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The Impact of Technophobes
fsharp writes "Most of us have experience with average folks requesting technical support. I have friends and family members that would be lost without my support. I opt for a sliding scale payment plan, usually dinner. At any rate, The New York Times has a nice piece on the impact of technophobes on the Internet (vis-a-vis MyDoom and other email-borne viruses) and their technologically adept friends and family."
I read this article earlier this morning. Parts of it felt like reading a biography of myself. Anyone else feel that way?
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
. . . the biggest problem is the just-plain-dumbasses.
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
I'm glad that so many people don't understand what I do. That makes me more valuable.
I'm coin operated baby!
[ Don't reply to this ]
i wear one of the thinkgeek "no i will not fix your computer" shirts
I've experienced the same frustration plenty of times myself, having ushered several family members and friends on to the internet, only to be confronted by the same ridiculous ( HOW COULD YOU DO THAT?!?!?! ) behaviors.
:)
The fact of the matter is, most people treat computers like a glorified appliance. A computer should more aptly be treated like a motor vehicle; yeah, you can go have some fun in it but you'd better drive defensively and know how to operate the thing properly. You don't just take it out of the box and start pressing buttons
Can we really blame the users though? After having dealt with plenty of computer illiterates in my day, I've come to realize that advertising and computer companies are at least as responsible as the users themselves. Inasmuch as they may be advertised to be so, a computer is not "plug and play". It requires maintenance and careful attention! Computer companies have put the average consumer into a "PRES BUTAN TO INTERNET!!!" mindset, and it's a bit hard to get them out of it.
Frankly, though, I can't say that it bothers me too much. Computer illiterates are my best source of favors. You need all that spyware removed and windows reinstalled? Yeah, well I need some vodka. Of course the fact that they do a nice job of filling my inbox with crap (both viruses themselves, and spam from hijacked machines) certainly gets on my nerves, but I've got my fingers crossed waiting for the next breed of mail protocol which should solve these problems altogether.
Sometimes things just work out
Sounds like you're on the other end of the technoadept/technophobe spectrum than you think.
When people ask me what I do know. I am a janitor. If they push, I am a high tech janitor.
The moment a prase like "I work computers" comes out of your mouth. Or "I work on Cisco stuff" you get a nice carpet bombing of questions and requests for help.
Just lie, it is not worth the fight. Fun/Pain ratio is way out of wack on this one.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
My parents asked me yesterday how to rewind a dvd. I laughed... and then realized they weren't jokin. Then i was sad.
----------
Battlewang Where the large win big
From the article...
Miriam Tauber, 24, makes no apologies for her lack of computer knowledge. To her, computers are like "moody people" who behave illogically.
Uh oh. Computers, by definition, are cold and logical. They don't have personalities. They don't have moods.
If users think computers do have mood swings just like the typical female human, we've got serious user education problems. They clearly don't know the basics of what a computer does, and that makes it much harder to explain how to properly operate a computer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/05/technology/05VIR U.html?ex=1076562000&en=4c668483a7875695&ei=5062&p artner=GOOGLE
One reason TCO on office computers is so high is that it takes a disproportionate amount of time to deal with the one or two people who swear that the computer maliciously changes their settings whenever they look away from the screen. The sort of people that comlain that their systems been "hacked" becuase they have the caps lock key on and therefor cant enter their password. Whenever I see one of these people waddle over to my office I just KNOW its going to be a long hard day of explaining why and how computers do and dont work.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Of course, you're better off simply throwing them at something other than the Internet...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
That is what the computer industry is about, makeing computers accessable to the end users. If we do not help them, then we are self defetting.
It is our jobs to make it easy to use. Be it as a programmer, a sysadm, or a help desk person. The end goal is to get the end user to use the product.
Looking at the 300 or so copies of MS-related virus crap caught by my procmail filters in the past day, I'm starting to think that internet licences are a good idea...
It is more worth my time and money to spend $399 on the cheapo Dell PC for my dad and just have him call tech support when he needs help. Dad's not technical and my patience has worn thin for technical support of "click, double click," etc.
"So, Dad, what did Dell say when you called them? "
"I didn't call em yet"
"Okay, well, ya know we paid for that with the computer. Let's get our money's worth..."
Seems to be the best deal going for me.
-- There is no sig line, only Zuul.
More like Technoidiots, or maybe Technomorons.
Too late to add to the poll?
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
Actually, its the ones who think that they know what's wrong who are the most difficult to help. They tell you all the information that led them to their conclusion, ignoring the one fact right in front of their nose which would contradict it...
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
I've found Mac zealot's better-than-thou attitude self-selects against having friends, which solves the problem on its own.
The biggest problem is the Technolazy, people who have seen to much Star Trek, or who have been so brainwashed by the 'ctrl-alt-del' mentality, that they assume things are easy when they aren't. Driving a car, operating a VCR, or designing a website are all DIFFICULT tasks, which require attention to detail, and have strict guidelines to avoid failure.
None of this matters to the Technolazy, who stomp their feet when the "computer doesn't want to print" or when it goes "beep beep" and totally eats their very good paper. Technolazies also refuse to admit that paying for real hardware, quality software, and educated tech support is necessary - they all know someone who "kows computers". Resoning typically doesn't work, since "they heard" something from someone, and so therefore they know more than you about T1 lines, printer drivers, SCSI drives or database software.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
that particular sentence is particularly annoying. if you go to china, YOU learn chinese or hire a translator. otherwise you don't go to china.
if she want to use a computer, she will have to learn how to deal with them. i work for an isp, when i receive a virus infected email, i cut off their internet access plain and simple. they can call back to have it reactivated after they get someone competent to disinfect it.
the burnout for those on the other end of the phone when you call tech support is like 8 or 9 months... talk about a hard demanding job.
Evolution or ID?
Geeks Put the Unsavvy on Alert: Learn or Log Off
By AMY HARMON
hen Scott Granneman, a technology instructor, heard that one of his former students had clicked on a strange e-mail attachment and infected her computer with the MyDoom Internet virus last week, empathy did not figure anywhere in his immediate response.
"You actually got infected by the virus?" he wrote in an e-mail message to the former student, Robin Woltman, a university grant administrator. "You, Robin? For shame!"
As MyDoom, the fastest-spreading virus ever, continues to clog e-mail in-boxes and disrupt business, the computer-savvy are becoming openly hostile toward the not-so-savvy who unwittingly play into the hands of virus writers.
The tension over the MyDoom virus underscores a growing friction between technophiles and what they see as a breed of technophobes who want to enjoy the benefits of digital technology without making the effort to use it responsibly.
The virus spreads when Internet users ignore a basic rule of Internet life: never click on an unknown e-mail attachment. Once someone does, MyDoom begins to send itself to the names in that person's e-mail address book. If no one opened the attachment, the virus's destructive power would never be unleashed.
"It takes affirmative action on the part of the clueless user to become infected," wrote Scott Bowling, president of the World Wide Web Artists Consortium, expressing frustration on the group's discussion forum. "How to beat this into these people's heads?"
Many of the million or so people who have so far infected their computers with MyDoom say it is not their fault. The virus often comes in a message that appears to be from someone they know, with an innocuous subject line like "test" or "error." It is human nature, they say, to open the mail and attachments.
But computer sophisticates say it reflects a willful ignorance of basic computer skills that goes well beyond virus etiquette. At a time when more than two-thirds of American adults use the Internet, they say, such carelessness is no longer excusable, particularly when it messes things up for everyone else.
For years, many self-described computer geeks seemed eager to usher outsiders onto their electronic frontier. Everyone, it seemed, had a friend or family member in the geek elite who could be summoned ? often frequently ? in times of computer crisis.
But as those same friends and family members are called upon again and again to save the computer incompetents from themselves, the geeks' patience is growing thin. As it does, a new kind of digital divide is opening up between populations of computer users who must coexist in the same digital world.
"Viruses are just the tip of the iceberg," said Bill Melcher, who runs his own technical support business in San Francisco. "When it comes to computers, a lot of intelligent people and fast learners just decide that they don't know."
Many of the computationally confused say they suffer from genuine intimidation and even panic over how to handle the mysterious machines they have come to rely on for so much of daily life. Virus writers, spammers and scammers, they say, are the ones who should be held accountable for the chaos they cause.
But as the same people equip themselves with fancy computers and take advantage of the Internet for things like shopping and banking, critics say that their perpetual state of confusion has begun to get tiresome. And while the Internet's traditional villains remain elusive, those inadvertently helping them tend to be friends and neighbors.
Some in the technocamp imagine requiring a license to operate a computer, just like the one required to drive a car. Others are calling for a punishment that fits a careless crime. People who click on virus attachments, for instance, could be cut off by their Internet service providers until they proved that their machines had been disinfected.
And some, tired of being treated like free help lines, are
Just because I don't care, it doesn't mean I don't understand. Homer J. Simpson
Geeks Put the Unsavvy on Alert: Learn or Log Off
this is a shocking misnomer. people who are technophobes write letters with fountain pens. the people this article is referring to are 'techno-dumbasses'.
Go read some bible: nubible.com
Since I can't help over the phone without an identical system to examine, I require they buy me identical hardware and software. This has been so successful that I'm prepared to expand my offer to the general public. I'm available for server and network support, as well, on a unit-for-unit basis. You've got 50 servers? Buy me 50 of the same and we're good to go.
The original article is a perfect example of why tech jobs are going offshore. I can get 10 guys in India instead of just one American nerd and the Indians won't lecture me about how inept a computer user I am and they don't mind when or how often I call. Indians: better, cheaper, faster.
And in his case he's got a Ph.D so he's already got a good amount of elitism going for him.
Your solution is to only support the minority because minority operating systems don't get viruses? Let's pretend Macintosh became 90% of the desktop market and Windows became 10%, just like that. Now all the people who write viruses have switched platforms. Now Macs DO have the virus/worm issues that Windows currently has in the real world, which is the first and I'm assuming the primary reason you stated for not supporting Windows users when it comes to tech support. I wonder how much your opinion of the respective operating systems would change in this hypothetical situation.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
is that even though I barely know enough to get by a lot of the time, and really all I do is make webpages which of course anyone HERE would know doesn't have anything to do with actually operating a computer, anyone who doesn't understand the technology or can't find the power button assumes I'm some kind of 7337 hacker than can solve all their problems or tell what brand of computer they have when they say "it's one of the beige ones with a CD-ROM."
And I can't help them, I couldn't if I wanted to, and so I end up looking like a jerk to my family because I "won't" help them fix their computer and they think I'm lying about it just because I spend half my time on the internet writing plain old HTML. Now that's annoying.
My Webcomic: Asylum on 5th Street
Good one, but your URL has 2 spaces in it (damn the /. text editor). It's much better like this.
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
From the point of view of a non-educated user, they think clicking on the "click here to be removed from this list" link in an e-mail is what to do to in order to get less spam. They think running the patch that comes in via e-mail will protect their system. They think the deposed Nigerian leader who e-mails them really needs their help and will pay them millions...
The common bond? What you see in e-mail, particularly an e-mail from somebody you've never heard of before, cannot be taken at face value. Just because it's in an e-mail doesn't make it true.
Maybe the safest thing to do would be to set up clueless users with a whitelist-based e-mail client... if a sender is not already in the address book the message won't be displayed, with maybe a "Knock-knock, do you know this person?" box for unrecognized senders. That'd at least cut down on the number of scams...
Click Here
Google link, for the tin foil hat impaired
First off, does anyone else find it highly disturbing that a PhD is not only posting on Slashdot, but FIRST posting? I think the apocalypse is near.
Also, my only solution to the "family tech support" problem has been to either ignore the question (if it was via email or voice mail this is easy to do) or act surly when I answer it. Eventually, the family decides it's easier to just try and figure out the problem themselves, or ask someone else, then it is to deal with the hassle of having me fix it.
If your family wants you to be tech support, be BAD tech support, and eventually they'll stop asking.
I charge my family and friends a standard callout fee of 1 cookie, and then 1 cookie per hour onwards up to 4 hours where a sandwhich is then required. A beer is required on the 8th hour, as is another sandwhich.
It works very well.
Or, here's a link to a non-NYT version at the International Herald-Tribune. Enjoy!
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
clicky
I opt for a sliding scale payment plan, usually dinner
Thats very modest of you. I also know a family that I'm usually generous with. I opt for dinner when I tell them to flick the power switch to ON.
The other rates are:
Dinner + Lunch: When I tell them its a blackout and you cannot switch it ON yet
Ride to Work for a week: When I have to tell them that their Admin password is blank
Pay monthly rent: When I have to tell them that the CD drive is not for hot coffee cup holder
Adopt me: When I have to tell them that 'Any' key really means what it means
I am working on getting into the Will soon!
Free XBox, PS2
Just Google it. There is nothing that cannot be googled. Back when I knew little about computers I googled my computer out of the woods from several viruses. If you look hard enough you can always find people asking your questions. As for the plain dumbasses, just tell them there's nothing wrong with their computer. They'll believe it because an expert said so.
people trying to get free advice from Doctors...or lawyers...or heck any other professional ?
There must be some doctor/lawyer/non-it professional reading slashdot ? is there ? please, I for one would like to know how you deal with friends/family/co-workers asking for free advise/troubleshooting...
I thought of this sticker immediately when i rtfa.
Can we really blame the users though?
Yes. Yes, we can.
I often use the analogy of the car when describing tech tasks: no one expects to buy a car and have it run forever (and remain safe) without maintenance. Most people understand the need to check tires (treadwear, air pressure), get the oil changed, etc. Draw parallels to these items for technically-challenged folks and they seem to understand. YMMV.
No one should purchase potentially problematic machines (computers, blenders, cars, etc.) without understanding in a general sense how these things work. I would like to think that would be common sense, but common sense is often neither common nor sense. Discuss.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
A few years ago I had a part time job at the IS helpdesk. On my last day, I wrote a fond farewell message to the people, told them how to get in touch if they wanted to(they were nice and cool people), and mentioned that I was going to forget everything I know about computers at around 5pm that afternoon...
perhaps I've been spoiled by my email programs but I've found that you have to do quite a few steps to execute an attachment. I've used outlook, pine and several web-based email services. In every case if a file is a zip or exe, I have to first save it to disk. Only then can I open it.
Is this virus spreading due to people going out of their way to open attachments in this fashon? If they know enough how to save to disk and then open it, wouldn't you think they would know damn well better?
Blaze a trail to the New World
I only have time to tell this funny story...
A middle-aged woman I know called up and said her brand-new PC wouldn't turn on at all. She'd hooked everything up and just got this cryptic error message on the screen.
I drove all the way out to her suburban house from my apartment in the city, and when I got there I asked her to turn on her computer.
She pushed the button on her monitor and her monitor turned on, displaying a message that there was no signal.
I asked her to now turn her computer on, and she said, "I just did! This is all it shows! What's wrong with it?"
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
...the average computer user isn't going to start becoming computer-savy anytime soon. Even this generation of children are woefully ignorant for the most part. Look at the VCR -- it's been out for ages, and I know that most people still cannot figure out how to program it to record at a certain time or program the clock.
At some point in time, software developers are going to have to come to grips with the fact that their target market isn't going to smarten up, and start building dumber and dumber applications.
The solution to email-bourne viruses isn't to tell people "don't click on attachments." If we want to prevent this, we need to change email programs so that attachments can't do what they are capable of currently. It isn't going to work any other way.
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
Macs don't have the virus or worm issues that Windows has, Macs work when you plug peripheral hardware into them
If Macs work so well, why the hell are you doing support for your friends?
'Technophobe' implies an irrational fear. But if somebody is catching viruses they are almost certainly using windows. The fear of windows technology is quite rational. I'm afraid of it. If you and your computer are trafficking in MyDoom virus, the appropriate term for you is probably techno-schlemiel, techno-sucker, techno-gomeral, techno-dupe, but not technophobe.
Stepping over your obviously sexist, but typically
In fact, I love that my weed dealer is techno-stupid. I average about an ounce a month from him for consulting fees :-). The fact of the matter is, he really isn't that stupid. It's not like he's calling me to install office, more like "Dude, can you help me with my fstab stuff, I can't write to my fat32 drive except as root". Nothing difficult, but not really intuitive. In reality, he is just too lazy to search Google groups. I say let'em be stupid, they pay my bills and buy my weed.
ymmv
Technoclowns need nothing more than a "glorified appliance" and they should be able to treat them as such. My mother should never have a need to "recompile a kernal" or anything like that. All she needs to do is "Turn the picture thing on" and maybe click the email icon.
If there is email in her box it should be:
1)her email
2)the system should be smart (or dumb) enough not to provide her with something that is going to infect itself.
Expand these 2 rules to any other application that her appliance should do.
Example - Looking up movie times. Application should:
1)Show movie times
2)the system should be smart (or dumb) enough not to provide her with something that is going to infect itself.
The problem is forcing mega machines on people that only need an information appliance (or maybe allowing those people to buy them)
Post: Sigged, for your pleasure.
I help my family member and friends when I can. At my part time job, I'm the computer guru, though all I do is basic spreadsheets with Excel.
You'd be amazed at how often I hear something like "I didn't know you could do that," or "That way is so much easier" from my boss. She isn't completely computer illiterate, but she didn't grow up with a pc instead of a dog as I did.
"When God kisses Satan and the Incarnations applaud." "Death is dead. Long live Death!"
Here ya' go!
http://zapatopi.net/afdb.html
But there is suspicious lack of detail on the Menace To The North.
I love fountain pens, have ~12 of them, from Montblanc to Rotring (best, IMHO).
:-)
I'm also a quite good NetAdmin/BOFH.
Don't pick up the pho*(@)$*@&@!@ NO CARRIER
to become greed/fear/ego based LIEforms?
could happen?
I agree, you should just hop in/on and use it.
They should both work without knowledge of how they work, have clearly defined maintenance routines that will keep them in good condition, and the dealer network should provide adequate skilled staff who will perform normal maintenence and other repairs for a reasonable, defined standard cost.
Computers are treated like cars, people don't maintain them. Tires are always flat and bald, they don't change their oil, or check the other fluids. Few know how they actually work, people complain about all the garages ripping them off, even though that have little or no idea what is actually going on.
I've lost count of the number of people I've talked to who said, "Um, I think I'm infected..." and don't even have anti-virus software installed. To them, I ask:
Do people not read the news? Every time a major virus is sent across the Net, the morning news talks about it and even specifies that the email has the "From" address from infected people who has your email adderss in their contact list. So, with radio, T.V. and newspaper telling you exactly what to look out for and what not to do (i.e. open it), you would think people would get the hint! However, chaos reigns.
It is not our abilities that show what we truly are... it is our choices.
I find it more disturbing that he is referring Linux and other Unix operating systems as being seperate from MacOS. I hope he realizes that the current MacOS is a Unix OS and that although it has some interfaces to help the user configure stuff that there are other Unix OS's that provide similiar things.
I think it depends on the extent of the support. I have friends/family that are lawyers, and doctors, and sure, I'd ask them a few questions, but I wouldn't go to them for a full check-up.
Similarly, my friends/family ask me for tech support, but this can work out quite well, with paid nixers from their contacts/colleagues, etc. as I'm known as someone who knows what they are doing technically.
Us tutors in computer labs
Us support technicians
Us customer service people in general.
Pray for us, lest we do something totally irrational, illegal and damning.
What?! I can't believe--come here! Come here you little--!
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
It's interesting how there's quite a large population of unemployed geeks, yet an overload of computer problems out in the wild. If you want us to clean up the mess you're making... pay us! Making the mess and then asking us to clean it up for free just isn't going to work.
Interestingly, this entire discussion stems from the limitations of semi-literate (read: average computer users) that many of us forget about when we discuss the latest trends and technologies. My concern is that the gap between the computer literate and the semi-literate could possibly be greater now than it was in the mid 1980s, when computers were quirky and used mostly by hobbyists and very specific business-related activities, and few people owned them for home use in the public at large.
The frustration seems to stem from not just the myriad of viruses, but also the necessity of weekly anti-virus updates, spyware, and the absolutely requirement for some type of firwall on Windows-based computers. I dare say that the level of technical knowledge to maintain a computer today is higher than it was twenty years ago. People seem to gloss over ideas like this but having been involved with computers for more than twenty years, I think it's important to reflect on this once and a while. Regards, Goalive - who was given 'bad karma' on Slashdot because not everyone shares his sense of humor :-/
If I drove a car without obtaining a Driver's License first, not only would I be breaking the law, but I would a danger to the other drivers on the road and a liability to my insurance company. While any clueful admin secures their server (akin to having airbags and wearing your seatbelt), they can still face problems due to the irresponsibility of other people.
I foresee in the next 20 years a program being implemented where people have to learn basic computer skills and obtain a "license" of some sort before being allowed to use a computer or order service from an ISP. Perhaps even the equivilent or a "learners' permit" for people who are just getting started and want to use a computer under the guidance of someone who is more experienced. Using a computer without a valid license would make you subject to fines and imprisonment in extreme cases. Spreading a virus through ignorance will result in getting "points" on your license. If you get too many points you lose your license and have to get a new one.
On a related note, I actually RTed the FA, and saw one of IBM's Linux ads on the page, which I thought was rather nifty.
I've found in my 8 or so years of computer use that there will always be problems. No matter what. Everyone has them too. I have been in tech support for roughly 3 years and have found that most end users don't know how to plug in their own equipment, let alone use it properly. But then again, can you expect them to read the manual? It has all those big, foreign looking words and acronyms like USB, DDR, SDRAM and motherboard. Does a computers memory actually remember things anyway? Will I have to keep a fire extinguisher next to my computer if I get a Firewire drive?
What you need to realize is that these people are what drive innovations and pay my salary. They have money, and if it helps them get their computer to work in a way that they can use it, they will spend lots of money on it, whether it be a new component they don't know how to set up, or a couple hours of my time. If it solves their problem, they'll do it.
When people ask me what I do know. I am a janitor.... The moment a prase like "I work computers" comes out of your mouth. Or "I work on Cisco stuff" you get a nice carpet bombing of questions and requests for help.
Here's a thought: consider the possibility of spending $30 on business cards. When this feared carpet bombing of questions comes, hand out business cards & tell them to call you during office hours. If/when the phone rings, start the "billable hours" clock and get a lease on a Porsche.
At least, that's the way it worked when *I* was getting started.... What? It's not the mid-90's?? Oh, never mind... maybe you really should be a janitor; you'll have better job security.
--Mid
But that would cost me $34,950, even before the hardware!
The virus spreads when Internet users ignore a basic rule of Internet life: never click on an unknown e-mail attachment. Once someone does, MyDoom begins to send itself to the
names in that person's e-mail address book.
Ah, a "basic rule of the Internet"... never open unknown email attachments. So why do we rely on the user to understand this rule? Why don't the common beginning-level email programs (read: Outlook) make it very difficult (impossible?) for beginners to open potentially-dangerous attachments from email addresses that aren't in the address book? Seems like there is too much blaming the victim going on here, and not enough protecting them.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Look here's the deal. I'm willing to do work for you, many hours of work in some cases. I'll fix what geeksquad, compusa, or whatever other halfass outfit has fucked up for free. But I expect you to sit down with me and learn how to prevent what got hosed. I don't mind teaching, I've mentored a lot of techs over the years, but I do mind if people dont implement what I teach them.
It's a little like having someone's engine freeze because they ran out of oil. You explain to them that they need to get an oil change, you tell them the enormous number of hours involved, and you repair their engine for them. They thank you and you forget about it, until a year later their now rebuilt engine once more seizes because it ran out of oil. There are only so many times you will fix it before telling them to take care of it on their own.
The issue is not the doing, the issue is the redoing when someone now knows better. I think the solution may be a really basic newbie web page somewhere that teaches people very basic lessons. It has to be made so as not to be patronizing, or people will dismiss it and ignore.
If it covered just these 5 things the Internet would be a much better place.
Dont open attachments from anybody that hasn't verbally told you they one.
Get a popup blocker and do not accept any "offer" that you didn't go looking for.
Antivirus software, use it, update it, and run it at least once a week - all of which can be automated.
Get Ad-Aware and use it. Treat it just like you do your antivirus.
Patch your computer! Go to the appropriate OS update site and use it.
People need to take some responsibility for their own computers. As tempting as the idea for a license is, it would become to easy to politicize. Perhaps we should start holding inviduals financially responsible when their system gets hijacked and inflicts damage on other systems?
everyone wants to blame either the users or the virus writers but not the developers. In most cases microsoft, but not exclusively microsoft, is the problem. training users to bad habits such as double clicking on every icon they see, building software that hides an implicit expectation of knowledge in a user interface that encourages ignorance, and making a system that is unable to handle any of the consequences gracefully. Mac suffers from many of the same problems but their system can handle the consequences better than windows.
Why would you build an email client to systematically treat files as trusted and place an implicit responsibility on the user to act the opposite?
IHT? Yuck. Side scrolling javascript web pages that call columns "pages" is almost as bad as requiring a subscription.
You sicken me man.
Here's the NY Times link for anybody that is too lazy to reconstruct it yourself.
and shes a hell of a lot more tech savvy than she's made out to be. thats all.
Me: Now email me that file, the one on your desktop Them: How would it have got onto my deskop, I didn't print it out? True story.
I have friends and family members that would be lost without my support.
I'm not gonna take any shit from my wife.
I'm not gonna take any shit from my mom.
I'm not gonna take any shit from my boss.
I'm not gonna take any shit from my brother in law.
So Yes even if MAC OSX was the top dog there would only be one or two major problems a year, Unlike the 4-5 you get with Microsoft.
I run both windows, and linux. I use the linux box to connect to the outside world, and the windows box to play games on.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
The article captures in a nutshell one of my biggest pet peeves; people who wish to benefit from the "neato" technology without lifting a fucking finger to understand how it works or what it can do. I used to try to be helpful, but after getting phone calls from neighbors who have managed to get ten consecutive viruses on their computer by doing the same thing ten times in a row, I quit. It just wasn't worth it to try to help someone who refuses to learn. I would normally suggest that we (the collective /. we, that is) just refuse to help these idiots and let nature take its course, but, sadly, that's not an option anymore either. By wallowing in their ignorance and clicking on attachments, banner ads and spam, the actions of the unwashed many are now having a direct and dire impact on our own internet experience. I'm not going to pretend that I know what to do, other than perhaps kill off most of humanity. Which may indeed end up being the only solution to the mess we're all now mired in. Maybe someone has a better idea...I sure don't.
Boycott everything - they're all trying to fuck you one way or another
Welcome to the apocalypse... by your logic a female PhD posting on Slashdot has GOT to signal the end of the world, right?
I prefer to be called Evil Scientist.
Most of us have experience with average folks requesting technical support. I have friends and family members that would be lost without my support
when I was in college, I was probably responsible for getting about half of my dorm onto the campus network, installing ethernet cards, netware drivers, etc. At the time I was only 19, so I made anyone I helped out buy me a 6 pack for my troubles. In fact, it became my going rate, and I drank for free for most of my first semester. These days access to beer is not the hard part, but I still do tech support for my friends, and I still make them pay me in beer. Just last night my roomates motherboard fried, so I swapped out his harddrive and peripherals into an old gateway box i had lying around. It took me about an hour, but it was definitely worth the sixer.
Congrats! You nix folks just assured the DEATH of Linux.
You all should e-mail Linus and beg forgivness.
It's an old argument. Putting aside the "Which one is used more" argument, I feel that Macs are less likely to be infected because the platform was built from the ground up with security in mind. (OS X is a descendant of OpenBSD, no?)
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Some people even get genuinely offended by their computers because they unprovokingly personified these entities of plastic, metal and wiring.
Well, considering the hatred for the US, once you start punishing acquaintances, then you may as well nuke the middle east. Seems many are associated in one form or another with terrorists. The thing to do is to modify our foriegn policy and just punish the actual terrorists instead of going down the slippery slope of acquaintance punishment.
My best friend is in a methadone clinic, does that make me a junky?
ymmv
For instance, I have several family members with computers: if I ask them if they have a firewall or have current virus definitions they look at me like whats that? and So what?
Hell most of them don't even check for Windows patches, much less wonder why there computer is slow as hell, they just think it's time for an upgrade - not to check for spyware, virii, worms, etc.
Some even tell me 'what the problem is' and refuse any explanation, for example Program X doesn't work correctly it needs more memory. Mind you that the individual doesn't know how, what, which memory to buy (or is compatible) or that it might be due to all of the 500 apps open in his taskbar.
Most home computers SHOULD be glorified applainces. The average user doesn't need all of the complexity of the current generation of computers and really shouldn't have to deal with it. It is not the fault of the user that they know so little about systems so easily broken. Not everyone has the time, energy or desire to learn about all of the ways in which Windows can self-immolate.
The problem is that computers are designed by geeks for geeks. They need to be designed by skilled industrial designers for complete morons.
And for us gearheads there should be the option to buy complex and tempramental computers/OSes, just like people can still buy cars with manual transmissions.
The age of "you must be a computer nerd" are over and it's time that software designers recognized that fact.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
A headline eerily reminiscent of the lyrics from the Greatest Geek Song Of All-Time, namely Clock DVA's "The Hacker", likely inspired by Bethlehem, the first widespread PC virus.
The date is not a typo. Ninteteen Eighty-Eight.
> "There are these MP3's and PDF's and a million other things that you don't even know what they are," Ms. Tauber said. "I don't feel like I need to figure out computers, because my instinct is there's just no way."
Miriam Tauber, the song doesn't say "Learn Fifteen Years From Now". It says NOW.
As a Linux user, I am sick of my Windows using freinds having problems. So I use my Linux skills to fix windows.
Useful Linux tools.
K-noppix. The Universal boot disk. Useful for deleting viruses, partitioning hard drives and of course getting rid of windows
Ports of famous Linux programs for Windows
Use this to secure the internet
It is working! Many people have asked me for my Linux CDRs and cannot be any happier. Linux saved my life as a techie. With the new KDE 3.2 there really is no excuse not to use Linux, as it is now almost totally idiot proof!
I disagree, few people come even close to properly maintaining their vehicle.
Go look at a 4-5yr old big flashy SUV, the tires are probaly flat/bald or not rotated (back/front wear).
Blenders are problematic? The good ones have only a few buttons (on/off/ice). There are no issues, you put stuff in, turn on, wash it occasionally, a very nice appliance.
This is why computer types hate people.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
"But computer sophisticates say it reflects a willful ignorance of basic computer skills that goes well beyond virus etiquette. At a time when more than two-thirds of American adults use the Internet, they say, such carelessness is no longer excusable, particularly when it messes things up for everyone else."
Where does user inexperience end and bad design begin? Is it reasonable to say that inspecting file attachments for possible viruses is a "basic computer skill"? Especially when the return address is likely a person who you know and trust, possibly even your handy computer guru?
Trashing users is not really productive. Unless they live and breathe computers they are not going to keep up on every new variation of probelms, and shouldn't be expected to.
What we want ordinary users to do is maintain a reasonable level of security. Mostly that means running a decent virus checker and being prudent about attachments.
Telling people to never open attachments is just plain pointless - everyone on e-mail uses file attachments, and people are not going stop sending photos and jokes. It's reasonable for a user to see an attachment from a close friend, and again, even from their most trusted computer guru and assume that because it made it past Norton or AVG it must be OK to click it.
One of the biggest obstacles to making average users into safe computing people is the tech arrogance that leads to either calling them idiots, or to baffling them with reams of information that overwhelms instead of educating.
If you feel superior because of your immense knowledge of computing security, you should sit down by my mother-in-law, and see what she can do with her collection of $5000 computerized sewing machines. Her knowledge and skills far outstrip yours.
Although admittedly at 69 years old she's pretty darned good with a PC as well.
Three Squirrels
I'm the only one who cooks in the family and a sysadmin by profession ...
Usually if I go over to cook for my family I wind up looking at the mal/spyware virus infected pieces of junk. After three - four months most peoples pc's really need to be wiped clean. Unfortunately I'm not up on all the windows crap anymore since I stopped using it years ago.
OS X has a monstrous commercial backing that has usability at or near the top of its agenda. Even if there ar emore Linux boxen than OS X boxen out there, the average home user is more likely to have heard of Macs than Linux.
Also, Linux and BSD(therefore OS X) aren't from the same codebase. They have roughly the same structure, and they often run the same programs, but that's it.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Not really, I'm well aware that plenty of females post on Slashdot. I also know several female PhDs.
Just because you have a chip on your shoulder about your gender doesn't mean I'm the one that's sexist
D'oh. Severing information, that is.
Your solution is to only support the minority because minority operating systems don't get viruses? Let's pretend Macintosh became 90% of the desktop market and Windows became 10%, just like that.
Let's suppose that that in a certain area there is a pattern of carjacking - sedans are more often assaulted than wagons (I'm making this up right now, but actually patterns like this are often quite significant). If someone asks me for advice, my advice is "buy a wagon". I won't enter theoretical ramblings that "in theory, there is nothing inherent in sedans that makes them more dangerous, it's just a coincidence, let's suppose it's the other way around, see? then it would be the other way around". Here we have exactly the same case - okay, maybe the lack of viruses it's not a virtue of the MacOS itself (although I could argue on that - for a start, Mail.app does not treat attachments the way the default Windows mail client does). But even if it's not - it's still a good advice for a customer, avoid the platform (a vehicle etc.) that attracts bad guys. When the situation changes, change your advice. Although it's highly unlikely in this case, Macs will never get 90% and Apple has no intention of doing so.
Computers are moody and illogical. You have to remember to feed her at least once a year with new hardware. Oh, and be sure to clean her regularly, especially those nasty heat sinks that seem to collect every speck of dust that has ever existed in the room.
It doesn't hurt to pet her daily or to complement her on how well she is multitasking today. Remember, just like women, flattery works some/most of the time. Complement her on how sharp her monitor is looking today and she'll flash you that gorgeous smile we have all come to love.
Do these things, and you'll have a cordial companion for as long as you need. Just don't forget that those pesky solar flares that run on fourteen-year cycles will occasionally cause random errors in her logic.
Switch something here, switch something there, and your relationship with her turns from sailing happily through blue skies to finding your way past those pesky blue-screens-of-death some of us are all to familiar with.
See, our computers are much like our significant others. They are just a bit more loyal I think. Now... I just have to find some way to keep her from PTP sharing with that nice Xeon server two buildings over.
"When God kisses Satan and the Incarnations applaud." "Death is dead. Long live Death!"
If you actually read the post you'd see that:
- viruses are the not the main reason that the poster only supports Macs
- Windoze PCs are not the only systems he complains about and won't support (he mentioned IRIX for pete's sake!)
The point of the post is that you don't have to dink around for hours to get a Mac to work. Stuff really does just work when you plug it in.Nope. There are zero known viruses for Mac OS X, none, nada, zippity-do-da. There are about 60 viruses for OS 9, as well as a few that macro viruses that infect MS Office (which runs on both Windows and Mac)
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
I completely agree. Some of the worst viruses do not really even begin to exploit the OS weaknesses of windows. They are activated by the ignorance of users. Anyone could write an executable piece of code for macs that would function the same way these viruses and worms operate. Same for Linux. Really, these users are literally ASKING their computers to run a piece of code and send copies to everyone in their address book. This has less to do with the OS and more to do with the computer simply doing as it is told.
Those that suggest you "dance like no one is watching" really want to see you make a complete fool of yourself.
I think this article points out one of the major weaknesses in the IT profession currently: a lack of people skills and empathy for the end user.
I've been a computer professional for over 25 years now. I'm still aghast at system administrators who take servers down on the last day of the month for maintenance, with total disregard of the fact that the company's biggest transaction volume occurs that day. Or help desk people who answer the phone in an impatient tone of voice, as if it's a major annoyance that someone is disturbing them.
Computing SHOULD be an appliance, it SHOULD be invisible. Sure, it was cool in the early days of the Internet to be among the priesthood and the elite, but that's not where it's at today. The clueless are not at fault here; it's we geeks who are at fault for designing systems for ourselves, instead of for everyone.
To answer another poster's assertion that the Internet is like a car, you can't just drive, you have to have some knowledge, I'd say this: sure, you have to know how to USE the car. But you shouldn't have to be expected to understand its architecture and occasionally pull the carburetor as well.
"Go out, get a book," suggests Zack Rubenstein, 28, who has for years provided free technical support for his extended social network. "You went to college and you got a degree, you obviously can learn something. Play around with it; it's not going to kill you."
Ok, so when your car breaks down, go to the local auto store, pick up a Chilton's and get to work. After all, it's just a car, and anyone with a degree should be smart enough to work on it. He should be using his intelligence to help people rather than berate them and bemoan the lunacy of the average user.
For three years the ONLY time she wants to talk to me is when she wants to know how to do something in AOL. I keep telling her "I have no frigging idea what to do. I dont use AOL because it is a peice of unadulterated crap. Maybe you should get a real ISP and then maybe I would be able to help you." I can tell her that on Monday and on Wednesday she is calling again. Makes me think she has alzheimers or a perpetual case of brain farts. God I wish she'd get a clue!
SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0
0 rows returned
Stop complaining about users. The fact is that computers do act irrationally and don't work as expected and allow users to do really dumb things. Hell, how can Apple, Microsoft, etc. justify that their systems DON'T come with anti-virus software? That, in Outlook, clicking on an attatchment can run an installer? That's just plain stupid. The OSes suck in terms of usability straight out of the box for new computer users and nothing has been done about it. Apple gave up the mantra of user first a long time ago (just look at the dock) so I only see it getting worse instead of better. I work at an elementary school so it is VERY obvious that computers are not designed logically/intuitively. If a 5th grader that uses computers all of the time can't figure how something works, there is probably something wrong. Why 5th grade? They have enough exposure to identify patterns but are still readily able to adapt to new ideas. As for older people trying to understand them... good luck.
Because BKAC errors are cross platform.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
I don't know where you got that from but it's just plain wrong.
There have been several.
A quick search google came up with an example from 2001 - the MAC/Simpsons@MM virus.
There would have been many others too, had I been bothered to scroll down.
This article had the strong flavor of "blame the user" when really more attention should be paid to the weaknesses inherent to the OS/apps and their configuration.
That being said, I gave up on helping people with tech support issues long ago (except when hunger compels me) when:
A friendly and jovial neighbor came up one day and said: "say, you know about computers..."
He had an old computer running windows 3.1 and was having a problem hooking a new printer up to it. He downloaded some drivers and did all kinds of things before I got to it. I don't know what he tried, but it didn't work.
I told him I'd help him out before seeing the machine (he wasn't sure even what version of windows he had) and got a wierd feeling in my gut as I watched it boot up.
I warned him this may not only not work but his computer might be messed up after the attempt.
I copied all the system files to a backup directory before beginning.
It was hard going (found some drivers on the 'Net) but eventually the hardware was installed and it worked ok. But there was a moment when the computer started really flaking out, it got totally wierd, and I remember having to go into a dos shell and mess around with some things.
That must have really gotten to him because when it got flakey he got really flakey too, and looked accusingly at me, practically pointing his finger in my face, telling me I'd ruined his computer.
I did that for free. Never again. When someone mentions they're having windows problems I tell them I don't know anything about that OS except that it's good to stay the hell away from. It makes people unreasonable.
But I do the same thing with Linux (shame on me) I don't want to hold someone's hand that's going to hold the fact I put linux on his system over my head.
I'd even hesitate to do it for a friend.
mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!
The little asterisk (*) next to his name tells us all that he's a subscriber, and therefore sees the article a little before us cheapos, so it's not as bad as you might think. :)
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
My favorite is the "run into a friend of a friend of a friend in the grocery store and the printer won't work." What kind of computer do you have? A PC... I think. OK, what kind of a printer is it? An Epson.. no wait, an HP. OK, so what operating system do you have? Operating system? Then they look horribly mystified and hurt that you can't tell them to press a single button to make it all work right while standing in the produce section having no idea what kind of system you're dealing with.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
I am asked all the time to help fix people's computers, because I'm well known in my church as "the computer guy". I used to be asked a lot more in the past, but I started telling people that I work on computers for a living, and if they needed my services, they should pay me.
There are some people who get very offended at this, because they expect something for free, which I find astonishing and repulsive at the same time. I would not attend the type of church that caters to the class of people who constantly want handouts. One of my best friends at church is a florist. Do these people expect him to bring free flowers to them every Sunday? Of course not. I am no different.
Anyway, this past Sunday I spent all afternoon fixing the computer that belongs to the church. The secretary had clicked on one of those viruses, and infected her computer. She's been told not to click on attachments before, so this is clearly a problem with incompetency or even insubordination. I agree with the article. Users need to get smart, quick. If not, they will have to face the consequences.
--Guns don't kill people, abortion clinics kill people.
But perhaps tough love is sometimes OK. For instance, when I was in the school almost everyone would forget to log out their account at least once. The standard procedure, which I noticed have been formalized into nice documentation on the net, was to edit their login.com to automatically log them off next time then tried to log in. This was a non-destructive instrument to help them learn to log off. It embarrassed the user by forcing them to ask for technical help, but did no damage to the account.
Of course, if all the viruses, worms, and DDOS attacked have not embarrassed MS or Windows users, it means they have no shame and probably cannot be rehabilitated. For the rest of the world, there is hope.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
every time i see this argument i cringe. it's simply not true. gee you send me an attachment in mac os x. pardon me while i open a terminal, chmod it to +x, and then run it with ./command. that's assuming you sent a plain binary. consider the same with a mac Folder.app. just to test this, i took an application and sent it to myself as an attachment. apple's mail.app automatically zips the .app (since you can't send folders). so the average user would have to unzip and then run it. clicking the attachment say: Warning, this attachment is an application. since applications can contain viruses or be harmful to your computer, be sure this attachment is from a trustworhty sender before saving or opening it. that sounds a hell of a lot more cautionary than outlook express and outlook.
i don't know if you're getting the trend here, but it's a LOT harder to quickly run an application sent as an attachment in os x. enough to the point that most users won't impulse run something.
even after all this, the most viruses on os x can do is wipe files you own. granted this could mean all your personal files, this does not mean your system folder or other user's home folders which are safe.
- tristan
My solution for friends and family that ask for technical support is simply that I will help them out if they have a Macintosh. Otherwise, there is no way I have the time to troubleshoot and support Windows, Linux or other Unix operating systems.
In other words, to paraphrase "I am no longer competent to administer or help out with anything more complicated than a toaster, as I haven't worked in the field in years. But rather than admit my own shortcomings, I'm going to blame my atrophied skillset and laziness on you and make you feel guilty for having chosen to run an operating system I am no longer familiar with. Furthermore, I'm going to take that guilt and leverage it into evangelizing the One and Only Computer System(tm) according to My Doctrine(tm): Apple."
Which would be fine, except for the blaming others, guilt trips, and blind evangelism.
I too encourage anyone and everyone who will listen to use something (anything!) other than Microsoft products, and actively encourage people to switch to FreeBSD, Linux, or Apple, but I do not refuse to help friends and family out when they're in a bind, regardless of what they use, and I certainly don't mask my own incompetence in blind evangelism, and make them feel somehow inadequate for my own failings.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I'm curious if there are any previously documented experiences of technology having such a wide impact and so much adaption by people with a lack of skills to deal with it. In my limited knowledge, I can't recall anything.
That, I think, is part of the problem. Not only is it new, powerful, interconnected technology, but its adapted and being adapted at an unheard of rate. People are not keeping up with it, and we have no real comparison for it.
I recall discovering my mother-in-law's computer was overloaded with spyware and my wife asking for me to look at a co-worker's laptop infected with porn spamming software. A weekend spend educating themselves would have solved a lot of problems.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
absolutely correct. but using the general term for all sys5,bsd,mach,etc kernel bases as unix OS's. Is what I meant. My point was that he was acting like it was still the old MacOS 9.x and before.
Fuck I just hate it when my friends and relatives call me and ask for computer assistance!!! Fuck, I work 8 hours / day with computers, that's enough!!! One of my friends is a plummer, I don't call him and ask him to fix the pipes for free because he knows how to do it!!! People just don't get it. General discussion about this on newspapers should be raised to make people aware of this.
Macs will never get 90% and Apple has no intention of doing so.
Now that right there is not really a smart sentance. you started out ok. but the last half just is non-sense. You are telling me that Apple has no inentions of becoming the number 1 computer company in the world? i would beg to differ as an ex apple employee we had all kinds of webinars (not realy that word but i just learned that in the poll forum so i will use it cause it is fun) talking about and introducing plans to become the number 1 computer company. in fact i rember #1 in 2001 wow that was so catchy. cant imagine why i quit.
"So, you're saying he installed AOL 9, but that didn't work, so he deleted it and installed AOL 8 instead. And now that it doesn't work he says the problem is your virus protection software, so he says you need to disable that... Wow! I'm ... speechless."
Just out of curiosity: where do you get the "... 70% of the server out there run a version of *NIX." from?
I use Linux exclusively myself, but I haven't heard any recent stats about *NIX. Last I heard, it ran some 90% of the 'net in 1985, and dropped to 65% in 1998, but I can't even remember where I heard that. Thanks in advance, I might need to know the stats someday.
C|N>K
I'm not sure the term "technophobe" describes such people. I would define a technophobe as someone who is afraid of technology. Most of my friends and family who are technically ignorant, asking for help, aren't really afraid of technology -- they just lack the ability to understand it.
How about "technilliterate" as a substitute term?
Proverbs 21:19
I have teh exact same situation with my wife, and she has a higher IQ than I do.
Part of it is the differences in the way men and women think about technology. Men love buttons and switches and lights and dails and lots of things to configure with and adjust. Look at any home entertainment center for proof of this. Women just want the damned thing to work. They do not care about the details. All they care about is it doing what they think it is supposed to do.
It's not that women are stupid. It is that they care about *BUM BUM BUMBUM!* different things that men do. Do most men give a damn what something smells like (assuming that the smell is not activily offensive)? Do men, outsode the graphic design crowd, really care about the differences between two almost identical shades of light green? For the most part, no. But most women do.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
I think computers will become more like automobiles or the old days of TV repair. When they "break" or you get confused you have to call or take it to a mechanic.
The difference is that I expect that more "remote repair" we be available in the future so that somebody can fix, or at least inspect stuff remotely. Thus, there may not be a big need to physically move the machine or have a mechanic visit the house. (Unfortunately this may mean more offshoring.)
Another issue is if people will trust a remoting service. After all, who wants to hand all that fetish porn to a complete stranger? They may feel more comfortable having a "locked" box, which would need a more physical approach to repair.
Table-ized A.I.
mod up, boys. i had to scroll waaay down to get this.
I have a little rule that I follow. As soon as someone asks me to fix their computer I ask them what it is running. More often then not it is some flavor of Windows. I merely tell them they have two options, load linux which I am happy to do for them and support or pull out their credit card and call Microsoft...Have a nice day..
Got Code?
First off, does anyone else find it highly disturbing that a PhD is not only posting on Slashdot, but FIRST posting?
You might be surprised to know how many folks with doctorates do contribute to Slashdot. Of course noise has been going up in the last couple of years, but there are informative posts to be made and read on Slashdot. As far as first posting, what are you complaining about? You would rather read stuff like "FRIST POST"?!!?............ Please.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I live with 9 other people, I wouldnt call them technophobes, they love technology, especially P2P like Kazaa.... and there in lies the problem, we share a house PC that needs about 8 hours a week of labour deleting the very latest in virus' and spyware. The only solution, since they cant stand the idea of education = prevention = easy street, is to act like a nazi/sysadmin at home and give them ZERO privledges.
serenity now!
I think that Technophobe is the wrong word here. If they were technophobes, they wouldn't even be n teh net or use a computer. Technophobes fear technology. this article isn't about technophobes. Techno-ignorant maybe, but not technophobes. I've met actual technophobes and they're not about to even touch a computer with me standing there to help them, let alone fumble about on their own.
I'm an arachnaphobe, but I'm not about to mess up and get poisonous bites by handling the wrong spiders. I don't handle any of them. I stay the F*** away from all of them using violence to clear anybody out of my way if need be.
Your approach is not unlike Calvin's approach to shoveling show...
the question is where you put a limit on the os and any service running on top of it for as i recall there was some worms flying around in the late 90's that targeted apache installs...
the only reason (as pointed out by others) that mac isnt a target is the very fact that they drop of radar mutch like small birds do. they are not used for any large scale server installations and they are not running on about 90% of the desktops around the office and home.
these two are the most common machine/os types targeted as ones one is infected you can use them as a spingboard while haveing a high probability that on a random ip sweep you will find more targets.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
I hate it when someone has a slow machine and keeps clicking and clicking waiting for a response...
I was helping some woman once who clicked on a link in IE and it was taking a while to load the page so she clicked the link again... and again... I said "Whoa... wait a minute... Do you realize you're starting the whole process over again every time you do that?" and her response was "It comes up faster when I do that". I've even had people jump immediately to Task Manager and kill an app if it didn't respond in 5 seconds.
Of course, there are times when your HTTP request seems to get lost in that big bit bucket in the sky, but this was ridiculous.
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
You assume that the number of worms affecting windows is proportional to their marketshare.
But the sheer number of online mac and linux machines make them a good target for virus writers anyway, only they are just more difficult to compromise.
Being a little paranoid: you may be right if we take into account that the pc security market is big enough to actually need new viruses and exploits to be developed.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Make no mistake. The problem isn't the "technophobes", or those who can't or won't become adept and intimate with information technology. The problem is the failure of system designers and coders to acknowlege the existance of such users... and the fact that they represent the majority of people using software.
It's completely unfair to equip a user with software that will ruin their entire system when used in a normal way... such as an email client that disguises and autoexecutes virii. There's no damn reason for it, and it is NOT the user's fault they're not savvy enough to grok a virii from a clever screensaver.
While it's true that any foolproof system isn't, technologists can go a looooong way to make sure that sophistication is seamless, and complexity is revleatory rather than immersive. What I mean by that is that while programs should be flexible, configurable and powerfull, users should only be exposed to the parts they are comfortable using, and the parts essential for getting the software to go should be simple for the novice, yet reveal more and more to the user who knows what they're looking for, using drill-down icons, tabs or submenus.
Empowering the user means creating software that a novice can do useful work with the second they launch it as well as offering enhanced options for the power user. Too often, programmers and designers focus on the feature list. Here's a hint, bright boys: usability is a feature, and perhaps the single most important one.
SoupIsGood Food
My inner geek was cruelly suppressed at a very young age. (I blame the entire thing on Computer Class with Father Casper in the basement at Benilde St. Margaret's High School...) So, I repressed everything, and only dated geeks. :) But now, the inner geek is BREAKING FREE!!! Mwah ha ha. (Ahem.)
However, believe me, if you have been discouraged from understanding anything about computers for years, it is very daunting. I'm lucky enough to have some wonderful mentors now (a good reason to stay friends with exes.) I'm learning more every single day. The project is using essentially all of my free time. That's how I like it. I cannot bear being ignorant any more. But the average person has been led to believe that basic technical profiency is impossible to achieve, and the older they are, the more likely this is to be true (which really is sad.)
Anise
Is helping a family member out such a horrible prospect? And if you don't have the time or even the inclination too, is it that hard to tell them as much?
Being a dick to people you don't know is one thing, but deliberately being a dick to your family doesn't speak very well of your character.
In the long run, being polite, and maybe even helpful once in a while, is always a better way to deal with people. It won't kill you.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
I wasn't complaining, I was joking. But if you want to get your panties in a knot about it anyway, knock yourself out.
Oh, and as for the trolls, I don't mind them. Some of them are even kind of funny (not many, but some). This, and the rampant moderation-based censorship that occurs on this site, is why I always browse at -1.
In my experience in Tech Support, there are people who are not looking to take responsibility for what they do.
They just want someone else to "fix it when it's broke" so they can go back to forwarding jokes and flash email.
I've explained to them until i'm blue in the face that 99% of their problems can be prevented if they just adhered to some simple rules. But they don't want to hear rules, they just want to do what they want to do without someone telling them they are wrong.
I've lost a few customers this way. They refuse to take responsibility for their actions and what they do to themselves and everyone else, and since i don't tell them what they want to hear, which is ("awwww i don't know why you are being picked on. It's not YOUR fault, you didn't do anything wrong"), they respond with a "GET THIS CLEANED UP ASAP OR I'M GOING TO GET A NEW SERVER".
It's one thing to be naive, but it's another to be naive and not want to learn, just to go fsck shit up and expect someone else to drop everything and fix it.
i hate my job.
do() || do_not();
The problem is that computers, as they are now, cannot be used in the way that many people expect to be able to use them (as a result of marketing campaigns). They see all the cool features and want some of that, but have the impression that they can just use it like a toaster when it's really much more complicated.
I think that both ends are going to have to be moved. People will have to learn a few things about How Stuff Works, and computers will continue to get better at taking care of things when they can. But yes, there's some really complicated stuff going on in the background with a lot of variables. It's simply not going to be as easy as people seem to have been lead to believe.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Is it any wonder why non-geeks only contact geeks for help and nothing else? Because so many of them are assholes like you.
I used to get a lot of goofy questions from friends and family: "I can't find that letter I wrote last week, where is it?" "Double-click on My Documents..." and worse. So I finally hit upon a solution that works:
"You know, I don't really use Windows, most of my work is with a different operating system, UNIX. You know, you've heard people talk about Linux? Well, that's what I do. And anyway, now I do security so I'm not really the most qualified person to ask. But ask Robert, he seems to really like computers and he'd probably be happy to lend you a hand!"
The side benefit here is that some of the more clueful have started to convert to Linux (three new Fedora users in the last month!) and now I get questions about chkconfig, fstab, and other stuff. The questions are harder but now he's moving in the right direction.
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
...whether I am stupid and will die poor (because I have never requested a penny for my help), or I have very mean friends and family.
:)
Mind you, neither. At least, in my network of friends, requesting money for help is totally forbidden, a perfect taboo, probably it is a cultural matter. But the payoff is huge: whenever I need help with cooking some strange thing, or to spend some nights at somebody's flat while I find something (once it was for three months!), or I am moving, I only need to make a few phone calls. You'd better have a really good reason to say no, same cultural reasons as above
Having a skill that not everybody has is a real blessing. And you get plenty of beer.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
The reason I got my whole family to switch to Linux was their fear of viruses!
Some day they asked me what to do to avoid catching a cold (well, their computer anyways). At first I thought about doing all kinds of stuff to their windows machine, but when I (half jokingly) told them to use Linux they they were surprisingly open for the idea.
So I set it up for them, expecting that they would have me remove it within a few days, but they still (it's over a year now) use it.
They seem to be a bit scared of the all-mightiness (maybe I shouldn't have set up a Slackware system after all) though.
It's working perfectly however. It's odd they never ever got a virus.
OS X is a descendant of OpenBSD, no? No. OS X is derived from FreeBSD.
Complexity is Easy. Simplicity is Hard.
Why the fuck is this a troll? Sounds insightful to me. Here's a virutal +1 misunderstood - sorry it's worthless.
I'm glad my parents love me so much that they basically had me born into slavery to them.
If that isn't love, then I don't know what is...
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
When friends and family tell me their PC has been infected with a virus, I shake my head and tell them that's really sad. Did they lose data, I ask. Oh, no backups? That's terrible... and all their photos, gone? You know, Windows just is not safe any more. Would they like a nice little Linux install?
Xandros costs $39.95 and I am on my second pack of five CDs. People are remarkably happy to pay to get their PC working again, and Xandros does a wonderful job of it, handling most hardware perfectly, including adsl modems. Quite often I can recover their precious photos and leave them with a system that does pretty much exactly what their XP did, except it's resistant against viruses and is much harder to break.
And amazingly, I find that people using Linux come with far fewer questions than people using Windows.
I provide hardware/software support for diesel engine mechanics. When you look up "power user" in the dictionary you certainly will not see their picture. On the other hand, most of these guys can overhaul an engine blindfolded, they don't suffer from a case of general ineptness.
I've often thought that if they could have a PC designed specifically for them it would be much easier. Instead of software on CD the storage medium would be shaped like a standard hex nut which they would screw on to a bolt to install the program. Also, instead of the typical squealing/static noises the modem makes, if it made diesel engine sounds that reflected the communnications state ("sounds like your modem's idling kind of slow there Earl, we should probably bump the speed up a notch") the diesel heads could solve their own problems.
Similarly, if EMachines desktops had a toilet flush handle attached to the side that rebooted the PC when you jiggled it the owners could solve more of their own problems. It's all about what you're accustomed to and what you intuitively understand.
--If 50,000 people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
Really. I'm fine with someone who's *intimidated* by a computer, afraid they'll break something, or just real cautious. But I lose all patience with people who are willfully ignorant and refuse to learn anything (and then conveniently blame a system or component for being "too hard").
I find that there's almost a kind of class attitude about this -- people who practice willful ignorance also think this somehow makes them more upper class or something because they're not having to sully their hands learning some technical skill. Sadly I also see a gender bias, with a lot of women taking that tact.
I actually had a huge fight with my wife about this one time. She is a marketing exec who was going on a long business trip to California. Prior to leaving, she asked their office's IT guy (small office, only one full-time admin/helpdesk guy) to configure her laptop for remote access. The night before she left, she pulled out her laptop and was *furious* that it didn't work and that it was jeopardizing other business she needed to keep up with while away. I asked her if she made any attempt to work with the IT guy, and she said no, she was too busy. I told her that it must not have been important to use remote access then, if she wasn't willing to spend 5 minutes running through it with the IT guy.
It's either important or its not, and bitching at the IT guy because you weren't willing to put ANY effort into it is total bullshit. The tools are valuable, but like it or not they are somewhat complicated and unless you work with them all the time, you need to put a small amount of effort into them to make them work for you.
And at that point her frustration with her deadlines and travel and my frustration from working with self-important marketing people dovetailed really nicely and we had a huge fight.
Being free tech support to tons of friends/family, I have learned a few very helpful tips to those of us that take the time to share our knowledge of (I hate to admit this) fairly simple to learn tasks. I know this is pretty Windows specific, but come on so is this class of tech support.
Pass these along to those that ask you to bail them out each time they have to figure out what a right click is.
There you go, now you know enough that I can probably walk you through fixing 99% of your problems over the phone, or preventing them all together!
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society - M. Twain
IE is the dominant browser? Technophobes bringing windows to the internet is the biggest problem. Email viruses, web sharing holes, activex (or whatever the marketing term of the day is) virii, IIS hacks, etc, etc, etc. Cant we have one Internet for lusers and one for non-Windows users?
doesn't mean I'm the one that's sexist
Is it sexist to say that most females have pictures of their stupid cats on their websites?
Why do you assume somebody who is going to send you a malware attachment will use apple's mail.app to send it to you? There are plenty of other mail clients that don't zip it up automatically.
Granted, some of them are regular mainstream apps for non-Apples and probably damage binaries from Apple's forked-up filesystem.
---
And some [geeks], tired of being treated like free help lines, are beginning to rebel. They are telling friends, relatives and random acquaintances to figure it out on their own.
Heck no! Those are the people who will feed and shelter us when our jobs are offshored. Gotta be nice the them.
Table-ized A.I.
That's not a bad idea. Believe it or not, but in Finland we have had driver's license (yes, it's actually even called 'computer driving license') for computer users since year 1994. You can find some more information about it here
141 000 finnish computer users have got it so far and it's mostly required if you're applying for a certain kind of jobs.
Let's face it. Non-technical people have made low-cost computing economically feasible. Most of us couldn't afford our own computer without them.
Furthermore, we should not forget that it's the virus writers that are 100% responsible for viruses.
The problem is easy enough solved. Instal GNU/Linux for your friends. Make sure they can surf the internet and get their mail. Explain ones spamassin. You'l never here from them again. No problem at all. And if you here from them its because they like you as person and not for youre computer magic.
Apple would certainly like to be #1, but (at least under the current management) they won't get there. Apple isn't willing to reduce the profit margins in order to compete with low cost PCs, so they have no access to a large percentage of the market. They tried this once (around the time when there were 3rd party Mac clones), but it almost ruined them so they returned to their "more expensive but much better" mantra.
I clicked on Mydoom (novarg, as it was reported to me).
Yes I know better. I even performed above-average checks. I got the email with the attachment. I saw that it was from someone that I was expecting a Zipped TIF file from. I scanned it with Norton AntiVirus. Then I clicked on it.
And this was at 5AM.. I was half asleep, working in my PJ's. When the TIF file didn't open, I realized that it was a Zipped PIF file (not Zipped TIF), and within seconds, I unplugged my Lan cable (wireless.. I actually yanked my card, at risk to my hardware!)
Then I spent 2 hours cleaning the mess up.
In that period of less than 3 seconds, the darn virus sent itself to at least 10 people THAT I KNOW OF. Probably hundreds of people.
I got to find out that our sysadmin isn't keeping virus definitions up-to-date on the Exchange server or on laptops. (We just switched Exchange Servers, and apparently there was a problem with auto-update of virus def's). It was an educational process.. systems weren't working as they should have.
And I am someone who makes a living preaching to people not to click on attachments. Obviously I f**ked up, and I know better. It just goes to show you, though, that even the paranoid (like me) who are diligent in checking for viruses, who understand viruses enough to have written some, can be duped. Hey, my excuse is that I was half asleep. It's not just the technophiles. It can be one of us that screws up too!
I have laughed at people and rolled my eyes when I hear that someone clicked on an attachment and got a virus. Now I can empathize.
I'm just thankful that only a few contacts were able to figure out that I sent it out. This would ruin my reputation! Good thing it spoofs email addresses.
(One last check to make sure I am posting this anonymously.... OK...)
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
I prefer to be called Evil Scientist.
I no longer accept any money for any services. My reasoning is that if I don't let them pay me, they'll feel really, really guilty about calling me. Hence, by not taking any money, they don't call me as much. It works pretty good, except with family.
Interesting!
Now that right there is not really a smart sentance. you started out ok. but the last half just is non-sense. You are telling me that Apple has no inentions of becoming the number 1 computer company in the world?
Exactly, just as Subaru has no intention of becoming the number 1 car maker in the world. You can either try to mass-market your product with low profit margin (and it's very difficult to attain profitability with this kind of strategy on the tight PC market) or try to run a kind of computer boutique - sell in relatively low volume, but with very high profit margin. Since return of Steve Jobs, Apple obviously embraced the latter strategy (that's why there are no clones and there are interesting experiments with "luxury" computers, like the G4 Cube, the 20" iMac or the Big Al powerbook).
That's true, but from the perspective of someone marketing a computer or software, would you not want to make sure there's as thin a language barrier as possible to make the product desirable. Microsoft, while flawed in many ways, has done a good job in that translation.
"I work for an isp, when i receive a virus infected email, i cut off their internet access plain and simple."
Please let me know what ISP you work for so that I can discourage everyone I know from patronizing your business.
Your company's customers are paying for a service, and expect a certain level of reliability. If your company's customers aren't made clearly aware of your disconnect-on-virus policy (and is that company policy or just yours?), your company is baiting a lawsuit.
"they can call back to have it reactivated after they get someone competent to disinfect it.
I don't suppose your company is so kind as to provide "someone competant" to assist their customers...
Policy like that will inevitably cost your company customers, if not lawsuits.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
This is why I bought my parent's a WebTV when they first wanted to go online a few years ago. By the time they became sophisticated enough to need to use a real PC online, they already were tech savvy enough to know not to install dumb apps, answer pop-ups, ignore attachments from people they don't know, etc...
_______
2B1ASK1
MOD UP!!
but it's a LOT harder to quickly run an application sent as an attachment in os x.
I have a Win98 box that I received plenty of copies of the virus on and they seemed plenty "hard" to quickly run on there, I can't imagine that running them on a Mac would be that much harder...
For mydoom to work, didn't people have to un-zip and then specifically run it, or did I miss some automated launch mechanism.
If it was manually launched, then all the crap about this being the worst terrorist^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hvirus attack was completely self inflicted.
It keeps my relatives happy, anyway.
I prefer to be called Evil Scientist.
Dude, sucks that you are labelled a troll for saying that we shouldn't punish innocent people with guilty friends.
If my 7 year old niece and my 96 year old grandpa can both use computers without horribly fucking them up, they're obviously reasonably easy to learn and use. Does anyone blame Boeing for people not knowing how to fly an airplane? If you want to use the equipment, you'd better put in the effort to learn how.
And by the way, it's viruses, not virii. Quit trying to sound smart.
A modern PC is an incredibly powerful tool. Factory specs don't say it all however. On my circa 2002 PC, I have developed benign s/w that typically performs a trillion (10^12) algorithmic passes on a long afternoon. Each pass includes a fair amount of trig ops. Imagine an algorithm that isn't benign.
In 15 to 20 years, given Moore's Law, computers will be 1000 times faster than today (1024, but who's counting?). Consider the analogy with transportation. If a person can't handle a vehicle traveling at 1 mi/hr today, how could they possibly be qualified to handle supersonic travel 20 years from now?
Graham
Linux - Fast Pane Relief
(OS X is a descendant of OpenBSD, no?)
No. I'm not sure where you get it that the platform was built from the ground up with security in mind.
OS X was not built from the ground up.
Apple Dev linkola
(to paraphrase)
OS X uses FreeBSD as the reference code base for BSD technology. Most libraries and utilities are from FreeBSD, with some derived from NetBSD. In addition, the Mach kernel and NEXTSTEP have influenced OS X, too.
OpenBSD was forked from NetBSD, with the focus on security. While there is a lot of code sharing among the BSDs, you're not going to find that OS X is as secure as OpenBSD.
Yes, Some Buzzword complient person that has no real understanding of the underlaying issues it pretty annoying. The kind of person that buys P4's to Make the Internet go faster TM Intel with his 56K dial-up.
However what tend to irritate me more is someone that has no interest in finding out what was wrong. Meaning that even if it is a absolutely simple issue that person will have no qualms asking for help with same problem a week later.
People that complains about pop-ups but refuses to use Mozilla even with IE skin. You know the type.
Help fight continental drift.
I've eventually come to the conclusion that I no longer am in the mood to answer tech questions for my friends, either naive or otherwise expert, until they convince me that they'll actually learn something on their own. Sure, it takes me five minutes to answer a question that might require an hour or more of research, but when someone's just given an answer without having to do the footwork, they don't respect the value of the knowledge. This ultimately leads to a never ending stream of 5 minute interruptions from someone who's not willing to learn for themselves. On the other hand, if they did the hours of research, not only do they gain the satisfaction of learning something new, they've probably just eliminated their next hundred 5 minute questions, thus saving both of us time. It's tough love, but sometimes that's what it takes to get someone else to respect knowledge.
Oh, but look at this! MAC/Simpsons@MM is actually an AppleScript worm that uses Microsoft products to propogate!
You believe Mac's are a better platform? Fine.
Try convincing the rest of the world. You'll find that when you tell the next PC user that you only support Mac is that he won't "get it". That is because you won't take the time to go a little bit onto the PC side of the world, and help him through his problem. If you help him through his problem, he might actually gain your trust and consider your advise on Macs. Empathize with him. Don't put him off, or you'll come off as ignorant, and your words will go right past his ears.
We need more people to help others regardless of situation. Just the first few comments was how to get out of the being-leeched-tech-helper situation. No one becomes any less of a technophobe if they aren't given a chance.
I support all platforms, even when I hate Mac, and have a strong distate for Windows. But I never approach a question to being, "your using the wrong platform." I fix their problem, and swallow my thoughts before they become words. I recommend ways to keep using their computer without losing IE, OE, for example, or their other old work-horses. I don't force them to change. If they seem interested in alternivates, I may suggest mozilla. It may seem backwards to have them keep using IE and windows, but maybe, I'll save them time and frustration moving to another setup. And it will save me time showing them how to use it. I'll fix the problem, right out, and show that I do have skill, and gain their trust, so maybe I can give them real help when times are more desperate.
I frankly believe, we need more honest and capable tech support people. And definately not be a bad tech support like some else said, or put them off. Because what will happen, is people will flock to the few that do give honest help, and overload them, or continue picking up the bad apples out of the bunch. If we don't approach being a good tech support seriously, there will continue to be the so called technophobe impact, regardless of what platform.
I'm no Mac zealout or Windows zealout, I'm a Linux geek. But please, Mac is much more secure than Windows. Windows main issue is RPC, and Outlook's ease of opening ANYTHING. I use Ximian Evolution, files aren't openend until I say to open them, makes a nice security touch. And there is no RPC with loads of buffer overrun issues.
Believe me, people would write Mac virus's if it was more popular, but it would be hard than Win virus's are.
This is just something Microsoft needs to clean up.
Mac zealouts are annoying though. I fix Winboxes, and I would happily try to fix a Mac if people would just have real problems with one, people I know anyway.
I convinced my family to get Mac's & I was able to cut out the support stuff all together!
Sounds like a great idea for the "Lusers"! Your so-called Luser internet would be totally without viruses because none of the users would be able to write one. Meanwhile, the hackers would be forced to target the UnixNet.
I live near a small villiage way out in a rural area. You tend to end up knowing a of the people out here despite not going outside much.
"So what is it you do"
"Computers".
"OH! I have a problem with my Windows..."
"Oh, not those kind of computers, the really big ones that businesses use".
"Oh. So you have one of these big computers at your house?"
"No, I work at home but the computers are somewhere else".
"Oh, so you work over the internet... I have this prob..."
"No, I don't really use the internet, I have a special kind of satellite"
"Oh, we have a problem with our satellite what does it mean when..."
"No, not that kind of satellite, it's a special military kind. When there's a problem two guys in back suits come up and work on it.".
"You don't really work with computers do you?"
"No, I'm a farmer. I grow hydroponic basil".
"Yeah that figures. You don't know anything about
computers".
Ten years ago i was telling everybody they had to get on the internet. Back then I thought it would be neat if everybody was online.
Now that they are I can only say "what the HELL was I thinking?".
When Lauren Knowlin was at the then-internic about 94-05 or so she said she'd get support calls that went like this:
"Is this the Network Information Center?"
"Yes, this is the Internic, how can I help you?"
"My mouse doesn't work".
"I'm sorry but that's really not what we do, we..."
"But I'm connected to the network, aren't you the Network Information Center... is says you are"
"Yes but that's not really what we..."
"Look, I'm conncted to the neteork and I need information on how to fix my mouse..."
And you wondered why you couldn't get through to the NIC back then.
It's always bothered me that people with a clue can't get tech support for anything these days because they've dumbed down the whole process for the drag'n'drool imbeciles. I've often thought we need the equivalent of the grocery store checkout counter; somewhere you can call or email if you know what you're doing anf can keep it short.
Need Mercedes parts ?
I like going with the ambiguous "I don't know man, it could be a lot of things", it seems to work really well for getting people off my case about fixing their computers. Some people think this is being dick but personally I've done enough "friends and family tech support" to no longer care. My parents learned and now they *PAY* someone to do their tech support, my friends are slowly learning too, they'll offer me a case of beer or a small monetary reward. I used to enjoy trouble shooting but as you start doing it people get accustomed to having you do it and start to take advantage of it. If they have to pay you in some way they're not nearly as likely to feel as if its a service that they deserve. Also you avoid situations where your roommates mother calls you for tech support :-p
plenty of other mac mail clients do some sort of encoding because of the mac's forked filesystem, be it macbinary or whatever.
they also zip/stuff any folder, not just application packages
Yeah, and I've got that one as well - we support a Windows application, just a small program that uploads to the internet. That's all, we have nothing to do with the hardware!
Support call:
Them: Your program doesn't work.
Me: Is there an error message on the screen?
Them: No
Me: What do you see on the screen?
Them: Nothing.
Me: Do you see a button labelled 'start' in the bottom-left of your screen.
Them: No, it's completely black.
Me: Is the computer on?
Them: It was yesterday.
Honestly, I don't think it is possible for anyone who has done tech support to see a tech support story that they couldn't believe. There really is no limit.
This one.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Finland has had 'driver's license' for computer users since 1994. 141 000 finnish computer users have got it. The Finnish Computer Driving Licence is an IT examination for everyone, the first of its kind. It is intended for those who have used computers very little, very much or not at all. It is mostly required if you're applying for a certain kind of job.
You can get some more information here
..is when the mindless masses try to express the problem they are having with their machine:
"My computer is broken."
"My shit is fucked up."
"HELP!"
Yes, these are typical tech support emails I get (in their entirety). Could these people possibly be more specific? Let us not forget that it is almost invariably some small, pathetic problem. For example, I had a user who claimed he was not receiving any email, so I went to check out his computer. Lo and behold, the little plus mark for his email account was not expanded and he could not find his inbox, so therefore he concluded that he was not receiving email.
These things drive me nuts. They keep me from doing such things as redesigning our hideous webpage which has not seen a makeover in at least four years. Please, something useful for once.
Oh no, the phone is ringing again.. Someone's email is "down", someone's computer will not "turn on", someone cannot find solitare. Help them? HELP ME.
[/rant]
Sorry. =)
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power. -- Mussolini
Most of the non-technies I know are pro-outsourcing to India due to the illusion they will save money on their ISP or support bills. After the market has demonstrated that this practice does absolutely nothing for the end-user experience, since the suppply and demand metric is what controls prices. Show me one ISP or software company that's dropped it's prices since this practice began.
But I digress, I've all but quit helping people due to this broad attitude of "too bad for them".
I'm small, yes. But I'm bitter and angry, so screw 'em. They can talk to the Indians. >:-O
Today it works fine.
Yesterday it didn't work.
Windows is like that.
---Author Unknown
The truth is an offense, but not a sin.------R. N. Marley
when I can scrub viruses, trojans, worms, spyware, adware from someone's system and they cannot do it themselves. Yes I am talking about Windows and someone running Kazaa or some other file sharing app and not scanning or not having AntiVirus software and just running anything they get.
:) Of course I tell them to donate to Spybot and register The Cleaner, the rest is up to them.
Amazing what AVG 6.0 Free version, Spybot, and The Cleaner 30 day trial can do.
Usually before I can run AV software or even access the Internet I have to uninstall a lot of junk they installed on their system to get it stable. Nothing like 30 shareware or commercial programs that loaded up 30 different icons on their startup tray and eat valuable resource memory. Uninstall them, run MSConfig and remove them from startup, etc.
I have been called an Anti-Hacker for removing malware from friends' and relatives' systems. I do it pro-bono or for a small fee if they insist on paying me. Usually enough for a tank of gas and a meal, I don't get much for my work, not as much as I could if I ran a business. I have three groups of people that want me to start up a business with them. Too bad I am spending most of my time at college now.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
There's a button to make it all single-column.
Although I do agree that the interface sucks, it can be made to work the way you want. It does not have to be horrible.
The previous sig has been removed due to
How is it censorship if you can still get access to it?
well, calling mach-based systems Unix-like is not necessarily true. OS/2 on IBM's RS6000 architecture runs on top of a Mach microkernel, for example.
</pedant>
First off, does anyone else find it highly disturbing that a PhD is not only posting on Slashdot, but FIRST posting? I think the apocalypse is near.
Isn't obvious? PhD = No job = slashdot
After finding that a couple of my neighbors felt comfortable calling me up any old time and getting an hour or two of free help, I've just learned to feign cluelessness when asked for technical advice.
Neighbor wants to know if he needs a firewall? I say "oh yes, they're very good. You should buy a cisco PIX".
Advice on a printer? "I don't really trust those inkjet printers. See if you can find a good Centronics dot-matrix printer. Of course, you'll want to write your own driver software, and..."
By then, their eyes usually glaze over and I can safely wander away.
Apple simply couldn't do it because 90% of their marketing is oriented around fitting a niche, around "being different", around rooting for the underdog, and so on and so forth. If they were the big guy, they would have no one to bitch about and all their customers would move to Microsoft, cause it has less viruses, and isn't just for the majority of computer idiots(this based on if Apple was suddenly 90% Microsoft would be the 5% competitor)
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
Of course your post is missing something. I maintain a lab of 10 iMac workstations running OS X. Mine is running Yellow Dog Linux. Then again, I don't ask for tech support; I am the tech support.
I could swear when I first looked the headline was "Impact of Technoprobes". Thought I accidently clicked Art Bell instead of Slashdot.
Anybody want a peanut?
Don't you hate being right all the time? I get tired of it after a while. Usually it's not being right that gets you in trouble though- it's how you point it out :-/
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
Everything embeds computers these days. A cell-phone or digital camera may have as much computing power as the original Cray-1 (60 mega-ops per second). A computer is an appliance with a very general interface and/or one very hard to use. When you hide such beneath a simple, powerful interface such as in a digital camera, it ceases being a "computer" to the user.
Somewhere out there the must be a website that collects instances of these kinds of inane questions, I just know it. After a while they could be categorized and the redundant ones would be culled.
Categories like "Don't know where such-and-such key is on the keyboard" (like these people I'd be helping and I'd say "Okay, now hit 'tab' to go to the next field," and they'd look at the keyboard, scanning it with their eyes up and down and left and right, 'tab, tab, tab, where is it, again?"), "Don't know how to start the computer at all," "Don't know to use 'Shut Down' instead of just flipping the switch on the power strip and then panic when ScanDisk comes up on reboot," and so on.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
> "To answer another poster's assertion that the Internet is like a car, you can't just drive, you have to have some knowledge, I'd say this: sure, you have to know how to USE the car. But you shouldn't have to be expected to understand its architecture and occasionally pull the carburetor as well."
The car analagy holds very well. If your car does something wierd and you don't know about cars you take it in for service and pay a few hundred bucks for them to diagnose the problem and replace some cheap component.
But if you know cars you can diagnose it yourself, buy the part as a fraction of the cost and install if yourself and save an absolute fortune (plus know it's done right).
In the car world dumb-asses pay for their stupidity. In the computer world they just leech off the cluefull.
Need Mercedes parts ?
that people who are too lazy and / or stupid to read and understand dialog boxes, surely won't read your comment which is even marked as too long by slashcode!
Okay I read the article, and agreed with most of it. I have been there many a times for friends that have done something stupid on their computer and needed a 'white knight' to save the day. And yah, it does get annoying when the only time you hear from someone is when they have a computer problem. What really got me about the article is the little bit at the end:
Perhaps the one thing that technophobes and technophiles can agree on is that software companies like Microsoft should make things easier and more secure for all kinds of computer users.
You can't make things easier and more secure at the same time. It just doesn't happen with computers or even in life in general. If you want something to be easier to do/use you must sacrifice security, and if you want security, you end up sacrificing convienence. Those are just the facts of life, and people need to realize it. Look at Airports for example. How much longer do we wait to get to the gate now with the increased security in the US? Sure you can stream line it a bit, but the fact remains, it is no way an easy process. The same is true about computers. One of the problems with Windows is that it is to easy to use in some aspects, which in turn leaves it open for attack. Where as *nix is the opposite, it is not as easy to use, but is also far more secure.
I just think people should look at the reality of the situation, and realize they can't count on another company to do everything for them and they need take some responsibility for their own security and safety.
Sig? No thanks, I don't smoke.
You are forgetting an important difference. In Linux most people don't login as root to read their e-mail, and all the machine's file system is read-only except the user's home directory.
In Windoze, everything is wide open, and most people log in as admin by default!
I tried to change this in my computer at home. I removed my user and my wife's from the Administrator's group and set all the filesystem to read-only except for administrators. It went damn wrong. The damn machine went crazy, lots of applications were broken, specially those from Microsoft (strange).
I gave up. Just added me and my wife to the admins again. I don't have the time to set up the whole damn thing.
That's why I say Windows is inherently insecure. A lot.
Don't know about Macs, though.
Since mydoom hit I have been traveling from friend, to relative fixing their computer and drinking their beer! If these windows worms keep spreading it is my liver I will be concerned with, not the health of the net :P
"Trashing users is not really productive. Unless they live and breathe computers they are not going to keep up on every new variation of probelms, and shouldn't be expected to."
Agreed. And MyDoom showed very clearly how totally flawed the 'dont open attachments unless you're expecting them' idea is. The reason it got the level of spread it did is exactly because it emulated expected attachments. People expect various automated returns on unsuccessful mails, so this one got most of the 'responsible' users too.
Allowing execution of binaries from untrusted sources like the internet without active user action is the problem. If Outlook merely forced users to save the attachment and change permissions on the file to executable the whole trojan problem would be _gone_. The number of users who'd not get the warning bells then would number in the thousands, rather than the millions. And most of those wouldnt know how to make the attachment executable anyway.
The whole trojan problems fault lies squarely on the application manufacturers. Userfriendliness is a good idea, but TV's dont have a 'blow tube' button on the remote, nor do cars have a 'set fire to my gas-tank' button. Mail programs should not have the equivalent, just for the sake of simplicity.
You know, they are YOUR family, it does not hurt to be nice ...
my $0.02
The virus problem is simply poor design. Mac OSX is existence proof that a PC need not be inherently virus prone. Admitedly, software is very complex, but a well engineered system should be "user proof" for common tasks. Witness the difference between the external support required for Windows OS PCs vs Mac OS PCs.
* There are plenty on non-virus-related reasons to insist that lusers use Macs. So, in answer to your first question, "no." The virus issues are minor.
* There are no viruses that run under MacOSX
So as a test, I mailed myself an application. On the default mail reader under MacOSX, I double-clicked it. Up pops a dialog box:
One of the big reasons that people spread Windows viruses is that poor design and security holes allow non-clever people to easily be infected. With myDoom et al, you double-click the "folder", you get the virus. On MacOS, you have to work at it.
Well, obviously you watch too much Matrix to be saying vis-a-vis in this story. "Antagonistic demographics show an uterrance towards the proletariat masses when invisioning the two-syllable style of language"
Everyone knows that car insurance is very responsive to the risks associated with each driver (i.e. their past record, their car, their knowledge of the road, etc). It is an efficient economic way to make it harder for bad drivers to get on the road.
I suggest that a similar approach be taken in the computer field. Right now the cost of ownership is falling on friends and the technophiles. Since this currently costs next to nothing, it causes people to take advantage of it. Enter insurance. Insurance companies are very good at determining risk and setting a value on that risk. A computer insurance company could set a premium for maintaining the customers computer. That premium would be based on OS, computer experience, computer hardware, and the software involved. This means that there would now be an economic incentive to learn about computers and how they work. furthermore, the information that technophiles now dominate vis-a-vis toms hardware, et al. would be immediately reflected in the premium. as such, users would choose systems that have lower premiums, and those systems would be more reliable. The insurance system brings information to market without a user having to know anything about it. when you put a price on a behavior (i.e. irresponsible computer use), the behavior will be halted accordingly. I believe that a simple economic approach will enforce responsibility in the computer market.
yes, but then there's that stupid bouncing navigation(?) bar. That thing's hideious.
Way to go to stick up for the IT guy and get into a fight with your wife. That's some true balls man (or just asking for pain). ;)
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
I learned my lesson working at the help desk of the dorm computer lab. People go for the path of least resistance. I once had a girl sit down at a machine, immediately turn to me and ask "where's the internet?" becuase I was right next to her and she knew I worked there. She didn't even look at the screen! She didn't even take the time to look for the internet explorer icon and click on it, because it was easier to turn her head and ask me to do it for her. I now hide in the office. There are various signs around the lab which take care of most problems like - Zip drives DO NOT read floppies, please do not put a floppy in the Zip drive. I haven't had to break out the tweezers since I posted a few of those. When I sat out at the desk, people would just yell out questions from across the lab. It's much less convinient to walk to the office, pop your head in, and ask. If they have to go through the effort of walking across the room, they're much more likely to figure things out on their own, or bother the person at the machine next to them. If they do come to office, we know it's something that they probably really do need help with and we try to teach them. We have a policiy of never doing anything for anyone. We make them sit at the computer and we just talk them through what to click on. Even if it is the 100th time I've had to show someone how to click on Attach File to attach a file to their email.
Thanks a lot, fool. You must be an MCSE!
After a decade-and-a-half of tech support, I tend to agree. Strongly.
It's like saying "many accidents are caused by people getting confused and distracted by road conditions. Cars should have computerized autopilots so nobody has to know how to drive them. That would solve everything."
In a way it's unfortunate that limited "net appliances" have never taken off - to stretch the analogy further, they're sort of the equivalent of "mass transit" - you don't need to know how to drive at all but you're limited in "where you can go(tm)" when you use them. People who can't or won't learn to drive safely can use buses and trains, so perhaps we need a computerized equivalent for people who can't or won't learn how to operate a computer safely?...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
While the New York Times makes its money breeding "divisions" between "phobes" and "philes" in every human endeavor, geeks make money by bringing together people with technology. I am the "designated geek" for many circles of friends and relatives, but I long ago lost patience with giving free help. The worst part is that people think it's worth what they're paying: NOTHING. So they just want someone to take care of it for them, and ignore any actual "advice", usually repeating the problem again.
So I have some consultants in my address book who I refer to those in need. It's like having a plumber to call, except plumbers cost twice as much, and there's that buttcrack to contend with. The pressure is off me, my friends don't feel guilty about calling, they actually take the advice seriously (and avoid paying for repeat calls), and the geeks for hire make money off people with more money than sense. I don't know why it took me so long to start doing it. I guess some kind of ego trip. I definitely look a lot better to my friends by sending them the right help than I did scratching my head and cursing over bad cables on cheap hard drive installs. And the geeks all owe me, when I need something special myself.
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make install -not war
Back in the day a friend of mine had a Tandy PC with DOS 5 in ROM. Yes it was slow as hell, and impossible to upgrade, but I think they might have had an acceptable idea.
Make an appliance that people just turn on and it works. Little bells and whistles, little speed but 100% idiot proof. A small HD to store the files that they want (including MP3's). A Knoppix style idea might even be perfect for some people.
An virus that a person might get is removed at reboot. (Just don't run the infected file again.)
Nobody that any of us know would ever own one (we wouldn't let them), but think of how many complete n00bs that this might help with. Hell you could charge $100 - $300 and make it disposable.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
OK, Anonymous socially maladroit Coward, Mac users are too artsy, have too much money, are preoccupied with style, and somehow don't have friends? You really don't know what friends are like at all, or what attracts them, do you?
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make install -not war
I've also been the victim of the "you know computers, can you help me" club. I now limit that interaction to close friends and some family (who fortunately are all at least 500 miles away). For everyone else, my answer is this: My time is valuable. If you want me to fix your computer, I charge $70/hr, minimum of 30 minutes. I reached the point where I was getting tired of being taken advantage of.
That being said, I see two larger issues in all this techno illiterate world. The first is obvious to anyone who knows about Windows vs. Linux. Simply put, you can't secure a system that is inherently insecure. Windows users run as "root". Period. Apps that run on it have free reign. App design deficiencies are a real close second though. MyDoom doesn't affect systems that don't use Outlook. Lotus Notes and Eudora spring to mind. My wife was unaffected my MyDoom. Monoculture is not good, kids.
I can't really blame the users fully. They don't know any better and I think it is arrogant of the technoelite (of which I consider myself a member) to expect the rest of the world to bow down to our ideals and expectations of what someone has to know to use a computer.
Which brings me to my second point. The problem isn't the users, it's the computers themselves. Specifically, their interfaces. We've had GUI interfaces for almost 20 years now and frankly, we are still no further ahead in usability. GUI's were supposed to make things easier. All they've done is increase confusion and create new and wonderful ways to breed complexity.
You'd figure after 20 years that we would be coming up with ways of making computers know a little more about how to get things done. I'm not talking Utopian dreams of voice or 3D interfaces, but the building of knowledge into the system. I'm sorry, kids, listening to a CD, ripping some music, sending e-mail or watching a video clip on a computer should not be a chore! People do not care whether a document is .doc, pdf, .txt or .sxw, a video clip is an MPG, RM or an AVI. They get angry when it doesn't work when they just want it to. If the plug-in or player isn't present, give the computer the knowledge to know where to go get it, download it , guide the user through installation and then do the original task. Some programs do better than other at this but it is still often obtuse and fraugth with peril.
We should be listening to these users. Ask them: "How do you think this task should be done?". Have them explain it in terms they know. Get from them the picture in their head of how they think it should be done. It is the hardest thing to do in the world because what they think they want vs. want they really want are often two very different things.
As a result, the following maxim can apply:
The complexity of an application or task is inversely proportional to how simple the user thinks it is. - Matt Pickering
Translated: The easier someone thinks it is to do on a computer, the harder it will be for the developer to write. Conversely, the harder or complicated the user thinks the task is, the easier it usually is to write. I have observed this phenomena over the years and the maxim holds true. The more complicated someone thinks something is to do often I find to be straightforward. Then they come up with things that seem simple to them and they turn out to be devilishly difficult to produce (if not impossible).
Instead of us continuing to create more complex, feature-rich and elaborate applications and environments, we should be embracing these users (people like my parents who are computer clueless) and ask them how we should be
People don't understand what Murphy's Law really meant. What he was saying is, people will inevitably do things wrong, intentionally or accidentally. You need to DESIGN THE SYSTEM so that it makes doing something wrong very difficult (or impossible) and so that if you do manage to do something wrong, it fails gracefully.
Microsoft Windows has almost none of those design attributes.
But it is kind of rough...
> How is it censorship if you can still get access to it?
Because he said so, of course!!!! What, you don't automatically assume all wild claims are true?
I've been to many a foreign country without knowing the language or having a translator. It's amazing how much can be communicated without language. Of course, a little humility goes a long way in these situations.
I think it's funny people complain so much about technical illiterates. If your friends and family is good people, then what goes around will eventually come around. If you've surrounded yourself with users, than you have a more fundamental problem. As for Ms. Tauber's "moody people" analogy, I think she's right on the money. The logic gates in the CPU might be "purely logical," barring the occasional flipped bit or Pentium bug, but the modern day computer experience is comprised of layers upon layers of code, with arbitrary constructs, metaphors, and bugs strewn throughout. What we see on the computer screen (the conscious mind) is but the tip of the iceberg, supported by a vast, subconscious motley of processes, protocols, libraries, etc., all interacting in strange and often suboptimal ways. I'm a bush league computer guru, pathetic by Slashdot standards but accredited god-like status by my coworkers, and there are many times when I have no idea what the problem is. We've all that experience with that intermittent problem that won't go away and can't be diagnosed.
disclaimer: parent's author is way 1337er than me.
>> I think this article points out one of the major weaknesses in the IT profession currently: a lack of people skills and empathy for the end user.
Probably. And that's why Jimbo in the mailroom doesn't have the IT directors phone, or the oncall tech's pager number. IT isn't about people it's about information.
I'm sick of the attitude that IT and related departments must serve double duty -- once to keep the 'puters up, again to be a receptacle for every bad vibe and pissed off middle manager to scream at. I won't go into details but I've been there. As helpdesk, as computer operator, as field tech, it doesn't matter that I'm polite, professional and helpful, I still get slammed for anything the user imagines or if they got cut-off in traffic this morning. The problem is not that people are mean, but that IT workers are usually required to take an unlimited amount of abuse on a routine basis with no recourse. No departments except sales and complaints should be totally without recourse, that's their purpose. IT's purpose is not to answer a call that starts "So I guess you IT guys are too stupid to do anything right, huh?" and be expected to calmly, caringly help the caller. IT is there to fix and maintain and build. Helpdesk sits on the fence, but even so there is no excuse for requiring employees to take abuse from jerks. Any caller who states that "You're an idiot" or "you don't know what you're doing" has failed the kindergarten test, and should be put on hold or disconnected (or at LeAST forwarded to a supervisor). Plenty of places will fire you if you do not respond with a canned line "I'm sorry that ____, I'd like to help you with ___ if you can just tell me ____".... this is total bs. The correct answer is "Sir, please remain civil or I will have to move on to the next caller." This reduces the cost of running the helpdesk over time (you can pay tier 1 less if the work is less painful), reduces call length (customers spend less time swearing and more time rebooting) and increases productivity (problem solved more quickly because IT doesn't have to fight the user as often), not to mention, letting your employees sh*t all over each other is not generally the smartest way to run a corporate culture.
>> I'm still aghast at system administrators who take servers down on the last day of the month for maintenance, with total disregard of the fact that the company's biggest transaction volume occurs that day. Or help desk people who answer the phone in an impatient tone of voice, as if it's a major annoyance that someone is disturbing them.
Wow, I'm aghast too. Why aren't they fired?? especially in this economy. And ESPECIALLY the helpdesk workers!! C'mon, helpdesk is like housekeeping or burgerking, you can hire anyone, highschoolers are more than sufficient. College kids if they have no computer knowledge (for first tier at least). Helpdesk being rude to a customer?? Damn, this isn't 1988 anymore... wtf.
>> Computing SHOULD be an appliance, it SHOULD be invisible.
You have a good point. That's the path MS chose to follow, and they have not succeeded thus far. They have nominally kept down the level of required skill but created untold numbers of other problems (technical social and otherwise) by their choices. Computing should be an appliance, sure, if you're a 64 year old accountant, or the Sales manager, or typing a memo for your boss. The rest of my post is just b*tching so I deleted it.
Remember Leader Kibo!
Imagine if all that were needed to drive was ownership of a car. Think of what the roads would be like. That's what the Internet *is* like.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Mostly that means running a decent virus checker and being prudent about attachments.
If we could get to that level, the world would be a much better place.
Instead, IT sends out a memo saying DO NOT open attachments from emails claiming to be Microsoft or Dell. Twenty minutes later four users have already been infected. IT escalates the matter by wrapping all emails with attachments inside a zip file with a warning not to open the zip file without confirming from the sender that it was indeed sent. Thirty minutes later another user is infected.
Users will not be prudent. My company has quarterly classes on how to use Word and PowerPoint. Such a waste of time. Instead they should have mandatory weekly classes on computer citizenship.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
if i had points myself i would use them...
i think you made some good points that many people don't ever realize
No, because then it's no longer a computer, it's a glorified appliance.
Then maybe they shouldn't use a computer.
Considering that no one has ever been "taught" but humans inherently have to put effort into learning, then, yes, it is their fault.
In which case, they shouldn't use it (I don't for that very reason).
No, "skilled industrial designers" need to design appliances and other tools with relatively few functions for complete morons. The rest of us are perfectly happy with our computers that have infinite uses and possibilities.
Hmm, and yet to drive a car with an automatic transmission, you must still have a drivers license and training. Maybe we should have a license required to use a computer before you can get on the net, just like you have to have a license to use a car on publicly funded roads.
No, it's obviously NOT over because there is still a need for computer nerds, and there are still computer nerds. Software designers need realize nothing other than what their users requirements are: ie, if the are developing a general purpose operating system, it should be able to do what a general purpose operating system can do; if they are designing an MP3 player, it should play MP3s, no more, no less.
Nathan's blog
I couldn't agree with this article more. I think computer science should be a mandatory high school credit after this experience. I was a technical manager for a major media conference and I had to work with someone who was, by her own admission, completely technophobic (scary part: she was the conference's media contact!) She was completely unreasonable with her demands on the conference web site. She asked me to teach her how to build and maintain a site, but that went nowhere. After awhile, I had to prevent her from logging into the conference's web server out of fear of her making radical (and dangerous) overhauls to the site. Finally, she managed to screw up sending a document via courier on a CD that was corrupt and unreadable. My solution? I contacted the tech guy at the company the document was originally to be sent to, logged onto FTP, sent it via the web - it was done in five minutes. I also had to make an advertisement via layout and graphics programs - she had no idea how the programs worked, what these programs are even capable of doing, and what looks good (and not so good) from a design point of view. I went through a series of battles with her, trying to make her realize that what she wanted was impossible. The kicker came when we had to get web access at the conference. I set up the internet in a hotel room for all the organizers to use, as it had been designated the "war room" and my director wanted it there. So I set it up for them. She calls me on our two-way cell and goes crazy on me for not setting up the web in *her* room. This, after I had spent the first day of the event getting everyone their cells, organizing laptops, getting a PowerPoint presentation finished, and setting up a major A/V system at a huge federal government building and battling with hotel staff in figuring out how to get past their firewall to log into a high speed web connection (this hotel wasn't the most cooperative in giving me instructions). Finally, my director had enough and told her to quit harping on me about it. She was pouty for the rest of the event, giving me the cold shoulder and assuming it was my fault that I didn't set up her precious web access in her room. And here's the last bit on info: this girl was only 23. So not all twentysomethings know computers. Only the incompetant ones.
... because I agree
The previous sig has been removed due to
No offense
Steve
After being laid off from another tech-wreck, I purchased my desktop box as they seemed to have a few extra after downsizing from 10000+ to 7 hundred. My brother, a tech-illiterate, has never had a computer but he wanted one so the kiddies could use it for school, games, etc.
I added a graphics card, DVD, CDRW and mucho software. I dropped it off at his place, gave him a very brief intro (showed him how to start the games) and said call me when you get the internet set-up. When he got the local ISP hardware, I went over, set the PC up, showed him and his equally illiterate wife how to send/receive e-mail and surf safely. I returned home happy with having introduced the family to the wonders of the net.
Not TWO days past before I get a call from my Bro, which I expected because he's techno-illiterate. He asked me where I had put the OS install CD. I was stunned.
It turned out that at work he was discussing with his work buddies (all labourers/plumbers/welders/etc) his computer learning, adventures and problems from the night before. Them being the computing know-it-alls they are, decided that they could 'fix' his problems. Well, with the days work being cancelled due to weather (it was -40 with the wind chill) they headed over to my bro's place for the big fixing session. By the time my brother called me the PC would no longer boot.
Making a long, painful story short, I had to re-install everything (can you believe they actually screwed with the BIOS?). It wasn't the tech-illiterate that was the problem. It was the tech-know-it-all. The people who are most dangerous are those that think they can fix anything with no experience, books, knowledge or common sense.
The car metaphor worked well here too. I told them that the computer may have had a broken tail light or maybe had the equivalent of a weak alternator but that was no reason to replace the entire power train.
I made my brother swear not to let anyone else near his PC. If he did - then he forfeit my gratious tech-support services.
The details of the 'reasoning' on the 'fixing' still keep me awake at night though....
Here's what you should say when she does it:
"Man that sucks. That could ruin your whole trip and cost the company money"
"He really fouled that up".
"Typical. Those guys are idiots"
"What a jerk. He should have been more responsive"
Extra points for pretending to be sincere while you are saying it. They like that.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
The car analogy is fine, and yes users manage to do some remarkably stupid things with the computer, but no it isn't entirely their fault.
On the car, there are the basic controls on the dashboard, and the scary technician's controls under the hood. On a computer, all the controls are splashed all over the dashboard.
If you go under the hood and play around and the car stops running, you know it's your fault. If you just wiggle the turn signals and turn the stereo on and off and the car stops working, you get to make angry phone calls.
Computers need that level of UI design.
One of the most powerful things about a computer is it's ability to treat everything as a file. For the technicians, this is excellent, but that needs to be 'under the hood', it only causes trouble for the basic user.
For years the average user was only "drag the windows folder elswhere and yes to all" away from destroyng the computer's OS. Now we get users that don't know what a right-click is because they are afraid to break things.
Not entirely their fault.
-Z
>"Especially dealing with academics," Mr. Rubenstein added, "you'd think they'd have some ability to deduce or think problems through for a minute."
I disagree with his premise...
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
IHT? Yuck. Side scrolling javascript web pages...
:)
I must have missed out on those "enhancements" by running Opera. No wonder people love IE so much -- that sounds almost as good as unclosable popups! I myself find life far too enjoyable -- I'll have to start surfing with IE so I can be as irritated as the rest of the Internet.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Valuable my ass. For my trouble I get a thank you very much, maybe a dinner, and a token "cool nerd" for the night badge. I spent $25K earning my bs in cs. The neighber, the plumber, spent $0.00k on education and he gets $60/hr to plumb. My answer, I don't work for free anymore.
I'd say a huge part of the problem is the over abundance of features. Take the email client for example: They have the option to turn on the preview pane or leave it off (or maybe it's on by default, I don't know. I haven't touched outlook in years). Most users have no idea what all that opens them up to, and the ones that do seem to think that the convenience of it outweighs the risks. It's still the user's fault, any way you cut it, but if you take away that option and leave them with no preview pane then the problem is solved. So they have to click ONE MORE TIME than they did before. Waaaa. Then there is the option of displaying html code, and importing external html references. Again, not so smart from a security stand point, but they like the pretty graphics and stuff and naturally that's more important to them. So remove that feature. Problem solved. Will software companies actually do this? Probably not because then their software isn't as appealing to Joe/Jane computer user. Instead, most of them just put a little warning next to the check box that almost always gets ignored if they read it at all. You can put in all the warnings and pop up windows you want. Hell, you could affix a bright blinking neon sign to their monitor that flashes a whole speel about the security risks involved in what they're doing and they won't pay any attention to it because then it isn't as convenient or pretty. So who's at fault? The software company, for not being proactive, and the user for just plain being ignorant.
I'm sick of providing free tech support for Microsoft. But it is no all MS's fault. My parents and many of their friends are just lazy and cheap about keeping their computers secure. They bring all kinds of crazy/crappy application software home from work and install it, and then when they have a problem, I'm supposed to be an expert on accounting software to help them out, etc. At work, people install all kinds of spyware-laced crap like Hotbar and then wonder why their computer has slowed to a crawl. Most people are just idiots and shouldn't be allowed to use computers at all.
You're missing the point. A better designed operating system does not ultimitely determine how many viruses are written for it. Popularity does. Better OS design has an effect, but not as big an effect as popularity. If OSX were 90% of the desktop market, I'm absolutely certain there would be more viruses available for it than any other operating system. Sure it wouldn't be as bad as the current real world Windows majority (in theory). But always remember, majority OS always translates to most-attacked.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
And cars are less complicated than computers. If many people can't be bothered to remember to change the oil, ignore "Check engine" lights and loud, unpleasant, repeated noises until the car doesn't start anymore, how can we expect that they will take better care of their computers?
People cut their hair over the sink and then complain about expensive plumbers. A large segment of the population just doesn't pay attention to, learn about, or take care of their stuff. I have no idea what they're running around doing; apparently it's mostly watching TV and paying too much for crappy food.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
I made over $1,000 one semester fixing people's computers. I'd go over to there house and connect them to the Internet, take out floppies when their PCs wouldn't boot, and reset screensaver times. It's a great after school, after work type of business.
My brother is a lawyer and helps me with legal problems. My father is a dentist and does my teeth for free. My niece is a doctor and looks at my throat during family dinners. My buddy spent a day helping me move. Start to get my drift?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
You know, I was ABOUT to post a comment along the lines of hitting F1 for help because it's Windows...
But then it occurred to me - it's not difficult to add help files to Windows, is it? Perhaps some virus/worm/trojan related help files ought to be written up and distributed for people. Then they really CAN get "MyDoom help"...
Better still, the helpfiles and installation tools can be sent via email attachments. Then only the people who really need it will end up installing it....
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Some reports on NANOG indicate that 10x-100x the traffic from the virus itself is being generated by braindead antivirus which responds to the spoofed addresses with a stupid 'you have a virus' message.
But the tab key? Surely you jest! What about the 'any' key?
I get stuck with helping my brothers all the time. When my mother got on the net I passed that honor on to one of them, since she only emails and plays a few little games. Otherwise, I find that the general timbre and level of discourse has changed over the years for the worse. Not trying to be elitist, but I really think that all the AOLers on the net have made it less useful then it used to be. I guess it's the price to be paid for mainstreaming.
I can see "sleeping on the couch" if my wife caught me sleeping around or something of that nature.
For disagreeing with her when she's just wrong? That's dysfunctional.
My mom's iMac just needed plugging into the wall and cable modem. Sure, if they were more popular there probably would be more virii, worms, trojans, &c., but it would still be a *lot* more secure (X at least). Of course, I may be designing something to be completely foolproof, while underestimating the ingenuity of complete idiots. ;D
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
You're thinking in the Unix mindset. Windows has the extra feature of the registry. The problem is not filesystem permissions, it's registry permissions. Open up regedit and take a peek at each key's permissions. If you experiment a little, you can lock down the system just like a Unix box.
- Source Authentication is missing. (Email, Web, etc)
- Source Identification is discarded (Web page links, attachments, etc)
- Context is hidden or obscured. (Where does this form really send its data?)
- Metadata is hidden. (Why does Windows now default to hiding file extensions? It's assinine!)
- HTML doesn't allow the inclusion of data in a document, it's transcluded, unlike the markup... brain dead decision in an insecure environment.
The fact is that computers now hide most of the information necessary to make a well informed decision about their use. If I could be sure that an email was actually from Microsoft, would it be a problem to trust it for a bug patch? If I could know that the file was actually just a text file, why shouldn't I open it?HTML email is a really big evil, if the graphics files were embedded in the document, instead of transcluded from an unknown (and hidden to the user) source, a great deal of trouble with email bugs, and URL tweaks, etc... would just disappear.
It's easy to blame the user, it's harder to step back, and figure out how to make a better system that makes things more transparent, and useful.
--Mike--
The fundamental difference between Windows and unixes that mitigates the impact of user-opened worms lies in the file permissions. If the mail client doesn't allow executing of the received binary or script, the worm won't run. The attachments aren't sent with file permission informations (except maybe when uuencoded, and masking away the executable flags is trivial), they are assigned client-side. If the attachment doesn't have executable flag, it won't run. If it won't run, it won't infect, it won't spread. It HAS a lot to do with the OS.
I have 3 words for you: local root exploit.
YOU FUCKING TROLL. That link you have up googles for "Mac OS X local exploit", not root expoit.
Wank.
...Since I know a lot of people who DO neglect their cars. A LOT of people think that it's time to change the oil when the oil light comes on and would not give it any thought before then. Those same people only pay attention to tires when they go flat or it's time to out the Winter set on, and will drive both their sets of tires until they're bald. You can forget about them thinking about ATF, flushing the cooling system once in awhile or changing brake pads before they wear out and grind rivet grooves into the rotors.
Car makers have done a WAY better job in usability and reliability than PC/software makers. Even east-European and South Korean cars made today are better than almost all PCs on the market today. I've heard the argument that people ought to have computer operators licenses--after all, we all learn the rules of the road and obey them to avoid fatal accidents...well, MOST of the time...But ponder what it would be like if Microsoft and Intel made cars and see how many people would die on the highways:
1. You'd have to take your car in for monthly service to remove tar-like deposits from your engine and have the ignition control system 'defragmented'.
2. The location of the gas, brake and clutch would change with each new model year, and each model would be different as well. Also, the steering wheel would be a different size or shape and the gears on the gearshift would chage orders.
3. The leading carmaker would make their new cars use a different fuel, and using the wrong fuel in the wrong car would make the engine catch fire. The new fuel is meant to "increase performance and relibility" of their new models but conveniently destroys competitors models and their own older models.
4. You will be forced to buy a brand new car after 5 years because they stop making parts for it, and use legal tactics to keep anyone else from using their precious obsolete IP to make replicas.
5. Cars spontaneously crash much less than they did a few years ago, but they still often stall on the side of the road for no apparent reason, you cant turn on the headlights while using cruise control and it's common knowledge that when the turn signals stop working, you must fully shut of the car and all occupants must exit and shut the doors behind them, wait 30 seconds then get back in and re-start the car. These problems have existed for 20 years but are of such low priority that they linger on.
6. Every car is required by the manufacturer to be equipped with OnStar-style tracking system "for safety reasons". It's handy when your call stalls so frequently and it costs nothing extra. However, the OnStar system is polluted with marketers broadcasting spam to all the cars, which make your radio tune to stations you don't like and interfere with vital engine systems, reducing your top speed to 50 km/h and increasing gas consumption 400%. Time to "get the engine defragged" again...
Massive, complex, integrated closed systems like Windows and Office XP can indeed seem to be "moody". The more complicated something is, the more difficult it can be to diagnose, and the flakier it will seem.
But my computer doesn't do that. I start up Mutt and it Just Works. Every time, for years. Vim doesn't spew weird error messages at me; if there is a message, there's a definite REASON and there's something that I can clearly do about it.
I'm not claiming that OSS is immune here; the larger, more complex software starts to get into that magical zone again. Mozilla has sometimes given me problems (although GNUCash hasn't so far, and it's been almost a year). That is, however, part of my point. The more the software tries to tailor itself to the human instead of the other way around, the more error-prone it is.
Will things get better for complex software? Probably. It's unfortunate that the learning curve for apps like Mutt is not for everyone, but I think that eventually the right combination of good programmers and good marketing will produce a system which is reasonably usable by people who don't want to spend much time with it. I'm glad I don't have to wait for it to get MY work done, though.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Hardly a surprise seeing that that came from an AC.
Also, Linux and BSD(therefore OS X) aren't from the same codebase.
What? I thought they were both stolen from SCO...
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
n. informal:
1. The first guy who hacked his Tivo so he could post his 1/4" second shot of Janet Jackson's breast onto the internet.
2. The guy who designed Janet's piercing (was that cool or what?)
he probably got it from there:
r ve y.html
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_su
(though that's about server software, not OS, but not many non-MS servers run on top of Windows)
10.2 and 10.3 don't have any (known) exploits for which a patch isn't available. Educate before you spew.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Maybe Microsoft needs to do a better job welding the hood shut, eh?
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
You know, the courses that are given to the unemployed, are not made for the unemployed. Instead, they are put together so that the company that organizes the course, earns money, at the taxpayers' expense.
It's the same with the "European Computer Drivers License" (ECDL). Lots of people attend courses so that they can take and pass the test. But you do not learn anything that has much useability in a real job - especially not in an IT-job.
What is even worse is that most of the courses, in most subjects (that you can get as an unemployed) have basically the same problem. They are not advanced enough. You will not have an better chance of finding a job after having attended such a course.
What I find sad, is that the unemployment-office actively encourages their clients to attend such courses.
At least these are my experiences as an young unemployed person living in Norway.
Netcraft shows what 65% percent of webservers are apache. Apache does run on windows, but how many of those installs are there, I have never come across one, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exsit. Add in how many *nix servers that are not running apache minus the windows macines that are and you are somewhere in-between 65%- 70%.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
If we look at web servers, why then does a search of the virus library at Network Associates show more virus's for IIS than Apache. I did the search with Apache and IIS as the search words and found the following (word - count):
Apache - 1
IIS - 14
I don't have stats on this, but I've seen many people indicate that Apache holds a large share of the webserver installations. If your argument of popularity and virus writer choice were accurate, why then do we find less in this case?
I also did the search using these keywords too, just out of curiosity (word - count):
UNIX - 26
MacOS - 24 (tried just on Mac, but that returned too many MS Office macro exploits)
Linux - 62
Win32 - 496
Win - 628
Granted that some of the virus's on the Win32 platform are indirect to the OS (caused by flaws in an application), but the ultimate problem appears to be bad system architecture of the OS. Why as a user on the system should should I be able to screw up the system? Even without administrator rights, a user can still take on greater permissions through exploits of the OS (the bad architecture).
Mac may not be a big target for virus writers, but even if it did dominate the market, I don't think it would experience nearly the number of exploits you see with MS Win32 systems.
Jim
In my opionon there is greater reason to attack mac, simply because of fame, Attacking windows is done for a reason, test an Idea, to see if you can bring down the Net, get passwords, and install spam relays(mydoom). Attacking the mac will be the ultimate hack if you can turn the mac into a security the level of windows.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
As a quickie CV, I worked from helpdesk frontline to personal support over about 4 years. In between I became a helpdesk supervisor, network specialist, sometime sysadmin, etc. All this for my university IT office, while studying for a CS degree. Now I'm a software engineer.
Dealing with strangers:
This is the easiest, because most of the time, if they asked you for help, they already expect you to know more then they do. They'll usually listen to you and follow your steps.
- Evaluate the audience - try to figure out if they are the "professor without power" user, or the weekend sysadmin who hosed his user disk
- Once you know the level, speak to that leve.
- Drop the attitude - no one calling cares what you know. No one cares how smart and important you are. And if you don't know the answer, don't spew forth ridiculous answers you know will confuse them so they stop bothering you. Whether you get paid, or not, you've agreed to help. so do it.
- Look at the guys in Gamestop. If you find yourself acting like one of those guys, stop trying to help and go home and half-finish your xbox mod
Dealing with friends:This can be tough, because your friends are voyeurs. They want to watch.
also, they don't want to waste your time, so they will try to lear what they can. Often you're shanghai-ed from fixing the cdrom (which, of course, was just a scratched cd) to showing them the location of all the best porn.
- Fix the problem as fast as you can, and don't let him sidetrack you.
- "I'll fix this, then we can address Janet Jackson's boom-boom bitties" will work wonders. Often, any of the myriad questions that would have waylaid you for minutes to hours will become a distant memory by the magic of the now WORKING cd-rom (which you had a backup of, luckily) and Ms. Jackson's Nasty nip
- Be prepared to help him in many ways. Spend the night. Then date his sister. As they say, it is a dish best served... cold.
- Look at the guys in Gamestop. If you find your friend acting like one of those guys, stop trying to help and go home and let him half-finish his xbox mod himself
Dealing with a spouse/signifigant other:Absolutely the most difficult task in IT.
Hey guys. This is Miriam Tauber speaking. I have several things to say to you people. 1. I am not an idiot. I am an average computer-user. I am actually very good at using the computer. I, in fact, use my computer all day long. I just dont know how to fix it, like most people. 2. I dont understand your blind rage against people who use computers and cant fix them. Can you guys build a car? Make a toaster-oven? Write a book? Would you be able to fix your microwave if it broke? Get over yourselves. We live in a highly specialized society. Without so-called "technophobes," which I am definitely not, you guys would be out of a job. 3. I know what a goddamn MP3 is. I also know what a PDF is. They are EXAMPLES of suffixes. Some suffixes are more familiar to the average computer user than others. My point is - how are you supposed to know when something is a virus if you are not a total computer geek and the e-mail comes from a friend of yours? The answer cannot be that only techies should be able to use computers. That's like saying that only mechanics should be able to drive a car. I bet none of you know anything about economic theory, but you guys still go to the grocery store and write checks. 4. Poor little techies! Their friends and families ask them for help! They might have to talk to people! They might have to be nice to another human being in need. Their lives are just sooo impossibly difficult. We should really give them a vacation. It is, after all, quite taxing to be such an elitist.
I think that those interviewed in the article and some of the responders are not really trying to understand the point of view of the non tech savvy. For us, computers truly have been a mixed blessing. They are amazing tools that are also quite intricate and often difficult to use.
Nobody should be surprised that people might be intimidated by computers when the study of this particular machine can earn one a PhD, and even then the student can be unfamiliar with many of the systems and subjects relevant to computer use. These machines are complex, expensive, and very imperfect. They do malfunction often, and fixing them is not simple. Personally, I wait for my (very tech savvy) husband do work with my slowly deteriorating PC because I am afraid of hasting the demise of a several thousand dollar investment by doing something ignorant, and I do not think that's unreasonable.
Learning to use a computer well and to troubleshoot that computer demands an inordinate amount of time, and often money as well (for books and classes). Nobody can afford to be an expert in everything, it's simply too costly. We all have to pick and choose. That some have chosen to become experts in a non-tech profession, doesn't merit that they be called "tech dumbasses" and the like when they encounter difficulties using their computers. (Though let it be said that I lose sympathy for a person who infects a computer with a virus by opening an unknown attachment after the first couple of times.)
I'm sure that computer scientists sometimes ask their doctor friends for medical advice, or their mechanic friends for car advice, and they wouldn't deserve to be derided for doing so. They've chosen to be experts on computers, not cars or bodies even if they have some basic understanding of each.
I haven't much used windows these past couple years so when friends ask a windows question I usually refer them to someone more knowledgeable.
Or offer to install Linux on their computer - though I haven't had much success with that yet I must confess. I have switched many people to Mozilla, though, and even running on top of windows it's a big help against virii.
I used to do tech support (6+ years) for both Windows and Macintosh. I still get calls from family for support, my husband is also in IT and get calls from his family. While my current role doesn't specifically include tech support, as one of the more technically literate users in the department, I get many of the tech support requests.
Most people, given the chance, want to understand what went wrong so they are not reliant on someone else to fix their problem next time. It's just that many people in tech support techno-babble at them in a language they don't understand and they are too intimidated to ask. I would make a point of explaining in plain english to my customers what had gone wrong so that they knew how to avoid the problem in the future - at least as much as they could.
My biggest problem was the people who didn't want to learn, you could explain things in words of one syllable and it still wouldn't help. They aren't interested in knowing how to load a printer or install an application - even my mother has worked out that much. When I was paid to do tech support I had to help these time-sinks, now I refer them elsewhere and hope they get charged buckets of money for the privilage of being ignorant.
cheers
Sara
a Macgrrl in an NT world
You're just adding fuel into the fire. I have something about the damn registry, too. At my work, I don't have admin privileges on my machine. But I have write access to all the partitions, including full access to the system FS (thank God!).
I cannot write in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, it's ok, I shouldn't be allowed to write there. But some of my apps are broken because of that. No app should try to write on that part of the registry except when it is installed, all should use HKEY_CURRENT_USER. Those apps are not well-behaved.
Strangely, the apps I'm talking about are mostly Micro$oft. So, they are so concerned about the security of their system that they design their apps assuming full access in the system! See what I mean?
Other example:
In my college the machines run w2k, the disk and the registry are protected, otherwise they would last a few hours. Some apps are broken, of course. Even so, I find all kinds of shitware installed and I can't uninstall it because I don't have permissions!
Installing a fresh Linux may be more difficult than installing Windoze, but installing a secure Linux is much much easier than a secure Windows.
Call them, they're in charge of IT now, right?
Of course I do. This is hardly a wild claim. Ever since the moderation system came about has it been echoed through the halls of Taco.
One of my problems is that I have to keep fixing various systems nearly every time I see my in-laws. In the end, I just started locking down the machines. I used to believe the machines aren't mine, so I have no right to lock them down. After fixing the WiFi a couple times, because someone farqed the key, I locked the system. I and only I have the admin password. The next Win9x system that gets farqed is getting an upgrade, and locked.
How different is this from people who can't fix a sink asking their plumber friend for help, or someone who wants to do their taxes asking their accountant friend for help. Everyone has a sink and pretty much everyone has to do their taxes, and I would think those numbers are greater than those that own computers. This just shows that the demand for computer skills is out there waiting to be tapped. Convergence will make those with compute knowledge much more valuable and will embed technology into every pore of our lives. Eventually it will be expected that generations to come will learn how to use these things as they grow up, like anything else that is learned.
My kids are able to grasp computer concepts at a much earlier age an I did. And I can say the same for my daughter who is now 9 and can handle a computer better than when my 13 year old was that age. Eventually this gap will disappear, but there will always be some sort of technology gap in the population, be it sinks, taxes, or computers.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
but don't you think that if someone is readily duped into running a Trojan, they'd also likely have overlooked patching their system? Remember, I'm talking about Joe iSixpack here.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
</troll>
Every time a window pops up on my sister's computer that says something, she calls me.
First thing she says is "My computer wants me to say 'Restart' or 'Cancel.' Which do I choose? My natural question is "Well, what does the rest of the dialog say?" It's usually something like "Foo finished updating some foozlets so your computer will work better and I need to restart." Naturally, it's because she just downloaded a system update (which I've told her is OK if it comes through the system itself and she doesn't seek it out) and it's finished.
Maybe I should post a sticky on her monitor that says 'Yes, it's OK to restart...BUT SAVE YOUR WORK!"
fs
p.s. FINALLY got her up to OS X. I'm hoping that'll reduce my tech workload.
My brother and I attend the same university and a few months ago, he needed a connector for his Powerbook. He was in a class where he needed to run a PowerPoint presentation from his laptop to an LCD projector... but the projector only had a VGA input on it, whereas his laptop only has a DVI port.
When he went to our school's tech support guys for the proper adapter cable, and they either told him that his computer, a 667mhz PowerBook G4, was "obsolete," or they'd hand him a VGA-VGA extension cable and tell him that "it would work."
So there's several scenarios here:
1) The support kids were completely clueless; possibly intimidated by the fact that it was a Powerbook and not an Inspiron or Vaio.
2) The kids purposely wanted to be a jackasses and didn't want to help my brother, knowing full well that the port was in-fact a DVI port and that they're hired and PAID to help other students.
3) They were too busy with "more important things."
I won't lie for someone else's convenience ... not even my wife's. It sets a horrible precedent, and has a ton of "unintended consequences" just waiting to be unleashed. The truth is the truth, and sometimes it's painful.
As for sleeping on the couch, if she's so torqued that she can't stand to share the bed with me, she can damn well mosey on out to the living room. After all, I'm not the one with the pent-up angst, am I?
How is it censorship if you can still get access to it?
/.
/. community moderates itself. These moderators each have five mod points at a time and can only moderate a single comment once.
/. user will never see it.
/. at -1 (as I do), but not everybody does that. Those who don't should have a reasonable expectation that the peer moderation will not be over-ridden in the manner that is sometimes evident.
There's two types of moderation evident on
The first type is the standard peer moderation where the
The second type is the small number of all-powerful moderators with no limit to the number of mod points available. If they disagree with a post, even when the peer moderation has lifted the posts visibility, they can push it back down and keep it down where the average
That is censorship.
You might well read
That's to make everything seem "friendlier". Here's an analogy that might help if you end up talking to someone who's confused by the concept.
The file extension is like a "family name". The intention is that by knowing the file's "full name" ("ReadMe.pdf" - "First name" ReadMe, "Last name" pdf) you know where they "live" (which application to use to view it). The "pdf family" lives in the "Adobe Acrobat Reader" (well, okay, in my case it's KGhostview), so if you want to "see" ReadMe.pdf, you know where to go do to so.
Microsoft, however, thinks that's too formal, and assumes their customers will be intimidated if they're not talked to like children (am I the only one that thinks "My Network Places" sounds grossly condescending?), so they leave off the family name to sound "friendly".
Of course, that means when ReadMe.pdf.exe shows up, the virtual clueless, smiling, allegedly helpful guy in the butterfly suit that lives in the computer buzzes you and says "Hey, ReadMe is here to see you, should I let him in?" regardless...but doesn't that sound friendly? :-) ("Well, mister ReadMe, he says he knows you because he clicked YES. Go right in through the door marked "executables", Mr. exe...")
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Why can't we (at least on Windows): Get on the "Welcome to Windows" (the thing that often runs first when you very *first* boot up the system) to: * enable maintenence wizard by default and have it run while the computer is idle, and *inform* the user that there are certain things that must be done to ensure the "health" of a computer? * get a *better* version of the maintenance wizard? one that oh, i dunno, includes something like a defrag, scandisk, lavasoft's ad-aware, and some sort of basic virus-scanner? (if only that were ever possible) and then inform the user with some kind of popup or message to remember to leave the computer on from time to time to do defrag, maintenance and all that? In my local school district, almost all regular admin duties (the gradebook, taking roll, etc) is done on computer (of course, if the system goes down, regular paper books are also used as backup), and I've noticed that at least for our systems (which use w2k), every time the computer has been idle for around 20 min or so, maintenence comes on and scans the computer. Why can't we have that on regular Windows systems? * get a "basic" firewall enabled by *default* with a tab on the lower right (near the clock) in the system tray running, just like zonelabs's zonealarm? * have outlook not auto launch files? (this, of course, should've been implemented *way* earlier) I suspect that most of these problems with spyware (gator, all that) could be softened with at least these changes in effect. If only the focus was, instead of building more fisher price looking OSes, figuring out ways to make computer systems more bulletproof for the users against the outside world and against themselves (which seems to be addressed by MS via Pallidium, and was halfway addressed with all those "rollback" software packages).
Try not to let life get in the way of living.
(sorry for double submit, forgot to change to Plain Old Text) Why can't we (at least on Windows): Get on the "Welcome to Windows" (the thing that often runs first when you very *first* boot up the system) to: * enable maintenence wizard by default and have it run while the computer is idle, and *inform* the user that there are certain things that must be done to ensure the "health" of a computer? * get a *better* version of the maintenance wizard? one that oh, i dunno, includes something like a defrag, scandisk, lavasoft's ad-aware, and some sort of basic virus-scanner? (if only that were ever possible) and then inform the user with some kind of popup or message to remember to leave the computer on from time to time to do defrag, maintenance and all that? In my local school district, almost all regular admin duties (the gradebook, taking roll, etc) is done on computer (of course, if the system goes down, regular paper books are also used as backup), and I've noticed that at least for our systems (which use w2k), every time the computer has been idle for around 20 min or so, maintenence comes on and scans the computer. Why can't we have that on regular Windows systems? * get a "basic" firewall enabled by *default* with a tab on the lower right (near the clock) in the system tray running, just like zonelabs's zonealarm? * have outlook not auto launch files? (this, of course, should've been implemented *way* earlier) I suspect that most of these problems with spyware (gator, all that) could be softened with at least these changes in effect. If only the focus was, instead of building more fisher price looking OSes, figuring out ways to make computer systems more bulletproof for the users against the outside world and against themselves (which seems to be addressed by MS via Pallidium, and was halfway addressed with all those "rollback" software packages).
Try not to let life get in the way of living.
That still isn't censorship. The comments are still there, readable by anyone. If you have a problem with this, which is clearly stated underneath every comment submission form, you have an overly-large stick up your arse, and you find something better to whine about. There is REAL censorship in the world about way more important shit than what gets reported on here.
I can't deny your points about popularity, but there are some mitigating factors that need to be mentioned. How long an exploit remains unpatched is a huge factor. Nothing really new makes it out to the script kiddee level until the real discoverers exploit it privately for a few months.
What's disturbing about MS products is that users have been hit harder by minor variant viruses finding a way around previously patched bugs, than by the actually novel exploit, and people who give a damn about security and do cooperate with good practices aren't seeing nearly as much improvement in their chances as they should.
I know that last point is a bit subjective - just how much safer is not being totally clueless going to make you? - Answer: YMMV.
Certainly, if Linux, (or BSD, or OS X) had 18 times its current market share, there would be about 18 times as many people trying to find holes in it. There might even be 18 times as many genuinely original viruses, worms, and trojans written. (I think it would be somewhat better, maybe only 9 times instead of 18, but you could well be right).I don't think there would be 18 times as many minor variants and kit bashed exploits as there are now, following on those, and I don't think those minor variants would spread as effectively or do as much damage (economically speaking at least).
Who is John Cabal?
IMO its not an either/or thing. The number of viruses written is a combination of popularity and ease. MS is in the unenviable position of winning in both cases.
Fanboy bullshit like you've seen a thousand time before on slashdot.
That's all, nothing to see here. Move along.
This public service announcement was brought to you by A.C.
"...I feel that Macs are less likely to be infected because the platform was built from the ground up with security in mind."
Well, UNIX security aside, there is that OS X runs on a different processor than most unices out there. So even if there is a worm out there targeting unices, most likely it's aimed at the i386 version, rather than PPC.
****************
I understand this guy's point of view completely. I bought my Dad a digital camera for Xmas. I spent hours farting around with it, only to find that it conflicted with his USB printer. So in order to use it or the printer, one or the other has to be plugged in before a reboot. Whereas on my Mac, uh, you plug it in and...it works.
Email as we know it, should be killed. It's not so much the concept of email, which is great and useful, but everything built around the current implementation. But the only way to get rid of all that cruft is to start from scratch with a new infrastruction (client, protocol, etc.) that forces everything else OFF the social network.
Thats very modest of you
Then lets be less modest.
Have you ever gotten laid from repairing a computer?
This actually came up in a conversation a few weeks ago, on a snowy evening with about 15 of us sitting around the fire. We were ripped to the gills after drinking every drop of alcohol in the place, thus the stories may have been embellished slightly. We now have set a new sliding scale plan for sexual favors as payment. I was heartened to see I was not the only one who had received sex as payments. We might be geeks, but we're socially active geeks.
Recovering her doctoral thesis from a dying hard drive (backups, what are backups?): Dinner during the recovery, and a night of passionate sex after successfully recovering all the documents. Then dinner and sex for every night the rest of the week. Sorry DK, just doing what felt good
Rebuilding her system after her daughter put an AOL CD from a box of cereal into the machine: Getting stoned and having sex as soon as her daughter left for school. 3 days in a row.
Making 2 macs, 2 PCs, 2 printers, a scanner, and other assorted incompatible stuff work together on a network: Girlfriend for a few months
ADSL+firewall installation: a quicky while sitting at her desk
Reinstalling her system at work after getting the latest destructive 'doze virus, thus saving her job: blow job
Setting up her church group's mailing list software: dinners, dating, living together, marriage
Setting up a new PC and configuring ISP dialin: backrub and foot massage
Average people don't know the difference between a .jpg an .exe. There are two solutions:
1) Assume everyone on Earth has perfect and complete knowledge of everything, including messages like "error pqx7923.8", which is the current model of software development.
2) Give messages that are in ENGLISH and MEAN SOMETHING. Yes, I know this is totally radical and completely new and unheard of in software. That's because I'm a hardware engineer.
For instance, when clicking on an exe, a message could come up that says "Clicking on an unknown executable is the computer equivalent of swapping body fluids with a stranger. Are you SURE you want to do this?"
You techies are full of hate
I will go back to a Ticonderoca and a Big Chief
Please share the brief and readable version, so that we all could send it to those who call often on us.
Once upon a time, it was really no contest between Macs and PCs. Macs had this user-friendly graphical interface, and Windows had this half-assed imitation. But over the years, Windows got better, Intel machines got faster and cheaper, and Mac hardware and software stagnated, until Windows systems, while still a bit awkward and less elegant than Macs, were pretty close, and faster and cheaper. Using a Mac was a matter of choosing esthetics over performance.
And then OSX came along. I've been using OSX for awhile, and with each version it's gotten a bit better, but I still had an idea that the relative status of Macs and Windows systems was about the same.
And then my sister asked me to set up her new Dell. What a pain! I had gotten used to the way almost nothing bogs down Mac OS X. You can be doing almost anything--even applying a system update--and you can switch to another application and go about your business. When you install and update Mac OS X, you generally have to reboot the system twice, three times at most, to get it absolutely up to date. Most application installs do not require a reboot. Installing Windows XP was a horrible exercise in frustration. I think I had to reboot over a dozen times to get the system and applications up to date. It was an all day affair. Not to mention having to install and update the virus software that is necessary to prevent a non-sophisticated user of a Windows system from getting completely overrun with infections and spyware.
Even after installing it, it seemed slow and clunky. And this is not in comparison to some super-duper G5, but to my old 800 MHz G4 Powerbook. Now I'm sure that new 2.6 GHz Dell would smoke my Powerbook in any number of benchmarks. But routine things like windows redraws just seemed so slow. And most of the standard software seemed so clumsily designed.
And I realized...the old days are back.
This is your wife!! Just wait until I get home tonight, buster! You are fucking toast!!
Car experiment:
put the car in neutral.
hold down the gas.
turn the wheel to the left.
put the car in reverse.
put the car in drive.
turn the wheel to the right.
put the car in neutral.
put the car in drive.
repeat until your transmission blows out, your tires blow, or you hit something interesting, like a tree while going 60 mph.
If you don't know how to operate the car properly, there's a very good chance that you'll damage it, or it will fail to run for other reasons.
First, I tell my friends that I know absolutely nothing about MS Windows, and cannot help them with that. If I'm feeling generous I offer a Knoppix test drive and then I offer to install Linux. I insist that they have a modem for remote access. To start with they don't get the root password. If they are going to use the internet I insist they get the satellite system to report their current IP number to me. A site vist deserves a meal.
So, you are advocating making screwing up on a computer lethal?
Them "screw-uppers" is what we like to call customers.
Please don't kill them all - curried chicken is nice, but I'm not sure I would want to eat it every night.
And I sure as heck ain't in the mood to pay fealty to the statue of an eight-armed pagan god...
We have something like that on the forklift computers where I work:
512 mb flash drive with embedded Windows XP. There is a program installed to "set" the drive image.
Since it's on the equivalent of a tablet PC, we use a barcode scanner and touchscreen for all input. If someone hoses up the system somehow, we restart, and it's back up as-is. Throw on an external hard drive, and you're set with a perfectly stable system. Impossible to screw up if you can hide the commit executable.
ten people in India still wont be able to resolve a problem and the reason they dont belittle you is they know less than you do.
gnulinuxrat
Seriously. My dad does eye surgery and everywhere he goes people ask him for free medical advice when people look at something of his and they see the MD(and none of it has to do with eyes). Over the years I've noticed that men ask a lot more questions to my dad than women. I guess its because they are scarred of doctor's offices.
Open Source Sushi
Don't you love it when you click on an interesting link and it asks you to fill up a lovely flowery HUGE form? :p
Lord of the Binges.
Doesnt sound like you could have many friends if you wont help them unless under certain conditions. Maybe you should just say I dont have the experience to resolve your problem. The way you describe Mac's the only problem your friends do have is with plugging them in, which you explain quite clearly is within your capability.
gnulinuxrat
You know the one that comes with every copy of Windows.Seriously why the fuck can MS have a virtual monopoly,charge out the wazoo,and not include a paper manual?
When I finally broke down and bought a new computer with a properly licensed OS (XP) I kept going through the box looking for it...must be here somewhere....shit everything else comes with a manual why not Windows?
totally..my dad is like this. He is a small business owner and he refuses to learn anything about a computer. I helped him buy a computer for his office (he used to just have his secretary do everything for him, until he realized that he could do crossword puzzles online!!) and this was a huge mistake. Immediately he started calling for 'help'. It was not even like he wanted help, he just wanted me to do it for him. Simple things, like sending email with MSN. He would call me over to his office in a big panic and tell me that he couldn't figure out how to send email. When I'd show him how to do it he wouldn't pay attention..in fact, at one point, he left the room and started dictating the letter to me! It's people like this who piss me off the most..just a complete unwillingness to learn..
Those who can, do. Those who can't, go into business for themselves.
Guy at party: Oh you are a doctor? I have this pain in my leg, what do you suggest I would do about it?
Doctor at party: I would see a doctor about it.
Search for doctor jokes and you will find many others and better ones too.
If you have a truck license then expect to be called upon whenever someone around you needs to move house because you want to drive a truck on your off days too. If you are handy then expect to be asked to do DIY stuff so basic you expect a demented 2yr old could do it. Simiarly I ask a girl I know with beautilfull handwriting to write my business christmas cards. Friends know I got lousy handwriting but business relations must be able to read the card to know who it is from.
So I help with computer problems. Only if people are being annoying I stop after a while. Just as the truckdriver doesn't need a rear seat driver or the DIY expert needs your advice, if I fix your computer I am the teacher you are the student and no the student will not surpass the master in this movie thank you very much.
I don't mind technophobes. They let me get on with my work. I mind the idiots who think they know computers because they know the windows desktop a bit. I wouldn't hate MS nearly as much if it wasn't for the kind of people who use it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
As a slashdot reader, I make no apologies for my lack of knowledge about girls. To me, they are very much like a computer running an older operating system, requiring frequent restarts, being undependable, and difficult to work with. If girls were more comprehensible, I would certainly make more use of them.
You said you e-mail people the *nicer* version... you meant one still as long? Does anyone actually read all of that before they call you again??
delibarate incompetence
I hate those arrogant types who delibarately choose to be incapable of even checking whether the power lead has fallen out "because that's technical and I am a liberal arts graduate" - as if that is something for them to feel superior about.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
So I propose the Tech Support Mother Exchange. You answer my mom's tech questions, I'll answer yours. We'll both get fewer 3 am panic phone calls because our moms will have *gasp* listened the first time.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
"People aren't perfect, and people make computers, so why should computers be perfect?"
Apple stuff is inherently more secure, so while there might be more viruses, iHighly doubt that it would reach the "more than on windows" level.
90% of apple's marketing is oriented on having nice looking equipment that works well. This is also a different way of looking at computing.
People who make the switch say things like this:
"Well, it doesn't have 2800Mhz processor, but damn, this thing has looks great and has features I actually like using!"
Mail is better than outlook, more polished than mozilla. Quicktime works better than WMP9 or Mplayer. Address book has no rival. iTunes is better than winamp, iPhoto becomes indispensable almost instantaneously....
Dude, just try one, they're really where it's at right now.
.. with fairies and cute little elves and everyone dancing around in a circle happily. Because I swear that's the way many people think of it.
With a good chunk of the problems people seem to have online, I can usually make them see where they went wrong with this scenario: A random stranger walks up to you on the street, and asks you for $100. What do you do? I've never had someone tell me "of course, give it to him/her!". Me: "so why would you do the same just because it happened on the internet?".
A little common sense would solve so many problems, and yet people seem to leave their brains at the door when they turn on their computer.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I usually try to start out simple, and work my way up to complex and evaluate the users amount of knowledge as we go - the big problem is that sometimes you do get fellow geeks, or reasonably clueful users and I run the risk of sounding patronising.
If I had a buck for every time I helped someone with their 'Im having a problem with my computer, can you help me' scenereo where (of course) they want free help because of something (obvious) that they had done wrong...monitor not plugged in, monitor not turned on, computer not turned on, printer not turned on, no...it's a power outage and your computer really does need electricity, it isn't a coffee cup holder, it's called a cd tray......I would be richer than William Henry Gates III.
It's great that you don't think that, even if the mac did dominate the market, there would be nearly the number of exploits. I must be nice to believe that the virus writers wouldn't be trying a little harder to exploit the mac. It must be comforting to believe that if the mac dominated the market, its users are so technically adept that they would never succumb to the social engineering tactics that those stupid Windoze lusers fall for. I am not entirely convinced of these things.
whose technology has been around for only around 25 years or so and I'll show you one complicated, frustrating machine to use.
But unlike most people, I'm totally fascinated by them and willing to spend thousands upon thousands of hours poking and prodding and experimenting. But I certainly do understand people's frustration and utter bafflement with these things. I sure as hell get frustrated tyring to do just about ANY new task with them. I recently got into doing a little video editing. I burned an mpeg2 to my hard drive. I played it and it worked fine. Then I transferred the video to another machine running the very same software (or so I thought) and it won't work! I'm informed I don't have the right "codec". So now I have to spend an hour or boning up (again) on the latest video compression technologies when all I wanted to do was show a 3 minute video of my kid. Any mortal would just throw up their hands and say "What the fuck!" and go spend some quality time with the family---probably a much more rewarding pursuit.
Also, it takes LOTS of practice to think in the abstract universe of a comuter, even for something as "simple" as word processing with a GUI. Compare it to a typewriter. You hit a physical key and see some metal object whack a sheet of paper on a roll and leaving a black inky stain behind that looks like a letter. Then you rub a gummy piece of rubber on the paper if you make a mistake. And if you fuck up too much, you start over. It's limited and pain in the ass technology but it has the advantage of laying out most of its inner workings right out in front of you. Not so writing a letter on a computer...you have to worry about fonts, colors, layout, images, spell checkers, grammar checkers, etc. all hidden by funky keystrokes/drop down menus/and bizarre mouse movement & click combinaions.
Computers are a new technology that most people have not grown up with and therefore far from intuitive. It's only a matter of course that many users are confused and that computer geeks get frustrated helping them. But as much as it can be annoying, patience and handholding is required. There really isn't a way aroud it and it's the only way to make the world a little more civil. Rest assured that as the years slide by, the technology will improve, and the kids today will be running the world and our pissed-off-selves will have moved on to something else to get annoyed with.
So, there you go.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
I think the problem is deeper and more pervasive: We are becoming a nation of incompetents, or rather, people with such narrow, specialized skill sets that we are incapable of solving problems outside our tiny areas of expertise. I once came across a copy of the "Ladies Home Journal" from 1910 or so. I was amazed by the levels of competence the writers assumed to exist in the readers. Apparently it wasn't uncommon for most/many people of this era to know how to repair all sorts of mechanical devices, raise crops, build additions to their homes, tend to the sick, garden, sew, design clothes, etc. I know that in many ways we are better off today than in 1910 (better medical care, longer lifespan, etc) but we have lost something as well. It is crazy that people who are neurosurgeons, attorneys, university professors should feel terrified in the face of a personal computer. What has happened to values such as self-reliance, ingenuity and competence?
...you can't force people off of them. As long as anyone has one single friend or relative who can't give up SMTP, everyone will keep using it.
0 1 - just my two bits
When the latest internet worm runs rampant across the internet, nobody dies from it. Traffic accidents are a leading cause of death.
0 1 - just my two bits
I've got a friend (who is a 'dorm tech') that usually opts for a blowjob and some soda, when the individual is female.
(Kidding. I just thought it was funny.)
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
How many former electronics, steel, auto, textile workers are you feeding and sheltering?
IT is not special. Your job will be outsourced to a company in indochina that employs 300,000 people at least as well-educated as you, and pays them starvation wages. Nobody outside of the navel-gazing IT industry press will even notice. Adapt or starve. This is the nature of trans-national capitalism, as it is the nature of the jungle.
It's funny you say that. I haven't used IE in about 4 years.
But I wonder what's so broken about Opera's javascript implimentation that it can't do those things.
Oh well, sucks to be you.
So basically you're saying that a skilled architect, accountant, marketing expert, or car engineer should be fired just because they're not an expert in computers? That instead of learning more about their own job, they should drop everything and stay up to date with computers instead?
Geesh.
Here's some free clue: for those people, the computer is just a tool, just like an abacus or a pencil. It's _not_ their l33t h4x0r skillz that generate revenue for the company. The computer is just a tool for their real job. The software running on it should be designed from the ground up, and tested, with one single purpose in mind: to make their real job easier.
If said tool only makes their life harder, then it's a crap tool. Then it's time someone made a better tool. One which doesn't require a Ph.D. in CS to use.
Let me give you a better idea: how about we fire people like YOU. It's about time we stopped letting such ego-centric assholes design unstable, buggy and unsafe software, and then blame it on the user. Hire someone who can keep the following simple fact in mind: it's your job to meet the customers' needs, not viceversa.
So, yes, the parent poster was right: the computer _should_ be a glorified tool or appliance. And software should be designed from the ground up with the users' needs in mind.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
A: Well, it's blue, and when you see it, you die.
Q: Do people see the blue screen of death often?
A: No one has ever lived to tell, but we believe so.
Q: How can I avoid the blue screen of death?
A: You can't. Eventually you will see it, and you will die.
Q: Who invented the Blue Screen of Death?
A: It has been with us for as long as anyone can remember.
-- thinkyhead software and media
that sounds a hell of a lot more cautionary than outlook express and outlook.
Really? Have you used either? Click on an executable attachment in OE (assuming you have that latest version with up-to-date patches). It displays a dialog saying pretty much exactly what you assume it doesn't say.
Open mouth, insert foot.
Early in life we learn through intuition, but around 6 we become fixated on understanding through language, except for some very gifted or intuitive children. The addiction to language, and moreover to objects of desire, causes untold stupidity throughout many persons' lives. Not everyone can be a genius like my friend Fern here.
-- thinkyhead software and media
I can understand my olds not knowing about technology but the people I really hate are the people I went to school with and grew up with who can't use a computer. Maybe they were to cool for computers but come on we used them all the time at school. They piss me off. And they think its stylish to be clueless. I'm 23 btw.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
Open -- port is accepting connections
;)
Closed -- port is not accepting connections
Stealth -- port does not exist at this IP address
You really need to be in stealth mode
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
"If your family wants you to be tech support, be BAD tech support, and eventually they'll stop asking."
If this were true, why does Microsoft have a tech support arm? Surely people would have stopped asking them years ago...
To say that any young child is a master of technology is completely silly. To prove this, you would have to have them imitate a process that has more than 3 actions a row. (ymmv) Successfuly building a web page and publishing it, for example, would be impossible for a child of this age. Hitting three buttons to restart their favorite game, or one button on the remote to get to their favorite game is simple cause and effect behaviour. Cry -> get food. Laugh -> get a hug. Do this -> game works.
When language (which starts well before age 6) starts its formal education, the child begins to learn how to expand this simple function of "Do = Get" to complex and intricate tasks. Young children imitate simple processes because this is how we are built to function. If actions/thought/behaviour never evolved beyond this point, we would NOT be capable of complex actions and abstract thought. Reading and language comprehension isn't something done by imitation, but real-time cognition, in addition to memory.
Attempting complex tasks result in "disasterous results" because they don't have the cognative ability to think (or infer or make educated guesses) beyond a few steps.
I work with autistic children between 4 and 7 years old. They are all well versed with technology. I've watched these kids perform "complex actions" with children's games but then fail to replicate a similar cognitive process (without the technology) because they have mastered the actions, not the idea behind it. I watched a 4 year old autistic also "navigate a hierarchical menu" to go from the login of an NT system to a game of Half-Life and then use both the mouse and keyboard at the same time to walk around. Did he know what any of those buttons really mean? More than likely not. He just imitated his older brothers or father who also play.
Good imitation does not mean "absolute genious"[sic]. Good imitation merely indicates the *possibility* that children will also pick up concepts in other areas.
Building on this idea, you have the technoLAZY, which ultimately is what this is about. People who can imitate the use of a computer, but don't fully comprehend the consequenses of opening that virii ridden email from the greetorama-spamhaus. People who make no effort to go beyond this simple imitation phase (in any hobby or profession) are typically the ones that are proud of their ignorance.
I don't believe computers should be dumbed down, as that more than likely leads to less informed users. But I don't think they should be made needlessly complex. This post does an excellent job explaining the difficulty of finding the right balance.
I just read through all the highly modded posts and I can't believe you guys. PCs DO suck.
They are hard to use. They crash. They are confusing.
There are all kinds of 'hidden' things that are important (you need a firewall, wireless security, etc.).
I can't believe everyone is whining that people need to be responsible and learn how to use these pieces of crap.
What we need is an easier to use computer that is more like an appliance. Someone is eventually going to figure out how to do this and get very, very rich.
Nah, welding the hood shut sucks. I hate the fact that the only CLI I get to work with when repairing XP machines is basically crippled.
Microsoft's monopoly position has stagnated user interface design for operating systems, and is partially responisble for the inability of the average user to cope. The users do get the other half of the blame however.
-Z
My cousin is a sanitation engineer and he... uh... helps me take out the trash?
I think I've finally got them understanding that they need to keep their virus files updated. I installed I Hate Spam on their computer, one of the simplest programs there is, and they couldn't handle *that* (but boy oh boy do they complain about spam!!!) I just *know* their computer is rife with adware and spyware, and that I should do something about it, but honestly, I can't handle another two-year learning process. I swear it must have taken me six months to teach them how to use email several years ago.
The thing that gets me about my father is that he's a mechanical engineer - not the sort of person you'd think would be so afraid of computers, esp. not after using them for a good fifteen years or so. But he is just *cowed* by the technology. I don't buy the excuse that he didn't grow up with computers, since I didn't either, and I managed to learn it, and I wasn't even CLOSE to being as technically savvy as my father has always been.
Then there are the friends who should *also* be able to learn this stuff and "can't". I know a lot of unemployed ex-telecom services people (don't we all!) and they can't find a job because they are rigorously stuck on providing sales or service to this one field they know. They know local and long distance and data services, but they can't see the overlap and branch out into the computer field. I mean WTF, I did it in reverse - I started out in computers and branched out into telecom services. Talk about tunnel vision! I was out to lunch with one of them last weekend and she wants to get out of telecom service and into customer service - not exactly an industry suffering from a dearth of applicants. I have encouraged her for years to branch out into computers - if you can learn the finer points of selling T-1s and DSL, IMO, you can learn computers and networking - but she has ignored me, as has everyone else currently pounding the pavement from the telecom services here. She was telling me how her son can't surf the Internet except through AOL's kid filter, and seems to think that's all she needs to do to keep him safe. I tried to tell her the kids are often savvier than the parents, and I completely *forgot* about Peacefire, but it went in one ear and out the other. Boy oh boy, people have time to warn their children not to let Uncle Joe or Father McFeeley touch their wee-wees, but they "don't have time" to learn how to use the computer properly, or check up on their kids to make sure they're not giving out directions to the family silver to any old schmuck they meet on AOL.
Argh, I didn't mean to rant - but that NY Times article REALLY struck a chord with me.
God knows, I just get lazier and lazier as I get old.
/rant
I thought Laziness was one of the (Perl) programming virtues anyway? Along the same vein, I'm too lazy to use Windows if I can avoid it (sometimes I can't).
"Where's the phreakin' command line?!? I know how to do this, just get outta my way". I've had to use a (bad) GUI tool at work lately, instead of "all that difficult programming". It's making me completely insane. Hmm. THAT'S how the techno-foolish have afflicted, er, affected me
Windows is for precognitive cretins who suffer a lack of "object permanence" ability: If I can't see it, it doesn't exist! I know, let's hit it with a rock and eat it! click, click!
Yow! I'm supposed to have a plan?
I am a very patient person when it comes to technophobes, after all, I spent 20 years trying to explain technology to managers in Fortune 100 companies and the US government. What I don't have any patience for is cheapskates and intellectual know-it-alls who first come to me for (free) advice and then argue with every single thing I advise them. I am currently "downsized" but I have been spending a fair amount of time (especially every time the latest Blaster type conflagration hits) straightening out computer messes.
One neighbor had a several year old PC running a copy of Win/XP/Home that had NEVER been patched, and AV software that had never been installed. It was infected with Blaster AND it had a backlevel version of MSN software which was causing MSN to unplug him every time he tried to connect to do anything. He basically had a non-functional PC. I spent about 40 hours over many sessions getting the PC de-virused, WindowsUpdated, AV software and free XP firewall configured, PC vendor patches, etc, etc. and also patiently trying to GIVE HIM A CLUE. My one request for him to DO ANYTHING was to upgrade his 2002 AV software (about to expire) to a current version including a more robust firewall. I even printed him a coupon and gave him the vendor info on how to do this for exactly what renewing the AV software alone would have cost him. So far it has been 2 months and he hasn't done it. The next time he gets bit he can buy a new computer instead of calling me! Or he can go back to the people who were giving him tech support before (his brother, and his daughter's BABYSITTER) - the ones who left him completely wide open.
Back in 1999 while we were working furiously on preventing Y2K I had adopted a fake career as an "auto-detailer". When "The Big One" virus/worm attack of 9-11 proportions formats all the hard drives of the computer ignorentsia I am going back to being just a "humble auto detailer". Computer professionals get no respect when everyone is an "expert".
OS's outside of MS Win32 systems aren't as susceptable to the social engineering tactics that some of the latest virus's work with (at least the systems I've been exposed to). If I am sitting on my UNIX box and download a virus as an email attachment, what's the chances I'll actually manage to install the virus so that it runs everytime the system is rebooted? What's the chance of it burying itself inside the OS files? Can it corrupt the OS? No, it can't, unless the user is running as the root account, and what user would actually do that? I don't have any reason to log in as the root account as I can simply "su" to it when (and only when) I need it. How many applications on MS Win32 systems require that you have elevated rights just to access things like the graphics systems? Even software written by MS often requires it (I play Age Of Mythology and I can't run it unless I'm part of the administrator group...software written by ESO, owned by MS). On UNIX, the OS is protected from the users, the applications are generally installed with a separate account from the users (at least if done properly), and the only thing a user can mess up is their own home directory and possibly data directories.
I do believe that if other OS's dominated the market that virus writers would work harder, but I do feel that these other OS's are designed much more securely than MS Win32 systems. Non MS Win32 systems will experience some exploits (nobodys perfect), but I do think the flaws are less severe.