> From: Ronn!Blankenship <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > Or, there is the argument that "I paid about as much for this computer as I > did for my refrigerator, and all I had to do with the refrigerator was > bring it home and plug it in and it worked fine for the next ten years > without my doing anything to it. If I'm going to spend that much for an > appliance, it darn better well work just as well for at just as long > without me having to fix it every few days." >
Computers are several orders of magnitude more complex than refrigerators, the same way a NASA shuttle is more complex than a catapult. Just the CPU has how many hundred million switches?
I know that, and you know that, and probably most of the regular active posters on this list know that, but people who are told that they need a computer so they can send and receive e-mail with pictures of their grandkids, or so their kids can do book reports and term papers for school, etc., and so go to Circuit City or some such place and say "Gimme a computer," take the box home and plug it in (or have said kid come by sometime and hook it up for them), don't know that, but figure it is like a refrigerator or TV set or any other home appliance. As long as it works, they're happy, and when it stops working, they have no idea what is wrong, but all they know is that something they spent several hundred dollars on is always on the fritz, and feel much the same as someone who frex buys a new car which is always in the shop for something like an electrical system problem no one can find which makes the car stop without warning and causes them to keep replacing batteries, alternators, starters, voltage regulators, etc., without ever solving the problem for any length of time.
> And then there are the cases where Junior uses Daddy's computer while Daddy > is out of town (despite explicit instructions not to do so), and of course > Junior opens the e-mail promising an "Awesome screen-saver" . . .
Which of course is exactly how another e-mail list I am on went through a period like the one Brin-L has been going through recently, with the list server and many of the list members' machines getting bombarded over and over by virus attempts which we eventually traced back to a particular list member whose account the list manager then terminated after he didn't respond to any messages informing him that his machine was infected and bombarding the list. Then a couple of weeks later we all got an apologetic message from him after he got back from his trip, discovered what his kid had done in his absence, and gotten his computer cleaned up. I don't recall him sharing with us the details of what he did to the kid . . . ;-)
-- Ronn! :)
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