Miles Fidelman writes:
> Which leads me to take just a little issue with your comment that "younger
> people have more useful experience." I'm actually not entirely sure that's
> true. If anything, younger people have narrower (or at least different)
> experience.
I tend to agree. Lisi is right that the experience of
younger people is more relevant to today's world but I also
think of that old quotation which says that those who do not
learn from history are doomed to keep repeating the same
mistakes and that is so, so true.
Those of us who also happen to be blind are painfully
aware of how useless a modern device is when there is no way to
find out other than eyeballs focused on a screen, what that
device is doing.
In Linux/Unix in general, we have a concept that is
rather old of output being something you can send where it needs
to go because you may not always predict where somebody will
need to send it for a particular job. The smart guys and girls
back in the day were not thinking about blind people but were
instead not wanting to nail shut any doors that might be needed
later.
In Windows and nitch operating systems for many
purposes, Some designer just figured the screen was good for
everybody and there is no way to divert text and numbers to any
other device. A person who is blind can't feed it in to a speech
synthesizer or Braille display. A repair technician can't
capture the output for service purposes. The door for further
use of the data is glued shut.
This is the difference between solving a problem in the
short term versus solving that and many more problems for all
times.
Younger people tend to be cought up in what's here now
and, if they are not careful, they think it is as good as it
gets.
Those of us who have been around the block a few times
know better how it should be and groan when yet another screen
gadget comes out that you can't use if the screen is not
visible.
That is just one example of countless other examples and
I don't wish for a minute that we were in an earlier time, but
let's value collective wisdom. It can sure save us a lot of
trouble if we take advantage of it.
It kind of reminds me of the squirrels and electric
power poles. Ever so often, we hear a raucous explosion in the
neighborhood. A squirrel has just learned a mortal lesson that
7200 volts will make your body explode and ruin your day.
Squirrels do not have a history of symbolic language or written
communication so if some other squirrels see their comrade change from
carbon-based life form to just a hand full of carbon in a
millisecond, they have no way to tell the rest of the squirrels
not to walk around on all those neat perches at the tops of the
poles, and so ten minutes later, another squirrel, another
explosion. I sometimes wonder how much smarter are we than those
squirrels? I guess that's for the philosophy mailing list.:-)
Martin McCormick
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