Does everyone need to do everything, or can we recognize others have talents we don't? I suspect the larger exercise is "learning to learn"
Computer oriented people made tools, and to make bank they decided to make software allowing the marketing of these tools to the general public. You build it, you figure out how to make it work for the public you're selling it to. I mean we've done this with automobiles.
I've got sympathy for the guy who wrote the article when network settings are blocking the fine-tuned running of these systems. But that's what an IT person's job is for: to navigate between systems and policies for the regular user.
Edit to add: > Ask them to upgrade their hard-drive or their RAM and they break out in a cold sweat.
When I was 28 and decided to personally change the spark plugs and plug cables in my car I was very anxious. Fortunately the Chilton manual told me exactly what to do. The only minor problem was I chose the wrong kind of plug (they were advertised as better, but on a forum people mentioned to only use the copper ones in my particular vehicle).
I've been trying to put this in words for a long time. Some people will exclusively seek a doctor's opinion even if their own judgment will suffice. Researching the best antimicrobial sanitizers when hot water and soap was always known to be fine, for example.
You could say that you can't teach experience I guess. You can't teach sitting at a computer for hours a day for years in a life breaking and fixing your own computer over and over through mistakes or misuse or even on purpose trying experimental things.
Like one example that comes off the top of my head was fixing one of my friends computers who was having trouble starting up OBS to stream with. Every single time they would start up obs and they would try and add a video capture device OBS would freeze. I got them to diagnose the chipset drivers and the USB ports and even unplugging everything that was unnecessary to no avail. And then I remembered something from when I was testing a whole bunch of different vtuber softwares, if you don't know what that is it's software to control a 3D or 2D Avatar basically and a lot of them install virtual webcam drivers in Windows. Even if you uninstall them sometimes they don't totally clean up their virtual webcam drivers. So I quickly did a little Google search to find out the registry location that contains all of the current and previously known Windows imaging devices. I found that and then I talked my friend through finding that in regedit and I asked them to click on all of the different entries in there and sure enough those were different webcams that didn't need to exist anymore so I had them delete all of those keys and then reboot and try doing it again in obs and it worked! In fact a lot of things worked better that didn't make any sense at all and I believe that's because a lot of programs in the background or related to obs... Something was trying to enumerate all of the windows imaging devices over and over and over and over and failing.
I think if I didn't have that previous experience stored away in my brain that I never would have found out the root cause of the problem and fixed it. Another troubleshooter might have just been like, just reinstall Windows it's because Windows is broken windows broke itself... But that would be completely incorrect. It was poorly built programs not knowing how to uninstall themselves correctly and windows was just fine.
My most recent required computer class was indeed learning how to use Microsoft Office in high school in 2016. That's it, all the computer education that students required. Even in middle school we were learning how to use office software. Insane that schools STILL just teach office software and not computing thanks to Microsoft's efforts.
I was hoping that schools would learn from these mistakes in the past, but we are only heading farther into the reality of locked down phones and console replacing desktops skills. General desktop skills seems much more important than learning how to use a word software.
Doesn't have to be Microsoft office, but pretty much all the other offerings are copies with small differences. Some people are adamant those differences meaningfully make them better, but regardless if you know the basics of office you can easily transition to any of the other offerings.
Programming is a skill just like any other, and learning it helps in everything.
It’s like a mechanic making a blog post complaining that people don’t know how cars work because they can’t change their oil or brake pads and somehow that’s a bad thing.
The examples he’s given are more like a driver not knowing how to turn the wiper on, changing the speed of the wipers depending on the amount of rain and so on.
Changing oil or brake pad would be like upgrading RAM in a machine which has easy slots for upgrading RAM (such as in many Windows laptops).
Edit: I’ve had a neighbor tell me that he doesn’t know how to change wipers in a car. So that would be another example.
> They click 'OK' in dialogue boxes without reading the message. They choose passwords like qwerty1234. They shut-down by holding in the power button until the monitor goes black. They'll leave themselves logged in on a computer and walk out of the room. If a program is unresponsive, they'll click the same button repeatedly until it crashes altogether.
I would say these are all things we can expect and the real problem is that people can't make computers usable.
- no undo or dialog boxes that disappear with messages you can't later relay to IT is dumb
- password manager should be included with OS/browser, only remember main password
- pressing the power button should sleep/suspend.
And journaling filesystems are a thing, as is autosave so won't lose much
- sensible defaults for screen/password timeouts
It is less that they aren't 'tech-savvy' and more that they are unwilling to dig into uncomfortable problems. There is a certain itchy feeling my brain gets when it is in totally foreign waters, it needs time to adjust to a new problem space. I think most people just bail or pick up their phones when they get that feeling.
It's the same as most people knowing how to drive but not being able to rebuild an engine or even replace their own windshield wipers.
But I believe school curriculums should include some exposure to general computing as a way to make everyday life easier.
> Without reference to Wikipedia, can you tell me what the difference is between The Internet, The World Wide Web, a web-browser and a search engine?
I don't think the difference between `Internet` and `The World Wide Web` is really a good measure of anything. World wide web is an archaic term that I haven't seen used anywhere