How old are you/technologically savvy?

[tyme]

What's average seek time on a punch card?  How many punch cards on each spindle, and how many punch cards per box?  I must determine IOPS...  Anyone got an external hot-swap enclosure for punch cards?

[HeroHog]

Standard old new IDE 40 gig punch cards.

[tyme]

Oh stupid me, NOW I see the molex power connectors.  :(

I was having a vision of an 8x sata/sas enclosure and passing the controller through to a guest vm running a database...
vision is now on the floor in pieces.

[Lee]

We have a Wii here at home that sees occasional use but there isn't enough time left in my life to get into gaming like some of the kids at work.

Tech Tip:  When your Wii appears to be dead....you must unplug the power cord from the electrical outlet and leave unplugged for 1 minute.
Then it will work again.  Just another tech quirk that we used to call a defect.

[HeroHog]

No no, it's a "feature".

[sanglant]

that's a get in bed it's 4 hours till you have to be at school feature. costs big money, but they forgot and put it in all of them.

[grampster]

Ehhh, cough, ahem....67 years.  I can read and send e-mail.  I can surf the web when I have a question about something.  I still have no idea how to post a picture on this site or the others I frequent.  I just figured out cutting and pasting a couple years ago.

Most of the time, ahh well, all of the time you folks talk about whatever you talk about involving what I think is some kind of computer stuff or...whatever it is, I have no idea what your talking about.

I actually use a cell phone to call someone and talk to them.  I do use facebook because it's easier to contact my grandkids and one of my sons.  I think I hear from some of you on facebook, but I'm not sure because I don't know many of your real names, so I probably deleted a good number of you because I had no idea who you were.  My other son just uses the computer for some gaming.  He's more into movies and his 2 year old grandson.  He got married when he was 35 and Lucas came along when he was 38.  He barely answers his ground line phone and doesn't have a cell phone.  What's the word for someone who does not like modern stuff or tech.  He be dat, and I be one jump ahead of him.

The only skill with the ether tech is marginally cretin like.  I don't want to know much else, actually, because then I'd spend more time sitting here getting a neck ache looking through my tri focals to see the screen.  I do have a good digital camera and I take good pics with it, but downloading the pics to the 'puter is movie worthy to watch, (and the language is informational) and if I can actually fid the pics later, I'm doing good.

[sanglant]

grampster, the way you post pics here is easy. email them to me(pm for addy) and i'll stick 'em in my free space for a few months.

if you would rather learn how on your own, again pm me and we'll get it sorted.

[HeroHog]

left brace ([) + "img" + right brace (]) + pitcures internet url (the picture HAS to be on a internet accessable machine, not your computer's drive) (http://herohog.com/images/icons/HH.jpg) + left brace ([) + "/img" + right brace (]) and that's it! :D

[wuluf]

This is a really interesting topic.  I'm 54 and have used computers since the early '80's.  I like my cell and regularly text friends and family.  Gaming and Facebook have no interest for me, and i don't think that's about age.  I never liked gaming, Oregon Trail, LSL or even Pong.  I camp, shoot, reload and my most important hobby, reading.  I've never played a game that was more fun than a good book.  It seems that many "younger people these days" (here we go...) don't have/take the time to read or even just sit and think.  Constant entertainment and stimulation are rewiring our brains in ways we don't yet understand....And yes, I think we will be the worse for it.

[HeroHog]

My eyes (well, the left one anyway) are all wonky these days and reading isn't fun because of it so I live on the forums, I have 10 or so I read daily, and watch a lot of web videos like anime on Adult Swim (Shonen Jump, Full Metal Alchemist, Cowboy BeBop etc) or Holic & Moon Phase when I can find episodes I haven't seen yet.

[BlueStarLizzard]

This is a really interesting topic.  I'm 54 and have used computers since the early '80's.  I like my cell and regularly text friends and family.  Gaming and Facebook have no interest for me, and i don't think that's about age.  I never liked gaming, Oregon Trail, LSL or even Pong.  I camp, shoot, reload and my most important hobby, reading.  I've never played a game that was more fun than a good book.  It seems that many "younger people these days" (here we go...) don't have/take the time to read or even just sit and think.  Constant entertainment and stimulation are rewiring our brains in ways we don't yet understand....And yes, I think we will be the worse for it.

there was an interesting show on PBS about this. the commen consensues seemed to be that while it may seem like a bad thing, its may not be. its just diffrent. i think the main diffrence is something i was trying to say in my earlier post, which is how we younger generations are getting hardwired at a very young age to accept technological change without blinking. i learned the commands for playing computer games (and by the by, the only thing for a kid that young to do on a computer is play games) by route, for no other reason then i couldn't really spell or read yet. (speaking of games, who played the number chruncher game? it had these monsters that ate numbers and such?)

this "young person these days" also enjoys reading and thinking, as do many of my contemparies. 

[tyme]

I never liked gaming, Oregon Trail, LSL or even Pong.  I camp, shoot, reload and my most important hobby, reading.  I've never played a game that was more fun than a good book.  It seems that many "younger people these days" (here we go...) don't have/take the time to read or even just sit and think.  Constant entertainment and stimulation are rewiring our brains in ways we don't yet understand....And yes, I think we will be the worse for it.

That's a broad brush you have there.
http://senseis.xmp.net/?GoPlayingPrograms

[taurusowner]

Being in the Army, I have read some interesting stuff on how the video-game/computer centered youth of today actually excel at certain modern soldier tasks that older soldiers struggle with.  Teach new UAV pilots is easier because they grew up gaming.  There is even a remote control land-robot under testing right now that the control interface is an actual X-Box 360 controller.  They figured it would be intuitive to the young soldiers being given the technology in the field, and so far they've been right.  A soldier's ability to pick up and quickly learn how to use devices like the handheld GPS devices, language translation assistants, and biometric enrollment screeners has be increased due to young peoples familiarity and comfort with picking up new technology quickly.  I took a class on the DAGR GPS system for the Army, and the instructor giving the class said it's always easier to give his class to lower enlisted vs. upper enlisted.  With the higher NCOs and officers, he would have to go through each powerpoint slide and answer all sorts of questions, whereas with lower enlisted, he really only had to hand out the units, give a quick rundown, and let us play with them until we figured them out.  It has even extended to shooting as many new soldiers have increased hand eye coordination and dexterity due to video games.  And also, to be blunt, some studies have shown that the modern soldier is somewhat more willing to engage and kill human targets than they have been in the past, due to having played shooting games during their youth.

Constant entertainment and stimulation are rewiring our brains in ways we don't yet understand....And yes, I think we will be the worse for it.

You may be right that our brains are undergoing a rewiring due to the constant bombardment of information and stimulation..but I don't see us being worse for it.  I think it's just as likely that our brains are learning to process things faster and more efficiently due to the massive and constant input being forced on it.  It's possible that as we upgrade the things around us, our brains are upgrading themselves to cope.

[Monkeyleg]

I think it's just as likely that our brains are learning to process things faster and more efficiently due to the massive and constant input being forced on it.

Too bad Einstein didn't have video games. Imagine how much more brilliant he could have been. 

[HeroHog]

Coming into computers when I did played a huge way in how I think and go about learning new software. Back then, "pirating" and "hacking" software was the big thing and how most of us back then cut our teeth and learned how things worked. We had a disk with some files on it. No manual, no instructions, sometimes not even a setup.exe file but we figured out how to make it all run and use it anyway. It was years before I actually started paying for my software. I remember the first application I paid for, it was TextPad, a fantastic Text Editor that can handle files of almost ANY size and has macro capability. At the time I was a dBase/Clipper programmer using the Brief editor by Underware and was so impressed with TextPad that I bought a 5 seat user licensed version of it. Since then I have been strictly legal and paid for anything I used.

I DID learn a lot back then about file extensions and binary file editors and such. I still use batch files all the time. These days, most people don't even know what a command line is much less how to write a batch file! Let's not even talk about loading your systems and drivers to conserve DOS High Memory. Remember emm386? LOL It is amazing what we used to do on a 8086 with 640 meg of ram and a 20 meg Seagate ST-225 MFM Hard Drive! Real 3D CAD using Cadkey! Oh well, just an old fossil rambling...

[erictank]

This is a really interesting topic.  I'm 54 and have used computers since the early '80's.  I like my cell and regularly text friends and family.  Gaming and Facebook have no interest for me, and i don't think that's about age.  I never liked gaming, Oregon Trail, LSL or even Pong.  I camp, shoot, reload and my most important hobby, reading.  I've never played a game that was more fun than a good book.  It seems that many "younger people these days" (here we go...) don't have/take the time to read or even just sit and think.  Constant entertainment and stimulation are rewiring our brains in ways we don't yet understand....And yes, I think we will be the worse for it.

At 39, I'm 15 years your junior - am I "younger people"?

I have a *LIBRARY* of hardcover and paperback books (mostly novels, but some instructional and non-fiction as well) - more than will fit on the shelf space we have available in the house, actually - PLUS the hundreds of ebooks I carry around on my phone everywhere I go.  Among other hobbies, I draw, design, and build movie-grade costumes for fun, and I read VORACIOUSLY, probably into the thousands of pages per week, EVERY week.  Oh, and I enjoy computer gaming, too, when I have the time for it.  Just finished the new downloadable content update for Left 4 Dead 2 last night, while switching around to nightshift - single-player only, though.

My 15 year old stepson is a virtual XBox addict - he'd play Halo all weekend if we'd let him.  He also reads pretty heavily - he carries a book with him every day to and from school.  He doesn't read as fast as I or his mother, but he does pretty well.  Among other things, he liked MHI a lot.  He hasn't read MH Vendetta yet, because I don't have it in deadtree format yet.

There're two more counterexamples for your anecdotal collection...

[Perd Hapley]

Too bad Einstein didn't have video games. Imagine how much more brilliant he could have been. 

It's one thing to process information quickly and efficiently. It's another thing to think deeply or to find new perspectives that lead to breakthroughs. Like others have said, the new way is not necessarily worse, just different. Then again, maybe the old way is better, or maybe we need a mix of the two.

[RevDisk]

This is a really interesting topic.  I'm 54 and have used computers since the early '80's.  I like my cell and regularly text friends and family.  Gaming and Facebook have no interest for me, and i don't think that's about age.  I never liked gaming, Oregon Trail, LSL or even Pong.  I camp, shoot, reload and my most important hobby, reading.  I've never played a game that was more fun than a good book.  It seems that many "younger people these days" (here we go...) don't have/take the time to read or even just sit and think.  Constant entertainment and stimulation are rewiring our brains in ways we don't yet understand....And yes, I think we will be the worse for it.

I suspect the number of kids reading has been fairly constant for quite some time.  Respectfully, when you were a kid, I'm sure you heard the old folks complaining about "kids these days".  It's one of the primary advantages of aging, I'm told.  Some kids like reading and some don't.  I wonder what would happen if you polled folks over the age of 50 and asked whether they'd rather spend time reading or (watching football | golf | etc).  I'd rather spend time hitting myself with a hammer than watching football or playing golf, but that's just me. 


Just an alternative thought.  Texting and facebook are written.  Video versions exist, but are significantly less common.  When the kiddos spending X amount of time yammering on Facebook, they are writing and reading.  If a parent has a problem with their kid's grammar, teach them proper grammar.  Some games are fairly mindless, but others are now quite complex.  There's plenty of puzzle type games on the market.  Hell, I enjoyed Assassin's Creed II just as much for seeing Renaissance Italy architecture as for the gameplay.  (Tho, the fistfight with Pope Alexander VI had me on the floor laughing.)

[brimic]

Going on 38 in the next month.
I've never had any computer classes but can figure out how to fix just about any problem with a windows based PC, and run most Office applications with some modicum of competency. I've assembled 1 computer so far and have always done my own hardware upgrades, set up my home wireless network, etc.
Facebook- meh. Tried it, its way past my level of ADD and doesn't interest me.
Computer gaming- I spend a lot (too much) time on 1st person shooters online. Then again, I don't watch TV, and it keeps my brain much more engaged than the same amount of TV watching would. I enjoy the quirky personalities and drama of the people I regularly play with a lot more than TV could ever provide.
Cell phones- I've had a few, but mostly neglect them and never use them. I haven't had one in the last few years.
IPOD- I use one occasionally. I prefer the sound of CD's when I'm driving or listening to my home stereo though.
Books- I buy a paperback or three every month, usually reading at least one book at a time- usually one in the bathroom, one by the couch, and sometimes I keep 1 in the car (for reading during kid's sports practices etc). I have hundreds of books in crates in storage that I put out in garage sales, I have a few dozen that I really liked and plan on keeping. I plan on getting a Nook or something like it in the next year.

Typewriters- I learned to type on one of those old 50lb Royal typewriters and did many term papers on it. People always give me a hard time for how hard I strike keys on a computer keyboard.

[brimic]

I suspect the number of kids reading has been fairly constant for quite some time.  Respectfully, when you were a kid, I'm sure you heard the old folks complaining about "kids these days".  It's one of the primary advantages of aging, I'm told.  Some kids like reading and some don't.  I wonder what would happen if you polled folks over the age of 50 and asked whether they'd rather spend time reading or (watching football | golf | etc).  I'd rather spend time hitting myself with a hammer than watching football or playing golf, but that's just me. 

I'm betting it has a lot to do with a kid's parents' attitude towards reading. When I was a kid, Dad always read, he had us go to the library at least once every other week, etc. I read a lot, as do my sisters. My wife wouldn't read a book if her life depended on it, noone in her family reads either.

[Perd Hapley]

My father seldom reads, as that would take time away from playing the guitar and mandolin. I was too lazy to learn an instrument, so I did a lot of reading.

[taurusowner]

I started reading in-depth stuff quite early.  I started on Tom Clancy and Michael Chricton novels when I was 9.  I was reading autobiographies and such (usually memoirs from Soviet defectors) by middle school.  These days though, I listen to audiobooks a lot.  I just don't have time for reading as much as I'd like.  So I get them for my iPod and listen to books while driving, running, cleaning guns, etc.