I’m on the flip side. I know what a zip is and I can’t stand you using closed source suck-your-soul.
Sometimes I send .tar.zst’s on purpose to keep people on their feet. They need to stay up to date on their compression algorithms
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That’s because all they know how to use are iPads. They don’t actually understand how real computers work.
Plus of course there is this attitude that if it doesn’t immediately work on its own you should give up and just pray to the nebulous entity that is “IT people”.
You wouldn’t believe how many people get annoyed that I don’t know what their password for something is.
For me it’s recovering my boss’s files from his broken mac.
I have decades of experience in Linux. I can invoke the recovery shell and rsync his files onto a USB stick. But save that locked down OS? No idea. I’d have to watch a video and hope I don’t make a mistake.
The thing with Mac is, it’s easy if you set it up correctly and if you haven’t set it up correctly (as in you have left it in default mode), it’s borderline impossible.
I call bullshit on this post. Since Windows 10 you can just double click a zip file and it opens up like any other directory (even if it isn’t) and shows you the files.
If this zoomer wanted to open it they’d obviously double click.
So calm down boomers, this is fiction.
Administrators can disable this, so I think the larger point is: if a tech literate person receives a zip file, they understand that it is in fact a compressed archive that can contain one or more files and directories, and that you need an archive tool to extract the contents, whereas a tech illiterate person doesn’t understand this and expects it to just be handled magically when they double click on it and are stumped when that doesn’t work.
Double clicking works for 99% of file types. So if I send you a pair of Excel files in a zip and you double click it under Windows 10 or 11, it will just show you the Excel files and you can even open them. Not sure what your point is here.
Double clicking works for 99% of file types
You’re completely missing the point.
Not sure what your point is here
The point is that when the double click magic doesn’t work for one reason or another, for example because the administrator disabled this feature with a group policy or because the file associations got messed up, the tech illiterate person does not know what to do because they don’t grasp the underlying concept.
They may have emailed it to the zoomer, and the zoomer attempted to open it on their iphone or something that doesn’t have native zip compatibility.
iOS supports zip by default.
Slightly inconsistently I see!
Maybe they downloaded the zip and then immediately tried to open it in a specific program through the open dialog giving them an error. I see similar mistakes with my parents - they have no concept of where files are, it’s just “on the computer” because they rely so heavily on “smart” file picker dialogs that show you everything recent or by a file type no matter where it’s actually located.
Maybe it was actually a .7z
Not super tech literare… Is there even a reason to unzip the files if you just want to grab one of them? I kust assumed windows is unzipping it into some weird temporary memory anyway to show me them, so a file is a file?
It makes the file smaller, making it easier to send over networks.
I mean the file is zipped, as in compressed. So it might just look like a file, but if you open it inside the zip (with file explorer) Windows does have to decompress the file in the background to show it to you.
Which is obviously slightly slower than if you unzip the file and put it somewhere and then open it, but you won’t really notice the difference except we’re talking about massive files.
And of course if you make changes to the file you can’t save it (except to a new file) as it gets opened up as read only.
If you just want to store the file and view it every now and then I don’t see a reason to unzip it. And you can always do that later anyway.
If it’s an executeable with dependencies in the archive it might not run without being unpacked.
Can’t email executables.
Yes you can.
Outlook blocks it by default so if you allow exe’s to be emailed… you’re pretty stupid.
I don’t use software that imposes arbitrary restrictions on me for my “protection” and suggesting that this functionality is baked into email itself is just factually incorrect.
Good for you??
more like uhh… bad for everyone cause you presented false information as fact
Ladies and gentlemen, the Ego at work
Or maybe you’re not stupid and don’t require a program to automatically block files for you since you know what you’re doing.
You can’t email exes, but once you zip it there is no exe, it’s a zip. If outlook automatically unpacks and scans the zip (which i doubt) you can always password lock the archive
Edit: And my email them i mean attach them in outlook
The greentext says “he asks for some files”, that doesn’t sound like an executable, which usually gets blocked by the mail system anyway (even in a zip, if there’s no password on it).
But yeah, that is one way to have it broken, besides Windows refusing to run a random .exe
I call bullshit on this post. Since Windows 10 you can just double click a zip file and it opens up like any other directory (even if it isn’t) and shows you the files.
Just the other day I had to tell someone to unzip first before they could patch the rom (they were going to play some romhack on an emulator); I don’t know how old they were but clearly there can be scenarios where someone has a zip file and don’t know what to do with it or use it.
I don’t even know what the rom was or which emulator they were using, because I just told them if they google
Rom Patcher JSthat’s going to work for whatever file type it is, because according to them the problem was that the patcher they had didn’t work…But as it turns out they were trying to use the .zip archive as the patch file, so I then had to explain to them that they need to extract it first.
And afterwards the patcher they had did work so I don’t think they even used
Rom Patcher JSin the end.That’s also more of a Windows issue than a user issue. I absolutely hate that file types are hidden by default in file explorer, makes the whole thing feel unusable. First option I change whenever I touch a Windows PC.
So besides the icon you can’t see at first glance as a casual user that it’s a zip file. And a ROM most likely had an icon the user wasn’t used to, so they didn’t notice something was wrong :-/
Right, I forget about that every time until I’m reminded of it. It’s the first thing I change along with showing hidden files when helping someone. (Even if what they need help with is unrelated)
They don’t know how to program in assembly because they don’t have to know. Same is true for WinRAR, rotary phones, stick shifts, and all the other cruft that prior generations had to deal with.
Hardship makes you hardy but reducing hardship is progress.
The industrious among us just find other frontiers to push and hardships to subject ourselves to.
Zips aren’t “cruft”. Many new formats are zips with another name, like all the office OOXML formats (docx,xlsx,…), 3mf and so on.
I have yet to meet the braindead skibidy rizz zip file zoomers everyone keeps talking about. I assume I’ll find them with the latte avocado toast millennials.
I know a few. Some of the younger people we’ve hired recently as more computer illiterate than my 93 year old grandfather.
You’d be surprised.
The thing is they tend to be in the same avenues as where you’d encounter tech illiterate people of every other generation too.
While there is a degree to which there’s age barriers, it was more a thing going from no computers at all to computers.
Nowadays age means less in terms of tech competency than things like socioeconomic background, professional background, and general interest.
Sports kids in HS who grow up to go into a nepotistic position at a construction business doing sales have roughly the same tech competency if they were born in 1970 or 2000.
I work in tech and all of the recent hires (Gen Z) are domain-general smart: they have great critical thinking skills, can reason through a problem abstractly, and pick things up fast.
But damn can some of them not use a computer in an efficient manner. Having to walk them through changing display settings or how to set up Outlook rules or basic keyboard shortcuts is a little painful.
As someone who, nowadays, uses his phone for pretty much 98% of all computing tasks, I get it. But it’s still painful
I’ve met them. But I’ve also met tech illiterate millennials. And genius boomers.
I don’t have enough data to conclude yet, so options are open. I do believe zoomers use computers less than millennials do tho, in favor of smartphones.
I worked as tech support for a patient portal at a previous job and found that a lot of both boomers and zoomers use their smartphones exclusively. The bulk of our calls were from boomers and trying to teach them to navigate a smartphone over the phone was one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever had to do.
Explaining them how to navigate a computer over phone is even worse.
Had to explain for 15 minutes to some old guy where the location of the start button was.
As far as I can tell boomers know how a computer works and don’t know how to do this weird thing they need to do for some reason or they break it in a weird way. Zoomers seem to be a mixed bag of no IT knowledge or never needing help. Everyone else just drops the laptop and lies about it.
This has actually been studied. Turns out, zoomers are so reliant on smart technology like tablets and phones, they never actually learned anything about normal PC file systems or extensions. They literally don’t understand what a folder is because they’ve never been exposed to PC or Mac environments.
I blame hardware and software manufacturers for locking and dumbing down their devices
And Chromebooks!
zoomer programmer here and so glad i have the hobby i do and the dad i so dearly love for introducing me to real technology—the nitty gritty and all
I’ve seen people comment about needing to teach folder and file hierarchies to young people in CS classes because they grew up with cloud services and auto-save. Dunno how widespread that might be.
Cloud services like Drive etc have folders anyway.
Yeah, but you can also just upload everything into one giant file orgy. I’d wager most people take that approach.
Animals. Utter animals.
I’ve had to teach folders, file types and extensions to lots of ~18 yo. When I ask them where they saved a files they get confused and generally respond with something like “on the computer”.
Forget the 30 year old boomer, I present to you: the 18 year old boomer!
I am a sophomore computer science student and when I entered freshman year I was very surprised as well. Just last week, I was helping some kid with his intro C++ final and the entire semester, the guy has been saving everything to /downloads. He was wondering why every new program he made in Visual Studio failed to work. It kept messing up because he was in the same directory all the time messing about with the other 5 or so programs he made beforehand.
And there are lots who don’t understand what the shift key is for. They use capslock to shift…
Stop. You’re all hurting me.
There was a tech reviewer that scorched Chromebooks for taking away the CapLocks because… he couldn’t type capitals anymore!
I’m reminded of that infamous game reviewer that couldn’t figure out how to jump over a box on the first level of a tutorial. And then gave the game a bad review
I’ve observed this personally but I didn’t know it was studied. Can you provide a link to a study about it?
By study, I don’t mean in a lab setting, but more so the data has been collected by employers reporting that their Gen Z staff is technologically stunted.
https://futurism.com/gen-z-baffled-basic-technology
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
https://www.digitaldisrupting.com/gen-z-kids-apparently-dont-understand-how-file-systems-work/
There are tech illiterate people in every generation, but they definitely seemed more prevalent in the boomer generation. In my experience it’s Boomers > Gen X > Zoomers > Millenials in terms of most to least technologically incompetent. Always suspected millennials are usually more comfortable with tech because they grew up with it, and it grew up with them.
For older generations, especially boomers, I figure they were more set in their ways and for many (but not all, obviously) it was hard to adapt. For Zoomers, I think it was just assumed that they’d just be inherently good so there were many things they were never actually taught (though many of them learned for themselves because they are nerds, which is pretty great if you ask me). Anyways, that’s my theory on generational tech literacy.
I’m Gen X and credit playing video games for most of my self-taught knowledge on how computers work. My first computer was an Apple IIe, which didn’t require much more than putting disks in and typing startup commands, but when we got a Windows 3.1 PC next, I had to learn about file systems and troubleshooting when things inevitably went wrong. To this day, most of the computer stuff I’ve learned was from trying to get games working.
Yeah, PC gaming was a pretty significant motivator for me to learn all sorts of tech related skills.
And the limited experience I have with Linux is from getting my Raspberry Pi working. I even posted about having a problem and learned about “sudo.” (it worked)
I don’t know, I had my dad on the phone the other day. He was explaining his backup routine and rotation between two different location. He is 65, worked most of his life with unreliable OS. Sensitive hard drives, floppies etc. He know how to make sure his data is safe.
There are absolutely boomers who are well versed in tech, shit some of them helped invent it, but there’s definitely a trend of boomers in general being tech illiterate.
In my social circle, none of the 15-25 hav the slightest idea how to work a computer (no, wait, there’s one out of the six or seven). So they all come to the nearly 60 year old me that has to explain to them again what a directory is.
Yeah, not being able to touch-type on a keyboard seems to be a skill many don’t develop/aren’t taught too. Basic stuff just gets skipped over because it’s just assumed young people are good with tech (probably a holdover from raising millennials)
The typing thing is interesting. I’m old enough that I learned to type on an IBM Selectric typewriter in the early 1990s (we had Apple IIs in the “computer lab” - but there were two rooms full of typewriters for this class). I did well in general in high school, but I took typing much more seriously than many other classes, because I hadn’t yet learned it on my own, and I knew how useful it would be in life. My classmates thought I was nuts (again, I’m sure). But that was one high school class that definitely did help me in “the real world”.
So now, despite the ubiquity of computers, it seems they aren’t teaching typing.
GenXer here. I’m not tech illiterate, except when it comes to social media. Then it’s more of a Luddite thing, because in 2007-8, I worked with early Facebook APIs (graph bullshit) and developed a deep hatred for Zuckerberg and his shitty website.
I think the nerdy Gen X are a lot more technical than the nerdy Zoomers because we had to know more to use early PCs as kids. But it also meant a lot of us didn’t get into it until a bit later in life (or to make a Buck before the various don’ dot-com bubbles burst).
GenXer here. I’m not tech illiterate, except when it comes to social media.
Same. It’s funny that the things that come naturally to Zoomers are intimidating to me and vice-versa. Of course, a big part of that is that I didn’t grow up with social media and therefore have no interest in it (except for message board style things like Lemmy.)
I’m gen z and I’ve noticed the same thing. Nearly all gen z use computers, but because its so accessible and simplified they are nearly all tech illiterate.
The people most knowledgeable about tech that I’ve met have been gen x. A lot of them are unfortunately some of the least knowledgeable though because they had no experience with computers until later in life.
Gen X built the Internet you’re using actually, and most of the server infrastructure that runs the world.
A select few, sure. But as far as I’ve noticed, Gen X (especially the older half) are like Boomer-Lite, and not just from a technological-literacy standpoint, either.
I’m a xennial, and i think one of the key characteristics of my generation is that we grew up with tech becoming omnipresent, but it was also non user friendly tech.
We started having PCs young, but we really had to know how to build our systems, it was much less plug and play. We grew up with visual OSs, but configuring that shit was not intuitive at all. Or outright broken (looking at you Win ME). We had to troubleshoot, fix, learn, read and test just to get our tech working.
Younger generations grew up with tech omnipresent yes, but tech that mostly works intuitively - you barely ever have to really figure shit out, fix it or reconfigure it.
Just my 2 cents!
Sounds like a pretty accurate take to me.
I have two older siblings that are xennials, and I would say people born from about the late 70’s to the early 90’s represent the peak of technological literacy. It’s almost like a bell curve… the further you get away from each end of that range, the more technologically incompetent (on average) people are.
To add in to it, a lot of the experience during the formative years was with desktop computers. Consoles were there, but had far less capabilities. Handheld devices were generally more expensive compared to today and worse to use.
So you’ve got a case where young adults today have to work on a computer platform completely foreign to them while young adults 20 years ago usually had 5 - 10 years experience as a user on that platform.
A lot of current users aren’t ever exposed to the underlying tech. They only use a few applications. The ideal device for them is a tablet (or a ChromeBook). They know next to nothing about files, networks, most aspects of hardware (except the bling factor, maybe).
It’s both a good and a bad thing.
Yeah, once we had invented proper tablets and smartphones, those things are so intuitive that I have seen videos of monkeys figuring out how to use them.
We got the sweet spot. Having to know how to program the VCR and cable boxes gave us a leg up on troubleshooting, and DOS just sealed the deal. Never thought I would be thankful for all those frustrating days.
That is about the only animal testing I approve of.
Can’t wait for companies to put “So easy to use, even a monkey could do it” sticker on their tablets.
Anybody else here remember being the kid that knew how to set up VCRs for their grandparents and parents? LOL
I learned how the cables worked so that I could get my NES to work on the TV. Sometimes you’d have to wire it through the VCR and so I learned how the VCR worked. Then I was a wizard to the old people
This really bugs me at work sometimes. I’m a designer and I often have to split up images in several mails because others don’t understand the concept of archives. Or even worse: send the photos as “excel image file” (slapping them all in a excel sheet). I even once had a printery tell me my file was corrupt because it was (accidentally on my part) compressed as 7z. Oh how I would love to send files more often as 7zip… But that’s black magic apparently.
I mean Excel files are zips, so that kinda checks out.
I used to work in a camera shop back in the day. Alot of people came in with a thumb drive of some sorts, and wanted pictures printed of images in a word-document. They were baffeled when we said we can’t print it with our lab. “But it is right there on the screen!”
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Well at least windows just treats archives as folders as infæ you can just double click on them. Don’t even have to extract anything to work with the files
Windows 11 also supports rar and 7zip natively
Weird, right? I feel like I grew up in the perfect generation, where I started with MS-DOS and Windows ‘95. We had to KNOW how things worked in order to get games and other software running. Had to know how to install, how to fix driver issues, how to configure things, etc. Even (re)install a complete OS.
But tech these days ‘just works’. A lot of software is one click installs, with no real user interaction needed. And everything else is easily accessed on the web or a phone app. Windows itself is also much more reliable, so even that doesn’t require much knowledge.
It’s made everything available to a much wider audience, but it also means people don’t need to develop actual skills in this area. A good example is my dad. He never figured out how to do things on our Windows ‘95 PC, but he loves his iPad because it’s so easy toddlers can use it.
That’s why everyone should use Linux.
As someone who isn’t technologically ignorant: I’d rather have things that “just work” over things that I spend 3 days trying to make work and it still doesn’t.
Sure, but current distros mostly “just work”. My desktop linux installation is broken half the time because I enjoy tinkering, but the one on my work laptop (linux mint debian edition) has been working like a charm since day 1.
I feel lots of people don’t realize how Linux is much easier to use nowadays. Most people I talk to seem to assume they need to learn how to use the terminal, but really they just can do everything by using the GUI.
I agree with you. I currently dual boot, but once windows 10 is not updated anymore, I’ll just use Mint and go Microsoft free. It’s less bloated, no telemetry, most games work flawlessly to perfectly (with proton it will just get better) and most applications needed are easily found in the software manager and are for the most part open source.
Also most problems have already been asked on forums, reddit or Lemmy so it’s not that hard to fix problems.
that’s not quite the reason, but I agree, more ppl -> more support, better everything.
I butt chug Panera charged lemonade, by the way.
To not get anything done except setting up the OS till 3am
“First boot is so much quicker than Windows!”
“Wanna talk about the setup that comes after that to get everything working as it should?”
“Oh no, we don’t talk about that.”
Yeah, you fire up a brand new Windows PC, spend a few minutes creating an account etc, then leave it to it’s own devices for an hour or so to update itself.
It’s really not a big deal.
creating an account
yuck
Do you not have a password etc on your computer?
Then don’t create an account, it isn’t so difficult, even on a home edition.
most “just works” distros have really intuitive installers though, I’d even say it’s easier than windows, if not for the mandated Microsoft bullshit on all computers by default like secure boot and TPM
I don’t appreciate getting called out like that
It’s not 2007 any more.
Or you could useArch and spend a few days just for installation
- connect ethernet cable
- boot from USB
archinstallYou could but it takes the fun out of Arch. Okay maybe if your at your tent installation of arch or you already known how Linux works yeah it makes sense but if you want to learn it’s not the most optimal
Doing my first linux install on a main PC (after a decade of managing a headless server). Honestly, getting the trackpad to scroll at the right speed has been something of a hobby of mine lately.
Meanwhile on Windows, you leave everything on default and deal with it.
For me, Linux isn’t a time sink cause nothing works right out of the box, but because everything can be optimized.Linux Mint is really just the easiest for people who want to leave everything on default. If you ever want to get into Linux, I would recommend checking out Mint. Literally anything is better than WIndows.
Nothing quite like having to learn to edit config.sys in order to make something work with no internet or references at all.
Camping out at the library with whatever computer magazines they had in the reference section taking notes or using your last dime to make a copy because god forbid your parents would waste money on a subscription to BYTE or something.
Nothing quite like having to learn to edit config.sys in order to make something work with no internet or references at all.
You had to prove you were worthy to play the game by resolving IRQ conflicts and figuring out how to squeeze every spare byte out of HIMEM.SYS. Sometime it was more challenging than the actual game.
And let’s not forget that ‘system requirements’ were more like ‘system suggestions and challenges’. Especially when your parents bought ‘a computer’ with hardware specs that basically read ‘hard drive, memory, soundcard, CD-ROM drive’.
So when configuring things, there was some trial and error involved in figuring out what the software could attempt to configure in order to work with your specific thing. It’s not like today where us gamers pick the exact hardware down to the RGB-infused RAM.
And few things were plug and play prior to USB. You know how shitty printers are now? Try wrestling with one of those on a fucking parallel port.
That’s partially fault of IT isn’t it. They didn’t set the computer up with an unzipper.
Unless they are on a super old ass version of Windows: Zip and Unzip functionality is built directly into the OS. They would open like any other folder.
Microsoft also just announced not too long ago that native .rar file support is being added.
Windows supports zip files natively
Depends on what was in the .zip. The default double click action for .zip files is usually to display the contents, not to unzip it, and if you try to run an executable from that display it usually won’t work.
They may have also tried to load the .zip directly into another program.
wut is (z, b)oomer. all users are usually dumb. if you are average half are dumber than you
They grew up on iPads and phones.
Why is the default ZIP method disabled in their os? Fake
It’s at work…
Why would workplaces disable the OS’s free ability to use a zip?
It’s a work PC. And for the users work PCs operate entirely different from all other similar OS machines they know from private life.
Behold the difference between the generation growing with Win98, where everything was manual and accessible and doing it wrong could mean a manual install, and the generation growing up with iPhones, where you’re not allowed to change anything whatsoever.
Ease of use. Don’t worry about the man behind the curtain. Just stare at your tik tok
I’ve been teaching my gen Z coworkers about stuff. They are good kids, we should try and learn them a thing or two ❤️ They’re not all lazy brain dead kids. They kind of look up to us elder millennials.
