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I was just relying on personal experience with programmers and IT people. When I started programming 20 years ago, pretty much anyone who worked at any level w
by roc 15y ago
I was just relying on personal experience with programmers and IT people.
When I started programming 20 years ago, pretty much anyone who worked at any level with computers could build a PC. These days, half the programmers I know can barely maintain their machines, let alone build one from parts. [1]
If you told them they should oppose some piece of legislation because it would bar them from loading whatever OS they wanted on the hardware they purchased, they would (and do) shrug. They fully consider their choice to be synonymous with the hardware they bought in the first place. They don't think it at all odd that Android phones ship with locked bootloaders.
[1] I don't mean to disparage them; some of them are fantastic programmers. That said, I do know far too many of them who are running home wifi with whatever configuration the Comcast/UVerse guy set up.
- corford 15y agoAssuming your experience is not isolated, I find that very scary.
- einhverfr 15y agoWell, I have always found the oldest documentation of a network or computing principle to be the clearest because it usually has not been so obscured by later attempts to make sense of it.... How many folks do I have to explain why the Open Systems Interconnect network model doesn't match what happens with TCP/IP over the wire? I do think that we've create a class of specialists who protect their specialties in part through obfuscation.