On Wed, Jan 21, 2004 at 12:13:26PM -0500, Chris Santerre <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I know tons of people with broadband connections that might be on only a few > times a week. Some don't even notice their cpu is slower. I also know some > pretty intelligent people that despite what they try, still end up with > trojans and viruses from their kid's downloads. I say that your average > middle class family will just never fully understand how to handle a > computer on the net. They are busy scratching out a living.
I've had to deal with this myself. Specifically, a friend of mine has kids. This friend knows little about computers; his kids know less (and think they know more). Despite being quite handy with tools and similar, mechanical technology, my friend is completely at the mercy of his kids with respect to his computer. They do all kinds of things with/to it, and eventually the accumulated porn/virus/spyware starts to make the whole thing break. That's when he brings it to me and asks for help, and each time I absolutely boggle at the amount of damage his kids manage to do. The fact is, educating him won't work; he doesn't have the basic knowledge he needs to keep up with his kids (who obviously don't have jobs -- and thus a lot more spare time), and he doesn't have time to learn. Nor is he inclined to spend all his time chasing after problems with his computer. He just wants the thing to work. Certain operating systems make it very hard to lock down a system. Others make it a bit easier. Blaming Average Joe because he bought a computer using the dominant operating system at the time won't do any good, and he doesn't even deserve the blame because he's not making any claim to expertise in computing; he just got what the salesman sold him, and (most likely) wasn't offered a lot of choices. We can't expect everyone to be a computer expert. And if we want to convince people to bring their computer in for "maintenance" occasionally we need to fight the Redmond marketing engine that says they don't need to know anything about anything. The solution? I don't know. I don't like the idea of imposing broad restrictions on consumer internet access, because I like the idea of buying an "open pipe", and I don't want to see a power shift from "peer-to-peer" internet towards "client-server" internet, even if most consumers are already in the client-server model. But nothing will be accomplished by berating the average end-users for not knowing about computers. The most appropriate response would be to demand Microsoft fix their software. -- Matthew Hunter ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Public Key: http://matthew.infodancer.org/public_key.txt Homepage: http://matthew.infodancer.org/index.jsp Politics: http://www.triggerfinger.org/index.jsp ------------------------------------------------------- The SF.Net email is sponsored by EclipseCon 2004 Premiere Conference on Open Tools Development and Integration See the breadth of Eclipse activity. February 3-5 in Anaheim, CA. http://www.eclipsecon.org/osdn _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk
