Haha sounds about right.
We have a Dell networked printer. It does not play well with Adobe Acrobat, but ONLY from Apple devices, works fine with PCs. If you try to print a .pdf from a Mac it will blue screen my printer. This is a “known issue” - aka: nothing can be done but buy a new printer, which I just refused to accept.
I found a work-around. Its called “don’t use acrobat”. So I went around and set everyone’s default for .pdfs to Preview instead of Acrobat. The younger people looked at me like I’m talking greek and the older ones kept saying “just buy a new one”. Its been a year, works great! 
Go team GenX!
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A few widely-used computer languages were invented after I graduated college. Yet I still managed to learn them, because the theory behind Object-Oriented Programming hasn’t changed much, it’s just that the idiosyncrasies of each language take a little getting used to. Besides, if you learn in C++ like I did, everything else is easy by comparison.
The various types of ADCs/DACs are only a small part of DAQ design.
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Yeah, I only learned about the existence of them then, and vaguely how to use them (less vaguely later on). The circuitry is lost on me, as is a some of the ideas about how many bits to use etc. Really useful tool though.
Edit: I am getting way off topic here! Whoops.
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Chinese people get all GenX on us and discover androgyny - this hot Boy Band is all girls!
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Do you think GenXers and Millennials understand open source better than Boomers? With open source stuff, everything takes a lot of effort to set up because there are a lot of knobs and twiddly bits, and a lot of packages to sudo apt-get. It won’t work out of the box, and if it does, it won’t do everything you want it to do.
I remember configuring a simulation environment that was made up of a few different open source tools, and a few hours into it my supervisor told me to “call tech support”* because it didn’t work out of the box.
Although if it helps break the generational stereotyping any, this supervisor was a GenXer.
*meaning, the open-source tools’ tech support 
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This is why I don’t use a lot of open source stuff, because I have neither the knowledge or the time to gain it. OTOH, I have managed to avoid the trap of “because I don’t know how, it can’t be done.” I (like your colleague) assume someone must know and try to determine who that someone is.
After I try poking a few obvious things first.
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From what I see GenX are the only ones that will peek inside the box so to speak.
I’ve had our IT people tell me, more than once, that I should come and work for them, cuz I find solutions instead of just saying “its a known issue”. We’re not afraid to tinker. (I remember deleting .dll files and fucking up my computer so bad OMG!) Older gens want us to “call IT” and younger gens don’t realize that machines aren’t magic and actually need humans to set them up. We’re the only ones left that will “fix” things.
I keep coming back to that article @mindysan33 - seriously its stayed with me all day.
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Yeah, if we had an IT team dedicated to that sort of thing, I’d let them have at it first.
Then again, there were a few different moving parts to this simulation environment, and I wasn’t even sure at first what we needed. So, I needed to install the main piece, test it to make sure it’s okay, poke around a little, see what kind of results I got, reconfigure if needed, and then see if I needed to install anything else. Then repeat for the little pieces I needed to install. Because I was testing as I went along, I was probably the right person for the task. If I was working from a set of instructions, I would probably give those instructions to the people responsible for installing software, if we had such people.
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Cloud computing is not client/server, and the way that things like Tandem computers achieved high uptime is rather different from the cloud approach. But we are off topic.
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True, but there were architectures besides client-server even going back to the 1970s. Remote Job Entry from the 1960s was the granddaddy of cloud computing.
/hijack
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That’s a really good question, and I think it depends on what you mean. In my field (biology), I don’t know anyone my own age (Millennial) who doesn’t at least look for a FOSS before committing to a non-open source project. Most people are generally aware of how to read a paper, become interested in a piece of software and get it from GitHub or CRAN or Pip/conda or whatever. But I still observe a general problem of low awareness of how to evaluate software or treat it as anything but a black box.
I think something that is interesting in my generation, even relative to people Gen X, is the awareness of the labor politics of FOSS maintenance. How do we reward programming effort, making a useful widget that can’t necessarily be a stand-alone paper, etc. And I think that’s to some extent a reaction to seeing our Boomer and Gen X mentors, who might have been the first coders we ever had exposure to, work so hard to balance doing good FOSS with getting tenure.
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Boomer here. I will take apart anything and attempt either a permanent fix or a jury rig that will keep things running until I research a replacement. (I started to give some examples, but never mind. Just take my word for it. 
) I do my own plumbing and electrical work.
A number of factors, however, affect how I approach a problem:
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As I age, and time is more precious than money, I’m more inclined to buy a replacement part than cut/grind/drill/tap one out of the scrap metal and plastic I hoard obsessively. And now that parts for almost everything can be found online and shipped to my door in a day or two, DIY from scratch makes less sense.
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Many consumer items these days are not made to repair and it’s a waste of time to try (not that I haven’t tried, and occasionally foiled Big Appliance). One advantage of years of experience is that I am fairly good at assessing what’s worth doing.
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Sometimes what’s available on the market now is just better than the old stuff, like my new multi-temperature kettle that is better quality and faster than the old one that I repaired more than once.
All these considerations, more than just helplessness, may be influencing the boomers you encounter.
My daughter, a millennial, can change a tire, use power tools, cook, knit, and much more. She once complained that she couldn’t take the boys she dated seriously because “none of them can do anything”, but she has since found a young man, also a millennial, who meets her standards.
My point? I am really tired of hearing boomers this, millennials that. I’ve seen competent and incompetent individuals of all ages, and many who looked incompetent but just hadn’t lived long enough yet. There aren’t really generations, but there are different stages in anyone’s life.
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Don’t forget "internet appliances"
(Always thought that was a sucky marketing term)
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Whenever I’m trying to debug anything, the standard advice is to use “safe mode,” i.e. to disable all my changes to the settings.
For a MacOS issue, that would disable my defaults settings, which block some of the blinking cursors, and my mouse tools, which let me scroll. That’s impractical. For some reason, the system doesn’t let my install Gnome classic, disable blinking cursors, and enable wider scrollbars. … But unlike Ubuntu, it doesn’t certify hardware without any functioning drivers as “compatible” because of a hack that reads a hand passing near the touchpad as a serious of clicks, drags, and double-clicks.
For a Firefox issue, that would disable my animation-blocking fixes, and test whether my strobe sensitivity still only involves migraines, vomiting, etc. or has progressed to cause seizures.
Anyway, when tech support consists of either “please unfix whatever you have fixed,” or “please call this number,” I end up trying to avoid fixing anything I don’t need to fix, although there’s a lot I do need to fix.
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For sure we’re using vast generalizations obviously.
I grew up in a house of tinkerers and watchmakers and engineers. It was drilled into me that you open shit up to look inside before asking others to fix stuff for you, and you did that before buying a new one. And I just assumed everyone knew how to use and owned a skill saw if not a jigsaw (I was woefully naive there!). But in general, that is part of my job security in a way that the people I work for and the people that work for me do not seem to have and I worry about that. Mostly this thread seems to be about that existential dread. What do we do when people in general don’t know how to “do” anything? I find that worrying. I don’t see anything to allay that fear, your daughter and her young man seem to be the exception not the rule.
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The group has not released any music but plans to drop their first video in April.
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Wait for natural selection to take its course?
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I checked out their YouTube channel. Definitely KPop meets Boy Band - very teen Asian girl. Think their gender bending thing is a good idea. All the pop stars manufactured for younger teen girls always look like girls anyway.
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Sounds like an architect to me!
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I swear I had not read this when I posted the exact same thought!
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