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Computer Jargon Too Difficult for Office Workers
slashflood writes "Most office workers find computer terms such as javascript and jpeg just as difficult to understand as a foreign language, according to a new survey. A poll of 1,500 staff by recruitment firm Computer People showed that three out of four wasted more than an hour every week simply finding out what some technical term meant. 'A massive 61% don't understand the difference between gigabytes, kilobytes and megabytes and as a result have sent e-mails with huge attachments that have blocked clients' systems.'"
Its not just computer jargon that is confusing
I still don't know what TPS stands for.
I laughed myself sick reading this article...especilly the oh-so-helpful second page, entitled 'what it all means'.
Here's an especially good one from the list:
With 'helpful' articles like this, us IT professionals should remain in demand for a good long time. ^_^
But seriously, a good IT professional isn't one who's good at explaining the jargon, or getting laypeople to understand the technical isues...it's one that takes care of the issues for the laypeople, so they don't need to worry about them. A correctly managed IT department should be all but transparent to the other people in the office. Everything should just work, with the IT guy making certain the users' needs are met before they even know what they are. In a correctly managed facility, the IT guy's phone should almost never ring.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
This and more tonight at 11.
The preceding message was based on actual events. Only the names, locations and events have been changed.
Among CIOs, an amazingly large number of them think that office workers should have the permissions to turn their firewall off.
A massive 61% ... have sent e-mails with huge attachments that have blocked clients' systems.
A massive number of mail administrators don't know how to configure their mailservers thus allowing this to happen.
I could go on...
Empower IT with HR's traditional roles of hiring, promotion, and termination. Allow IT to veto any hire or promotion decision, and to terminate employees who are completely techno-clueless.
This will aid the security mission greatly as well.
Another word for this arrangement is "meritocracy".
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
In other news people have trouble understanding lawyer speak, medical terms, names of car components, how to build a house to proper code, publishing industry slang etc...
I guess that means people just have to learn eh?
I always thought Excel was a spreadsheet program (from article):
Excell - this helps to run programs on your PC.
When you're hammered everything looks like it needs nailed....
The article mentions foreign languages, but we aren't asking people to be able to read code.
Learning a few common terms is no different than understanding what taco or rendevous mean.
Some people don't need to know what javascript is. They just want to use their computer to type documents and read email. I'd say a good portion of business users need their computers for just that.
As far as sending huge files goes, they still don't need to know the differences between file sizes. People shouldn't be sending large documents through email anyway. A few megs at the MAX. Public drives or a webserver for anything else and the users should be educated on that.
Has anyone else had a friend that works in an office enviroment that is extremely paranoid call you up screaming that the hackers have their port?
$fortune
Tomorrow has been canceled due to lack of interest.
A massive 61% don't understand the difference between gigabytes, kilobytes and megabytes and as a result have sent e-mails with huge attachments that have blocked clients' systems.
And a massive 99% of people don't need to understand that. Mail servers should be designed to ignore e-mails of a larger size than they can handle. It's not up to the users to understand KB, MB, GB, mail server loads, HTTP, FTP, SMTP, SSH, whatever.
Their understand lies in doing their jobs effectively, whatever that may be. When my doctor refers to medical jargon I may not know what it means and may be confused (I'm generally well versed in my particular conditions) so do you really expect them to understand what the jargon in your field is?
Blah.
This is why I like to throw in the term "flux capacitor" every once in a while when I'm explaining stuff to end users...
It doesn't exactly take a rocket scientist to grok that most these complaints are from complete morons - duffers with more shine that substance, more muck that spine. :)
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Proper computing education should be mandatory for high school graduation and equivalent. Not knowing this kind of information in today's world is the equivalent of being illiterate. You wouldn't hire an illiterate person to read books all day. So don't hire a computer illiterate person to sit at a computer all day.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Your average office worker is lazy and doesn't want to learn what those terms mean.
The terms aren't the problem; it's the fact that your average cubical dweller simply doesn't want to learn them.
I've personally explained how to fix a the same problem several times to the same person, yet they keep asking me how to fix it every time it comes up. If they'd simply listen the first time and learn how to do it rather then noding the whole time maybe they'd be able to help themselves once and a while.
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
(Insert completely sarcastic obligatory flame-bait 'RTFM' exclamation here)
Rubs hands together a'la Mr Burns
Our long-term job security protection program is going precisely as planned.
Excell - this helps to run programs on your PC.
Especially with assistance like this from our allies in the media
Technoli
What does IT stand for?
Geez... newbies...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
They don't seem to understand basic instructions, either. "Don't open any suspicious attachments, especially from someone you don't know." == "Open anything! It's fun! Oooh, pretty smileys!"
I know nothing
This is just further evidence supporting PEBKAC.
Best advice ever.. "RTFM!"
C'mon now, not knowing what Excell is? Thats a bit to much, pun intended.
'But I don't feel I should know more - that is their job. If we did it all ourselves they would be out of a job.'
Oh, it's users like this that drive me nuts! Because this user feels she 'should know more' is the reason we have so many computer viruses/worms running rampant. I'll bet any cash that she'll be the first person who's demanding the IT staff fix her PC when things go wrong - probably because she didn't know but felt she doesn't feel she 'should know more'.
(/rant)
It is not our abilities that show what we truly are... it is our choices.
Megabytes - the amount of disc space on your computer and the amount of memory
Gigabytes - also refers to disc space, but measures it in larger quantities
These people are in Europe for crying out loud! They use the metric system! It's hard to believe that they can't understand that "giga" means something larger than "mega." I mean, it's not as if people can't understand that a kilometer is bigger than a meter is bigger than a centimeter. jeez people
Well, sadly, this is why Microsoft continues to be in power of the desktop.
People (in general) seem to have no flaming clue what in the name of they are running. Or how to run it.
Or even what to call it. There's plenty of people in my office that walk in, and after 2 minutes glaze over. Even if I'm just talking about Word. They just don't know the lingo. It's kind of odd... Someone who does things that I couldn't dream of doing on Excel (because I simply never had a need to do them, and therefore never learned) doesn't know what a Macro is. And gets confused when I start talking about formatting tables.
It's just.. baffling, I suppose.
Then again, I write helpfiles for software that'll be used by 60-year-old people. Oh-so-much fun, when you can't assume they know what "keyboard" and "mouse" means (yes, I was told I can't assume they even know those terms, or the word Monitor).
Just goes to show... the only way to combat it is to compare it to what you'd say/do if you hired a contractor. Do YOU know what a 2x4 is? Can YOU read a blueprint? Do YOU know the exact term for where two supporting beams come together to form a load-bearing doorway? Do YOU even know that doorways are load-bearing? I suppose it's the same principle. I have no interest in carpentry, yet I have to interact with carpentry-type things daily. Same concept.
However unthinkable it is to Code Monkeys (tm), they don't even want to know.
Code. Writing. Writing Code. Writing in general. What? They aren't -that- differnet.
Problem Exists Between Chair and Keyboard
Reason #32767 not to use VB6: Integers are 2 bytes... Think about it!
Visio, visio--powerpoint PCX GIMP tar c++ RAM. Outlook? Gigahertz!
There should be a certain level of understanding when required by office users when they are given access to things like email, computer systems, etc. If they can't learn and function in their role at work... maybe they should be looking for a new job. Ignorance is self afflicted.
Users shouldn't have to know about a firewall, and the IT department should have their computers locked down so much, they should never even know there is one.
HOWEVER...if your job requires you to use a computer all day, you should know something about them. Saying "I shouldn't have to know that stuff to do my job" is a copout.
As far as e-mails cloggin the servers....well, that shouldn't happen unless the server is really underpowered/misconfigured. Now, users sending HUGE attachments for no reason...that's the user's fault. I blame digital cameras. Everyone takes pictures with their 3 megapixel camera, and then tries to email the un-resized picture to all of their friends, not realizing how big those files are. And trying to explain how to resize an image to someone who barely can operate their camera is an exercise in futility.
Of course, when the Russian gangster finds that all his files have been erased, he plans to kill Jim and feed him to some rats. Jim explains to him that the files were stolen electronically, and fortunately when the gangster asks his accountant, "You can do that?" the gangster's accountant nods his head.
Profit is actually a pretty cool evil cracker character, but the FreeLSD OS he uses in the episodes is painful to watch ^_^
No wonder people are confused.
~opticsdoug
Office workers, you mean those with IQs of 120+ that accept the term lifelong learning as an important fact of life? Or, do you mean the traditional office worker who thinks learning is like operating a trashcan, ie there's a switch in their arse...when they sit in a desk in a classroom that switch opens their head into which they expect the instructor to just shovel knowledge? Or, do you possibly mean the office worker bright enough to think Intelligent Design is scientific fact? /sarcasm
I see, so learning things and educating yourself is a waste of time. I love our modern mentality.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
My secretary just came in and said "my email is broken" Well rather than ask her what the problem is I just went out to see. Seems what one of her stupid Cursor/screensaver/spyware/smiley things locked up and borked the system. I just hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete and ended Outlook, Dog thing (not sure, don't ask) and another unnecessary program. It gave me no real problems and I walked away. She asked what I did, I just say "I am not sure". See the problem is not that they don't get it. The problem is that we try and explain it to people who won't get it. She's 60 and never going to know the difference between 1 GB of Ram and 1.21 Gigawatts. Trying to explain it to her only wastes both our time.
It sounds heartless, but 'jargon' is absolutely necessary for people who do anything beyond the basics with computers. How else would we communicate precise information? And the truth is, most computer language comes from other contexts, where the phrases are even more established. So if comprehending the difference between kilo-, mega-, and gigabytes is too difficult (even though it's exactly the same for any other measurement dimension, like length or weight!), they should just surf over to Wikipedia and type it in. Professionals can't spend their whole day educating clueless users; they'll have to do it themselves.
Actually, this is normal.
...
Every field has its jargon that is virtually undecipherable for outsiders.
Think about medicine for example, and the names of medical conditions.
Or think about botany, or construction engineering.
Where the problem lies is that unlike the above fields, computers have become pervasive, and embedded everywhere.
If computers have remained in mainframe rooms with an army of programmers and operators, this would never have been an issue. It became an issue after the PC was invented and made it to every office and every home...
Live with it
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
My boss has been using computers since the early 80s, and was a tech journalist during that time. He still doesn't even understand the simple concept of a zip file. I don't think it's just the jargon that's too difficult. I think it's simply that computers are too difficult for many people. And no, I don't think that dumbing any of it down will ever make it better. I really think it's just that some people out there are too dense to begin to understand anything remotely technical.
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
FTA:
Excell - this helps to run programs on your PC.
Java Script - a computer programming language.
OK, Excell has been covered. But Java Script is not a programming language, hence the term "SCRIPT". It is a scripting language. Most people wouldn't know the difference only because stupid things like this give misinformation.
Really, if we are going to try and tell people what these terms mean, actually tell them the truth. Don't dumb it down because you think they wont understand. If they care, they want to know what it really means, if they don't care, why should you?
I'm a pale geek with no muscles, thick glasses, and back problems. I don't work for "two men and a truck", that'd be stupid.
use Open Office instead.
Problem solved!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
A massive 61% don't understand the difference between gigabytes, kilobytes and megabytes and as a result have sent e-mails with huge attachments that have blocked clients' systems.'
Give 'em all 28.8k modems, that'll teach 'em!
they should be called klein bites, medium bites and grand bites.
Fight Frist Psoting!
Browse Slashdot with 'Newest First'!
My experience has been that office workers (non-IT) are not the only ones who are confused by IT jargon.
From the article:
Yeah, well a LOT of IT people don't really know what a firewall does either. I've cringed at some of the definitions of firewalls I've heard peer IT workers give for firewall. And, of those who have an inkling, I would not be surprised at all if 75% of IT workers don't really know how and why firewalls work.
I've seen IT people play fast and loose with these terms too. I've been on projects where estimations are off by 1 to 6 magnitudes because some erudite IT person didn't understand the differences. (I got an emergency call one time because an entire project was going to get canceled because a team member had confused baud (bits per second) with Bps (bytes per second, combined with parity bits, essentially a magnitude difference) and had said what we were attempting would kill our network. I walked them through a pencil estimate and put them back on track that night with an estimate of bandwidth within 2%.
Again, find me an IT team fo which the majority knows this, too. It's amazing how many times jpg's vs. gif's vs. pdf vs. pbm, etc. are selected mostly on the basis of only what the person involved knows.
yeah, good luck getting consistent answers on this one. Again, my experience, IT people can be amazingly clueless about the notion of "direction" and server-side vs. client-side technology.
Yeah, me too! The IT jargon is inconsistent, overloaded, pseudointellectual, and obfuscated. It's a constantly moving target making true currency in technology jargon a royal pain-in-the-ass.
This is NOT a surprise. As may be inferred from my previous points, IT "experts" probably reach this level of blundering also.
The fluid and obfuscated universe of IT jargon has long driven me crazy. And foisting it on the lay community is a crime -- it's fscked enough in the IT universe, who the heck would expect the user community to spend the time and energy to stay current. I would like to think in an industry as driven by rigorous technological underpinnings the language would distill to a more formal, stable, and consistent language. Unfortunately, that's not been my observation.
Theory(?) The language is less driven by the technology and more by the commercial/business bent, thus pushing all in IT to distinguish themselves with the best and most sophisticated sounding terminology. (Just my theory.)
It's worth remembering that what you know you had to learn. These technical terms are not "too difficult." They are merely unknown or unfamiliar, and many people couldn't give a rat's ass what they mean, because they don't have to. Danish is not "too difficult for English-speakers," it's just not what they speak. If I said "crocheting patterns and terminology are 'too difficult' for IT workers," you'd spot the fallacy right away.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Let's teach them computer jargon the fun way!
This is partially a side effect of not understanding the metric system. Cue Grandpa Simpson's quote about gas milage. While certainly a mail administrator can configure this to avoid overflowing their own system, the end user will still generate a complaint as to why they can't send mail. The real misunderstanding is file size comparisions. For example, if you didn't know how big a "gigabyte" was, you might think one or two gigabytes wasn't very large (as far as emails go).
Gigabytes - also refers to disc space, but measures it in larger quantities
Excell - this helps to run programs on your PC.
Is this supposed to help or hurt things? These definitions don't explain anything. Maybe this is the problem. What they should get is a simple course or some terms with proper definitions posted. If people learn the basics, they can figure out a lot more on their own. These just raise more questions than they answer.
The number of idiots I work with who don't know the difference between a hard drive, a modem and their PC is astounding, and most of these people are also home users.
I just love getting the calls about how "My Microsoft isn't working".
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I have the humble opinion that some things just should not be localized and this applies very much to computer jargons. Understanding the commonly used English version is one thing, but it is very much harder when someone translates already hard computer terms into the local gibberish and then makes a short term for the local version which, obviously, is completely different from the English equivalent..
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
PC Load letter? What the %*&# does that mean!?
You can tell I'm an aries because of my ram.
"Around 48% are confused by different kinds of files like Jpegs and PDFs and don't know how they should be used."
if windows shipped with the default of "extentions turned on", this wouldnt be a problem. Theres also the fact that every time you create a user it defaults to this behavior. I have never found a group policy setting that addresses this issue, but i havent really looked too hard either.
its just one of those intelligent microsoft decisions that make things "easier". because theres nothing like having no idea what a file is when your talking ease of use...
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
I met a group of students from some poor African country on a study tour here and all of them could write essays a teacher could think were written by some university graduate. These students were at least 4 grades before university! I think the trouble is that the students of today are faced to too many distractions - the PS2s and iPODs and the like. I know I am right. I have a kid!
What I dislike more is the technical people who misuse an acronym or word because it is the "in thing" and makes them look current to managers. Like the guy who told me I could just get the connection hand-off from the LDAP. Or the people who say "Just write it in EJB" or "Why do we need JMS when we already send email?"... it works both ways.
Listen to the sheep bleat. Baaaa Baaaa Computers are everywhere. In business; In schools; at home; in the car; in the fridge.....on your damn wrist. In my experience, people who are totally clueless about computer basics generally don't have much of a clue about their own jobs either. If someone is not willing to learn about the basic use and operation of a computer when they have to use it every day at their jobs, then what are they doing there in the first place? I've worked in IT over 20 years and it's time for the clueless to step up or get lost. Time to lose the dead weight and clear the luddites out.
Fear is the enemy; the one true enemy. {Sun Tzu-The Art of War}
Just stop hiring people who don't know the lingo.
What PHB decided it was a good idea to let anyone near a computer when they don't know what kilobytes, megabytes, or gigabytes are? If they lose productivity and efficiency because their "office workers" don't possess basic computer knowledge, I'd say that's entirely their own fault for making stupid hiring decisions.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
Brain: Pinky, I have set up your computer so that nothing can go wrong. Just press the "conquer the world" button NOW.
.. .. So now we rule the world?
..
Pinky: Oh, which one is that?
Brain: The big red one in the middle of the screen, Pinky. Hurry!
Pinky: Ok
Pinky: It is starting again
Brain: Argh! Not the reboot button!
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms, and I honeslty don't remember the real definition of PCMCIA. But, technobable has a purpose, as my one professors says. Just like every other inudstry, we make up acronyms so that other people have no idea what we're talking about. :-)
I teach intro computer classes at several colleges, so it's my job to solve this.
/. for free instead of the usual final step ($$$)
1. Show them how to click a web browser (90% know this.)
2. Bookmark http://en.wikipedia.org/ for them - that's for the things they don't know.
3. Teach them the orders of magniutde of thousands, millions, billions, etc. For example, if you ask a common office critter how many thousands are in a billion, you will head "2," "3," or "8." The reality is that if you take a stack of 100 dollar bills, it will be 4/10ths of an inch long.
$1,000 (one-thousand dollars) will be 4 inches tall. This fits in your hand.
$1,000,000 (one-million dollars) will be 300+ feet tall. That's the length of a football field.
$1,000,000,000 (one-billion dollars) will be 60+ miles tall. That's tall enough to reach the space station.
$1,000,000,000,0000 (one trillion dollars) will be 60,000+ miles tall. That's tall enough to wrap around the earth almost 3 times.
4. Show them what Kilo (Thousand), Mega (Million), Giga (Billion), and Terra (Trillion) mean. Give examples where they find out how many 4.5 GB DVDs will fit on a half-terrabyte HDD. How many 14 MB MP3 files (half-hour meeting recordings) will fit on a 495 MB keychain drive? Show them real examples from your company, using their disks. Show them how much each disk holds and how to find out how much capacity a disk has.
5. (optional) explain that network tranmission speeds are in bits, and storage is in bytes, so sending 56k over a 56k/second connection takes 8 seconds.
6. Give it away on
Andy Out!
but not everyone should be using a computer.
When I got my first car, I didn't know much about them. I learned about them as I needed to. When your choices are "learn how something works so you can fix it" or "pay someone who knows how it works to fix it" some people do the former while most people do the latter. The real problem arises when people don't want to do either.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
They would if it was gigadollars, kilodollars and megadollars.
This is not a jargon issue, this is bad math.
Alvaro
I venture to say 90+% of office workers drive or take some type of automobile transport, and don't know what a turbocharger is, or how to ensure they have a safe air/fuel ratio.
After explaining several times what was causing issue X I found myself just giving up and telling users I was going to just 'reboot the internet'. Seemed to make them happy ;)
There is a line where I can de-geek something and still explain to the user what is happening or what needs to be done. Below that level they get the reboot comment.
If "Computer People" has a staff that doesn't understand these terms, perhaps they should change their name. Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but it sounds like they're doing piss-poor resume screening.
Ah yes, I well remember the management consultants where I worked in the late 90s, where official policy was to make "backups" of Access databases which were basically flat lists, but which were 100Mb or so and grew ten meg every time they were 'backed up' by the management consultants. Naturally, all these copies lived on our then-enormous 240Gb RAID equipped file servers - which, of course, were backed up every night, with the whole off-site, firesafes, random files verified and everything. We realised what was going on when we worked out this one project team had consumed something like 20% of the other 250 users' total space, within a month.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
We would try to explain "what we do", in simple lay-man's terms, It was not as easy as we thought it would be. Expecially if you are working on stuff like lax parser, CORBA,.
There were times when we couldn't even begin to describe what we do, without using some kind of jargon or other. As we got better in the game, we narrowed down what terms we could use and , by the end of 3rd year, we weren't even using the term computer in our description.
It worked wonders for me, at my next job interview. My would be boss asked to describe my current job (which involved building and distributing a J2EE app using perl scripts ) , to sombody like a stock broker. When I did, he told me that's the best answer he has ever heard from a techie, and I got the Job :-)
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
I've flipped jobs more than I'd like to admit, but I usually land in telecom. Despite that these jobs are all in the same specialty and usually java development work, I still spend months trying to understand what's going on in a group meeting. Every worksite has it's own culture (e.g. terms, in jokes, personalities) and much of it has nothing to do with technology.
So, the article may not have been that great but it did get me thinking, what is wrong with teaching people this? I think i am going to set up a class at our office and teach people this stuff. At least that way when I say you can't email a 50 Meg attachment, they will not give me that glazed over look. Has anyone tried this? Did it help?
and to you, I say,.. good day
I work at a helpdesk, where I frequently support users I've never heard from before and will never again. Thus, I explain the same things time and time again. For instance, when I tell them to turn off their computer and turn it back on, they will, more often than not, turn off their monitor and turn it back on. It's because they're not computer-savvy, and I shouldn't be hard on them, right?
Well, consider this: a desktop computer consists of a device that does the actual processing (the box), an output device (the monitor) and an input device (the keyboard). However, the user thinks of the monitor as "the computer". Now, think of the standard home theater setup, which people tend not to have much trouble using: a device that does the actual processing (the DVD player), an output device (the TV) and an input device (the remote control). So why does the same user, confronted with what's largely the same user experience, do something analogous to thinking of the TV as "the home theater system".
I've been trying to come up with an answer for that one, and I have yet to figure out a satisfactory one. Has anyone else run into the same problem?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
General computer operation skills are not required to use basic software. (AOL, browsers, instant messaging, email) Generally people who use computers in the office don't see the value in learning the basics about a computer before using it. They view that as only necessary if you are a different class of user, a geek, nerd, or whatever, which of course is a accepted belief.
For instance, if I don't know how big this image is, or what format it is in, it is commonly accepted that it is OK for me to remain at that level of education. You won't see that level of skill/education being acceptable in different areas, such as driving. If you are horrible at driving a car, you will undoubtedly fail the driving test (atleast that is the basic premise behind it), and until you get better at honing your driving skills you will have to live with not driving.
We don't have this kind of training required to use a computer, which is why we have so many "sucker"-traps such as spyware, viruses and all manner of other kinds of problems with computers the world over, no training is required to use them.
Some programs are designed so that a little baby could use them, but if you have a user that has the computer skills of a baby operating a computer full time, there will undoubtedly be times they will cause problems.
Meet new people, and kill them.
So what this article is saying is that a huge percentage of today's office workers are completely unprepared to use a standard office tool. Back around the early 1900s, did they say, "I just can't understand these typewriters. What's the difference between 'shift' and 'carriage return'? Why should I have to know these technical terms?"
Or imagine a modern office worker who said: "I don't know the difference between 'facsimile' and 'photocopy'. I mean, they even sound pretty similar; they both begin with an F sound, and end with 'ee'. And what's the difference between 'sending' and 'receiving' these faxes? I always have to ask for help on that."
Nobody here (or anywhere else, really) is arguing that the average office worker should understand how to code, or know what an IRQ conflict means. But simple concepts like upload and download, or the meaning of basic prefixes like kilo-, mega- and giga-, or the difference between a JPEG and a PDF, are things that anyone trying to use modern computing technology needs to know. Remaining willfully ignorant of these kinds of things is like remaining willfully ignorant of the difference between your car's brake fluid and windshield washer fluid (Hey, they're boh fluids, right? Lots of room for confusion there!), or not knowing what "miles per gallon" means.
The kilo-/mega-/giga- thing, in particular, is not solely important in deciding whether to send an attachment via email. (I agree with those pointing out that mail servers should be configured to reject overly-large messages.) But without an understanding of file sizes and disk space:
These folks need to learn to use the tools that are necessary for their jobs, or else find new jobs. If an office worker claimed not to be able to use a copier or fax machine, we'd laugh at them. ("Hey, how about the coffee maker? Can you figure that one out, or do you need help there, too?") We need to stop coddling those who can't be bothered to learn the basics about a tool they're getting paid to use every day.
Kai MacTane: Web developer for hire in San Francisco
This is the goal of a worm? I didn't know that. I have got some catching up to do. I better start "excell"ing myself.
Hopefully those "cookies" won't go stale while I'm catching up.
Has anyone read the "definitions" on page 2 of the article? What a joke:
"PDF - portable document format, which means the file is in a format that can be read on any PC
Excell - this helps to run programs on your PC.
Java Script - a computer programming language.
Worm - this is a virus that replicates itself until it fills all of the storage space on a drive or network."
File under heading: "Duh!"
To make it that much better, they even misspelled "Excel."
#include ".signature"
And the ones who store everything on their Windows desktops so it's a mass of icons in some sort of personal Rorschach pattern from which I'm sure you can derive ther sexual proclivities... don't get me started. Do they even know you can create new folder/directories to store files in? Ooooo! Ebola bombs for them all!
When referring to someone's computer: "How many megabytes is it?"
--- Dan
How about instead of KB and GB, which means nothing to normal people, you have apps report things in grams instead of bytes?
"Hmmm, maybe I shouldn't send this by email... should I really send a 2 ton file through this little wire?"
I know IHBT but...
Normally one takes the derivative of a function.
Unless you were taking the limit of a sequence of functions, how could you take the derivative of a limit?
Excell - this helps to run programs on your PC.
Umm....aside from the fact that it's Excel, not Excell, it doesn't "help to run programs," it IS a program. See, this is article is PART of the problem, and at the same time, proof it's right!
Take the derivative of a limit... whaa?
Surely you mean you learnt how to use limits to calculate derivatives.
A lot of "normal" office jargon is far too difficult for many computer workers.
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
Having managed an IT help desk for a few years and working in IT as a SysAdmin for quite a while, I've found a lot of times your typical desk-sitter is gunshy about asking questions, or calling for help. This has usually been due to being made to feel like a fool by the condescending, "you are too dumb to understand me" IT-types that you find all over this field. I've found that if you take the time to talk to the person AS A PERSON, they are more apt to listen and learn. I continually find that the "unknowing masses" at most of the places I've worked in my career happily come and ask questions, and retain most of the info, when they know that they will not be mentally abused. Of course, you always have the handful that ask the same things over, and over, and over....
If they can't understand the difference between gigabytes, kilobytes, and megabytes, how will they understand the difference between gigabytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gibibytes, kibibytes, and mebibytes?
OMFGWTFEROFLAMOBBQSAUCE
Apparently the 'jargon' is a little tough for journalists too. :)
So... if the worker is working a 40 hour work week, then they are essentially saying that they are spending 1/40th of their time learning the commonly accepted terminology used on what amounts to being their primary productivity tool. And I can see the term "wasted" being used if they were never going to use the words again, but I would hope that once they've learned the word and its meaning that it will stick for a little while.
If they were going to be an auto mechanic would they be "wasting" their time learning the terms "torque wrench" or "floor jack", as well as what they mean and how to use them?
At one point the article says:
'It's like driving a car - you don't have to be a mechanical engineer to drive and most people will learn something about the mechanics of cars, like what the spark plugs or carburetors do. But with the computer people have not got to the point where they are willing to lift up the bonnet and have a go themselves.'
The analogy is faulty. They're not being asked to swap out the hard disk, install a new video card, or bump up the RAM, just know the basics of their tool. In a large corporation the computer is the equivalent of a fleet car or other company asset the employee is being allowed to use. If the employee wants to "lift up the bonnet and have a go themselves" they need to buy one with their own dime and learn. I'm sure most desktop support people have had more than enough experience with repairing systems from users who decided to "have a go themselves". To continue the broken analogy, a driver that doesn't know the difference between an accelerator pedal and a break pedal probably shouldn't be driving.
Nearly 75% of people said they spend more than an hour every week simply trying to find out what something means in order to finish a task, according to the survey by recruitment consultants Computer People.
I've spent huge amounts of time trying to work my way through labyrinthine HR policies, Employee Manuals, and other detritus of the corporate world. It comes with the territory when you have to deal with something new.
Excell - this helps to run programs on your PC.
I feel much better now. Does the author mean Microsoft Excel? If this is what the writer of the article thinks "Excell"does then much of the tone and content of the article itself becomes clearer. And the HR department shoulldn't be hiring people who are this easily confused.
1) good idea. Ignorance of computer terms may be frustrating to those of us who use them fluently, but know-it-alls who overuse jargon (in any field) to appear smarter to novices are just assholes.
2) is Manging Director of Computer People Adam Fletcher's real job title? Is IT Director jargon? ;)
"Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony!"
Yes, even the articles explaining the problem have errors, but if you think about it, most modern workers are required to have a much broader skill set, vocabulary, and concept literacy than at any time in human history. We're only a few decades separated from being a manufacturing/agricultural society where a person would work 50 years in the same job and never do anything else. Now we have begun the transition to a service-based economy made possible by an ever increasing influx of technologies and concepts. Not only are we in jobs for a much shorter time, but more and more of us switch careers and/or industries.
/. types who keep coming up with new stuff and abandoning perfectly usable technologies in the name of "progress."
Take all that and add it on to the fact that by the time you learn anything to a significant degree, the technology has become obsolete and you have to start all over again, and it is no wonder that some people stick their fingers in their ears, shout "LALALALALALALALA, I'm not listening," and refuse to try to learn anything again.
I'm not saying this is the correct approach, but before we blame the luddites, perhaps we should recognize there is a combination of factors at work, and some of the blame can be fairly apportioned to us bleeding-edge
I can see this from both sides. On one hand, it's easy to say "Users need to *learn* the basics. If they're going to just say "I refuse to be bothered to learn what a megabyte is!" - then maybe they need to work elsewhere!" On the other hand, there's a strong argument for setting up a more user-friendly environment that makes a lot of this unnecessary. (EG. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Apple's Mail application in OS X is smart enough so when you tell it you want to attach an image to your message, it asks you if you'd like it sent "Small, Medium or Large size" and auto-scales to one of 3 reasonable preset sizes suitable for emailing. If this became standard behavior for all popular email clients, most of the problem of clogging mail servers with huge graphics attachments would disappear.)
Like most things, the answer is probably somewhere in the middle. Educate the users on *some* of the jargon, but try to construct an environment where as many technical details are invisible as possible, so they only need to know a few basic concepts to function in the office.
The biggest obstacle I see these days is the tendency for smaller or mid-sized businesses to try to cust costs on I.T. - eliminating full-time I.T. support staff, in favor of going with a service contract or a part-time worker. This does prevent the problem of paying someone to sit around and surf the web, etc. while they "wait for something to break". But it also causes such things as the situation mentioned in the article where users could simply "turn off their firewall" or make other harmful system changes. (EG. Can't send out my email!? Hey, maybe it's my network card settings! I remember the support guy at home walking me though that stuff in my "Control Panel" under "Networking" when I called for help with my DSL!. I'll try changing some of these numbers around in here!) Users are given more "administrator-type" system privileges due to the lack of real, full-time I.T. staff, and they begin tinkering with things, knowing it'll be a while before they get help otherwise. Then you've got much worse problems....
It's so true... I asked Slashdot readers what a GB and an MB were, and they told me "STFU^H^H^H^H RTFA, N00B."
and half the population have IQ's below that...
Speaking of not understanding, the people writing the mail client that let you attach and send such large files without even a pop-up warning box along the way are the real ones who don't understand their users.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
He's actually right, you know. Kilo, Mega, and Giga meant exactly what he said-- powers of 10. We computer-folk have been mis-using them for years to refer to nearby powers of 2, and there are new prefixes we *should* be using to avoid confusion. The "new" prefixes were published by the IEC in 1998.
for this:
1GB = 1024 MB = 1048576 KB
you should be using:
1GiB = 1024 MiB = 1048576 KiB
Where the GiB, MiB, and KiB stand for Gibibytes, Mebibytes, and Kibibytes.
Do I use them? No. They sound funny, and like many programmers I'm cranky and stuck-in-my-ways. But you should be prepared to accept that the standard "power of 10" usage of the SI prefixes mega, giga, and kilo you were taught in college science classes is indeed correct, and that the way we've been using them is an awkward legacy kludge that grafts a second meaning onto a widely-used standard.
Obligatory link.
Excell - this helps to run programs on your PC
What is Excell and what does this mean. I have never heard of it, but aparrently I should have it, because otherwise programs won't run on my PC.
My favorite comment though was the PDF- a document that can be read on any PC. Oh yeah? Can it be read on the PC that doesn't have a PDF reader on it? Hmm!
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
In my opinion, accounting jargon is too difficult for this IT worker. If you buy expensive stuff for your employer and have to forecast when it goes in service, you know what I'm talking about. It's all a matter of perspective.
I know Excel is the spreadsheet part of MS Office, but i'm wondering what Excell is. Some enterprise app?
or just a typo? or was the article writer taking the piss? googling shows lots of software/tech service related companies using the name "Excell" (serious Q, i just wonder what they were trying to define..)
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
...Normally when the technical support people come to fix my computer I just disappear and make a cup of tea..
Don't worry we like making trips to your funky-tea-smelling cubicle
"You'll have to speak up, I'm wearing a towel." ~ Homer
Seriously, there's some satisfaction in whipping out an acronym your peers don't understand. For example, I was at a conference and the speaker started talking. Without laying down any definitions, he gave a lecture using primarily the acronyms: CORBA, SOAP, UDDI, WSDL, etc. Ok, how many people were confused? Probably a few considering I knew what they ment and he was using them very liberally. Example, "So you UDDI that service from the registry..." UDDI is not a verb.
I believe this speaker smelled other nerds in his presence and felt threatened. He assumed a dominant stature (on the stage) and began to challenge our ability to keep up with him, thus affirming his alpha nerd status.
So before you get upset with someone asking you "what does that mean?" just remember to politely explain it to them and try not to snort and treat them like they're Ralph Wiggum.
This is communication, there's no need for a d*ck measuring contest in the workplace.
My work here is dung.
If I hear someone use the term download incorrectly someone is going to get hurt. Almost everyone I talk to says they are going to download something when referring to tasks such as uploading, sending attatchments, copying from hard to floppy drives, and even copying or moving files from one folder to another. It gets pretty painful sometimes, and I don't know crap diddly about computers. I can only imagine what a network admin, or coder might think.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
ROFLMAO!!!
Well doesn't this just make you happy you're a nerd instead of one of these idiots:
... A massive 61% don't understand the difference between gigabytes, kilobytes and megabytes ...
A lot of these folks may be more successful that we are, but in the end nearly all of them have to deal with computers at least some of the time and then they're completely helpless. Ha! >:->
Homer: "Ooh, the new issue of 'Weird' is here! [opens magazine] Gigabyte! [laughs] They've done it again! Gigabyte!
Wait, this isn't 'Weird!' [looks at 'Wired' cover] Why, there's no magazine *called* "Weird", is there?
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
I had a tech that is supposed to be a Microsoft Certified on Windows 2000 updates that tried to send an email with 2GB of data with proprietary information in it!! Oh my.
This is no different than any other profession. Jargon isn't for those not in the know!
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
Procedures for working with the IT department
1. When you call us to have your computer moved, be sure to leave it buried under half a ton of postcards, baby pictures, stuffed animals, dried flowers, bowling trophies and children's art. We don't have a life, and we find it deeply moving to catch a fleeting glimpse of yours.
2. Don't write anything down. Ever. We can play back the error messages from here.
3. When an I.T. person says he's coming right over, go for coffee. That way you won't be there when we need your password.
It's nothing for us to remember 700 screen saver passwords.
4. When you call the help desk, state what you want, not what's keeping you from getting it. We don't need to know that you can't get into your mail because your computer won't power on at all.
5. When I.T. support sends you an. E-Mail with high importance, delete it at once. We're just testing.
6. When an IT person is eating lunch at his desk, walk right in and spill your guts right out. We exist only to serve.
7. Send urgent e-mail all in uppercase. The mail server picks it up and flags it as a rush delivery.
8. When the photocopier doesn't work, call computer support. There's electronics in it.
9. When you're getting a NO DIAL TONE message at home, call computer support. We can fix your telephone line from here.
10. When you have a dozen old computer screens to get rid of, call computer support. We're collectors.
11. When something's wrong with your home PC, dump it on an I.T. person's chair with no name, no phone number and no description of the problem. We love a puzzle.
12. When an I.T. person tells you that computer screens don't have cartridges in them, argue. We love a good argument.
13. When an IT person tells you that he'll be there shortly, reply in a scathing tone of voice: "And just how many weeks do you mean by shortly?" That motivates us.
14. When the printer won't print, re-send the job at least 20 times. Print jobs frequently get sucked into black holes.
15. When the printer still won't print after 20 tries, send the job to all 68 printers in the company. One of them is bound to work.
16. Don't learn the proper name for anything technical. We know exactly what you mean by "My thingy blew up".
17. Don't use on-line help. On-line help is for wimps.
18. If the mouse cable keeps knocking down the framed picture of your dog, lift the computer and stuff the cable under it. Mouse cables were designed to have 20kg of computer sitting on top of them.
19. If the space bar on your keyboard doesn't work, blame it on the mail upgrade. Keyboards are actually very happy with half a pound of muffin crumbs and nail clippings in them.
20. When you get a message saying "Are you sure?" click on that "Yes'" button as fast as you can. Hell, if you weren't sure, you wouldn't be doing it, would you?
21. When you find an IT. person on the phone with his bank, sit uninvited on the corner of his desk and stare at him until he hangs up. We don't have any money to speak of anyway.
22. Feel perfectly free to say things like "I don't know nothing about that computer crap". We don't mind at all hearing our area of professional expertise referred to as crap.
23. When you need to change the toner cartridge in a printer, call IT support. Changing a toner cartridge is an extremely complex task, and Hewlett-Packard recommends that it be performed only by a professional engineer with a master's degree in nuclear physics.
24. When something's the matter with your computer, ask your secretary to call the help desk. We enjoy the challenge of having to deal with a third party who doesn't know anything about the problem.
25. When you receive a 30mb (huge) movie file, send it to everyone as a mail attachment. We've got lots of disk space on that mail server.
26. Don't even think of breaking large print jobs down into smaller chunks. Somebody else might get a chance to squeeze a memo into the queue.
27. When you lose your car keys, send an email to the entire company. People out i
"You'll have to speak up, I'm wearing a towel." ~ Homer
It does say Wales at the top of the artical, thats a bit like it saying Texus.
Jpeg - this is a compressed picture file.
What's a file, just call it a compressed picture.
PDF - portable document format, which means the file is in a format that can be read on any PC
Unless it has DRM... try explain that one. and what about PDA's and maybe Macs or Linux (even though a Mac is technically a PC I doubt a layman would make the connection)
Excell - this helps to run programs on your PC.
Replace Programs with viruses and your about there.
Java Script - a computer programming language.
Doh, Joe sixpack doesn't know what a computer programming language is,
Java Script - Makes web pages interactive.
Cookies - this enables some web pages to 'remember' your previous visits - for example, an E-Commerce site might use a cookie to remember which items you've placed in your online shopping cart.
Yeh, WTF is a E-Commerce site and online mean? moron.
Worm - this is a virus that replicates itself until it fills all of the storage space on a drive or network.
Umm... not really, it's just a virus that distributes itself via the network (or over the internet for Joe)
As for filewall, maybe the author doesn't know what it means either.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
three out of four wasted more than an hour every week simply finding out what some technical term meant.
You can stop reading the article right there.
1. Everyone knows that users don't educate themselves, as this implies.
2. Doing so is not a "waste of time", as this implies.
Don't know which is worse, users, or this media distortion, acting like educated people using "computer jargon" are to blame. It's not jargon when everyone is now required to know what it means. Computers are ubiquitous. Deal with it.
Well no need to explain any further... but I will mention that he has missed his deadline by 2 days now b/c of this!
I have seen fairly bright people absolutely freeze up at the hint of having to operate a computer.
Me: Jerry, just turn off the monitor.
Jerry: How?
Me: With the button.
Jerry: Which button?
Me: On the monitor Jerry, just press it.
Jerry: Which one?
Me: Jerry, press the on/off switch.
Jerry: Where is it?
Me: I'll be right there.
tap tap tap tap tap
Me: There, push that!
Jerry: Oh I was looking for an icon.
Me: When you lose you remote do you just leave your TV on for weeks?
Jerry: I tied it to my couch.
Jerry is not an idiot.
This
I was going to post about my visit with my mother and the argument we had over computers. Then I saw your post.
My mother gives people legal advice without being a lawyer: "Save your money, here's a website that will make a durable power of attorney for you that you can print out and sign."
My mother gives medical advice without being a physician: "Here, take these pills for your cold, they really helped my thyroid problem."
My mother knows next to nothing about cars, but that doesn't stop her: "My check engine light came on, could you replace my alternator while you're down this weekend?"
Building codes: "You don't need a building permit, it's just a porch!"
My mother seems to know everything. Thanks to the wonderful technology of email forwarding, she now knows even more! "Barbara sent me this mail about how to prevent identity theft, so I scraped my signature off of all my credit cards and peeled off those magnetic strips."
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
And this attitude is why most non-technical people think computer support people are arrogant assholes. You and your flawed "cookies and cups" example should take a hike and quit giving the rest of us geeks a bad name.
This reminds me of a topic discussed Wednesday on NPR's Talk of the Nation about the Baby Boomer generation getting ready to retire soon.
Personally, I can't wait for the older folks (the ones typically who don't know much about computers) to get out of the way and let the people who grew up with the technology and are much more comfortable with it to really begin transforming the workplace.
I waste so much time dealing with people who never got over the fact that there aren't secretaries anymore to take their dictation and can't even send a simple email without screwing it up. Supposedly they have these "invaluable skills" that came to them by virtue of being old that we'll all be losing out when they retire in a few years
Mod me as flamebait but I believe if you can no longer properly use the tools of your business, then you need to get out. You don't see too many NFL running backs in their 40's.
Delta Airlines, just prior to their recent bankruptcy filings, launched a new website that they are so proud of they are advertising the new website on television and radio. In their radio commercial they described the site as being "written in delicious Java".
Now it's one thing to be proud of a website and it's another thing to advertise that website. But, why would anyone need to know that it was written in Java? It's an airline reservation website for the general public! Why is the public supposed to know or care that the Delta Airlines website is "written in delicious Java"? What moron would put that in the advertisement?
I've encountered more than a few engineers and IT folks who think laptops are 'lab tops'. In each case, I've initially ascribed it to mispronunciation only to have my suspicions later verified by their writing/e-mail.
Your monitor is staring at you.
This is ridiculous. If you work on a factory floor with this level of ignorance about your tools you either:
a) die; or
b) get fired.
"It's too hard..." Tough shit. Learn it, you work in an office, it's part of your job.
I'm not sure that really adds any flames. You did, however, make the same mistake as the first time around. To reiterate:
IEC standard:
1 KiB == 2^10
1 MiB == 2^20
1 GiB == 2^30
SI prefixes:
1 KB == 10^3
1 MB == 10^6
1 GB == 10^9
Jargon just as difficult as a foreign language? These people obviously have never taken a foreign language.
Natural Selection. Those that fail to learn, adapt, overcome will not survive.
Think about it:
- With a graphical interface, what me worry about file structure? (not to mention type) It's all in FOLDERS, baby!
- MS soooo wanted to make its OS experience mimic that of Apple's Mac. They knew a good thing when they saw one. Guess what? XP is nearly, if not already, there.
Combined with the hugest user base EVAR, the result is a mess of folks who are eegnant about this appliance. And yes, it is an appliance.
Flame on.
Hey, does anyone have a mirror or torrent of this? The site's slashdotted!
No? No copies? No torrents? What, it deleted your torrent software?
I love the smell of irony in the morning... it smells like... victory...
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Sure some people are too lazy to learn anything, but that's too negative a view of people in general. Show me someone who has never used some fancy tech gadget, gets one, and is not willing to spend even 10 minutes on getting to know what it is, and how to work the thing. Not gonna happen, people are curious by nature.
The problem is not in the learning curve, but in the number of things to learn, and the amount of things to learn about each individual item.
Image teaching someone to use a regular, old-style phone in say, 1960. There's a dial, numbers 0-9, a speaker/mic thing you can pick up and hold next to your ear. Every other phone's got a unique number, pick up the 'earpiece', dial the number of that other phone, wait for connection, and place earpiece back when conversation ends. Easy enough to explain to anyone, and once explained, this knowledge holds for the next 50 years or so.
Fast forward to today: the cellphone. Each model looks different, has changed/new functions, sometimes does basic work differently from its predecessor, comes with a 100+ page manual, and people change phones (and numbers!) yearly as a fashion statement. 90% of any details you learn about your phone, doesn't hold anymore for your next model. And then there's carriers, pricing structures, GSM, GPRS, UMTS, Bluetooth, ...
And there's cellphones, computers, VCR's, television sets, microwave oven's, cars, electronic thermostats, ATM's, pincodes/passwords to remember, PDA's, the WWW, e-mail, instant messaging, equipment/software at the workplace, and your average pile of paperwork (taxes, employer, health insurance, ...) to deal with.
There's only so much you can learn in a day. Let's face it: our society is growing in complexity very rapidly. Technology can help us deal with that complexity (the pocket calculator comes to mind), but it's clear that this help is outpaced by the speed of complexity growth itself. Life may be getting easier, more fun or comfortable, but it sure isn't getting any simpler. Keywords: "Information overload".
Anyone who claims people are too lazy to read the manual for their latest gadget, is misinformed. It's just that people have better things to do than read manuals. Technology is supposed to make our lives easier and more fun, remember? Good design is when people can use a gadget without going through a 500+ page manual.> Porn Finder, Porn Hider
wahahahaah, man, that's a good one!
As someone that's a help desk analyst; I talk to people all the time that just don't understand anything related to IT simply because no one has helped them understand. This is because companies do not provide central IT information resources and cut their IT services to the point where the people that do IT are so strung out they don't have time for the work alloted to them.
It is amazing that companies will give some of their employees laptop computers, VPN accounts and Secure ID tokens but no information on how to use them. Often times, help desk personnel get so stressed with users who don't know anything about the technology they use. It's easy to think of the average caller as stupid or an idiot. Their knowledge range is so narrowly focused on just their assigned tasks so I like to think of them as having "specialized intelligence" but I guess id10t works too.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
"Nobody crashes their sedan into a tree and giggles while stating they are car illiterate"
The problem is that its ok to be proud of not knowing.. you crash you computer and just shrug it off... you chuckle while mentioning you have no idea what a 'jigawad interweb uploader' is and thats just fine.
Ok, we have our terms that we use and nobody wants to learn them. So, what do these people prepose we do? IM00987.fileformatthatsuportstransparenceofindexed ormonotonepictures?
or IM00987.gif, I mean is that really that hard, the "confusing" jargon is there for your own good.
- Shrödinger's Cat is Dead, Or is it?
Here is a difference... on the factory floor they are trained to use the tools. Some people are morons but a vast majority are not and to say that they just need to learn is silly since it seems that most of the people on my side of the fence won't bother to teach them.
people don't understand, education does help.
Jonathanjk.com
Many Back to the Future fans don't realize that what they hear as "jigga watts" is actually the preferred pronunciation (notice it's listed first) of the SI/metric prefix giga.
With respect to computer-related units, the hard g is of course strongly preferred, but 1.21 gW is certainly not a made up unit.
The flux capacitor needs 1.21 jigowatts to work! How many watts is that?
Hurry, there isn't much time...
Good luck getting the teachers to understand it. Computer classes in my high school were taught by football coaches, because the school couldn't justify their salaries without a class or two on their schedules. This stuff isn't so complicated that you need a teacher for it, anyway. It'd be easier just to train the two or three dumbest people in the class or office. That way you'll demystify it a little, and maybe the rest of the class or office will be shamed into showing some initiative and learning what a damned megabyte is.
We need more TLAs
The case is not the CPU. Please spread the word.
We all love being jerks. That's why I called you out on it. In fact, there's very little more satisfying than being a jerk to someone who is already being a jerk themselves-- you can understand my temptation to reply to your post, as you were doing the exact same thing to the jerk in front of you. This is the force that drives slashdot. We're all here to be pedantic jerks.
In my office people can't read, write or speak basic English. Getting them to understand computer lingo is wishful thinking.
i'm sure someone caught this on the second page:
"Excell - this helps to run programs on your PC."
but it's still funny anyways. you think they'd put a little bit more time into things like that since, you know, that IS what the article is about.
abort, retry, fail?
What makes me homicidal (well, more than usual) is people who are actually proud that they don't understand computers. At least, they think it's funny. There is a "ditzy housewife folk wisdom" person who writes a column for the local fishwrapper where about every other weeek she talks about how she just doesn't get all these gigglebites and interwebs and hard driver things (chuckle chuckle). She should be either (a) not so damn proud of being too stupid to understand something or (b) deeply ashamed of being too lazy to learn something new. Computers are not new. They have been in most businesses for 25 years and in most homes for 10 or 15 years. If my 5 year old kid and my 75 year old mother can learn to use a computer, then you can too. Learn the basics, or, for the love of God, SHUT UP.
People dont crash their cars and then say "I never could tell the brakes from the accellerator, huh huh huh".
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
My sister's response when asked how often she had the oil changed in her car: "when it runs out."
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
I just hate office workers. I'm an insensitive clod!
Nuke Gay Whales for Jesus.
I just can't help myself!
Nobody's trying to impose restrictions on common-use language here-- this isn't one of those "hacker/cracker" debates. The situation we have here is one where the older, widely-used interpretation of an international series of prefixes for use with systems of measurement is getting two meanings, and a new standard has been proposed to prevent confusion. Does it really make sense that we measure hard-drive storage as powers-of-10, but RAM as powers-of-2?
Use them however you want in everyday speech, but when you need to put down proper specs as an engineer, it's best to be absolutely clear, whether you do it with the new prefixes or simply by making annotations indicating which interpretation you're using.
Office workers are baffled and make serious business blunders.
"I have to check EBAY"
"I can't talk to you know, I'm IM-ing with my girlfriends"
"I'm too busy downloading free music from the kazaa"
"All this porn on my computer? I think it was the computer virus"
Our IT manager insisted that we switch off both virus checking on the mail server AND the firewall.
;-)
Was very surprised when the mail server stopped working and there was no external network traffic going in or out.
We took him at his word and just switched them off
Cars often have a graphical user interface (dashboard display) that indicates when a garage service is required. You don't need to know about oil changes you just take the car to the garage when the light comes on with the little man on it.
Computers should be set up more like this for non-geeks. Yes I know you can do more to make things easy for non-geeks (I want to say "idiots", but that's not quite fair, is it??) - for example, 3 icons on the Kicker, "internet", "email", "[open]office[.org]".
Your email app should have a (switch-offable, eg via an install option "I am not an idiot [o]") nag that says "this email will take an average user 3 years and 42 days to download, do you really want to send it?".
Mostly they don't look at how big the file is in the first place. Or realize that it is a big file.
I had a group of users who had a one page MS Word file that they were using as a template that got broken somehow and it became 12 Megabytes. When they got a complaint from a recipient who was on a modem they asked me to look into it.
I remade the file and it was 43 kilobytes. Then I showed them the way to figure out how to check the size and spent the next hour explaining about file sizes.
New cameras are also very much to blame but nothing is more to blame than XP's default way of dealing with big images and just shrinking the image view. They have no idea that the files are huge, and have no desire to learn about re-sizing, compression, file formats.... Mailserver be damned I am going to send this collection of worthless pictures anyway, I just got this cool camera and I am going to use it.
Otherwise, how can we leach off the public? I mean, *everyone* has an angle, a monopoly, a skill that they must capitalize on to make a decent living. This is ours, like a lawyer, like a doctor.
Watch: you'll see *they* will be the ones that complain about it (in reference to how much it costs them)...
Why does everyone here misspell "Excel"?
On the contrary, people who have no business using computers should accept that fact, and not try and follow the fad just beccause it makes them look cool. A clueless person using the Internet is a prime target for viruses and phishing. A person who's educated will know better than to open that friendly-looking I love you.exe attachment, or than to buy into a phishing scam. Thing is, most of those who use the Internet because it makes them look cool don't bother getting educated.
/. post" here]
[Insert obligatory "this is my first
Yes, you should, if you want to make sure that every time you click "send", your new mail really will "appear" in your friend's folder thingie.
> If I shouldn't send a large attachment (individually or in aggregate) my client software should tell me so, and prevent me from doing it, in the same way that an airline will stop me from bringing on a 3 kiloton suitcase rather than letting it get put on board and crash the plane.
If you don't know that "weight" is a property of matter under the force of a gravitational field, and why it's important to pilots, you're going to be frustrated when you exceed it.
Dialogue 1:
Airline: I'm sorry, we can't take the four of you, at 350 pounds apiece, plus your 200 pounds of luggage, in this Cessna.
Moron: Do you know who we are? We paid for our tickets. How dare you discriminate against us? You put us and our golfing equipment on that plane or I'll personally sue your airline into the ground!
Airplane: *crash*
(Granted, any pilot that lets such passengers board his aircraft deserves to crash with 'em. But the point is that an educated customer isn't going to be a moron, because they're going to be willing to listen to the error message "you weigh too much", and they're going to be capable of understanding it, and they're going to be able to take corrective action, by either taking two flights, by chartering a bigger aircraft, or by leaving some of their luggage behind.)
Similarly, if you don't know that "size" is a property of "files", and why it's important to sysadmins, you're going to be frustrated when you try to send big ones.
Dialogue 2:
Client: I'm sorry, I can't send that attachment to everyone in the company. It's way the hell too big.
Moron: This software sucks. Hey, sysadmin! I want to use a better mail software, the one you use! We make the sales this company relies on, and you answer to us! Either I get to email this DVD to my golfing buddy right now or your ass is fired!
Server: *crash*
Same problem. (And same comments about an admin who lets himself get browbeaten into blowing up his own server :)
There's a happy medium to be struck - but ultimately, it can't be solved only through clever UI design. Some user education is going to be required.
Computers have existed in the office for only 20 years, and have changed pretty radically over those 20 years. They're complex devices, and you have to understand at least some of what's going on under the hood to know what's common between a TRS-80, a Sun workstation, and an AMD64 running XP.
We had the same problem with automobiles in their first 20-30 years. The electrical starter, automatic choke, and the automatic transmission are about the only "new" UI developments for automobiles in the past 50 years. (The difference between EFI and carbureted engines didn't affect the car's UI.)
Ironically, we're seeing the usability problem more often in automobiles today than we did 20 years ago - it's not about being able to change your own oil, it's about knowing that oil needs to be changed, regardless of whether your engine was designed for oil changes every 3000 miles or 10000 miles. 50000 miles later, having never had an oil change, the car dies, and the user blames the auto manufacturer for the sludged engine.
It doesn't scare me so much that they don't know the difference between kilobyte, megabyte, and gigabyte... and would scare me much less if they didn't know how many bits are in a byte.
What does scare me though is that this means 61% people don't know what the prefixes kilo mega and giga mean.... how did they get through high school (I presume... or even elementary school) without knowing anything about metric prefixes?
Scientists they are not.
Microsoft switched ethernet OC-45 nanotube oxymoron!
Flaming World of Warcraft promiscuous mode goatse packet sniffer!
C'mon. Three out of every four people in an office spend an hour a week wandering the halls like Diogenes with a lantern to find out what (insert term here) means. I call BS. Horrifically crap research at the very least. Just because Chloe says they might as well speak Arabic doesn't mean that users are as tested as if they were actually speaking Arabic. It's a FIGURE OF SPEECH. You don't report research results based on one comment. And let's see - they rounded up a mess of office workers, who excuse me, but most cubicle dwellers would probably hold up their hands if they could anonymously vote on anything even mildly annoying in displacement of (insert gripe here), as bludgeoning your boss often offends.
And Christ, from what I've seen of Welsh, they could be thinking every consonant laden acronym is some obscure Welsh word and they spend the hour looking for a dictionary. (I suspect I'll hear about that one but hey - google "BWRDD".)
Thanks for the insight that "worms" work until they completely fill your hard drive. Either they couldn't even be bothered to ask the expert firm for definitions, or the expert firm is crap for having given those.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
The article tries to blame "jargon" for everything, and that seems to oversimplify the issue a bit. Filesizes are too "computery" for office workers to understand? Well, tough shit - if you want instant world-wide communication via email, you are going to have to learn a new system of measurement. When you order a desk, you don't whine about accidentally putting down "miles" instead of "feet", no one tries to get a "pint" and ends up with a "milliliter" instead.
Most modern people ("modern" being the last couple thousand years) can grasp the concepts of length, volume, weight, and even time - understanding that data has a measurement too, is not too much too ask. It's not "elitist" and it's not a "holier than though" attitude manifesting itself. No one's asking them to know that in common usage kilobyte refers to 1024 bytes, even though technically "kilo" is 1000; just like most people don't know the difference between weight and mass - they don't need to. But a vague awareness that a 100MB file might not be something you just stick into an email - that would be helpful.
Some of the examples in the article make no sense whatsoever - why on earth would "office workers" have the ability to turn off firewalls (I'm really hoping they mean personal firewalls)? That is definitely something they have no reason to worry about.
Oh and 48% don't get filetypes, but 74% know what a firewall does? I'm somewhat skeptical about the latter part.
sic transit gloria mundi
having JUST spent YET ANOTHER ½ hr explaining "Save As" to YET ANOTHER end user, I really feel that we have not addressed the fact that the majority of users just don't know how to use the GUI's out there, let alone understand jargon.
While it frustrates the hell out of me that such a simple task baffles so many people, and we can of course blame the users for being stupid, but I'm talking educated adults who do their jobs and lives fine in all other respects.
Almost all computer issues are described in terms of some kind of metaphore, which is not true of the car analogy others have posted here. Take "save as", people have trouble understanding the "Save in" field, let alone "save as type". These refer to metaphores; virtual cardboard folders in virtual file cabinets, and arbitrary technical formats (what does "format" mean anyway? its another metaphore!). So that makes 2 out of 3 of pieces of info needed to save a file that otherwise intelligent people get confused by, so they waste time, save things in the wrong place (yes that's why MS came up with "My Documents"!) and can never find stuff.
I still spend time on the phone saying, "Click on 'View' in the Menu... yes the menu.... That's the strip of words at the top of your screen. Can you see it? 'View'? Yes click on 'View'... yes one click."
And have YOU ever tried to explain when it's one click and when it's two? It is disheartening.
I would like to see a radical rewrite of the GUI. 15yrs and people just aren't getting it. So either people are just hopelessly stupid (except for us), or somewhere along the line, us computer folks have misunderstood the way the mind generally assimilates information.
In mother Russia, computer language learns YOU!!!!
I have pictures o' your momma and sista naked
Both the mean and the median values of a sample are considered to be averages. The same applies to modes, as well as the different types of means (arithmetic, geometric...).
-- $SIGNATURE
A recent survey has determined that the majority of office workers are extremely dense.
A survey among 1500 office workers determined that 61 percent spend more time IMing and drinking coffee than working. A very interesting discovery; employers may have to start monitering employee computer use more tightly.
...about 4 years ago, when myself and a bunch of friends (who were all programmers) were at a party on our employer's property. Of course, after a lot of beer we naturally got down to talking shop. Behind us (sleeping on a pool table someone had put outside under a tarp) was this guy who got up, came over, and quite seriously said: "If you ever call me a f**king javascript again, I will kick your ass!"
:)
Needless to say, it was then the running joke for the next year
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Congratulations on utterly failing to be able to communicate with people. Jeez, the average Slashdotter ROFLs at reports like this, but really its their own failure they are celebrating. Woohoo for me, I understand this crap, but its the people who put this cruft and jargon-encrusted shit in the way of me doing my non-IT related job who should be breathing a sigh of relief for that, not me. Never in a million years could you IT monkeys have a clue how to do my job, so get the fuck out of my way huh.
I'm pretty sure someone's already said this, but perhaps to work in an office with computers, perhaps one should have to learn computer basics like file size and how to get around in windows and stuff like that. It wouldn't eliminate the confusion, but it'd help out methinks.
Sometimes I comment just to hear myself typing.
Javascripts is NOT an acceptable plural form. The singluar is not a "Javascript." Would you say "I'm writing some Perls, Pythons, and Bashes?" I think not!
The correct form is the admittedly unweildy "Javascript scripts." (or better yet, "Javascript routines" etc) Blast Netscape for the stupid name, catchy though it is.
>>> "Don't open any suspicious attachments, especially from someone you don't know."
... no it's santa on a sleigh ... Hey!? Where'd my windows go? ... Hey!? Where'd my windows go?
Office Worker 1: I wonder if this attachment is suspicious
Office Worker 2: Oh, don't worry I have the same email, I'll have a look at it for you
Office Worker 3: What happened?
Office Worker 1: We got an email from George Bush, I think he "hacked" [waves fingers in the air] our computers.
???
... PEBKAC!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
> The problem is that you have a generation that didn't grow up with computers. They're the ones having problems.
:) )
I am of the generation that didn't grow up with computers. They existed when I was a child (1950s), but there weren't many at all, and almost no one had ever seen or used one.
But you know what? I got off my ass and learned, since it was clear these things were moving more and more into general society - you could even buy one for your own home! Now, I've done everything from writing ring-0 device drivers to code that let commercial *nixes boot mounting / over NFS. I learned OO languages when those appeared, and HTML when that appeared, and LISP just because it was cool. I managed to *get* computer literate even though I wasn't exposed to them until I was firmly in adulthood.
I (mostly) disagree the problem is age. I run into just as many clueless 20-somethings who don't understand the first thing about the technology. The salesdroids at Best Buy tell me I "need Microsoft Windows to access the internet". I believe the problem is people who are not willing to learn new things even when they have a reason to, like using computers at their job.
I really believe if the person doesn't know the mega from kilo prefix, that's a symptom of something much deeper than not wanting to know about computers. It is more likely that person is not interested in learning, *period*. Prefixes apply outside computers, after all. How will they know a centimeter from a kilometer if they don't know SI prefixes?
I agree with the rest of your post though.
(Posting this as an AC, so I don't imagine anyone will see it
Signed,
an old fart
being a tech guy, jargon is fine, but my company uses so many 3 letter or 6 letter acronyms, i learn at least a few each day. before, i could just type acro "abc" (firefox keyword acro links to acronymfinder.com) and i'd get the definition easily. but now, these acronyms my colleagues are using arent even on there!
HD Trailers
The world needs ditch diggers too.
My script don't crash! She crashes, you crashed her!
Sadly I predicted this back when AOL began, I honestly believe it's a result of the dumbing down of everything, had that not occured folks would be smarter
I do not understand the jargon docters use. I do not understand what the guy in the garage uses. If I come into a new company, I have no idea WHAT they are talking about.
I am sure there are a lot of jargons going on in any company that the IT-people do not get. Unfortunatly SLA (Service Level Agreement) is often one of them.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Try explaining to your National Guard tank crew what your theoretical chemistry PhD work is about. "Umm, well, my dissertation title is Methods in Hartree-Fock Molecular Dynamics. That clear enough? No. Ok, how about 'I sit in front of a computer'"?
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Among office workers 26% aren't sure what a firewall does and therefore have been tempted to turn it off.
Just tell them it's an e-condom.
Personally I feel if they are unwilling to learn then they should be fired or at the very least have their computer use suspended until they do. If you are unwilling to learn to do somthing required of your job then it could result in serious monetary loss for your company and possibly life if it concerned safety regulations.
I am glad high schools in my area have decided to make a computer literacy class mandatory for graduation.
Yeah, but they call it a "nautical mile". Or a "knot". It is abbreviated "nm" (although this can be confused with nanometer) or "nmi", rather than "mi". If we wanted to call it a "computational kilobyte" and abbreviate it "ckB" or something, it would be a fair analogy.
Heck, it might even be reasonably straightforward if all computer-storage things used the same convention. But we use kilo=10^3 for hard drives and kilo=2^10 for RAM.
As long as you're clear, I don't care which you use. But engineers can't afford ambiguity-- that's how we get little spaceships crashed into mars. I still use the 2^n version everywhere. But when it matters, I make sure I specify that.
Yes, I do. Don't you think that giving one term two meanings is a little confusing?
Which is better, the confusion resulting from learning a new set of prefixes, or the confusion resulting from nobody knowing whether you meant 10^3 or 2^10 in a spec?
Before you answer that question, you should know that I have invented a second meaning for the word "better", but I'm not going to tell you which meaning I used.
you just got me started.. actually read the article because of your comment
/rant
they forgot the golden rule of education, dictated by Einstein:
'Make it as simple as you can, but not simpler'
well, these asshats have made it a lot simpler than possible with their stupid little list of 'what' 'it' 'all' 'means'.
come on:
PDF - portable document format, which means the file is in a format that can be read on any PC
that's simply not true. a simple matter of oversimplification turning fact into manure..
and this one:
Megabytes - the amount of disc space on your computer and the amount of memory
Gigabytes - also refers to disc space, but measures it in larger quantities
now is it so effing hard to actually write down the factor in which those gigathingies actually are larger than the megadingbats them computer nurds keep talking bout all the time?
these uninformed, poorly written articles filled with useless 'knowledge' to inform people that shouldn't need to truly understand the matter at hand totally completely piss me off!
@icWales and all the other 'popular' magazines:
either explain it right or stfu!
(may read 'IMHO' wherever omitted from above text)
Your method works, and it is unlikely shrink anything. It is also unlikely to actually get your clothes clean - though you may never realize the difference.
To get the best cleaning you need to wash everything in the hottest water (liquid) you can get. Because some cloths shrink, and dye is just a stain that doesn't come out easily you cannot wash most cloths like that, so you have to modify your washing scheme to get the hottest temperatures you can without causing the unwanted side effects of hot water.
Whites can generally be washed in the hottest water you can get, and come out the better for it. Colors need a cooler temperature, but warm is good enough. Dress clothes (suits) should be washed in cold water, if at all - many are dry-clean only.
I'd say read the tag, but the tag may be wrong. I've seen things listed as dry-clean only that would be destroyed by dry cleaning chemicals. (dry cleaners know about this and will clean things right most of the time) I wash my dry-clean (not mislabeled) only stuff in cold water without problem, and put air-dry only stuff in the dryer. However I understand why things are labeled that way, and the downside of not doing it right, and consider it worth the risks.