It's a common belief that old people don't understand computers, and 
young people are all computer whizz kids. Certainly it's the case that 
my parents could never ever figure out how to program the VHS machine to 
actually record stuff at an appointed time, whereas having read the 
instructions, I always found this to be pretty easy. (Mind you, I often 
had to double-check the instructions; usually these things aren't very 
"obvious" without consulting the manual first.)

My dad taught me to program in C64 BASIC. Or rather, he dictated a 
program to me, and I'm just the one who typed it in. Later I sat down 
and read the C64 manual from cover to cover. (No mean feat for a kid who 
was nearly illiterate.) Initially I found it hard figuring out where to 
start, and I stayed up until ridiculously late at night on many 
occasions trying to get a broken chain of logic to work by repeatedly 
hitting it (i.e., tweaking minor trivial details like loop endpoints, 
endlessly trying all possible combinations to see if any of them work). 
But eventually I learned that when a program doesn't work, the correct 
thing to do is to step back and look at what isn't working, why it 
doesn't work, and how to make a better design.

We didn't have computers at school. (They /were/ a relatively new 
commercial product, after all.) When they eventually got some, it fell 
to the school's Religious Education teacher (no, seriously) to "teach us 
about computers". I remember them well: a set of RM Nimbus 80186 
systems. Each had dual floppy disk drives, and we had a single colour 
dot matrix printer to share between them all.

By this point, I had already moved on from BASIC to Pascal, using both 
Borland's TurboPascal 5.5 for MS-DOS, and on my Amiga Hi-Speed Pascal 
(who's libraries are nearly identical to TurboPascal, despite the rather 
different hardware). So say I knew more than the teacher did would be an 
understatement.

(I still recall an incident where I said you shouldn't unplug the 
printer from one machine and into another while both the printer and the 
computers were switched on because it might cause electrical damage. The 
teacher told me that the manual warned you not to unplug the printer 
while the PC is turned on because it might cause physical damage to the 
socket, which is why we always unpluged it from the printer end instead. 
WTF?)

I could continue with such anecdotes. Suffice it to say, I've always 
been good with computers, computer technology, and modern electronics in 
general. And a lot of the other people around me, particularly older 
people, haven't been. I guess I felt a certain sense of smugness about that.

These days, I don't feel so smug. In fact, I'm almost beginning to feel 
that the next generation is overtaking *me*. o_O

There are several new-fangled things that I really just don't "get". 
Allow me to list some examples:



What, in the name of God, is an "app"?

Once upon a time, you had the "operating system", which runs the 
machine, and then you had various "application programs" or just 
"applications", which address real-world problem domains.

Java gave us "applets", those pointless Tic-Tac-Toe example programs 
which are supposed to prove how fantastic and important Java is. But now 
the mobile revolution has given us "apps".

Suppose, for example, that you are somehow so stupendously rich that you 
can not only afford to /buy/ an iPhone but also to pay the bills for it. 
Through mechanisms which I do not really understand at all [Jesus Christ 
I feel old!], it is apparently somehow possible to access the Internet 
with such a device. (Presumably that's part of why it's so damned 
expensive - along with the obvious fact that it's extremely shiny.)

Now, if you're a maths nerd like me, you might know about Wolfram Alpha, 
the website where any question, no matter how pointless, can be 
submitted to Wolfram's Mathematica software and Wolfram's huge data 
repository to try to answer your question. It's a neat idea, although 
damned if I can think of a single /useful/ purpose for it. (Especially 
since Wolfram seem to be adding more and more restrictions to what you 

full copy of Mathematica, after all...)

Anyone, anywhere [except China] can visit this website and ask it 
pointless questions. So far, so good.

Here's where it gets weird: For a mere $35, you can buy the "Wolfram 
Alpha app" for your iPhone, which lets you access the power of Wolfram 
Alpha. Or you could, you know, visit the website for free, like 
everybody else is already doing. WTF?



Next up, the "netbook". Now the idea behind this one is pretty simple. 
If you want a portable computer, you can buy a laptop. But laptops are 
pretty expensive, especially if you want one that's any good. Now 
actually, it turns out a lot of people just want something to surf the 
Internet with. And you don't actually /need/ an 8-core Intel Sandy 
Bridge EP with 8GB triple-channel RAM and a high-end discrete GPU just 
to surf the net. Hell, you don't even "really" need an entire OS; just a 
web browser.

So - the idea goes - you can buy a netbook instead. It's like a laptop, 
but it's usually physically smaller, has web-oriented software that's 
simpler to use, has a much lower technical specification, and 
consequently is much cheaper than a real laptop. Because, if you just 
want to surf, you don't need the higher spec.

That's the theory. The trouble is, as best as I can tell, netbooks /do/ 
have stripped-down software, lower specification, and smaller size. They 
also have EXACTLY THE SAME PRICE as a laptop. (!)

Given that the entire /point/ of a netbook is to be a cheaper 
alternative to a laptop for people who don't need the extra power, the 
fact that it isn't any cheaper seems like a pretty big deal. Again, WTF?



Then we come to things like Twitter. Actually, before I get into this, I 
should probably back up a bit.

There was a long time when I couldn't figure out what the hell the 
/point/ of all this "social media" stuff was. This is probably partly 
because I don't have any friends. But every such site I got bullied into 
joining (required XKCD quote: http://xkcd.com/146/ ) was a complete 
waste of time. You create a profile, fill out a bunch of fields, and 
that's it. There's nothing to "do" after that.

On top of this, all of these sites were /shockingly/ unreliable and 
buggy. I can't even express how useless they were. They just flat-out 
DID NOT WORK PROPERLY. I've never seen such a thing from a /website/ 
before. You would have thought there couldn't be too many things that 
could go wrong with a mere web page. You would be wrong, apparently.

And then I joined Facebook. /This/ actually has a point. You can use it 
to /talk/ to people. You can arrange meetings. You can share any 
interesting photos you might have. You can ask people for opinions, etc. 
I'm not the type of person to sit on Facebook all day (I have far more 
interesting things to do), but it does at least do /something/ remotely 
useful.

Twitter, on the other hand, baffles me. It's, like, this huge Internet 
phenomenon. Your corporation is /nothing/ unless it's on Twitter. And 
yet... Well, let me put it this way. I once had this conversation with 
my dad:

Dad: So what *is* Twitter then?
Me: You know how on Facebook you can post your status?
Dad: Yeah?
Me: THAT'S ALL TWITTER DOES!!
Dad: ...WTF?

Not only that, but the few times I've actually been on Twitter, half the 
posts are replies to other people's posts, and there is LITERALLY NO WAY 
to find out what they're replies to. (!) Seriously, the most basic, most 
immediately obvious thing, the very first thing I tried to do, Twitter 
can't do. WTF?



Similar to the Netbook, we have episodic games. The idea, apparently, is 
to release smaller games more often for a lower price, rather than 
larger games less often for a higher price.

Personally, /all/ of my favourite games have been vast monolithic 
adventures. The idea of getting a game in little dribs and drabs is 
highly unappealing to me. They say how people are "too busy" now to play 
big monolithic games. Then again, "they" also say that any game without 
an online multiplayer component is commercially unviable. And then along 
comes Skyrim... :-P

(In a similar manner, while I do enjoy watching a good TV series, 
nothing compares to a good film. You know, a big monolithic video 
experience as opposed to an episodic one.)

Most puzzlingly of all, Valve seem to have mastered the "smaller games" 
part, but don't seem to have grasped the "more often" or "cheaper" 
parts. WTF?



Since we're here, I might as well ask: the iPad. Sure, I mean, I know 
what it /is/, but... why? What is it /for/? Can anyone articulate a 
coherent explanation? You can't use it as a phone, you can't easily type 
stuff on it, it's too big to easily carry around... so what can you 
actually do with the thing? (I agree, it is very, VERY shiny, and that's 
cool. But there has to be a bit more than that to justify the 
astronomical price tag...)

Post a reply to this message