborn because you don't approve of it?

Are you going to claim that using vi and xterm makes you stubborn as well? Should I stitch to gnome-terminal for anti-aliased text and then just use FixedSC in it anyway?

Or gcc? That's archaic as well. It is OLD. It's from 19-frickin-87 which is from your university days too. Never mind of course that 4.8.x is arguably the best compiler in existence (the combination of C++ support, compiled speed, portability is unmatched).

Basically I think you're being really, really silly.

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[Remus Shepherd]

I use lynx because my workplace blocks most websites that I like to peruse through the day. (They don't block Slashdot, though, which is why I'm here so often.) I need SSH for my job so they reluctantly opened a hole for it, and I then SSH out to my linux shell, start up lynx and browse the news.

I can't even list all the problems at work that I've magically fixed with perl.

Yes, I'm stubborn, yes, I'm regressive. But the old tools give me more power than the newfangled stuff, because the new stuff is often simplified to the point of uselessness or locked down by bureaucracy. There is magic in things that are old and wild.

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[Blaskowicz]

When searching for a monitor you have to only look at non TN panels then (IPS, VA, PLS)

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[Deltaspectre]

Thanks! I'll admit I didn't do too much research into monitors, this was just based on me moving my head around with various monitor configurations over the years.

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[tftp]

Uh, quoting is nearly entirely useless in Outlook, "discussion" is one of the things it is about the worst mail client for.

People have adapted to top posting. After all, they are most interested in what *you* have to say, not to what tens of other posters said before you. This works well enough for most small discussions. If you expect a larger discussion, email in general is not a good medium for that.

Also you can include screenshots in plain text mails, just not in the middle of the text.

Loss of continuity. I often have to insert screenshots. Referring to separate files is not convenient. A single story is better than a patchwork.

there are far too many people who throw around images like crazy so that finding the actual text to read is like am Easter egg search.

This is not a problem in business communication. At the same time, "actually explain stuff in text" is not sufficient - a picture is worth a thousand words. Note that in engineering a misunderstanding can be very expensive. You always want to be very specific, and every instruction that you send to techs must be very clear. Those techs are not rocket scientists; even if you explain it in text, they will come back and say "I don't understand what you wrote here." But a crude screenshot from your CAD, with a large red arrow scribbled on it with a shaky hand, will do the job. As they say, "X marks the spot" - not "count three large thingies from the left and seventeen small ones, then go up by thirty three medium thingies."

Also, rich mail completely breaks things for people who want to read e.g. green on black

Yes, it does that. Some of that is configurable, though. Other you have to accept as it is.

So no, rich text does not make it a good MUA for most people, because most people are unable to use rich text in a way that is a win.

Yes, most people cannot use rich text in the best way possible. However rich text *is* a good solution for them because it allows them to use it when needed. Nothing stops people from sending in plain text by default from Outlook - it is configurable. But they use defaults, and they are happy enough with that. Rich text is a superset of plain text, and it is not fitting to argue for *removal* of features just because the unwashed masses are not yet mentally capable of using them as I think they should be used :-)

Re:You aren't refusing to change

[Pentium100]

It also can be used over a terminal (ssh or whatever) to verify whether it is possible to open some web page. Useful when there is a problem in an ISPs network.

You learned what???

[Anonymous Coward]

"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?

Just use a little common sense

[bobthesungeek76036]

> 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...

Uh, no.

[seebs]

"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?

Re:Uh, no.

[jabberwock]

That sentence totally cracked me up, as well, and prevented me from taking anything else he said seriously.

"Dude, come back when you understand how funny that was."

Switch Careers

[RajivSLK]

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.

Re:Switch Careers

[Immerman]

I think the the Amish get way too much grief, as though they were some sort of retro-loving "get off my lawn" society. The reality is that they are just very conservative and take the time to thoroughly consider the true human cost of incorporating new technology into their lives. Telephones for example - they permit telephones only within outhouse-like structures at a distance from the home, because while phones do allow us to easily communicate with people at a distance, that comes at the cost of having your relationships with the people who are actually *present* in your life continuously interrupted by random people who want to say something that isn't important enough to come see you in person. I suspect you can think of several cases in just the last few days where that was very clearly the case.

Re:Switch Careers

[mattack2]

I think I sort of agree with you (though some of their beliefs seem to be intertwined with their religious beliefs -- that it's not a relationship with other people, but with god).. But still, are they even allowed to ride bicycles? A car or a tractor would help them do their daily chores better, etc.

(BTW, while it was widely panned, I thought "Breaking Amish" was entertaining.)

Re:Switch Careers

[Immerman]

I don't know a lot of the details, just a few specific examples that really changed my views from "quaint" to "they may be on to something there". As for a car or tractor - what exactly do you mean by "better"? More quickly and easily certainly, but how does it effect your satisfaction in a job well done? Your awareness of the condition of the soil? Your relationship with the land? Your state of mind while working? All of those things have very real effects on the quality of your life. Think of this - how often do you interact with your neighbors while driving to the store in a car? Almost never. Walking or riding a horse-drawn cart though things are quiet, slow, and open. You can exchange several sentences with everyone you pass without even slowing down. Things do take more time, but much how much stronger is your community for all those little exchanges on the way to the market? How much more centered is your mind for having a window in your day when it has nothing to do but reflect or simply bask in the moment? These are all prices we pay every day, and most people never even consider the fact that these are in fact choices we've made, and are making on an ongoing basis. Heck, if you've ever spent time in rural areas you've probably encountered the "finger wave" as you pass drivers going the other way - just a tiny gesture, one finger lifted off the wheel to say "hello, I see you", and many city dwellers find it almost freakishly endearing, once they acclimate enough to actually look through the windshield and see the driver approaching them. And that's a nothing gesture compared to exchanging a few words or even just a tip of the hat.

Where the hell did you learn that?

[Grashnak]

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.

Re:Where the hell did you learn that?

[QuasiEvil]

Actually I find a good bit of truth in that comment. Many people think that the next big thing will "change everything" and somehow magically fix all their problems. I see it all the time in various jobs. Actual discussion the other day (names of things changed to protect the guilty):

One of those people: "Well, SuperProgram 11.7 can track events and send them to the manager's Blackberry!"
Me: "I could do that ten years ago by stringing shell scripts together and running it via cron. It's called email. Is there even a defendable business reason to that? The business requirements we have in front of us say that it needs to display an alert on terminal emulator screen that the actual users are used to using."
One of those people: "But why would you keep using that old terminal thing. SuperProgram 11.7 will make it all point and click and put it in a browser!"
Me: "Again, business reason to do that? Right now they spend all day on their terminal. Now you're going to make them pick up the mouse and switch between applications. And spend more money on this product to do it. These people are really fast with the interface they've gotten used to over the last twenty years."
One of those people: "But nobody knows how to use a terminal, and you can't do it on a tablet!"
Me: "Correction: you don't know how to use a terminal. We have lots of training material on how to use this thing. And there are no tablets in our data entry office. There are a bunch of people very skilled at using their terminal based app for data entry and retrieval, and a bunch of machines already set up to do that."

People always think the big shiny new thing is "better", rather than the old boring workhorse. Do those technologies have a place? Absolutely. Is there anything wrong with sticking with terminal based text apps written in C and ncurses? Hell no, especially if you can't produce data to show that the users would be more productive on the new stuff.

Re:Where the hell did you learn that?

[ciggieposeur]

You were doing really great until the end there. "But nobody knows how to use a terminal, and you can't do it on a tablet!" is actually a real business concern that needs a plan to address it, even if that plan is "we will never outsource data entry or use anything other than desktop/laptop for it".

Point-of-sale systems are moving to tablets/phones right now - that's how the food trucks here in Boston are running their businesses. I'm sure there will be businesses moving data entry to it also. Perhaps the better response would be "The plan is to keep data entry on the existing systems, but move the data entry portions into the process itself so that we don't need humans here at all. When the data entry becomes trivial then we will look to either combine it with another role or push it to an outside firm."

Why adopt the new if the old works just fine?

[Wee]

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

Re:Why adopt the new if the old works just fine?

[AmazingRuss]

It working doesn't make it pretty. If it's ugly and it works, it's ugly, and it works.

Re:Why adopt the new if the old works just fine?

[Wee]

There are as many kinds of ugly as there are opinions and ideas.

-B

Re:Why adopt the new if the old works just fine?

[AmazingRuss]

...and if you call it ugly, it's ugly. If you don't think it's ugly, don't call it ugly.

Lynx? Luxury!

[QilessQi]

<yorkshire-accent>
When I was young we had to telnet to port 80 and format the HTML stream in our heads.
</yorkshire-accent>

Perhaps we need you as much as the youngsters.

[TightByte]

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.

Re:Perhaps we need you as much as the youngsters.

[Immerman]

I don't know, I think the "interesting times" curse very much applies, or at leastit will in a generation or so when the environmental and perhaps sociological debt we're incurring starts to really come due. As for the "advancement" addiction we seem to have, I agree completely. It seems like we're totally committed to "better, faster, cheaper" without ever considering the actual human consequences. I actually just replied to someone who brought up the Amish in a derogatory manner - while they are aruably a little extreme in their position you have to respect the fact that they actually take the time to consider the potential impact of new technologies on both individuals and their society before adopting them. The fact that so many youth return to their communities after their coming-of-age pilgrimage into modern society would suggest they are perhaps doing something right.

Re:Perhaps we need you as much as the youngsters.

[Immerman]

[grammar nazi mode engaged] Oh, also, time jumping SF aside "quantum" means "the smallest unit possible", so a quantum leap is a leap so small that you couldn't possibly make any smaller change and still claim to have made any change at all.

Re:Perhaps we need you as much as the youngsters.

[TightByte]

I had no idea. Thanks for pointing that out; I feel right foolish for having used the term without knowing what it meant all this time. Happily, I'm now (somewhat more) educated. :-)

Re:Perhaps we need you as much as the youngsters.

[Immerman]

Hmm, I haven't checked the etymology, but I'm guessing (2) must be an acknowledgement that the meaning of the word is being altered by popular usage, I certainly haven't seen it before, or in any of the other references I checked.

And (1) is consistent with what I said, though I'll freely admit I oversimplified for clarity. If a smaller step was possible then a jump from A to C would have passed through B, and hence been non-discrete. That does not mean that smaller jumps from A to B or B to C aren't possible, simply that they aren't possible in the particular context in which the jump from A to C is being considered.

Re:Perhaps we need you as much as the youngsters.

[Immerman]

I'm assuming you meant (2), otherwise you're going to need to clarify your statement.

Yes it does. Now, can you name *any* such leap in the realm of human endeavour? I can't. Those "leaps" are more accurately "rapid climbs", or more probably gradual climbs whose consequences at some point crossed a tipping point that suddenly catapulted into popular awareness.

I like the topic, but the author's dumb

[erroneus]

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.

You're 24?!!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Girls

[egcagrac0]

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.

Re:Girls

[Darinbob]

I dont' want to talk to customers. Eeeww, they've got cooties!

you tell them i'm twice your age

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

umm

[buddyglass]

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.

I didn't, but it worked out.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Your experience is contrary to mine

[melchoir55]

" 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.

Re:Your experience is contrary to mine

[mykelalvis]

It's conventionally wise that people tend toward the "change is scary" view, but I think the real change that we think others find scary is the change that we've already accepted. Thus, the OP's comment may remain valid depending on where you're standing.
For instance, in the parent comment the texting example is a very good one. I still have people in my life who fear texting (I'm talking to YOU, Mom!). But our acceptance of it as a communication form makes people who don't accept it appear to fear what we consider inevitable change.
Likewise, there wouldn't be such a proliferation of what are generally considered to be catalytic movements, technological or otherwise, if enough people weren't willing to embrace them. This statement covers myriad concepts, from the adoption of smartphones to the abolition of slavery to the possibility that gay people might get married (at least in some places).
You are not your tools. At the risk of sounding touchy-feely, they define some of your capabilities but not all of your limits. People who tell you that you need to keep up with the ever-changing Joneses are ignoring something we like to call taste, as well as the fact that while the world around you might change a lot, your little segment of it might not change much at all.

• Get your work done.
• Pick the right tools.
• Don't switch because of peer-pressure.
• Switch because it's the correct answer.

Re:Your experience is contrary to mine

[Kreigaffe]

actually old people and texting I think is a different beast. that, i think, is down to them simply not understanding the benefits of the technology.

all the old people i've heard poo-poo texting really have the same argument. they don't want to be bothered with a thousand text messages, what's wrong with just calling?

Yeah, but not ALL old people think like that. Some of them realized that, hey, if PersonFriend wants to get a hold of them, they can CALL, or TEXT. Either way is going to be a 'bother', but it's not a bother if you want to talk to them! With a text message the advantage is that they can send it off, and you can read and respond at *YOUR* leisure. Not theirs.

All the old people I've heard complain about texting use the same argument, and it's exactly the opposite of reality. They like talking to people, not reading and writing.

Me, you, most of us? Grew up with that shit. We know the value, we know sometimes a text is appropriate and sometimes we gotta call.

Re:Your experience is contrary to mine

[Immerman]

Indeed. It seems to me the real issue is that high-tech has become fashionable among the broader populace, and if I may be permitted to quote Oscar Wilde: "What is fashion but a form of ugliness so extreme that it must be changed every six months". I have met very few actually competent technological people who hav any interest in changing their tools with any regularity - your ability to use a familiar tool effectively is worth far more than any marginal increase the latest-and-greatest variant may bring. Occasionaly there are major leaps forward worth considering, and even the marginal increases eventually accumulate into something that may be worth considering, but the "jump on the latest buzzword bandwagon" mentality seems to be mostly restricted the the relatively ignorant who want to seem "cool"

Re:Your experience is contrary to mine

[Livius]

In general, people do tend to resist change.

But not always. I think he was referring to fads, where people irrationally embrace change because, well, not for any reason really.

And a trend I have noticed is an inverse relationship between the depth of change and the enthusiasm. I remember someone excitedly showing me a tablet or laptop or something - I forget what now - and me politely explaining that, having programmed computers for 30 years, I had seen a computer before. I literally could not figure out what was special and unique about the device.

So I see a lot of co-workers obsessing about different models of phones, which have only the most superficial differences between them, with the basic concepts well-established for years. An actual fundamental change would undoubtedly spark passionate resistance.

Re:Your experience is contrary to mine

[epyT-R]

How about the ones linking to youtube vids of someone typing (very slowly) into notepad.. those are my favorites..

Your old school is new school to embedded

[Garion911]

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.

Keep adapting...

[HockeyPuck]

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...

wtf

[M0j0_j0j0]

This is the most ridiculous post i read in a long time, you are a fucking hipster, no more, no less.

Kiddo

[oldhack]

When the geezers yell "get the hell of ma lawn!", they are shouting AT YOU. NOW GIT.

What the hell is "Web 3.0"?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I thought the web has already been upgraded to HTML 3.2, hasn't it?

How to fit in with the Hip Technofascists

[sesshomaru]

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.

OP is a hipster

[Anonymous Coward]

He uses a laptop brand you've probably never heard of.

The whole "article" smells of trolling.

Been there, done that

[MpVpRb]

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

Re:Been there, done that

[Immerman]

Still in the low 30s here, but have a similar perspective - got a second-hand smart phone a while back simply to add all the "might be nice" gadgets to my pocket that weren't worth carrying around individually. Actually unlocked the thing specifically to disable the smart-phone component because a bare-bones cell phone plan is all my actual usage patterns really justified and I can come up with much better uses for $50/month than all that gimmicky BS.

Ignore fruit-fly technological changes!

[Aguazul2]

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.

Re:Ignore fruit-fly technological changes!

[Bill Evans]

brushing does most of the work anyway

... that's what I thought, until I started using an ultrasound toothbrush.

The moral: be open to new technology.

You are soooo new school!

[multiben]

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.

Re:Lynx? Luxury!

[Intrepid imaginaut]

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!

Re:Lynx? Luxury!

[sphealey]

I was too busy reading the RFC drafts via Gopher to bother with "formatting".

sPh

Old school = conservative?

[Hartree]

Huh. I didn't know that RMS was a "conservative". He'll be so surprised.

Re:Old school = conservative?

[WillKemp]

Huh. I didn't know that RMS was a "conservative". He'll be so surprised.

He might be surprised, but i don't think anyone else will!

Re:Lynx? Luxury!

[Pop69]

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

serious computing still done that way

[iggymanz]

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

I'm 33 years old

[twistofsin]

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 just sound like a computer "hipster" to me. Come crack open a PBR with me and relax .. 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.

Your mashup of what would also be considered old (social networking) and new (Win 8) .. oh fuck I just convinced myself this was a troll submission, fuck off.

Re:I'm 33 years old

[tconnors]

You just sound like a computer "hipster" to me. Come crack open a PBR with me and relax .. 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.

5, insightful? Everything is better today? Like web2.0ified everything? Hardware management like Cisco's UCS client is now web2.0. As is VMWare's preferred interface to vsphere5. And half the monitoring crap I use. This is all in a fairly modern server farm.

And yet, the web2.0 part of all of it works exactly like, and is just as useful as a piece of dinosaur turd rotting in a vat of lava.

So, almost by definition, you're trying to run Cisco's interface over a narrow bandwidth relatively high latency IPVPN link to a remote datacentre, through a VNC session. And yet when it wants to pop up a web2.0 modal confirmation (yes/no) dialog box, it makes the background *fuzzy*. That works *extremely* well. Nothing like having to wait for 30 seconds everytime I want to click "confirm" while it progressively makes the background more and more blurry. But that's hip, I guess.

And when I try to move a bunch of servers into a different category in the Zenoss monitoring software, there's a small chance, that happens enough often to keep me on my toes nevertheless, that the GUI display of what I have shift-selected will be out of sync with what the backend thinks was the 4th to 8th item in the list (because some AJAX crap didn't quite load entirely, but the browser didn't flag any error), and I'll be moving a bunch of unidentified machines into the "decommissioned" category. That's awesome when that happens. Because it's web2.0, there's no change management, undo or auditing. If I notice that a bunch of machines seem to be in the wrong category, and can't work out where they came from, I have no choice but to go back to backups and try to restore several databases. That's just awesome. Give me back nagios and *automatically* managed .cfg files that can be checked into git (see, I can adapt to change, when change is an *improvement* over the old), please.

Re:I'm 33 years old

[Osgeld]

Im 34 and totally agree, when I learned of these tools in the early 90's my thoughts were somewhere along the lines of "gawd", and we were at the tail end of dialing into unix machines as a service (as a need, like work maybe, hell as late as 2006 I was still subjected to green screens and HPUX, but unless this guy grew up managing wherehouse inventory ...)

Re:I'm 33 years old

[Osgeld]

heh the article author wants to remember the old days, this guy is stuck in them, just shouting out hate for buzzwords

k gramps, you go back to your new times roman web 0.0

Re:I'm 33 years old

[jittles]

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 just sound like a computer "hipster" to me. Come crack open a PBR with me and relax .. 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. Your mashup of what would also be considered old (social networking) and new (Win 8) .. oh fuck I just convinced myself this was a troll submission, fuck off.

I will say that I am about your age and I did actually use pine professionally. When I was 17 I was writing backend tools to empower Tier 1 tech support to do some of the things that the Tier 2 and 3 guys normally had to take care of. Since I spent all day on a BSD box (via telnet), that also happened to host my mailbox, I used pine quite a bit. And I actually had a boss who, still to this day, asks people if they know how to use VI in an interview (and does not want to hire them if they do not know it). The VI thing always irritated me though. Anyone can learn VI. I want a good programmer who knows his stuff. If he doesn't know the tools, a good programmer will learn to use them in no time.

New and old are value judgements with no context

[Adammil2000]

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.

Use what works well:

[Hartree]

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.

Let the babies have their bottle

[uCallHimDrJ0NES]

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.

Re:wat?

[CannonballHead]

I have used Lynx and IRC and I'm only 28. That said, I wouldn't want to make a regular habit of it. I used IRC due to some gaming circles as another poster mentioned, and Lynx because I wanted to do osme web stuff in a text-only SSH session.

You're being a technological bigot.

[Above]

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.

Re:You're being a technological bigot.

[serviscope_minor]

It's bigotry. It's nearly the same as looking down on people because of their ... religion. It's arbitrary, capricious, rude, and uninformed

You are clearly looking down on this poster because of his opinions and choices. Why select these to look down on but not others?

New != Better

[FuzzNugget]

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.

Re:New != Better

[UnknowingFool]

Windows 8 ... do I even need to explain?

20 years from today

Back in my day, we didn't have these fancy operating systems that would give you a hint on what to do next. We had to click anywhere and everywhere until it did something. And we LIKED it that way.

Re:New != Better

[Immerman]

Nah, even fifty years from now I can't imagine anyone claiming they liked it. Not even after hiking ten miles through the snow uphill both ways.

Stay fresh but use what you know well

[monkeyhybrid]

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.

Do it faster and better, or be willing to change

[spasm]

"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.

Accept the good, keep the good

[Junta]

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.

Lame excuse

[Autonomous Crowhard]

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.

I see a lot of opinions here about the meat...

[Gideon Fubar]

...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.

Pull hair

[Cacadril]

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.

Remove the past's rose tint, and it's the future.

[VortexCortex]

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. :-)

Don't Ask me

[Master Moose]

I am still wating on the Amiga to make a meaningful comeback

Re:New != "cool" either.

[Darinbob]

Hah, I agree somewhat with this. I see too many cool and hip people bragging about how they're geeks and nerds when they clearly are not. The geek chic is not real geek. Being able to twitter or use a smart phone doesn't make you a nerd. Most real nerds want to know how things really work at a fundamental level, not just how to use them. Being a geek is the opposite of being cool.

Re:wat?

[rasmusbr]

Then you're almost old enough to remember when IRC was created in 1988. I'm 29 and I clearly remember the splash that mIRC made on TV and in the newspapers when it came out in 1995 and IRC took off among normal people, or semi-normal people, and I clearly remember how everyone in school was trying to learn how to use it in 1996. Hell, you could be 18 and still have learned to use mIRC when significant numbers of people where still using it, if you were an early writer/typer and started using it at age 6.

I guess it could be that the rate at which software and electronics is changing causes us to over estimate the amount of time that has passed since technology x was hot.

Old Phart Opinion...

[DigitalSorceress]

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

Re:Old Phart Opinion...

[xystren]

In my (old phart) opinion, change for the sake of change is what sucks.

Not the only old phart that has the same opinion. I'd go even further and say, "Implementing technology for the sake of technology is what sucks." All too often I've seen technology implemented for no good business reason, but because the technology was sparkley

Like you, I'm also fighting with the ribbon - the most unintuitive interface that I have seen. I won't even spout on the waste of screen real estate. It was nice having things always in the same location, regardless where you happen to be focused - if it wasn't relevant it would be greyed out. Even after fighting with the ribbon since 2007, I just can't seem to find a good reason for the change other change for the sake of technology. But I'm pretty sure I'll have some ribbon fanboy tout it's ease of use, blah, blah, blah.

Cheers fellow oLd pHarT!

Sometimes less is evidence of mastery

[ikhider]

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.

Re:Sometimes less is evidence of mastery

[Andover Chick]

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). One should not assume everything old is substandard - JS Bach is still the greatest composer after 300 years!

Re:Sometimes less is evidence of mastery

[ikhider]

@Andover Person Yeah, sure. The people I know use Vi. So maybe you need a gaming keyboard for Emacs. Stallman uses Emacs, haven't seem him with a gaming keyboard though. Maybe he has a WOW keyboard stashed somewhere. Guilty pleaseure.

Too much

[Taantric]

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!

Just use it all

[dreamchaser]

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.

when my age you are, look as good you will not

[tverbeek]

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.

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.

Re:when my age you are, look as good you will not

[Sockatume]

Windows 8 being a particularly pretinent example.

Do what makes you happy

[i.r.id10t]

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.

Bah!

[Greyfox]

Those shiny geegaws might do well on the consumer side but there's always going to be some bank or some company that's going to need a batch processor running mainframe assembly running somewhere. There's plenty of room to work in things you don't think suck. I'm seeing more opportunities to do development work on Linux platforms lately, not fewer.

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.

Network effects

[tepples]

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.

Re:Network effects

[tlhIngan]

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.

The reason the masses embrace reinventions of old technology is because modern technology makes it easier to use and understand. Facebook makes it easy to get in contact with your friends - no longer do you have to understand a cryptic email address - 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). And in one place, you can see what they were up to. At least, that's the marketing glitz that attracts people in.

Sure they could email, view blogs and such, but that's more complex and takes more time than having the information in one place, not having to deal with cryptic addresses (is this the right Doe?), having to deal with uploading photos and converting them, etc. (Remember the old jokes about people emailing 50MB worth of photos? They're true).

Basically, the reinventions are aimed at the non-technical market. It's also core to what Apple does - they repackage existing technology for the masses.

Netbooks basically were a fad because the masses wanted a cheap computer to do their facebooking and other stuff with - to passively consume content and such. But the formfactor was wrong, screens small, keyboards crappy, and all sorts of other things evident when trying to cut corners and repackage a PC to cost under $300. They killed themselves off when manufacturers, fed up at not being able to make money, started charging more and more ($400 and $500 netbooks became REALLY common. And yes, at $500, they were running into low-end laptops.).

Then Apple introduced the iPad that basically answered a lot of people's needs for a netbook (like a tablet, netbooks aren't for creating with their puny keyboards and such - and larger ones were again, costing the same as laptops).

Other manufacturers jumped into the same ring realizing they could make much more money selling a tablet rather than a netbook.

The old netbooks are still around - I still see them for $300, but they aren't movers anymore as for $100 more, you get a glitzier tablet with larger screen, multimedia, less hassle, etc.

As for technies, there's nothing wrong with the old methods - stability is good as well. But just as the masses aren't going to take up vi or emacs, it doesn't mean vi and emacs users are outdated and antiquated.

Obsolete is what happens when there are far better ways of doing what you're doing but keeping to the old methods. Like say, using a typewriter over a word processor. Using the latter means if you make a typo, you hit Backspace and fix it. You don't have to retype the entire page, or dig out the liquid paper or correction tape. Thus, the word processor obsoletes the typewriter, even though it's not entirely perfect (after all, a mechanical typewriter works with no power). But the common use case was people had power (and electric typewriters), thus making word processors far more useful for creating documents.

The old methods of shell windows, vi/emacs text editing, etc., haven't been obsoleted because there generally aren't good replacements. And vi and emacs have generally als

Accessibility

[tepples]

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.

Re:Accessibility

[k8to]

That markup also makes the document more comprehensible to users of gui displays.

No, really.

The gui mail client markup is so catastrophically bad that the text mode stuff is much more understandable. People freuqently are impressed by the clarity I produce in mutt using vim as compared to all my outlook-weilding cavemen.

Re:wat?

[idunham]

24 years old, I use IRC less now than a few months ago...I started on it thanks to OpenCDE. I've used alpine, but it's too slow; I prefer mutt. It's much faster to get mails that way.
Lynx I have also used, but I prefer Links2, which I've used in both text and GUI modes. It's really the best way to view some web sites--especially some "Web 2.0/30" type websites that use Javascript like they're on an allnighter and have flash/video, irrelevant graphics, and all sorts of other non-content. Also I find that I can often get better download speeds via Links.

At least use alpine

[mattack2]

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/

Here's a nickel, kid.

[Reeses]

Go get yourself a real computer.

Exaggerated reports of death, blah, blah...

[chaoskitty]

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.

Re:Exaggerated reports of death, blah, blah...

[Sockatume]

Most Windows users only upgrade their OS when they get a new computer, and they accept change only grudgingly. To the extent that the PC market is currently in crisis because it turns out that a $250 tablet and their five-year-old laptop does most of what these people need, and thus they've stopped buying.

The unacknowledged truth of the Wintel computer market is that it's built upon conservatism, basing its growth not around change and improvement but around making things cheaper ($400 laptops) and encouraging people to buy more of them (one laptop per person in a household). At some point that growth was going to stop and the lack of change was going to bite PC makers and MS in the ass, and that point is now.

Re:Exaggerated reports of death, blah, blah...

[zwarte piet]

It was computergames that drove me to buy new hardware in the past from 8088->8036sx->486dx->pentiumII I stopped playing computergames at the point I started using windows.. Everything after that I upgraded just because someone gave me their old pentiumIII/thunderbird/pentium4 wich I've been happily using for years with a few new caps in them.

Get a life

[plopez]

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.

Re:I know, right...

[plopez]

SCCS has better revisioning.

Expand

[jameshofo]

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.

Lol

[lightknight]

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.

It's a two-way street.

[JimtownKelly]

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.

It's simple..

[GigaBurglar]

[Reason #5643] - Section N, Sub-paragraph (7), Line (534). ) Convenience - I find studying with a tablet far easier than sitting at a desk.

You're not alone my friend

[ram5785]

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.

but did you bullseye womp rats

[decora]

in your t16 back home?

Technological hipster

[ZeroPly]

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".

Re:Technological hipster

[NoImNotNineVolt]

I just turned 31. My first experience browsing the web was with lynx. I still use lynx when it makes sense, which is very, very rarely. I'm not cool enough to even think about being a hipster.
But when I do web design, I make sure my sites render in lynx. Because anyone who doesn't is an asshole.
(consideration for those with accessibility issues, old hardware, etc.)

I am the same.

[antdude]

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.

I want to be you

[Art3x]

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).

People should make choices

[Skapare]

... 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.

Old school

[jandersen]

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.

Try to sympathize with other users

[Phasma Felis]

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.

Re:Not "Oldschool" just a hipster!

[gl4ss]

exactly!
me and my bro used lynx. before links was around.

why? we had a 8 mb system and a bunch of sites could be navigated with it back then pretty well. and by not booting up X we could play mp3's while doing other stuff..

Frankly, it doesn't matter.

[YoungManKlaus]

Work with what suits you best. Though what you have sounds like a severe case of the Hipster

Windows 8?

[Sockatume]

"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.

Win8 - MSDOS with a light pen

[dbIII]

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 ?

Different entry drug

[dbIII]

Nethack has vi keybindings for movement.

Re:Different entry drug

[david_thornley]

It's not the only one. Ever try to move diagonally in vi? Just because your favorite roguelike does it doesn't mean vi/vim will.

People actually resist change

[zwarte piet]

Yeah buying a new car or pc is usually easy. Changing your ways is something people aren't in a hurry with.

Quantum leaps

[Pfhorrest]

"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.

Re:Quantum leaps

[Immerman]

You are right, discrete is technically a better definition, but I think it's far more vulnerable to misundertanding. The thing is that all non-minimal transitions are almost by definition not discrete. If you look at your sudden leap in extreme slow motion you will see that, in almost all cases, it passes through many intermediate states. Hence it is NOT a discrete change, it is a collection of many smaller changes that simply happened faster than you noticed. Contrast this with, say, an atom being excited by a photon. At one instant the atom has energy A, and the next it has energy A+P. At no point in between was it at any intermediate energy state, because there are no intermediate energy states*. A photon cannot be only partially absorbed, it's an all-or nothing proposition. Discrete.

* somewhat oversimplified, but the details aren't really relevant to the conversation.

Older EE here

[Peter Simpson]

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.

:set spell

[tepples]

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.

General

[vkonnector]

All above things are considered true...but change is the requirement of successful business or in anything!

The old fool and the young fool

[angel'o'sphere]

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.

Battleship Keyboards are the Best!!!

[Andover Chick]

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 more things change...

[codemaster2b]

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.

Help us Alvin Toffler you're our only hope.

[Darth Snowshoe]

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.

Re:You're probably just a dumbass

[Specter]

+1 Best AC post of the thread. I LOL'd.

Clark Windows Kent

[Tablizer]

You do NOT want to be the enemy of the executives.

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.

Facebook's "dis am bigger" than yours

[tepples]

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.

What you value content over style?

[whitroth]

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

Dont accept the fads but

[ananthap]

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