No one yet has touched on the success of planned obsolescence.
I’m glad that many kids are into PC gaming, at least. That’s still a decent vector into computer proficiency and a little hardware knowledge.
I’m not sure how many kids will be into PC gaming when a low end Nvidia gpu is currently $550. I know that everything comes pre overclocked, and the 4070s still a good card even though it’s got a low and die in it it’s just depressing in the principle of it.
Maybe things like the steam deck will push kids into Linux since the mid-range gaming desktop is like two grand now.
I built a decent rig at the time 2 years ago for a 10 year old for less than 600€. Sure, some parts were used and it’s obviously no monster but he’s still using it daily. He’s learning how to upgrade it every time I have money for it, too.
You don’t have to buy all new Nvidia GPUs for $550 a piece to play games, ya know?
Yeah my first gaming pc was like…a crappy HP desktop with an Nvidia 6600 that I plugged in. Worked great for Age of Mythology lol
I made sure our kids got introduced to PC gaming. It sort of worked, they are more adept with windows then thier peers, but 0/3 have used thier shell accounts. They were into the persistent Minecraft server for a minute, but barely learned any console commands.
Hey remember when computers become essential to day to day life and schools started making it part of their curriculum? Yeah me neither.
For gen x and millennials, they got those skills for free cause their toys incentivized them. As in we got that for free.
It was never guaranteed for that to keep being true. And giving you basic knowledge for the world is usually what schools should do but they never did cause there is money to be made with dumbed down tools.
Try teaching them.
I refuse to fix anything for my inlaws without them watching me. I make them watch me Google the solutions and follow the instructions. It helps reinforce the “it’s not magic and I’m not a wizard” reality I want to instill in everyone.
This seems like an opportunity to quote one my shirts “I can explain it to you but I can’t understand it for you”. Teaching always involves two willing people.
Absolutely. I was acknowledging that with the word ‘try’.
“Try teaching an impatient person, who undervalues the subject matter, already missed several opportunities to learn about it in formal education settings and who you lack a teacher-student dynamic with…”
Or, in a way…
“It’s one banana, Michael - what could it cost, $10?”
Of course my suggestion wasn’t without limits. Personally I will try to help/teach anyone once. If they continue to not make any effort then neither will I.
I’m probably the same generally, but I don’t have to be humble about it… IME, majority are capable and would just rather be doing something else. So they get to go dance, I have to learn/practice and then fix their shit/teach them when their done dancing because I care for them as friends, family or just other humans.
Just frustrating, but I’ll typically offer the help or opportunity to learn, where applicable.
My dad can write DOS commands better than most people my age can and I work in Tech. beyond that? he’s clueless. Younger generations can either type with their thumbs or their index fingers and know absolutely nothing about how things work. If it’s an app they can open on their phones or tablet devices then perfect, they’re all over it. Beyond that? no way.
People my age and from my generation can type well, can figure things out and fix issues on computers, and know our way around tech. Why? cause we were raised in an age where things were essentially “kicking off”. I was taught typing in high school. Beyond that most of us used AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, mIRC, etc so if we weren’t taught it in high school we learned it that way.
We learned html, php, javascript, etc via Geocities, setting up PHP messageboards, hell even just customizing our Myspace page. younger generations don’t have anything like that so they don’t know it. We learned it in our free time to customize our online experience. We had daily consistent shows like The ScreenSavers or Call for Help to teach us how to use Windows or even introduce us to Linux. I learned to build my first PC thanks to Leo Laporte and Patrick Norton. countless magazines and books to pick up to read how to do stuff. And in those days if you wanted to game on PC you pretty much had to build your own PC. No one made prebuilt custom gaming pcs. So you had to learn that stuff.
Today things are all prebuilt for you. gaming pcs, phones and tablet apps, etc. People today just want things to “just work” and if there’s anything needed beyond opening an app and logining in then they’re not interested. Finding and signing up for instances? forget it.
I love Leo and Patrick. I think Leo is still doing The New ScreenSavers and Patrick is off doing an AV podcast last I checked. I miss their shows on rev3 too
Ugh I wish you hadn’t reminded me of screensavers. I loved that show! Now I feel old and sad haha
Bold of you to claim most millennials understand how a computer works.
They don’t understand a lot, but when you say things like “browser to the D: drive and attach the document called ‘not porn.jpg’ to an email, and send it to me”, you will likely get that email.
You can’t say the same about other generations because they don’t interact with the technology in the same way, if at all.
I literally just watched a video of a dude telling a story about how when he was 13 in 2012, his Xbox 360 controller stopped working and he thought the whole console broke when he just had to replace the controller batteries. 🤣
Yes. We are.
We are young with to have learned tech at an early age, but old enough that the tech wasn’t user friendly when we were kids, so we needed to understand it better than people do in the smartphone generation.
Installing a new game on my PC in high school was a multi-hour, sometimes multi-day ordeal.
Plugging in a secondary hard drive involved putting jumpers on pins to keep the system from trying to boot off it.
Assigning ports on peripherals involved understanding how to count in binary so you could assign addresses on dip switches.
Installing a printer involved unholy alliances with formless beings.
Every 2-3 years, I still wake up wearing black robes in a strange room in Romania, blood on my hands and a lingering scent of cordite in the air. I’m fairly certain that’s related to the Canon BJC driver issues I had upgrading my AST to Windows 95.
Installing a printer is still often a deal with the devil
Yeah. I’ve had to return printers that wouldn’t let me install drivers without also agreeing to install spyware.
More likely from soundcard settings than printer settings. If you’re channelling, its due to wrong number of channels selected.
That’s the weird thing. I used Soundblaster cards, and those blackouts were usually preceded by nightmares of an anthropomorphic goat. It was handy because you could make arrangements to feed the dog and stuff.
I had a boot floppy I needed to use when I wanted to play Sim City 2000 because my PCs usual configuration didn’t have enough free conventional memory.
I had another one for Zone66 because its memory management was incompatible with EMM386.
Random BSOD from changing… absolutely fucking nothing, then spending 2 days trying to recover, before saying fuck it and reinstalling windows, so you can play WC1 or D1…good old days.
Also printers can suck it. 20 years ago maintaining a fucking print server was bullshit… I’d rather deal with BES for another 100 years.
Sometimes I’d put a floppy disk in. It had 1.jpg crushed down to be 256 colors. Pam Anderson.
For the longest time it would crash windows 95 when I put it in the drive and opened the folder.
It had a “-” dash in the title…I took that out and no more blue screening.
Thanks Bill Gates…
I’d rather deal with BES for another 100 years.
Cool it, Mario… oh, the menus -shivers-
Lol I might have to take that back…BES was a pile of epic smoldering shit…even the engineers would tell me it was shit. I’m pretty sure I reinstalled that damn thing a thousand times. It was like winning the lottery when the CEO finally wanted and iPhone and then forced the reset of the company to android or iPhone… myself and my junior admin had beers in the office when we got the last user off it and got to shut it down on a Friday. Best day ever.
I’m fairly certain that’s related to the Canon BJC driver issues I had upgrading my AST to Windows 95.
I had the biggest flashback right now. I had a Canon BJC 4000 that would only print all the pages if you had two or more empty pages at the end of the document. Never figured that one out, but every so often I open an old Word Doc and find extra empty pages and remember…
The hardest thing I remember having to do to install games was if they were DOS games and you have to manually assign all the hardware ports or whatever (I remember one for “IRQ?”) for the game every time you ran it and if you fucked it up, it wouldn’t have a picture or wouldn’t have sound or they would be fucked up.
Not quite old enough to have actually had to type in the program after buying the game on a book. That would have been rad!
Installing a printer involved unholy alliances with formless beings.
Lol so true
The next generation doesn’t know how to use a mouse because they do everything on the phone. And yes, I have met people like that.
How old are they that don’t know how to use a mouse?
20’s
Young. It’s people that are 30-35 and younger that are not learning those skills, because they’ve never had to interact with an actual desktop/ tower.
Your numbers are off. 30-35 absolutely interacted with desktops only until college. The smart phones when we were in high school were blackberries.
weeps in 34 y/o
“How quaint”… cracks knuckles, proceeds to type a hundred words a minute with all ten fingers on a QWERTY board.
Relevant clip from a gaming industry veteran. Kids don’t even know how to use game controllers, because they have only ever played phone or tablet games.
Just curious, what age group is he talking about here? 6-year-olds? My little brother’s 13 and he plays games on his Xbox all the time. And his slightly older friend’s a PC gamer.
Most of the world doesn’t know how to use game controllers, because they’re not used outside of consoles
There’s a Pirate Software clip where he talks about the amount of kids who don’t even recognize a controller as an input and go straight to assuming all screens are touch screens
It seems that those aged roughly between 30 - 50 hit the sweet spot when it comes to computer literacy.
There is an interesting text about it, albeit it is 11 years old already: Kids can’t use computers… and this is why it should worry you
Every now and then I read one of those panicked articles raising the alarm about how some member of the young generation doesn’t understand folder structures or whatever, and I panic for a second because what if an entire generation grows up not knowing how to use a computer? But then I remember that I’ve read stories upon stories from Reddit and assorted boomer sites from the 90s and aughts about the exact sort of tech support problems described in that article, and that I’ve never met someone my age or younger who can’t touchtype at least 60 words a minute, and that my sister for whom a command line is the scariest thing in the universe figured out how to install ReShade for a DirectX game she liked all on her own, and that our parents talked the exact same way about cars, and I calm down.
Late Gen x and early gen y had an off-line childhood and digital adulthood. I think that explains a fair amount about computer literacy, because a lot of what they were exposed to is the base config so they had to learn their way up.
although I find that there are plenty of both that are absolutely clueless about tech
Another weird thing that changed in that generation was communication style. Sms and email bred their own language and abbreviations…
Other notables - digital wayfinding (online maps and Gps), music purchase and consumption, proliferation of social media, adoption of online persona, all changes that gen x / early y lived through.
TL;DR? Why not just go watch another five second video of a kitten with its head in a toilet roll, or a 140 character description of a meal your friend just stuffed in their mouth. “nom nom”. This blog post is not for you.
wow, this some next level obnoxious boomer shit.
If you are offended by this, then you obviously didn’t read the article.
Is it incorrect?
In the sense that I don’t believe the people described exist in any significant quantity, yes.
there is no statement there so I don’t know what you mean by “incorrect”. all i see is someone who doesn’t know how people use tldr.
Or someone who knows very well people use tldr to skip reading the post and you are annoyed that he caught you being that lazy.
valuing my time isn’t lazy. if you can’t summarize your post you’re probably shit at writing and the article is not worth the time in the first place.
not trying to be combative, but this grumpy response over a 5min read does illustrate something and i hope its trolling tbh. the tldr summary that is triggering here is kinda a key point of the article - people looking for a quick interaction and then moving on.
this is what i mean by shit at writing.
this fails to be the point of the article unless the article is suggesting people are moving on to quick interactions because they are deliberately being moved away from longer articles by the authors that suggest these articles aren’t worth their time… is the point of the article that longer content is belligerent and condescending?
I don’t think it’s actually getting any point across. it’s just a boomer who thinks no one has anything better to do.
Was it too long for you and you didn’t read it?
In that case …This blog post is not for you.
That’s what the question mark does. It marks a question.
RTFA? RTFA!
I didn’t read it because the tldr is retarded.
The definition of cringe, gramps needs 70ccs of sensory content, stat
Im suspect about 50. Im just a bit older and it was thing for nerds back then.
My four-year-old daughter is shockingly proficient with a mouse and keyboard. Kid goes to town on Spyro: Reignited. My wife snagged an old PC from her office and we want to set it up for her eventually for learning, light gaming and MS Paint. We figure in another year or two we can set up a family Minecraft server and get her in on it. The dream is to get her playing Valheim with us when she’s older.
Hoping she will be as good with PCs and I am, and would love to help her build one when she’s grown.
shes old enough to start learning hardware now! i absolutely did this with my kids when they were 3-6. take an old pc apart, put it back together with them naming the parts. they all loved it. a toddler trying to say ‘processor’ is hilarious btw. only one (25%) seemed to continue playing with hardware but they all know what makes up a pc and he is the one running the family minecraft in docker.
does M$ Paint really still exist?
Hehehe, boy are you in for a treat!
As a real answer, yes, you can still install traditional Paint, as well as that garbage-but-at-least-it-supports-tranparency Paint 3D.
Mine started Minecraft at 5. She never took to Valhiem, and plays minecraft instead. She’s 16 now.
Yes.
And at least when it comes to your parents:
Stop doing it for free.
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Gotta love it when you come into a bit of a bitch & moan article about Tech and end up learning something new about Human Physiology and Medicine.
Cheers for that!
.
Well, if I understood it correctly, my mother is very much like that (for example: it’s very hard to keep her on track to get to the end of a story without her getting lost of some lateral explanation about an explanation about a relativelly unimportant detail in the main story) and even I tended to work like that in the past (not so much nowadays), so your whole post for me was easy peasy to follow and a satisfying learning experience because it went into all sorts of interesting places :)
Judging by the upvotes from others, I would say I’m far from the only one.
It probably helps that here and in this post you’re basically talking about complex and interesting things to a pool of people with lots of above average intelligence, Education and/or curiosity ones.
Kind of. Those who were the first needed to know how computers did what they did… Because so often they didn’t …
Now your computers work without you needing to know how they do it Most are happy it simply works
