Four if you don’t count the one in the attic. I have two rigged to the stereo for duping tapes, we have one in the family for the big TV and my kid has one (one of my old ones). They all have different procedures for setting the clocks, none of them are remotely intuitive and all 4 have manuals written by people for whom English was a second language (at least).
Add in 4 clock radios, 3 digital clocks and the ferschlugginer microwave and coffee pot (to say nuthin’ of the digital watch) and setting time is an all day project. Hell with it…I taped business cards over the flashing "12:00"s. Worked like a charm.
Getting off the technological drift, how about all the people who are seemingly proud to have forgotten all the mathematics they ever learned in school? Or who will admit they haven’t read a book in over two years? Or feel there’s no need to learn a second language because everyone else on earth is learning how to speak English? Or who never bother to read any part of a newspaper besides the sports scores and horoscope? Do you ever feel like saying “my, aren’t you the idiot.”
As my name suggests, I am technical in nature. Network admin and web designer.
Now, the generational thing is caca. My father does a lot of trading on line and emails his buddies out of state on new investment information. He’s 62 and has embraced the computer.
That said, my brother and I helped him learn these things. However he is not technically inclined. His specialty is business and logical thinking there, when I need business advice I go to him.
As for my VCR, I never tape anything so I don’t give a hoot if the time is correct or not. The power also goes out at least 5 times a month in the summer so why bother. (it’s on screen programming anyway, any idiot can handle that.)
As for those that claim ignorance on technical things, there are a million reasons why people don’t learn. Time to learn could be one, they can’t grasp technical stuff but would blow us away in something else, they enjoy not having to know, etc.
I am a technical person, I have been taking things apart and putting them back together since I was a little girl (I was an oddball girl) however when it comes to other things I am an idiot…I never feel superior to those around me because they most likely have expertise in something else.
(my brother is my “boss” at the office, he looks at me and my counterpart real funny when we start talking tech, I think he gets a kick out of watching us talk like we are speaking a foreign language < giggle >)
(Warning: rambling thoughts ahead which may not be coherent due to me having had a bit too much alcohol
This site is a self-selecting sample of people who grok technology at least well enough to read or post here, so it may be hard for us to understand some of the examples above. I’ve always been a technical person as well (I have degrees in computer engineering and physics and develop commercial Unix internals for a living), and I have to admit that I used to, and still to some extent do, look down on people who seem unwilling to learn reasonably simple things of a technical nature. It’s all too easy, and I think unwarranted, to start feeling superior to folks who can’t (or won’t) seem to learn things that we tech-heads find trivial. Like sending email, say. When you’ve got the RFCs for SMTP committed to memory and live and breathe BSD socket code, it’s not easy to understand how somebody couldn’t even puzzle out how to use a nice GUI email client.
But I have been trying to modify my outlook on this issue recently. Case in point: I saw a lady at the mall painting pictures of pets. You could bring her a photo (or perhaps even the actual pet), and she’d paint a wonderful portrait of it. It was amazing to me, because it’s something completely outside of my ability or experience. She started with a blank page and some paint, did some things with the paints that looked random to me, and from that sprung an uncanny likeness of that particular animal.
Now, this is so far outside of anything I can do that it might as well be magic. It got me to thinking that someone who was adept at art, but not science or technology, might find an email client or web browser as bewildering as I would find paints and a canvas. Could I learn to paint something very simple, like perhaps an apple? Perhaps, but never well, and it would surely require more than somebody doing it once in front of me and expecting me to duplicate what they did.
For better or worse, we live in a world where having a basic familiarity with technology is nearly essential and being able to paint is not. But mentally reversing their relative importances gives me a newfound appreciation for the plight of those who don’t find it simple to program their VCRs or work their way through their email clients.
I understand these people. These people learned a skill early in life, as everyone should do - it has been perfectly adequate in earning them a decent living and a good retirement and will continue to be so. They haven’t invested time in learning new skills - and that is their choice, and its a valid one. I know from watching one of these people that they can learn everything they need to know about PCs to land and hold a PC support/networking type job in about six months - so until they really have the need to do so why bother spending the time? I mean, if you are a Cobal programmer for mainframe systems and hold this job for 30 years but in 1980 decide to learn about TRS-80 architecture (just to stay up with the new technology) and never actually apply it in a job then in 85 you learn about Commodores but never apply it and in 90 you learn NeXT but never apply it you’ve pretty much wasted all that study time haven’t you?
PCs have been evolving very quickly for 20 years - you have to be learning constantly in order to keep up with them. Why bother, if you’ve got marketable skills that require less work to keep honed?
Eventually however, certain technologies defintely become a part of the mainstream world to the extent that not knowing anything about them constitutes a kind of ignorance that people will feel ashamed of. The internet is already headed in this direction - I’ve heard so many people express the sentiment that “I’ve just got to bite the bullet and get online so I can understand what people are talking about”. Invariably it is easier than they think…
Some new and interesting comments here. What was the Heinlein quote? Something along the lines of “Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinquishable from Magic?”
JBENZ:
Chuckle. An elegant solution.
techchick: “Time to learn” - also valid; we’ll add that one to the list. Thanks.
Bantmof: the painting analogy can only go so far. Painting is a relatively rare skill and not everyone expects to be able to (hmmm, where the heck is this going?) Maybe the analogy is useful after all, have to give this more thought.
Cooper: I hear you, but … as I said, I knew three people who refused to get a home computer becuase their mindset was that computer = work and home != work. They deliberatly chose to seal off the opportunity to learn. Now,
I have trouble with this statement - I don’t think it’s a valid choice at all. Seems to me that if you don’t constantly and deliberately learn you stagnate. In your example, the knowledge picked up TRS80 skills (and then Commodore 64 and then …) is not wasted at all, because each skill contributes to the next one and therefore prepares you for whatever comes out next year. And cuts down that six month retraining process to prepare you for the next job.
One last VCR comment: I am unable to do timer recording with mine. I’ve never had trouble with other machines, I’m following all the obvious rules (clock is correct, tape is in, power is off, I’ve targeted the right date, and so on). Just never happens. I could, if I cared enough, figure it out but in the three years since I’ve bought the thing I’ve had the need to do timer recording three times. All three failed so I’ve decided to ignore the whole issue. This is a combination of laziness and the fact that it’s a skill that just isn’t required.
I’m not sure if all VCRs are this way, but on some of them, you must set up the timed recording and then turn the VCR off. If you leave it on, it will never start the recording.
This is somewhat counterintuitive, and probably mentioned in the manual, but who ever reads those? Anyway it might not be the problem in your case but it’s worth a shot.
Yeah, I’ve been caught by that one, it’s not the case here. My favorite is always when you want to record something at 2:00 am and forget that this is actually tomorrow’s date.
As I said, though, timer recording is so far down my list of priorities I can easily live forty more years without it.
I’m surprised you missed this - because I thought I made it clear. To reiterate: the point with this passage was that you could have spent a decade learning ‘the latest technology’ and none of it would have been relevant. Maybe I didn’t recite 10 years of obsolete technology, but I came close enough and surely there are VSAM programmers who would nod along with me. All of these platforms and technologies become irrelevant within a few years of their becoming ‘popular’. Now today, could you miss learning UNIX or NT? It would help in the short-term - maybe not in the longterm. But what is the longterm in computing terms? 10 years from now I won’t doubt if all current IT knowledge is irrelevant with the exception of the aforementioned CICS,VTAM,IMS,DB/2 type stuff. If Oracle, SQL Server, Windows 2000, Unix are just as standard I won’t be shocked(after-all, PCs are becoming increasingly ‘real’), but it is not a guaranteed necessity.
learning how to use new technology, the only thing you have to do is teach people how to use it, and do it correctly.
like:
the first thing you teach people who are going to use a computer is the undo button [ctrl+z]
then you teach em how to use the mouse
the next thing you explain files and folders
folders are like drawers
files are like documents
documents can be taken(mouse clicked and grabbing the documents/files and moving them)
how to make new folders and documents(remember the undo button)
teach em how to use the delete button(remember the undo button)
etc…
i teached mom how to use the undo button and now i cant keep pace with what she is learning, she bought herself a printer and scanner and is currently scanning and modifying almost every picture in her album, she can do things i never imagined she would do in such a short amount of time.
everybody agree i belive that you learn how to use computers and all that other stuff by “trying it out”, then an undo button is very valuable. just make sure the people are just learning how to use one program at a time :)(explaining what programs are is a good one too).
anyway, everybody can learn new things…and i guess you are right that some people are “stubborn” and refuse to learn. but as always it is the teachers fault if the student doesnt want to learn
Programmers tend to learn OS theory in an abstracted sense and then view some particular OS’s API as just an instance thereof. Once you grok VM algorithms in the general sense (or threading API’s, or whatever), whether you know the Win32 version or the Posix version doesn’t matter too much. Ok, so it’s CreateThread instead of pthread_create and the usage/params differ. You can pick that up whenever you need to - it’s just not that important. It’s much more important to have a theoretical grasp of OS design. OS’s come and go, but a TLB remains a TLB.
It’s just MHO, but I say look at the forest, and only pay attention to a specific tree when the need arises.
Cooper: Sorry, I wasn’t clear at all. Have to admit that when I went back and reread what I’d posted I was not happy with it. Let me try again:
When I bought my Apple II (a long time ago), I was able to do some neat programming because I already had a rudimentary grasp of mainframe BASIC and a strong grasp of mainframe Assembler. Later, I wrote a system on a DEC mini and was able to create a fairly neat VSAM-like file system because I had to do some fancy footwork getting data stored on the Apple. When the office got PCs, I looked at them and found what was common and what was different from the Apple. And was up to speed with them faster than anyone else in the office - net benefit. Same story when I bought my Amiga, I just applied the common concepts and learned what was new. Now, yes - the Amiga was a dead end but I learned a lot in the years I owned it and I feel that this contributes a lot to what I do now.
Programming. My personal opinion is that there are exactly three programming models: procedural (Mainframe COBOL, Fortran, Basic, etc.); event-driven (a lot of the PC languages like VB, Delphi, etc.); and object oriented (C++, mostly). Okay, work with me here even if you disagree on the simplistic breakdown - event-driven extends the procedural model and object oriented extends the event driven model. My feeling is that if you are fluent in a procedural language you have a huge head start in learning any other procedural one. Or an event driven language. Repeat for object oriented.
Now, it seems to me that if you ignored the event driven step, you’ll have a much harder time jumping directly to object oriented. And, if you ignore both steps, you don’t have a chance in h*ll of jumping directly to whatever comes next. Thus, the need to try out the new tech even though you know it’s going to be obsolete soon.
Exactly the same thing bantmof is saying - you take what you already know, fuss over any new concepts and change the spelling on everything else.
