Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
How do people survive, in this day and age, without at least a modicum of understanding of how computers work????
|
Not very well.
An old friend does telecom and networking for small businesses. He described a client he just dealt with. The client said his wifi sucked.
His network name was "wifi". The network
password was "wifi". He used "wifi" as his password for ease of remembering. And his employees were giving it out to others in the building, so everyone was using his bandwidth. Gee, no wonder his Wifi sucked.
But he's the sort of guy who puts his passwords on Post It notes on his monitor to reduce what he has to remember. They were the bane of my existence when I was doing corporate IT support.
My SO is on a bookkeeping list, and mentioned another poster talking about a client with the same network name and password, for the same reason. The client was in financial services and the British equivalent of a CPA. The response from the list was "Words fail me..." Given current European focus in privacy, I have to wonder how many regulations he might be in violation of with non-existent security.
The problem is two-fold.
First, it's possible to own and drive a car without knowledge of the principles of operation of the four stroke internal combustion engine, or being a mechanic and doing your own repairs beyond changing a flat tire. You don't have to know that stuff, and can pay someone else to maintain the vehicle.
We aren't there with computers (though we're better than we were), and it still helps to understand a bit about how they work and have some mechanical aptitude to fix things and do upgrades.
The second problem is that a lot of what people
think they know is wrong. That will bite them, but they won't believe they are mistaken until it does. (And even then they'll try to find reasons why it wasn't their fault.)
I told my friend
Axiom 1: Some people are smarter than others.
Axiom 2: You get to deal with the stupid.
He had to agree.
______
Dennis