Sometimes, things happen or you hear them, and an bulb lights up! Something is revealed to you.
Years ago, I experienced such a moment, from a 10 or 11 year old: my daughter Suhaila.
For some reason the stove that was only a year old, displayed a blinking "8:88" in the timer, and did not respond to buttons pressed.
After trying for a while, I told my wife jokingly: "Well, I guess we will pull the plug. I wish we had Ctrl-Alt-Del on it". To my utter surprise, Suhaila, my oldest daughter said: "Yeah, Ctrl-Alt-Del is very good. It is so useful! It solves all problems you have!"
And then it hit me: Microsoft has dumbed down an entire generation or two of people into thinking that technology being unreliable is a "normal" thing to have, and perfectly acceptable to live with.
So after decades of computers being made as reliable as possible by IBM and recovering from faults, being resilient to errors and all that. The same goes for phone lines: they never go down in a power outage, and only if the physical wire to your home is damaged.
After all that, we end up with the most widely used consumer operating system causing the consumer to just "reboot and it will go away" mentality.
To be fair, this was when Windows 98 was the most used version of Windows, and to their credit, Windows 2000, XP have been much more reliable (as a kernel) than that. But still ...
Comments
Anonymous (not verified)
It is worse than you
Thu, 2009/04/02 - 13:40It is worse than you describe. Microsoft has not merely "dumbed down an entire generation or two of people into thinking that technology being unreliable is a "normal" thing to have" - they have succeeded in making the victims of their unreliability *blame themselves*!
How many times have you, as a sysadmin (or whatever you may call yourself when assisting the technically less-competent,) heard someone say 'It was working fine until I ... (fill in the rest) - I shouldn't have done that!'
Many people feel that - if only they had not installed that bootleg copy of Word, gone to that 'bad' website, etc., etc. - their computer would still be working fine! (and again, here, most innocents equate the concept of 'computer' with the image displayed on the GUI desktop)
Not to draw too much of a parallel, but this sort of marketing is also perfected by the old Catholic Church - original sin, etc., leads to your eternel damnation!
What the heck - it seems to have worked for 2000 years...and don't get me started on what I call the Microsoft Tax - imposed as a tax on your time each time you need to reboot..often three or four times a day, and many many more times when you do a Windows Update...You could also calculate an actual carbon footprint for the useless burning of fuel to power the computer during these periods of enforced un-utility.
In short - Go Linux! Leave the plantation!
Khalid
Another example: Anti-Virus
Fri, 2009/04/03 - 22:33Here is another example of how the Microsoft computing model has caused people to accept and deal with inferior products, and just deal with it.
A cousin asked me today why his 10 month old laptop takes 18 hours to finish scanning 125GB of data on Vista. My answer was: I use Kubuntu Linux as my desktop, and don't use a virus scanner.
His answer was astonishing: "Don't you use a virus scanner on Linux?"