yorkie said:
Yep but you still said it was your connection, but it wasn't
Anyway here's my top 5 most annoying statements made by users:
1. "The internet is down" (impossible)
2. "The internet is slow" (no, you're just trying to download a huge file and your available bandwidth is such that it is going to take a while to download it)
3. "My internet has crashed" (no, your web browser has crashed)
4. "Newsgroup? huh? oh is that owned by Google Groups?" (No! google just re-brand newsgroups, anyone can do that!)
5.
Any statement that claims that the WWW is the only Internet application available, or even that the WWW
is the internet.
All of these would be eliminated if people just took 10 minutes to learn the basics of what the internet is. Although I blame the media and poor ICT education for this. I don't blame the teachers themselves, too often schools/colleges appoint people to teach ICT who are not specialists, and some of them know less than the pupils.
And before anyone says I am being pedantic, consider this: would you be frustrated if someone called a class 37 a "multiple unit", or thought Class 455s were the same as 317s?
Well actually Yorkie, yes, I think you
are being a little pedantic. (Well ok, if we're being pedantic here I don't suppose it's possible to be a
little pedantic, you either are pedantic or you 're not!
but I digress.)
Firstly, it's not just the 'uneducated' that use such terms. I could show you plenty of IT professionals who use terms like "the internet's down" when they really just mean (for example) that the proxy server is down or has crashed. (Yes, it does happen Tom, even on Unix systems
). It's just an expression of speech and describes the situation in a simple way that everyone on site can understand. No-one interested enough to care really thinks that they mean it literally.
In the same way someone saying "the internet is slow" really means "my internet connection is slow" and to anyone who doesn't understand the difference between the two statements it probably doesn't matter anyway.
As for point 3, seeing as we're being pedantic, it isn't necessarily your browser that's crashed. In my own case it's far more likely to be my NTL cable modem that needs a
kick (sorry reboot)!
Next, as far as most people are concerned these days the World Wide Web and the Internet may just as well be one and the same thing, although of course I accept your point that they aren't.
I just think that Mr and Mrs average just want to use "The Internet" and aren't bothered about the ins and outs of it. To them, if the internet doesn't work then the internet doesn't work whether it's crashed, locked up or disappeared into the ether(net)!
Finally, I don't know about people calling a class 37 a multiple unit but I know those who insist that a class 43 is! Better not go there though eh?
Frank
Cockfosters said:
People are too mollycoddled by computers - AOL / Windoze / M$IE users, *in general*.
And what's wrong with that? Haven't you heard of "computers for all"? Surely it's good that computers have become simple enough for anyone to use and that you don't have to be a nerd to use them? (God knows, when I think back a few years to the days of manually keying in a bootstrap loader on a DEC PDP11 before being able to load the OS from paper tape.......)
As for your little list, I have just read a detailed report describing how much stronger (security wise) IE7 is than Firefox. If Microsoft making progs more secure is mollycoddlling then that's got to be a good thing in my opinion.
What I think you sometimes forget is that not everyone wants to be a computer nerd like you (and possibly me!
) They
need to be mollycoddled. They just want something they can use easily without having to worry about
how it works or the technology behind it.
p.s. You could have a point about AOL though!
Frank