Things People Believe About Computers

Computers and especially software are really difficult to explain because of the sheer amount of abstraction involved, it doesn&#x27;t help that software often presents abstractions to users that do not reflect the underlying mechanism.<p>You will tend to find misconceptions about things very commonly amongst even people who work in IT as their livelihood. If you ask 100 mechanics how a 4 stroke engine works you&#x27;re likely to get approximately the same answer. Ask 100 IT people or developers what an operating system does and you&#x27;ll get 100 different ones.

&gt; #9: Computer Science courses teach you how to repair computers<p>Oh god, this.<p>edit: People also think CS teaches us which computer brands are good or answers to the questions like &quot;This computer has 4gb ram, should I buy it&quot;

This was a nicely written article, but missed a few pet peeves. Like how a full generation thinks the blue &quot;e&quot; icon is the internet, that they can close the internet by closing the browser, etc. Some of them even think Google home page is the internet itself.<p>And don&#x27;t let me start on how people name files: sent you a Word file, have you received my Excel file?, gotta present you a PowerPoint... Hurts a little inside.

Actually, the &quot;zoom and enhance&quot; thing isn&#x27;t necessarily quite as wrong as he suggests.[1]<p>True, this doesn&#x27;t exactly generate new information, but it generates new <i>pseudo</i>-information that can look awfully convincing, and in many cases is actually correct. See HN discussion here:[2]<p>Finally, the author omits the number one silly thing that people (well, people in Hollywood at least) believe about computers: that they go &quot;beep beep beep&quot; with every bloody keystroke. I swear I want to hurl things at the screen every time I see that....<p>1: <a href="http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~vision/SingleImageSR.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il&#x2F;~vision&#x2F;SingleImageSR.html</a><p>2: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4241266" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=4241266</a>

I&#x27;m split on this article. On the one hand, I empathize with the author. It can be very frustrating dealing with non-technical friends&#x2F;family who use computers all the time and are seemingly incapable of doing the most basic things. Especially googling their problems.<p>On the other hand, there are plenty of things that I do or benefit from about which I have no knowledge. I drive to work 5 days a week. I hate it. I don&#x27;t even have a long commute, typically it takes under 10 minutes. But I treat it as a necessary evil and I have very little knowledge of my car. It&#x27;s a tool that I use every day, but I&#x27;m sure there are many more than 12 misconceptions I have about it.<p>Put another way, I wonder if grilling enthusiasts write articles titled &quot;Things People Believe About Grills&quot; targeted at folks like the author.

Hollywood hacking: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ</a> Hollywood enhancing: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxq9yj2pVWk" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Vxq9yj2pVWk</a>

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Literally writing a book right now where I try and slay some of these. Thanks for reminding me of a few.

This reminds me of when I was describing to my wife how the NSA was snooping on the internet traffic, and she had a &quot;special&quot; moment: &quot;But how can they get the data if its floating in space&quot;. Talk about cloud computing!!!

Terminally Incoherent is a great name for a website.

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