Training some younger people at work: “click the cog in the corner to pull up the settings”. “What’s a ‘cog’?” Some things people miss out on life when you’ve never seen a Jetsons episode.
I know what a cog is but not what a Jetsons is
Ripoff of The Flintstones, except the family is from the future rather than the past.
Both are from Hanna-Barbera. There is also a cartoon called The Roman Holidays, which is The Flintstones, but set in Rome.
Hanna Barbara cartoon from the golden age of animation.
That’s not a cog, it’s a sprocket! George Jetson works for Spacely Sprockets.
I was thinking of the competitor: Cogswell’s Cogs!
I just described a cog as a circle with teeth and my son thought it was funny to call the sticky out bits as teeth.
I’m just hoping he doesn’t ask about crenellations next.
Cogs are gear teeth.
I always call it a gear.
Cogs are typically square tooth, gears have involute teeth.
The definition online says that the teeth of the gears are cogs, which I’d never heard of before.
Me neither. We were taught cogs were those janky gears for certain tasks, while a true gear had geometry for smooth engagment
I’ve never seen an icon of a single cog. Multiple cogs on a hub forming a gear, sure, but never just a cog.
Huh? The single cog is the standard for settings menus. Just looking at three random apps on my phone, they all had single cog icons.
cog
noun
ˈkäg
1 : a tooth on the rim of a wheel or gearCan you share an image of what you describe as a single cog?
It can also be used to mean a singular cogged wheel
Not according to the dictionary, or my masterful command of English
It’s splitting hairs, but that would technically be a cogwheel. The actual cogs would be the teeth around the wheel.
If you have a cogwheel with a broken cog, it would be accurate to say “the cogwheel is missing a cog.” That doesn’t mean the entire wheel is missing from the system; The system is only missing a single tooth.
My bad, I was using gear and cog interchangeably. Didn’t realize it could also mean just a tooth.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Look up cog in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
A cog is a tooth of a gear or cogwheel or the gear itself.
If you have an android phone, the settings icon is a cog.
To be precise, that’s a cogwheel. There are six cogs around the cogwheel in your image. The word “cog” refers specifically to the teeth around the wheel, not the wheel itself. The cogwheel may be colloquially called a cog, but it’s technically inaccurate; If you told a watchmaker that their watch was missing a single cog, it would have a very different meaning than if you told them it was missing a single cogwheel.
That’s a gear with six cogs.
The difference is that aged people tend to forget their training more. I’m not worried about the youngins.
Xennials are fascinating to watch navigate through tech hurdles. They have a custom built toolbox built purely through trial and error.
ouch.
I think you misspelled experience.
As an autodidact xennial, I’ll take that as a compliment.
DOS, Windows, all the format C:'s in my time, it’s all been trial and error as you say, because there weren’t really anything on the line in the 90s and early 00s.
Absolutely a compliment. It took me many months of research to figure out what PC parts to buy in the late '90s. Now you can easily piece something together in a day.
Farts unhappily
Is there a ghostscript way to rotate pdf?
Yes. (not sure if you wanted it actually posted the GS way is kinda long) there are a good 10+ different tools to do it on command line though. Even imagemagick’s “convert” command that does virtually every image format can also rotate a pdf. qpdf, pdftk are very popular too.
I actually found a thread that lists all the tools I did and even the “gs” command lol https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/394065/command-line-how-do-you-rotate-a-pdf-file-90-degrees
Can confirm, imagemagick is bad with PDF quality.
You have to set the quality to 100 and density to something high (150 or 300) because it’ll set it to 72ppi and it also has to become before the input file name. It’s like GS and wants virtually every parameter set by you and the defaults are like bare minimum it doesn’t take them from the actual file.
That being said just use qpdf or pdftk lmao
We are all working class.
The working class should hold the bulk of the wealth.
“Should” is doing all the work in that sentence
More work than the 1% will ever do.
pdftk input.pdf cat 1-endright output output.pdfconvert -rotate 90 in.pdf out.pdfDoesn’t convert rasterize the pdf? (I don’t remember)
Gen Z here, in college.
Some of these people are braindead when it comes to tech.
Like, I get if you’re not used to technology because you’re poor/had a lack of access to it, as many people might not have a home computer. So there were kids who were absolutely hopeless when it came to using windows at my tech school because they were broke, and the school only gives out Chromebooks (cause they’re shitty and cheap).
But outside of not knowing a UI and different file formats, you should absolutely know how to use anything on the web, unless you literally lived in an area with absolutely no internet and electricity.
Some people at my college STILL don’t know how to share Google documents correctly, and it’s the most insane and frustrating thing to me. Literally any device with an Internet connection can use it. Windows, apple, Chromebook, Linux, you name it. HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW HOW TO WORK GOOGLE DRIVE?!?!?!
Like many comments have said, devs have dumbed down a lot of shit in the name of protecting users, and people expect stuff to just work without any issues/effort, which I get, but damn, you’ve never simply done a 5 mins search on Google or YouTube for a quick fix?
My hand-me-down phone journey started with a Samsung G Note 4 as a kid, then a old iPhone (don’t remember which), moved to a Moto G Play 7 (I adore that thing today), moved to iPhone X, and now I’m at a Pixel 8a cause I put GrapheneOS on it. My mom got me it as a grad gift cause I hated my iPhone so much for all the shit I couldn’t do while I was on it. I’ve always just liked Android and Windows more for the freedom to fuck up (which I never did), instead of Apple’s shitty walled garden. And now I’m on Fedora, because I know I don’t have to subject myself to a shit user experience on Windows just for simplicity.
But other people my gen who aren’t willing to be adventurous for a bit and even try will never do that. Hell, you get shamed in school for not loving the Apple overlords and wanting Apple deciding everything in your life (green bubble shaming is real, I hated middle and early high school…). We want quick and easy, and we got it, but at what cost?
Mate just my 2 cents ignore overlords and enjoy using other stuff and getting a more global knowledge. Didn’t know the situation was getting this bad, let me guess: they know every single thing that has been posted on tiktok, but nothing else?
That’s no different from boomers and millenials really. Boomers only know the 6 o’clock news and either the front or back page of the paper. Millennial only know 90s cartoons and how to complain; I should know as i am one.
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I’ve used both for work and I’m having a hard time understanding what you could possibly find better about SharePoint. It’s consistently the most frustrating sharing and navigation experience I’ve ever had to endure.
Some people at my college STILL don’t know how to share Google documents correctl
They emulate a “files” menu (like any native office software has), where you can download/export it to a standardized format. Right?
Well, for the download/export stuff, yeah, you just go to the “File” tab and click the download drop down tab, and you can save it to the computer or Google Drive. Which some people still didn’t know about somehow but… (Some people never touch the tabs I guess)
But when I mean file sharing, I’m talking like sharing stuff to another person’s drive, or simply just letting them have access to it by clicking a link. To be fair, sometimes the sharing is wonky or really dumb, but it’s basically, give access to specific emails/accounts, give access to anyone within your organization with the link, or give access to anyone who has the link. You can specify if this access link should be viewer, commenter, or editor.
The amount of people who have shared a document with incorrect access rights where teachers can’t see their work and have to ask them to resubmit, or trying to do group projects with people who claim that it’s not working, is fucking insane. I get some of them are just being lazy and probably lying about it not working to get more time to procrastinate, but dead serious, some people just have no idea how to share files correctly. My public speaking class was full of these blunders, especially when sharing a presentation done with Canva, and we’d always have to waste like 3 minutes waiting for them to fix it…
Messing around with your old WinXP/95 computer and then fixing that mess before your parents come home and scold you does wonders to one’s troubleshooting skills. People of this generation never got to hear that scary XP error sound, and it shows.
Fun fact: Windows XP had cool day 0 loophole that saved my my ass. Once I decided to explore new options and I stumbled upon new and cool feature: setting a password. The only issue with it was that I’ve forgotten it half an hour later. I already knew ‘admin’ word so I used it in hackerman style and I logged in and I was able to reverse old password. This loophole was patched with first service pack but I still giggle when I remind myself of that.
Windows XP’s error sound wasn’t scary. Windows 95 and 98’s were. That natural alarming chime, combined with the angry faces when our parents find out the non-functioning operating system…
Turns out the one I was thinking of was the critical stop sound and the error sound was less threatening. Learnt something new…
Last night I offered to help my Zoomer classmate torrent Kamen Rider and he told me he was afraid of going to jail.
In my experience, Zoomers largely lack a lot of computer skills (specifically in troubleshooting), but, for me the huge difference between them and the older folks has been that the older folks will say things like “I’m just not a computer person ::laugh::” and refuse to be shown how to do anything whereas the Zoomer just doesn’t know, yet, but are more than willing to learn.
ETA: NOTE: that’s just the generalized trend … some of the most knowledgeable technical people I’ve met are Boomers and some of the best computer techs I’ve worked with have been Zoomers.
I started as a graphic designer back in November with absolutely zero experience. It’s crazy being whown how to do stuff in Adobe suite by a 68 year old man
Ha. My young coworker said “wow you really know this software in depth, how long have you used it?” me: meh 26 years. He was like “dude that is longer than I have been alive”
Oh god this was my previous colleague. “Hey MBech, mind showing me how I do this thing in Excel you’ve shown me 100 times?” Sure thing, but at least try to remember. He even told me he forgets it instantly because he just doesn’t give a shit about computer stuff. Then you probably shouldn’t have a job that has you working on a computer 90% of the time.
Don’t show. Guide them to do it themselves. Never be the one to actually do it beyond the first time.
If they still refuse to learn, make them take notes. Make them read to you their notes from last time. Make them tell you what each step is and means.
Make asking you the hardest option for them to get what they want.
That’s similar as the saying:
Give them fish, and they will have something to eat for days. Teach them how to fish and they will have something to eat for a lifetime.
Something along the line 😅
Build them a fire and they’ll be warm for a night. Set them on fire and they’ll be warm for the rest of their life. 🤣
Hahaha dark humor, nice !
“I should be able to ask my team for help” - The guy asking me to do his job for him after the umpteenth time of him refusing to learn a basic process.
You are helping - they clearly need the additional training, and you’re doing everything you can to supply that. Their job can’t be relying on you.
They shouldn’t (and almost certainly don’t) have delegation authority.
For corporate bingo, the keywords are upskill, cross-training, and bus factor.
This person had been taught the process multiple times before and simply refused to do it. It became relying on me to do the job for him in when my job is to help everyone on this large team with more advanced things then that.
I 100% agree with the caveat of SAP. I’m not letting those cunts having a single microgram of my brain space. I’m asking accounting for help everytime
Zoomer in computer science here: I’ve noticed that there are two types of people in my age range, you have the people who are really passionate about technology for the sake of being technology and want to know how things work under the hood (like me) and people who see technology only as a means to accomlish a goal like writing a document, maintaining a social media presence, playing a game, etc, and can’t care less about how it actually works.
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with the latter, but there can be conflict between the two groups because their priorities are completely different.
This is not unique to technology and you see this in other fields too. For example, you have the car enthusiasts who do their own oil changes and are constantly tuning up their cars, installing aftermarket mods, etc, and then you have everyone else who see cars as just a way of getting to where they need to go and bring it into the shop when the scary lights on the dashboard appear.
You forgot the third group, [email protected]
To use your car metaphor, there was a time when you basically needed to know how a car worked in order to own/operate one. I’m talking like the 1910s-1920s. They were unreliable, simply made, manual transmission, hand crank start, and needed a lot of maintenance.
Millennials grew up at a time when you needed to have some understanding of how a computer worked in order to do basically anything.
I suppose the issue is that the car metaphor breaks down because a vehicle really only does one thing. Push pedal and go. Maybe worry about snow conditions if that affects you.
Meanwhile, computers can still be used to do thousands of different tasks and the only thread tying all of those tasks together is that they’re done by the same machine. So knowing fundamentals about the machine gives you access to a lot of capability vs. just memorizing how to do a few tasks.
And which generation are you from @agraybee the forgotten generation huh?
Nihilism destroyer
Yep, that’s Gen X for sure.
One friend of mine told that he read once that kids these days doesn’t even know how to create a folder (or directory), is that true?
Do you know how to create a directory on your phone? Lots of kids have never used a desktop/laptop, just phones and tablets.
Yes, files, and hamburger menu at top right, new folder
You mean you don’t open the terminal and use mkdir?
Yes.
I mean, so do I, but it’s not something I ever needed to do on a phone.
So our IT guy sent a training memo for a task. Step 1, 2, 3, etc. The one step was go to folder /User, then go to folder yourusername. A young guy emailed back " there is no folder called yourusername".
I explained to IT, some of these people have never navigated a folder structure and don’t realize Yourfoldername is meant to be replaced with their own name.
I have this at work with technical people. It’s ever so frustrating.
It is true, and I’ve seen it myself. At first I refused to believe, but sadly we’re already at that state.
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I mean… My Mac M1 doesn’t allow right-click create a new file. 😮💨 ! Also, if I recall correctly, there is a similar thing that made me go crazy on Gnome DE.
Nowadays, people hate to get everything neatly separated in a nice and well ordered directory structure. They throw everything in the same directory and use the find/search function, for what it’s worth.
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Gnome had right click --> new folder, but only if you can select the white space, or you can right click the small empty square in the upper right below the top but above the scroll bar.
Haha, some kind of dead DE pixel ? 😅
Area 51
