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Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)

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Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)

#31

Post by rootsudo »

I am happy that I grew up in the golden age of computing - people say it was the 80's, but being a "90's" kid, we had classes from HTML w/ dreamweaver, how to modify/break windows 95/98 ---

In fact in NYC, my elementary school had keyboard class where you'd learn to type and general proficiency w/ a computer.

In Florida, middle school photoshop, dreamweaver, fireworks and even access database.

High school had C++ class - from what I believe was a fired Compaq programmer, needless to say it sucked but gave me a foundation.

Meanwhile this was also the time where you needed to know a bit of HTML to modify your Geocities, Angelfire, Neopets (middle school days) to Myspace profile.

Facebook came in and removed that whole layer of customization - Windows XP was really stable and besides malware no one needed to really know how to fix their computer.

Then if you were into Video game culture, you had to learn how to solder to modify consoles with modchips, how to burn a CD, and generally modify and configure OS settings from IRQ to adding a DVDRW.

Same with pirating videos, there was no youtube - maybe you'd get lucky and find an FTP server that hosted videos but even then you'd had codecs. Default, Windows didn't include Divx, MPEG2, etc - just WMV/WMA.

Same with burning an MP3 to CD.

Nowadays I feel like a SRE/Sysadmin hack, but man then again I know my way enough a system, can program lazily and hold my own with people who consider themselves senior devs, architects etc from MSFT, NIST, SpaceX --

It's nice. Maybe I do know something.

Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)

#32

Post by rc-5 »

Allow me to preface this by saying that I am, in fact, a teen, and absolutely do not represent the majority of teenagers.

This post is a generalization and a subjective rant that absolutely doesn't hold up in real life.

>>>When you explain what happens under the hood, they will ignore you. When you tell them what a certain setting probably does, they will ignore you.

In my experience, although there may be some teenagers for which this is true, this is also true for people of all ages - those who aren't interested in learning the base technology simply won't.

>>>Green text with a black background is the norm, right? No.

This seems a diversion from the writer's point, that teenagers don't understand computers. Maybe it's meant to simulate what the writer believes teenagers think of the command line? If so, it's hopelessly off it's mark, like much of this post.

>>>All they want is a computer that works, and that runs their text messaging, anti-privacy and social media apps. They think that Linux is for hackers, that OS X is premium users and windows is what everybody else uses.

No. Just no. I don't know where the writer could have gotten such an idea - most people who use OS X at my school do so for dev, but there is definitely also a sizeable Linux population in addition to the Windows contigent. Personally, I have devices running Windows, OS X, and a few Linux distros.

Ultimately, however, the writer disproves his own point, that teenagers don't know how to use computers as well as their reputation deserves. Being at home with the development of computers is vastly different from actually using them - something at which, I counter, teens are actually pretty good. Yes, the majority of teens may not use the command line much. But the computer is much more than the command line - something other posters on this thread have noted well.

Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)

#34

Post by benibela »

joezydeco wrote: post #9

The motivation is different, that’s all. When we were kids we needed to learn to hack DOS and Windows because our games wouldn’t run without them. Hard drive crashes, SCANDISK, reinstalls, fucked up drivers... whatever it took. My kids can’t fix Win10 but now they know their way around web filters and how to hack Screen Time to bypass the shutoff. They’re trading pirated movies in gDrive and doing all kids of other s…

Literally hacking. Lots of shareware games wanted a registration code, but after changing the right offsets in the hex editor you could play them without registration code...

People have no clue about computers, till they can manually convert between assembly and hex code

Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)

#36

Post by PeterisP »

Kluny wrote: post #30

"When you explain what happens under the hood, they will ignore you. When you tell them what a certain setting probably does, they will ignore you." So teenagers do what teenagers have always done? I agree with the others - kids who need to figure stuff out will find a way.

Sure, kids who need to figure stuff out will find a way, but the issue is that since the need for kids to figure stuff out has largely disappeared, the technical proficiency motivated by this has also disappeared. If some time ago we could implicitly assume all kinds of things that everyone "technical-minded" would know because they inevitably would have needed it as a kid, we now need to teach the very basics of how stuff works 'under the hood' explicitly without this assumption.

Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)

#37

Post by vidanay »

madengr wrote: post #26
joezydeco wrote: post #9

The motivation is different, that’s all. When we were kids we needed to learn to hack DOS and Windows because our games wouldn’t run without them. Hard drive crashes, SCANDISK, reinstalls, fucked up drivers... whatever it took. My kids can’t fix Win10 but now they know their way around web filters and how to hack Screen Time to bypass the shutoff. They’re trading pirated movies in gDrive and doing all kids of other s…

Well when I was a kid, I had to program my own games on the C64. Walked uphill to school both ways, too.

Typing 4000 hex values printed in 6 point font from Byte magazine.

Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)

#38

Post by vidanay »

gumby wrote: post #28
Johnny555 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not one in 100,000 could milk a cow. I know this wasn't your point, but I'll nitpick anyway since that number felt too low, so I checked, and the number seems like it should be closer to 1 in 200. There are 72M children [1] below the age of 18 in the USA today, so 1 in 100,000 would only be 720 and there's something like 40,000 dairy farms in the USA, and I'd bet every child on those farms older than 8 (probably youn…

Thanks for the clarification! I originally had typed "1 in 10,000" but that seemed too many kids....and it turns out I was utterly wrong!

Udderly

Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)

#40

Post by dismalpedigree »

gumby wrote: post #28
Johnny555 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not one in 100,000 could milk a cow. I know this wasn't your point, but I'll nitpick anyway since that number felt too low, so I checked, and the number seems like it should be closer to 1 in 200. There are 72M children [1] below the age of 18 in the USA today, so 1 in 100,000 would only be 720 and there's something like 40,000 dairy farms in the USA, and I'd bet every child on those farms older than 8 (probably youn…

Thanks for the clarification! I originally had typed "1 in 10,000" but that seemed too many kids....and it turns out I was utterly wrong!

turns out I was UDDERLY wrong!

Long day. I’ll be here all week!

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