Remember when ST:TOS happened. Everything was episodic, there were few "story arcs" in prime time (that's what distinguished soap operas), and on some shows consistency was laughable. Strange, considering that "serial" storytelling had already been common on radio. On ST:TOS people discovered something and it was never heard of again; on "The Man from UNCLE" the toys worked inconsistently to satisfy the episode in ways that would never have been let slide by a potboiler writer, let alone a decent novelist. By the time B5 appeared, technology banned after one use as "too risky" (and importantly demonstrating a paladin's strength of character) was dragged out of the closet a full season later so another paladin could lay down his life for another - that is, elements had persistence in the grand saga. (using "grand saga" as a literature descriptive term, not a quality judgment, though I did enjoy it.)
In an interview with the actor playing Marcus Cole, he said something about story vs. effects that I think applies to this discussion re: technology: Explosions aren't the story. People want to watch people. If they don't care about the people, they won't watch, and you can blow up what you like.
Any creative work beyond the most utilitarian (and sometimes even those) reflects the surrounding culture, technology level, and aesthetic sense. Archaeologists trace the spread of ideas through civilizations through things like jewelry or decorations on pottery. Do they depict people? animals? animals that aren't native and that they must have heard about from travelers? Are the depictions realistic, or stylized, or clearly fantastic? How complex is the piece, and what does it say about the tools necessary for its creation? Does it imply a stable workshop full of tools and equipment?
It's harder to see exactly what the supporting technology can do if it's not part of what you're looking at. Earlier video games on earlier technology were hard pressed to display a single player and a single opponent, so team operations were out of the question. AI-driven team members appeared as the game systems supported them, and live interaction once the underlying network was up to speed (anybody remember the lag on 1200 baud modems?).
Sometimes you don't even realize the significance of items in artwork until it's pointed out. I thought product placement was relatively new, since the movie era, until I took a tour of Renaissance paintings explaining details like which figures in each painting are the paying customer, or members of his family, or the artist, or someone's mistress (or all of the above). And then comes the political part that we don't see today: In a painting purporting to be a religious figure, who was the model? Is the "sacred virgin" really a picture of a courtesan? And was she known to other people in the circle that would be viewing it?
People like playing on teams, and always have.. The culture supports it. The technology supports it. That's why it's happening more.
... what should be a very simple program: manage schedules, 'notes' on discipline, and grades...
Perhaps you underestimate the complexity just a little bit.
What might seem like a straightforward project as a homework assignment becomes a lot more complicated in practical real-world applications with about 10x the error checking, 10x the human interface work, and a ton of special cases. That's why there are big companies that make a living from payroll tracking, when at first glance it's a simple matter of multiplying hours times rate. I believe that's why so many open-source projects that begin with enthusiasm get abandoned along the way: the core positive part of the project is interesting and useful, but the pile of work that turns a "project" into a "product" usable by lots of minimally trained newbies is not as interesting (or as much fun).
That's why they call it "work" and pay us money to do it.:-)
Developing a new system today, everyone assumes they're working on an *existing* system with resources and tools. How do you think people bootstrapped systems together in the bad old days? And that's why some of the early stuff took so long, and the pace of change is so much faster now - there's an entire infrastructure available today that was a fantasy when I was in school. Assembler was the course that separated the serious majors from . . . normal people.:-)
Besides: Who watches it on "big media" anyway nowadays?
There's an entire market segment of "sports bars", including sections of some general restaurants, with lots of big-screen TVs so people can get together and watch "the game" (whatever is playing at the moment). There's a big increase in advertising of new TVs before various big sporting events like the Football Game Whose Name Is Copyrighted and the College Basketball Month Without Sanity Also Copyrighted.
Most importantly, the entire enterprise - the sports event *and* the broadcast thereof - are being paid for by advertisers who have good reason to believe potential customers are seeing their ads because they wanted to see the event.
So, who watches big media? The great majority of NORMAL people who don't spend their time reading and posting/.
... I'd much rather have something I could take my kids to and just plain enjoy.
There's a place for that. And there's also a place for adult-level fiction. Same issue as the assumption that "animated" means "children's cartoon", which is not the case at all. The biggest complaint I have is about truth in labeling, and I think it's the one place where law and/or government has a valid role. Just like food has to be accurately labeled so people can make their own informed decisions, government should stay *out* of censorship (people can make whatever art they want) but *in* on labeling (before you buy and unwrap that art, you should be able to know if it includes anything you're allergic to [or want to keep on the top shelf where the kids can't get it]). Misleading advertising & marketing to the wrong group are related issues that would be solved when you get the accurate label.
In terms of degrees of separation, it's retail. WSJ's concern may be that people are just *changing* their subscriptions from online Internet (where WSJ knows about them) to Kindle-specific (where Amazon knows about them). But that's still not their information - if I have an agreement with my local shop to save me a copy of WSJ (or a regular periodicals/comics list or anything else), that agreement is with the *shop*, not with the *publisher*.
No offense, but most of the articles over the years trying to convince average PC users to switch to Linux have been just as over-enthusiastic, just as over-simplified, and, yes, just as naive sounding in retrospect. Normal people - even musicians:-) - don't want to understand things like system latency when their MIDI keyboards make sounds instantly.
It's irritating no matter *what* system you're using, or what you're trying to do with it, when you know there's plenty of horsepower but the system can't get its act together. It's like putting crappy tires on a Lamborghini. After working with embedded systems for 25 years, there's simply no excuse for a multi-gigahertz processor with multi-megabyte memory and multi-megabyte-per-second communication to fail to keep up with keystrokes.
>>>... using spacecraft that travel at a tenth of the speed of light, the colonization wavefront could take some 50 million years to sweep the galaxy.
We haven't even kept the same radio or television systems for more than 100 years, or kept spaceflight active for 50 years; do you really think that any one civilization could last for 50 million years? There might be ongoing propagation, but there would be so much change it would be like little kids playing "telephone".
And the idea that we are the descendants of a colonization or crash-landing go back to 1940's or 1950's science fiction, well before Battlestar: Galactica.
I've seen the same thing from the other side, as a probationary teacher. Class settles down, trouble-maker walks in late and then continues being disruptive, and the rest of the class period is shot. Try telling the football or basketball coach that you're going to "mainstream" the team by including below-average members, rather than selecting the most talented for the appropriate sport. Then explain why we disrupt the intellectual side of the school instead.
No, they were gutted because it's OK to spend money killing people, and getting more people killed to "honor" and "justify" the people you already got killed, but once you've done the impossible it becomes commonplace. Especially if you have an institutional culture that does its best to make everything boring and "nominal" even to an engineer.
Believe it or not, nobody realized how valuable some originals would be. Even here on/. go read the comments about the new DVD material and see how many people say "Who cares about data after 50 years anyway?" Original live TV show recordings were overwritten as a matter of course, because they never dreamed of "reruns" or a major market for rebroadcast, and the idea of a home player was ludicrous.
By the way - at one point The Moody Blues set up the most killer recording studio with the finest analog recorders available: NASA surplus. A few years later digital happened.
(And exactly what are you going to be archiving that you think will still be relevant or usable in a thousand years?)
We still read classic books, watch classic movies, view the originals of artwork. We still reference old records, particularly census and immigration and other genealogical information. We build whole societies around books that are hundreds, or thousands, of years old.
True, anything in constant contemporaneous use will be moved to updated media on an ongoing basis (like those books); but it's always good to check with the originals for authenticity. Imagine if we could see what various famous authors ACTUALLY WROTE instead of what succeeding generations chose to copy.
And maybe this time, having already seen a generation of problems recovering valuable data on tapes of varying formats, and with the advantage of much smaller storage space and a more standardized comm interface, people will make *sure* to keep DVD readers around.
Pollyanna, I know. But one can hope.
It's labeled as a picture but it's not a real picture. Simple as that. Well, yeah, it's a picture that is a "barcode-like" data transfer, and you could print it out and scan it into your Altair with one of those old photocell wands. Of course back in those days, if we could have downloaded a picture we wouldn't have needed magazines to print barcode.;-)
In fact, where's the savings? If it's just the.torrent header that's being saved under a fake name, the file still has to be hosted; and if it's the actual file that's been hidden as a.png, it will be downloaded individually instead of as a torrent, which completely misses the purpose. The *only* benefit is to get around a restriction by filename for people who distrust.torrent, so in exchange it's going to make people distrust and double-scan.png. Sounds like identity theft to me.
No reason to be obnoxious. YOU are the one who isn't understanding, or more probably just isn't listening.
M$ already spreads FUD about open standards like PNG, and this encourages people to think "Maybe this PNG isn't a real picture"./.ers get upset at M$ for putting executable code in places it's not expected, and mixing unrelated concepts, and subtly changing the meanings of standards so that they're not standard anymore; the average non-techie would consider this misuse of picture format to be similar enough.
I don't consider this steganography, either, because it's not hiding one thing behind another. It might be elegant to take some standard picture of Tux or the Mona Lisa, and use the file-to-be-hidden as delta modulation on it, and call the result "dynamic art"; using the bits as multicolor barcode isn't much different from amplitude & phase modulation on carrier signals (as if it wasn't obvious enough that I can call it "multicolor barcode" because the conceptual extension is "obvious to a practitioner in the field").
...just starting a new IE process by double-clicking the IE icon. That would launch a whole new copy of iexplore.exe. If that level of performance was acceptable...
Good point. And how sad that all the way back in the 1970s, even before Unix, there were systems like TOPS-10 that had shared-code / separate-data segmentation, and Windows couldn't be bothered to use it.
You are vastly over-estimating the impact of a process switch...
Process creation, allocation, then switch. But yes, I'm probably over-estimating.
Independent processes allow a dramatic improvement in robustness.... Plenty of people browse with many windows open...
I have eight or ten windows open most of the time myself. I don't care for tabs.
Moreover, major architectural clean-ups on software projects tend to improve performance as a side-effect anyway.
Like Vista?;-) Well, one can always hope.:-):-)
I'm afraid your post is one long stream of technically incompetent FUD.
Well, now, that's a bit harsh. I'd stick with calling it over-estimating. Perhaps I spend too much time with tight constraints; my perspective is based on my work with embedded microcontrollers, and in particular experience with projects in which someone went for either (a) philosophical purity, or (b) architectural simplicity, without realizing just how much overhead would be involved and how firmly limited the memory resources were. Efficiency is hard to shoehorn back in.
For users with anything pre-multi-core (and that's only a few years old), this will result in things getting *slower* because of the process overhead. I hope it senses resources and optimizes appropriately, or all of the friends and relatives I tech-support will be cursing me when the update happens. Some of them are already ticked that when they double-click on the Firefox icon, it takes longer to load than IE because of all the update-phone-home (the sort of thing for which we would all get annoyed at M$).
Eventually we'll get to the point where the window comes up and it takes a ludicrous time to fill . . . just like Windows already does now.
Better philosophical architecture is a good thing. Running well in the practical typical system, in front of the average user, is good too. Disruptive change is not always the way to please your users.
Other holy books go through revisions, get translated, have pages lost, etc etc - they can hardly be called the True Word of God at all.
Even DNA has gone through revisions over time. The very Earth has changed. God's creation is, itself, mutable. Any work of Man in interpreting and understanding God is inherently incomplete.
Why do you assume it's "creeping"? Faculty wants to encourage current students with interesting updates on recent graduates and how they're doing at college. If the page was public, it's PUBLIC to EVERYBODY - why would anyone expect that they can publish a rant for the rest of the world and *not* have the folks at home see it? If it was "friends only", and student chose to "friend" faculty for perfectly proper reasons - coach, college advisor, etc. - it's equally available.
Devil's advocate (just a possibility): maybe publicizing this was supposed to encourage current students to do better and get out to college, like Former Student, so they could expand their horizons like FS. OTOH maybe it's a classic flamewar; FS chose to write "Hometown sucks!" rather than "I've seen so much more in College / Big City than back in little Hometown!"
Slashdotters sometimes forget that everything they say applies to themselves too. If you want business and government information to be free, then anything YOU put online to display to the universe has to be equally free.
Despite the fact that they are hundreds or thousands of years old, people are still being taught English, French, Spanish, German, and various other Romance and/or Germanic languages. Not to mention the various non-Indo-European families.
They still work. They each have history and legacy.
People are still using fire to cook, too, and that's got many thousands of years on the odometer. It also still works.
... any more than they expect to upgrade their car or anything else. The computer came with stuff, and normal people think the stuff is the computer and the computer is the stuff and that's about it. Internet services reinforce this - it's not even a computer system with a browser (and other utilities) any more, it's a browser-machine that handles different sites. Even Firefox proponents talk about "the browser becoming the OS".
Normal people just *use* their computers, and they don't want any more complexity than "wheel - gas - brake" in the car.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember when ST:TOS happened. Everything was episodic, there were few "story arcs" in prime time (that's what distinguished soap operas), and on some shows consistency was laughable. Strange, considering that "serial" storytelling had already been common on radio. On ST:TOS people discovered something and it was never heard of again; on "The Man from UNCLE" the toys worked inconsistently to satisfy the episode in ways that would never have been let slide by a potboiler writer, let alone a decent novelist. By the time B5 appeared, technology banned after one use as "too risky" (and importantly demonstrating a paladin's strength of character) was dragged out of the closet a full season later so another paladin could lay down his life for another - that is, elements had persistence in the grand saga. (using "grand saga" as a literature descriptive term, not a quality judgment, though I did enjoy it.)
In an interview with the actor playing Marcus Cole, he said something about story vs. effects that I think applies to this discussion re: technology: Explosions aren't the story. People want to watch people. If they don't care about the people, they won't watch, and you can blow up what you like.
Any creative work beyond the most utilitarian (and sometimes even those) reflects the surrounding culture, technology level, and aesthetic sense. Archaeologists trace the spread of ideas through civilizations through things like jewelry or decorations on pottery. Do they depict people? animals? animals that aren't native and that they must have heard about from travelers? Are the depictions realistic, or stylized, or clearly fantastic? How complex is the piece, and what does it say about the tools necessary for its creation? Does it imply a stable workshop full of tools and equipment?
It's harder to see exactly what the supporting technology can do if it's not part of what you're looking at. Earlier video games on earlier technology were hard pressed to display a single player and a single opponent, so team operations were out of the question. AI-driven team members appeared as the game systems supported them, and live interaction once the underlying network was up to speed (anybody remember the lag on 1200 baud modems?).
Sometimes you don't even realize the significance of items in artwork until it's pointed out. I thought product placement was relatively new, since the movie era, until I took a tour of Renaissance paintings explaining details like which figures in each painting are the paying customer, or members of his family, or the artist, or someone's mistress (or all of the above). And then comes the political part that we don't see today: In a painting purporting to be a religious figure, who was the model? Is the "sacred virgin" really a picture of a courtesan? And was she known to other people in the circle that would be viewing it?
People like playing on teams, and always have.. The culture supports it. The technology supports it. That's why it's happening more.
... what should be a very simple program: manage schedules, 'notes' on discipline, and grades ...
Perhaps you underestimate the complexity just a little bit.
:-)
What might seem like a straightforward project as a homework assignment becomes a lot more complicated in practical real-world applications with about 10x the error checking, 10x the human interface work, and a ton of special cases. That's why there are big companies that make a living from payroll tracking, when at first glance it's a simple matter of multiplying hours times rate. I believe that's why so many open-source projects that begin with enthusiasm get abandoned along the way: the core positive part of the project is interesting and useful, but the pile of work that turns a "project" into a "product" usable by lots of minimally trained newbies is not as interesting (or as much fun).
That's why they call it "work" and pay us money to do it.
Developing a new system today, everyone assumes they're working on an *existing* system with resources and tools. How do you think people bootstrapped systems together in the bad old days? And that's why some of the early stuff took so long, and the pace of change is so much faster now - there's an entire infrastructure available today that was a fantasy when I was in school. Assembler was the course that separated the serious majors from . . . normal people. :-)
Besides: Who watches it on "big media" anyway nowadays?
There's an entire market segment of "sports bars", including sections of some general restaurants, with lots of big-screen TVs so people can get together and watch "the game" (whatever is playing at the moment). There's a big increase in advertising of new TVs before various big sporting events like the Football Game Whose Name Is Copyrighted and the College Basketball Month Without Sanity Also Copyrighted.
/.
Most importantly, the entire enterprise - the sports event *and* the broadcast thereof - are being paid for by advertisers who have good reason to believe potential customers are seeing their ads because they wanted to see the event.
So, who watches big media? The great majority of NORMAL people who don't spend their time reading and posting
... I'd much rather have something I could take my kids to and just plain enjoy.
There's a place for that. And there's also a place for adult-level fiction. Same issue as the assumption that "animated" means "children's cartoon", which is not the case at all. The biggest complaint I have is about truth in labeling, and I think it's the one place where law and/or government has a valid role. Just like food has to be accurately labeled so people can make their own informed decisions, government should stay *out* of censorship (people can make whatever art they want) but *in* on labeling (before you buy and unwrap that art, you should be able to know if it includes anything you're allergic to [or want to keep on the top shelf where the kids can't get it]). Misleading advertising & marketing to the wrong group are related issues that would be solved when you get the accurate label.
In terms of degrees of separation, it's retail. WSJ's concern may be that people are just *changing* their subscriptions from online Internet (where WSJ knows about them) to Kindle-specific (where Amazon knows about them). But that's still not their information - if I have an agreement with my local shop to save me a copy of WSJ (or a regular periodicals/comics list or anything else), that agreement is with the *shop*, not with the *publisher*.
and parallel topic just appeared on http://xkcd.com/619/
Was I ever that naive ? I might have been.
No offense, but most of the articles over the years trying to convince average PC users to switch to Linux have been just as over-enthusiastic, just as over-simplified, and, yes, just as naive sounding in retrospect. Normal people - even musicians :-) - don't want to understand things like system latency when their MIDI keyboards make sounds instantly.
It's irritating no matter *what* system you're using, or what you're trying to do with it, when you know there's plenty of horsepower but the system can't get its act together. It's like putting crappy tires on a Lamborghini. After working with embedded systems for 25 years, there's simply no excuse for a multi-gigahertz processor with multi-megabyte memory and multi-megabyte-per-second communication to fail to keep up with keystrokes.
"Radio Shack. You've got questions; we've got blank stares."
>>> ... using spacecraft that travel at a tenth of the speed of light, the colonization wavefront could take some 50 million years to sweep the galaxy.
We haven't even kept the same radio or television systems for more than 100 years, or kept spaceflight active for 50 years; do you really think that any one civilization could last for 50 million years? There might be ongoing propagation, but there would be so much change it would be like little kids playing "telephone".
And the idea that we are the descendants of a colonization or crash-landing go back to 1940's or 1950's science fiction, well before Battlestar: Galactica.
I've seen the same thing from the other side, as a probationary teacher. Class settles down, trouble-maker walks in late and then continues being disruptive, and the rest of the class period is shot. Try telling the football or basketball coach that you're going to "mainstream" the team by including below-average members, rather than selecting the most talented for the appropriate sport. Then explain why we disrupt the intellectual side of the school instead.
No, they were gutted because it's OK to spend money killing people, and getting more people killed to "honor" and "justify" the people you already got killed, but once you've done the impossible it becomes commonplace. Especially if you have an institutional culture that does its best to make everything boring and "nominal" even to an engineer.
/. go read the comments about the new DVD material and see how many people say "Who cares about data after 50 years anyway?" Original live TV show recordings were overwritten as a matter of course, because they never dreamed of "reruns" or a major market for rebroadcast, and the idea of a home player was ludicrous.
Believe it or not, nobody realized how valuable some originals would be. Even here on
By the way - at one point The Moody Blues set up the most killer recording studio with the finest analog recorders available: NASA surplus. A few years later digital happened.
(And exactly what are you going to be archiving that you think will still be relevant or usable in a thousand years?)
We still read classic books, watch classic movies, view the originals of artwork. We still reference old records, particularly census and immigration and other genealogical information. We build whole societies around books that are hundreds, or thousands, of years old.
True, anything in constant contemporaneous use will be moved to updated media on an ongoing basis (like those books); but it's always good to check with the originals for authenticity. Imagine if we could see what various famous authors ACTUALLY WROTE instead of what succeeding generations chose to copy.
And maybe this time, having already seen a generation of problems recovering valuable data on tapes of varying formats, and with the advantage of much smaller storage space and a more standardized comm interface, people will make *sure* to keep DVD readers around. Pollyanna, I know. But one can hope.
It's labeled as a picture but it's not a real picture. Simple as that. Well, yeah, it's a picture that is a "barcode-like" data transfer, and you could print it out and scan it into your Altair with one of those old photocell wands. Of course back in those days, if we could have downloaded a picture we wouldn't have needed magazines to print barcode. ;-)
.torrent header that's being saved under a fake name, the file still has to be hosted; and if it's the actual file that's been hidden as a .png, it will be downloaded individually instead of as a torrent, which completely misses the purpose. The *only* benefit is to get around a restriction by filename for people who distrust .torrent, so in exchange it's going to make people distrust and double-scan .png. Sounds like identity theft to me.
In fact, where's the savings? If it's just the
... and hopefully you'll understand.
No reason to be obnoxious. YOU are the one who isn't understanding, or more probably just isn't listening.
/.ers get upset at M$ for putting executable code in places it's not expected, and mixing unrelated concepts, and subtly changing the meanings of standards so that they're not standard anymore; the average non-techie would consider this misuse of picture format to be similar enough.
M$ already spreads FUD about open standards like PNG, and this encourages people to think "Maybe this PNG isn't a real picture".
I don't consider this steganography, either, because it's not hiding one thing behind another. It might be elegant to take some standard picture of Tux or the Mona Lisa, and use the file-to-be-hidden as delta modulation on it, and call the result "dynamic art"; using the bits as multicolor barcode isn't much different from amplitude & phase modulation on carrier signals (as if it wasn't obvious enough that I can call it "multicolor barcode" because the conceptual extension is "obvious to a practitioner in the field").
...just starting a new IE process by double-clicking the IE icon. That would launch a whole new copy of iexplore.exe. If that level of performance was acceptable ...
Good point. And how sad that all the way back in the 1970s, even before Unix, there were systems like TOPS-10 that had shared-code / separate-data segmentation, and Windows couldn't be bothered to use it.
You are vastly over-estimating the impact of a process switch ...
Process creation, allocation, then switch. But yes, I'm probably over-estimating.
Independent processes allow a dramatic improvement in robustness. ... Plenty of people browse with many windows open ...
I have eight or ten windows open most of the time myself. I don't care for tabs.
Moreover, major architectural clean-ups on software projects tend to improve performance as a side-effect anyway.
Like Vista? ;-) Well, one can always hope. :-) :-)
I'm afraid your post is one long stream of technically incompetent FUD.
Well, now, that's a bit harsh. I'd stick with calling it over-estimating. Perhaps I spend too much time with tight constraints; my perspective is based on my work with embedded microcontrollers, and in particular experience with projects in which someone went for either (a) philosophical purity, or (b) architectural simplicity, without realizing just how much overhead would be involved and how firmly limited the memory resources were. Efficiency is hard to shoehorn back in.
For users with anything pre-multi-core (and that's only a few years old), this will result in things getting *slower* because of the process overhead. I hope it senses resources and optimizes appropriately, or all of the friends and relatives I tech-support will be cursing me when the update happens. Some of them are already ticked that when they double-click on the Firefox icon, it takes longer to load than IE because of all the update-phone-home (the sort of thing for which we would all get annoyed at M$).
Eventually we'll get to the point where the window comes up and it takes a ludicrous time to fill . . . just like Windows already does now.
Better philosophical architecture is a good thing. Running well in the practical typical system, in front of the average user, is good too. Disruptive change is not always the way to please your users.
Other holy books go through revisions, get translated, have pages lost, etc etc - they can hardly be called the True Word of God at all.
Even DNA has gone through revisions over time. The very Earth has changed. God's creation is, itself, mutable. Any work of Man in interpreting and understanding God is inherently incomplete.
Why do you assume it's "creeping"? Faculty wants to encourage current students with interesting updates on recent graduates and how they're doing at college. If the page was public, it's PUBLIC to EVERYBODY - why would anyone expect that they can publish a rant for the rest of the world and *not* have the folks at home see it? If it was "friends only", and student chose to "friend" faculty for perfectly proper reasons - coach, college advisor, etc. - it's equally available.
Devil's advocate (just a possibility): maybe publicizing this was supposed to encourage current students to do better and get out to college, like Former Student, so they could expand their horizons like FS. OTOH maybe it's a classic flamewar; FS chose to write "Hometown sucks!" rather than "I've seen so much more in College / Big City than back in little Hometown!"
Slashdotters sometimes forget that everything they say applies to themselves too. If you want business and government information to be free, then anything YOU put online to display to the universe has to be equally free.
Denied, prior art. Robert Heinlein wrote advertising on the moon in 1949 in "The Man who Sold the Moon". (Or maybe the publication counts as 1950?)
Despite the fact that they are hundreds or thousands of years old, people are still being taught English, French, Spanish, German, and various other Romance and/or Germanic languages. Not to mention the various non-Indo-European families.
They still work. They each have history and legacy.
People are still using fire to cook, too, and that's got many thousands of years on the odometer. It also still works.
... any more than they expect to upgrade their car or anything else. The computer came with stuff, and normal people think the stuff is the computer and the computer is the stuff and that's about it. Internet services reinforce this - it's not even a computer system with a browser (and other utilities) any more, it's a browser-machine that handles different sites. Even Firefox proponents talk about "the browser becoming the OS".
Normal people just *use* their computers, and they don't want any more complexity than "wheel - gas - brake" in the car.