Experiences with non-techies

[soldier_ph]

When people in Public and even Teachers at School see that you're wearing Headphones but still try to talk to you and get mad once I'm like: Ah excuse me what was that after I took the Headphones off to show them that I'm listening. Like do they expect me to be listening to their crap all the time. That's the whole reason why I use noise cancelling Headphones. I've got the Sony WH-1000XM4 and Sony WF-1000XM3.

[sub68]

4 minutes ago, soldier_ph said:

When people in Public and even Teachers at School see that you're wearing Headphones but still try to talk to you and get mad

lol

I wear closed back sony MDR 7506

and some teacher know I am not paying attention some do.

I ask what is happening and they yell.

I go I am zoning out right there.

[Turbokees]

1 minute ago, soldier_ph said:

When people in Public and even Teachers at School see that you're wearing Headphones but still try to talk to you and get mad once I'm like: Ah excuse me what was that after I took the Headphones off to show them that I'm listening. Like do they expect me to be listening to their crap all the time. That's the whole reason why I use noise cancelling Headphones. I've got the Sony WH-1000XM4 and Sony WF-1000XM3.

I always try to look as grumpy/cranky as possible with my earbuds in when I'm traveling with public transport, to avoid entering social conversation when I'm not in a social mood, yet I'm always the first to be approached in a group when someone needs directions etc (though I'll never respond angrily or annoyed). Maybe a sticker on your headphones with "stop bothering me" will help?

[Bitter]

I need to learn the ASL for "sorry no" or just "no" so I can let them just assume I'm deaf or maybe learn a few phrases in an obscure language so they think I don't speak emglish.

[pythonmegapixel]

I'm not bothered by people asking me for directions. I AM bothered by people who attempt to start a conversation with me with 'small talk' for no apparent reason.

[Bitter]

What slays me is THEY'RE HOLDING A GPS ENABLED SMART PHONE READING THE ADDRESS THEY'RE LOOKING FOR FROM A TEXT MESSAGE OR WEBSITE. My name isn't TomTom, Siri, or Hey Google.

[da na]

My friend who thought that the core count of a CPU was the number of specified cores plus one because "all cpus have to have at least two cores right"...

So a single core has 2, dual core has 3, triple core (why did those exist) has 4, quad core has 5, etc.

[artuc]

16 hours ago, pythonmegapixel said:

conversation with me with 'small talk' for no apparent reason.

So this weather lately has been crazy right ?

[da na]

My mom, who would not let me buy my desktop because she had one 15 years ago and it sucked, and "everyone uses laptops now anyway, why would you want a computer that is not portable? Laptops are faster anyways because they're newer." (direct quote).

I had to explain to her what core count was and how you can't get a 16 core Xeon in a laptop...

Now that I have it she complains about how loud it is while the dual liquid coolers keep it preeety silent. I sit right next to it and can't hear it, yet she claims she can hear it outside of our house.

[da na]

OK so when I was at the doctors office, he left the room and I happened to see his (vista) desktop. This is in 2021 btw. He had 3 shortucts to the recycle bin, right next to the recycle bin, and shortcuts to folders and files that were on the desktop, on the desktop.

[pythonmegapixel]

1 minute ago, wat3rmelon_man2 said:

OK so when I was at the doctors office, he left the room and I happened to see his (vista) desktop. This is in 2021 btw. He had 3 shortucts to the recycle bin, right next to the recycle bin, and shortcuts to folders and files that were on the desktop, on the desktop.

I'm surprised you were able to look at his desktop. All medical places I've been to have had policies that staff must lock the screen unless they are sitting in front of the computer using it, as the computers have access to databases of sensitive patient records.

 

Of course we have the NHS here which means that this kind of policy is probably a bit more harmonised across the country than in the US, but still.

[da na]

5 minutes ago, pythonmegapixel said:

I'm surprised you were able to look at his desktop. All medical places I've been to have had policies that staff must lock the screen unless they are sitting in front of the computer using it, as the computers have access to databases of sensitive patient records.

 

Of course we have the NHS here which means that this kind of policy is probably a bit more harmonised across the country than in the US, but still.

This is America, what do you expect, He minimized the window with sensetive info but nothing else

[WhitetailAni]

1 minute ago, wat3rmelon_man2 said:

This is America, what do you expect, He minimized the window with sensetive info but nothing else

Our doctor's office is using 7, thankfully.

I thought it was Vista but it was just 7 Education or something.

I think they have to use 7 for whatever software they use.

[da na]

Just now, FakeKGB said:

Our doctor's office is using 7, thankfully.

I thought it was Vista but it was just 7 Education or something.

I think they have to use 7 for whatever software they use.

Better than my dentist on XP, they prolly need it for their software plus it'd be expensive to upgrade the like 30 machines they have

[artuc]

21 hours ago, wat3rmelon_man2 said:

Better than my dentist on XP, they prolly need it for their software plus it'd be expensive to upgrade the like 30 machines they have

Tell me about it. Having issues at a hospital, super slow, crashing constantly and about 10 years old. The CPU cooler fan bearings giving out finally prompted a replacement.

 

The 'new' one was about 5 years old and nearly as slow.

 

If you measured the staff time wasted daily due to these POS boxes and put it in dollar terms, a brand new PC with an SSD or hell a 1-2 year old refurb would pay for itself many times over.

 

I was face palming harder than Picard.

[Zob]

I was watching youtube with my grandma and i told her my computers slow so videos take a while to load, and she told me the reason its slow is because i got viruses from all "those stupid youtube videos i watch"

[Zob]

1 hour ago, Schnoz said:

Installing  h264ify can help significantly here, especially on  older  hardware.

 

But seriously,  how the heck could one get a virus from Youtube?! It's  just  a  video!

idek 

[Donut417]

3 hours ago, Schnoz said:

Installing  h264ify can help significantly here, especially on  older  hardware.

 

But seriously,  how the heck could one get a virus from Youtube?! It's  just  a  video!

An ad. I’ve had issues with Facebook trying to infect a system before, or at least one of the a holes they sold ad space to. 

[FalconBlue]

3 hours ago, Schnoz said:

Installing  h264ify can help significantly here, especially on  older  hardware.

 

But seriously,  how the heck could one get a virus from Youtube?! It's  just  a  video!

Yeah, you can definitely get viruses from video files. It's probably one of the easier ways to embed exploits compared to other files. Videos are luxuriously fat for a virus or trojan.

 

It would be hard from YouTube literally, since it's usually just streaming, not downloading files, and it's unlikely that YouTube would have any viruses in their content and not know it. But people download YouTube videos sometimes, especially with the aid of browser extensions designed for that purpose, and there's another vector – browser extensions can be malware. The grandmother might have been using "YouTube" to mean online videos generally, like Coke for any cola – maybe she's heard that lots of people have gotten viruses downloading porn videos, which is true.

[FalconBlue]

What gets me is not novices per se, but people who actually work in IT, or for software companies, but know almost nothing about computers. At one company, a software QA tester didn't know that you could use e-mail on a Mac. She thought Windows was required to do e-mail, and that Macs were relatively crippled and lacked basic functionality, like the ability to send or receive e-mails. This was maybe 2005, when Macs were somewhat more rare than today. She didn't understand how e-mail works, and maybe thought it was application-locked or dependent, like how you needed Word to work with Word docs (until all the open source suites arrived or something).

 

Much more recently, in the IT department of an American nuclear power plant, I encountered people who didn't know what Chrome was... Or Visual Studio. How is that possible? It's possible because at some of these larger corporations, especially quasi-governmental entities like bloated electric utilities, people can end up in IT after transferring from other business units. Maybe they were in the power trading side of things, or maintenance of the power plants, or safety or something. They go to IT for whatever reason, but they don't know anything about computers. They don't love computers or software, or even particularly like the domain. They don't use computers at home, which I think is the biggest tell of all – computers are just not a significant part of their lives or an interest or hobby. That nuclear power plant was awful. They tried to force me to use IE 8 as a browser, in late 2014 or so, long after IE 11 had been released. They used incredibly old Java versions to run their business apps in IE 8 with the Java plugin. Everything was just so insecure and easy to hack, and it was a nuclear power plant. There was just a profound lack of competence and proficiency with computers that fostered certain security risks that simply would not exist if those people just had a baseline of knowledge.

 

It's interesting to think about why people know so little about computers and software. The way people learn about it is obviously broken. It's far too informal and ad hoc, and whatever training or education most people get, from government schools or whatever, isn't adequate. There are some very basic concepts that really everyone should know, but they don't. Businesses especially need to normalize basic IT knowledge the way they might normalize basic accounting or bookkeeping concepts.

[KatanaDV20]

Multiple browsers 

 

I notice many of my friends on their laptops and no joke on the taskbar I see Firefox, Vivaldi, Opera, Brave, Edge, Chrome all open at the same time, each with 20+ tabs. I ask why and they give me that look like..."why not?" "who cares" but then they whine at me that the laptop "gets kinda slow". 

 

Their bookmarks are scattered all over the place. So they tell me "Oh check this funny video out on YT, I bookmarked it" and they have to check each browser and then find it. I want to tell them to try and stick to one browser to streamline things but they wont care. On the other hand I am impressed that as non-techies and non-nerds they have discovered browsers like Vivaldi!

[Mitko_DSV]

@KatanaDV20 Well... I'm gulty of this as well. For me the reason is that I use different browsers for different purposes, just easier to separate for example university and personal stuff. Though I usually don't have more than two browsers open at the same time. Currently tiping this in Firefox and have an online lecture running in Chrome.

[CT854]

1 hour ago, Mitko_DSV said:

@KatanaDV20 Well... I'm gulty of this as well. For me the reason is that I use different browsers for different purposes, just easier to separate for example university and personal stuff. Though I usually don't have more than two browsers open at the same time. Currently tiping this in Firefox and have an online lecture running in Chrome.

I typically use different profiles for this. With Chrome it's more straightforward than on Firefox, but I do it on both (Chrome on my laptop because I'm too lazy to import everything over to Firefox, Firefox on my desktop because I had just built it so... clean slate).

[Bitter]

Guilty of this on my laptop because used to be some flash stuff ran better in Chromium than FireFox.

[pythonmegapixel]

Guilty of having multiple browsers because I want to make sure code I write plays nicely with Gecko (Firefox), Blink (Chromium) and WebKit (Safari).