technological shortcomings in the universtity population
I had cause to spend a few hours in the computer lab at my university yesterday, and a few things surprised me—most notable among them the presence of six beautiful (or at least once-beautiful) Mac Pros, complete with Apple Cinema displays, gracing one side of the room. Mac Pros? Isn't that a little much for machines that are only going to be used for email and writing double-spaced undergraduate essays in Microsoft Word? Even worse (though, sadly, less surprising) was the fact that no one was using them, preferring instead to patronize the several rows of Dells. Which can't cost more than $600 each!! Shouldn't that price differential matter to people?! Clearly they haven't heard the news, that Apple is the new darling of the business world. The halo from the iPod is going to overlap with the halo from the recently-released Apple TV, to create some kind of robot super-halo. Luckily for them, the folks in the lab got a taste of the Mac love against their wills, since the printer connected to the Dells was non-functional, and to print anything they had to email it to themselves and figure out how to get onto the internet on a non-Windows machine. And believe me, they had their troubles. Not the wonderful user experience Apple might have hoped for.
The fact is, the level of computer knowledge in the room was not high. That applies not only to the students, but to the lab personnel as well. The part-timers have some excuse—work-study doesn't require a great deal of experience or training, I believe—but their supervisor wasn't much better. One of the Macs was having a problem opening Word files, and he was trying to remember what the keyboard combination was to rebuild the desktop. Aside from the fact that he was sitting in a room filled with 50 computers connected to the internet (who needs memory when you've got google?), rebuilding the desktop is OS9 voodoo, at least seven years old now. The new superstitious response is repairing permissions, don't you know!
That machine's problems were minor, however, compared to another one of the Macs, that was kernal panicing as soon as it was started up. They were trying to reinstall the OS, or at least do something with the install disk, but sadly the install program couldn't even find the machine's hard drive. Now what could they have been doing to that poor computer to reduce it to such a state?! I can excuse the hideously dirty keyboards (white keys do not belong in a public lab, I'm afraid) but not the 'motherboard troubles' that the lab tech diagnosed. Between the poor care and the public disdain, I had half a mind to try and liberate one or two of the big guys from the lab, to give them a chance to live up to their full Pro potential in more congenial surroundings. But I've got my own big computer to take care of now, so they will have to await another liberator.