Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Dealing With a Fear of Technological Change?
An anonymous reader writes "Despite the fact that I am fairly young at twenty-four years old, people see me as rather 'old school.' I regularly use Lynx, IRC, Pine, have many consoles open, and am currently typing this on an older plain black laptop that has a matte 4:3 display and no chiclet keys. As the days progress, I am coming to the realization that the 'old school' computing world that I grew up in is slowly fading away and a new world of Windows 8, Web 3.0, tablets, smart televisions, and social networking is starting to become fairly common. If there is anything I have learned, it is that most humans have a desire to throw out the old and accept the new without any sort of hesitation. Like many Slashdot users (I am sure you know who you are), I do not accept the new as easily as I probably should. How have you learned to adapt and accept things that are new and different in the world of technology and computers? If not, what are some effective strategies to utilize to keep these kids off my lawn?"
Stay cool, don't be a fool.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Having gone through some of the same things, the best advice I can say is to ignore those feelings publicly. At work I'm riding the wave with the rest of them. At home I'm back on my happy train. The last thing I want is to be marginalized at work because I'm "that guy" who is a roadblock instead of a guy that moves things forward.
In the tech industry, you do NOT want to be the enemy of the executives.
Definitely point out real problems when they're there, and nix projects that are bad, but try not to let your bias lead you to make irrationally bad arguments. And who knows, you might learn to like some of the stuff, which will help you in the future as well both because you know more, and also because your attitude will be more open. It's worked for me so far at least - I just bought an iPad and a Surface Pro today for testing, will be getting a Nexus to validate very soon as well. It's actually pretty fun.
In any case, good luck, and long live lynx!
I've got socks older than you. What are you gonna do when you really get old?
If the current tools you have are getting the job done, I don't see a need to change.
If you want to force yourself into getting started with new technology, I'd start with a rootable Android smartphone, or a Nexus 7 if you don't want to spring for a phone plan. Then just jump right in to exploring it.
You'll learn a lot of the new interface tricks that are shared with tablets/phones, there's a lot of devices and web services they can integrate with, and you can still get your hack on and put SSH and all that other fun stuff on the device.
Umm, no. That is the exact opposite of what most humans have a desire to do. We hang on to things that we know. Why do you think Windows 8.1 will have a "Start" button? By and large, people hate change.
it's not about the tools, but how well you use them. If you're more productive with old tools than your peers are with new ones, why worry? It's easier to move forward than backward, so you'll always have a bigger tool belt than those who didn't bother learning/understanding the capabilities of "old school."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
You're actively regressing when you stick with a text mode browser in the modern world. You aren't "old school" -- you're stubborn. Old school would be sticking with what you learned to start with, not specifically choosing something from the late '70s or early '80s to work with.
Your big problem is you need to grow up.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
"If there is anything I have learned, it is that most humans have a desire to throw out the old and accept the new without any sort of hesitation."
When did Slashdot start accepting submissions from Bizarro Earth? Or in Bizzaro Speak, When did orgDotSlash start rejecting admissions from Normal Earth?
"If there is anything I have learned, it is that most humans have a desire to throw out the old and accept the new without any sort of hesitation."
I guess you haven't learned anything, then.
Maybe try again?
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
If you don't have a desire to change and accept the inevitable progression of technology switch careers. I hear the amish are making wonderful fireplaces.
I use pine (well, alpine) daily. I'm typing this with an IBM Model M keyboard made in 1988, hooked up to an old, re-purposed Dell with parts from all sorts of sources. I don't keep a lot of xterms open, but I do love xfce's tabbed Terminal Emulator app. I still use things like job control and screen, even though I could have 100 ssh sessions going if I wanted to. When I need to make some quick-and-dirty HTML, I probably use tables more often than not. I still look at usenet. I write (gasp!) perl scripts from time to time.
So why use all those "old" things? Because they work. Why not switch to something new, or stop using screen when I can hit shift+ctrl+t and get a new session? Because there's no compelling reason not to use screen. It still works. Sure, you don't see things like rlogin, rsh and (maybe) ftp anymore, because those things no longer work sufficiently well. Why don't I bother with things like a "semantic desktop" that can sync all manner of social media and such right there in my WM? There's no compelling reason to do so. I just don't have a need for any of that. Why not carry a tablet around? Because a laptop is far mroe flexible for my needs. It still works for me, and that's my primary concern.
But the bottom line is this: If it's ugly and it works, it's not ugly. Keep your eyes out for new stuff, but just keep using what both appeals to and works for you.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
<yorkshire-accent>
When I was young we had to telnet to port 80 and format the HTML stream in our heads.
</yorkshire-accent>
Koans and fables for the software engineer
How have you learned to adapt and accept things that are new and different in the world of technology and computers?
The girls I talk to want the new features. If I want to keep talking to the girls, I stay reasonably current on features.
If you want to, you can replace "girls" with "users", "customers", etc. Really, though, this is nothing new, since about Windows 95 and AOL.
you tell them! i am on a pdp-11 terminal and i have to run my data stream trough a translation code that puts everything into lower case so that slashdot's filter doesn't tel me that im yelling or somethng- so iguess i'm whispering now? i have 12k of ram and a hole kilobyte of disk space. my factorite game is star trek in basic. I don't have any spiel chk ither. my power bill is about $1,000/ mo for the computer and ac. sometimes - aside from marketing hybole - technology imporovments are a good thing, sonny.
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.
" If there is anything I have learned, it is that most humans have a desire to throw out the old and accept the new without any sort of hesitation"
The above quote is in stark contrast to my own experience in life. I'm not much older than you (29) and I have found that people often require extremely powerful motivators in order to accept "the new" otherwise known as "change". There are different personalities of course, but the personality "I want to learn it once and be an expert forever" is pretty common in my own workplace. A lot of people don't push themselves to learn. I don't mean outside the workplace, either. I just mean learning the proprietary in-house tech we have. Folks learn it as much as they absolutely need to then kind of check out when it comes to the more in depth stuff. Not all people of course, but not an insignificant part of the population either.
Other examples abound. How many 60 year olds were texting a decade ago? It certainly isn't that they are too stupid, because a lot of them do it now. Old people are just as smart (smarter?) as young people with the unfortunate disadvantage of poor reaction time. It's that they had methods of approaching the world which were well worn and change is scary.
The tech crowd is not plagued with the "change is scary" mantra to the same degree as other crowds. I've found that it accepts change faster than most other demographics I've been a part of.
If you're into programming, think about moving into the embedded. I work for an embedded company, and I recently got the company to realize that remote gdb works pretty well.
When your connection is only over ssh, telnet, or *gasp* serial, your old school will be very handy.
Slashdot is like Playboy: I read it for the articles
Me. I'm "old school", I manage, architect, support storage subsystems...
Parallel SCSI ... done that...
ESCON then FICON... yep.
NFS/SMB... yep
SSA (IBM's Serial Storage Architecture) yep.
Tape... LTO is "new" compared to the stuff I've done.
FibreChannel.. now FC over Ethernet... yep...
Object Storage... yep
Hadoop/MapR... here today...
I still manage and architect storage environments for customers...
I just adapted to what was coming... the requirements for my clients or employers didn't change. They wanted high performance, easy to manage, cheaper than the previous solution and most of all reliable..
Just keep adapting, keep educating yourself on what is here today and what various vendors are working on... All this server virtualization that people are deploying now... nothing new... I did LPARs on mainframes in the 90s. Dumb terminals... The "cloud" today is nothing more than a 1000 cheap x86 servers with software running over them to enable you to dynamically configure VMs on the fly. I did that with OS/360 years ago on a Parallel Sysplex on the mainframe. Concepts are the same, implementation is different. Requirements haven't changed that much.
Don't be afraid to evolve. Keeps you young, interesting and relevant. Plus you can apply all that you've learned to what's coming...
He uses a laptop brand you've probably never heard of.
The whole "article" smells of trolling.
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.
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.
Huh. I didn't know that RMS was a "conservative". He'll be so surprised.
And everything you claim to have learned on was outdated when I was a fucking teenager. I have a really hard time believing that this "old school" computing world is what you grew up with.
.. you don't have to try this hard to be different. As someone who has done production in many industries, please let me reassure you that we wouldn't have adopted today's tools if they weren't better than yesterdays.
.. oh fuck I just convinced myself this was a troll submission, fuck off.
You just sound like a computer "hipster" to me. Come crack open a PBR with me and relax
Your mashup of what would also be considered old (social networking) and new (Win 8)
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.
...but not much about the shape of the bones, OP.
If you use old school tech for its own sake and it's really a cultural affectation then there's no real reason not to switch.
However, if you use them because you're interested in the raw stuff that makes the modern world work and you're not content to just accept that every new toy is a magical box controlled by Apple or Microsoft or Samsung... you should probably both stick to the old stuff and branch out into finding out how the new technologies do what they do.
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
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. :-)
I am still wating on the Amiga to make a meaningful comeback
. .
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.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
In my (old phart) opinion, change for the sake of change is what sucks.
For instance, I really hate the MS ribbon, it actually gets in my way... There was nothing wrong with classic menus. They're efficient - especially for "I don't know what I want, but I'll know it when I see it"... the Ribbon makes me have to hunt for everything. That was change for the sake of change. It was MS trying to make Office seem like it was somehow new and exciting... because, let's face it, their flagship product has been feature complete since Office 97 - sure, there have been a few improvements here and there, but Office XP wasn't that big of an improvement worth shelling out big bucks for the upgrade from 97... and 2003 - well, in retrospect, it was MS Office's finest hour, but it was an incremental improvement...... 2007 added the ribbon to some stuff, and 2010 completely replaced the menus. Yeah, it works just as good and has a few nice features, but I fight with the UI so much that my general perception is that it stinks. I use it cuz I have to (at work).
Be careful not to get labeled as a stick in the mud. Work with the stuff that you get stuck with, but always keep an eye out for actual good change - accept those good changes wholeheartedly, and laugh as others spin their wheels on the thing of the moment... but only to yourself - when nobody's looking. :p
The Digital Sorceress
Then you have not learned anything, padawan. It may be commonly true of your peers, but it is not true of most humans in middle age or later, especially those of less tech-friendly varieties.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
do not be worried that you're not embracing all the stuff that the masses embrace.
True, argumentum ad populum is usually a fallacy. But sometimes it isn't. Economies of scale in manufacturing is one case. As the masses have moved from "netbooks" (10" laptops) to tablets, it has become more difficult for a happy netbook user to find a new replacement for failed hardware. Communication platforms are another case. If people aren't willing to make their writing available through an open technoloby such as an Atom feed but instead prefer to lock their communication inside the closed systems of Twitter and Facebook because everyone else is doing it, one has to join what everyone else is doing in order to be able to communicate with everyone else.
there is a huge difference between text mode and graphics mode.
Not as much as you might think. Quick: Guess what mode the third and fourth generation game consoles, such as the NES and Super NES, always ran in. Answer: It was text mode, just with customized colored fonts.
You should no longer expect people to mark up with alternate text mode.
The markup that makes a document accessible to the user of a text terminal is also likely to make the document accessible to users of speech interfaces or braille displays.
There is nothing wrong with choosing an older tool because it does the better job. But claiming to have an emotional attachment to it is attention mongering. This guy is just a technological hipster - he's using Lynx to be different. He probably can' t bear to be separated from his straight razor or manual typewriter either.
It is insane to think that a 24 year old somehow grew up with Lynx and just doesn't want to change, unless this narrative involves a village in Somalia or something. We're supposed to be in awe of how special he is, but as someone who actually used Lynx when it was the only game in town, all I have to say is "get a fucking life".
Support microSD: in a post 9/11 world, it is unwise to carry your data on media that you cannot comfortably swallow.
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).
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 ?
Pretend you are like a super-hero, maybe LinuxMan, EmacsMan, LambdaMan, etc.
During the day you are Windows Kent, but at night you put on your EmacsMan suit and save the day from the unsuspecting clueless minions below you without thanks or recognition except for a handful of fans who realize you have kept Joker Ballmer from ruling the entire world.
Table-ized A.I.