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You are not a grandpa yet, are you?
The other day, in the coofee corner at work, we were talking about how fascinated kids are if you take them into a real darkroom, in pale yellow/green light, where they can see the magic of a picture growing out of that white photo paper.
Or, in springtime you show them how to make a willow pipe.
Or, you bring your physical core dump to work to show those newly educated kids what "core" really is. The one physical core dump I have saved is a prism about half the size of a beer can, and it stores 1152 bits.
Sometimes I am surprised by how little those youngsters know or what goes on behind the scenes. As an oldtimer, I know, because we had to understand it in the old days. Things like how an interrupt handler is written. How paging works. What information is available in a class object (the first C++ compiler I used compiled to K&R C, and we had a great opportunity to see how OO really works). Very often, when code doesn't behave as they expect, once I tell them about the inner workings, they cheer up - and generally, they write better code after that.
You could say that the knowledge we oldtimers carry very often is context. We know where things fit into a whole. We understand why this and that design decision was made. Then we know how to use it in the way it was intended - or we know that it was not a good design decision, and we should not let it steer us in a wrong direction. We know to see what is the emperors new clothes, hype and nothing more, and to recognize truly innovative ideas.
People tease me for being a "squirrel": I have collected stores of "nuts" (that is, papers, articles, old magazines, whatever) in every available storage space, even on the harddisks of my computer. Honestly, I am surprised myself about how frequently I have to dig into those stores because some question came up at work, or I had to help a friend with an old computer, or my neighbour could make use of some information.
Now that you mention "the maze layout of games": When someone at your workplace, while struggling with some unwieldy problem, makes a sigh: 'You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike', and the other fellow says '...a maze of twisting little passages!', isn't that when you go home to dig up that old drawing of the Adventure maze and show it to the others during the coffee break the next day?
Those things are valuable, enriching the day. Don't be afraid of being the one who contributes to it.
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nice anwser 
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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You have forgotten about them anyway. 
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legacy code/knowledge
don't know how it works.
don't know who or where it came from.
don't know what connects to it
but it works. so you keep it in fear that by removing it, you don't know what will happen.
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Or not[^] 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Apple maybe cool, but winter is coming...
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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And House Stark with it...
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Only in the show. Right now Stanis is still alive in the North, and we do not know whose son Jon is. Arya is still on the other continent, and Sansa is still under Littlefinger's finger.
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... But you're really not helping!
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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At least in that case your little head will not rule you.
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Ypu paraphrase a quote from something I hate. That'll work.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Geez I hope not. Just had winter, dont need another one.
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... and thought: Yup, that's me[^]!
Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant
Anonymous
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The problem with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine
Winston Churchill, 1944
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I'd just like a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
Me, all the time
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... but hosted on twitters CDN.  
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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... This week, at least. Ask me again next week.
After the total debacle of windows fastboot making my laptop's system and restore partitions look like RAW, and the even debaclier process of obtaining a recovery disc from Wenovo (names changed to protect the innocent), who kept "correcting" my address, and the debacalissimo process of watching the recovery disc take a week to show a mouse cursor on a black screen, I ripped out the HDD and replaced it (with a new, completely blank disc, it should be noted).
Giving them one last chance, I shoved Wenovo's recovery disc into a USB slot, and selected it in the boot menu...
... And it simply rebuilt the entire machine from scratch!
No mess, no fuss, just "Hey, it looks like your laptop is ***ked*! Ya wannus ta fix it? [Y/N]" (I have to paraphrase, because I can't recall the exact wording).
I had back-ups of the drivers, etc. (almost a gig of the damned things), so I had been looking forward to hours and hours of installs and reboots, but I didn't need to do any of that. The recovery disc literally took care of everything. A couple of hours later, the machine booted clean and pure, full of the joys of spring -- and with a 2TB disc, rather than the old 500gig one.
The only unfortunate thing is that it's still windows 8, but I can live with that (after a lot of judicious hacking).
Wenovo. In the good books.
(This week)
* That's "borked", you filthy-minded heathens!
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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A friend of mine connected his brand new Wenovo to charge the battery for the first time... His little kids played around and felt over the cable and the laptop after them... Nothing gone only the hard drive... I connected Wenovo to ask for a recovery disk (it wasn't in the package originally, which only contained the laptop with a protective case)... The next day I got an email with several links to download, for W7, W8.1 and W10...
I was impressed...
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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These days, seeing tech companies do good things for their customers makes a very pleasant change.
I'll buy from them again, that much is certain.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I did as much with an old desktop HP back in 2010 and I was very hapy - but I won't buy from them due to the absymal hardware quality.
ASUS also worked fine for me, without even needing the disks I had to create at the very beginning.
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP. -- TNCaver
When I was six, there were no ones and zeroes - only zeroes. And not all of them worked. -- Ravi Bhavnani
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That's good, it sounds like they're trying to re-brand after Superfish[^].
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
- Benjamin Disraeli
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Tail between their legs, on that one.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Just a suggestion: Once you have a perfectly working system, take an image of the systems drive and make an emergency boot media that can re-image your drive. The process of re-imaging typically takes 10 to 15 minutes, compared to a complete rebuild that takes hours.
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
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I don't normally keep computers long enough to make it worth the storage of shadow copies, etc.
This was a special case, where it was windows itself that killed the machine (error 00xc0000185; look it up. It kills a lot of machines*, and you don't get recovery discs with personal PCs, any more).
* The %$#*ing Operating System kills the machines! WTFingF are those cretins doing?!? The purpose of an OS is to make the hardware work, not to kill it!
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I did search before posting, so apologies if it's an old trick and has been mentioned already.
Helping a friend over the weekend, we were rudely greeted by Chrome's message of no connectivity.
Immediately Daz perked up and started bashing away on the keyboard. Looking over with idle amusement, I realised that the offline dinosaur picture you're shown is actually the main character of an easter-egg game the developers left.
When you see the t-rex, either hit space or the arrow keys to start the game. Ha! Too funny.
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Dunno, so far I haven't met a dinosaur I didn't like...
Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant
Anonymous
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The problem with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine
Winston Churchill, 1944
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I'd just like a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
Me, all the time
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