Like many geeks I have been doing some computer support during the holidays. I installed a firewall, a spyware remover, Firefox. I did some education on good practices, warned about viruses, phishing, etc. It became tiring after a while I must say.

That’s when you see that computers are still very complicated and people really know very little about them.

Computers are not keeping their promises for “normal people” (by opposition to geeks). The industry is marketing the wonders of broadband, digital photography, etc. Great, but sometimes one can doubt if it’s worth the pain: crashes, virus, spam, identity theft…

Digital photography is IMO really a shame. People are switching massively to digital but are not conscious at all that contrary to our parents, most of us won’t have our old photo albums to show our children, because the hard drive crashed, or we discovered that the CDR had a limited lifetime…

In a certain way, having some kind of training required for using a computer would make some sense. Think at a driving license: The license is made to protect people from harming others and themselves. If your computer is used to relay spam, you are harming others. Or if by not making backups you loose your family memory, you definitively harmed yourself.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 26th, 2005 at 2:02 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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