Tech Tuesday: August 13

In my quest for more regular features, I'm dusting off the old Linux Monday and reviving it as Tech Tuesday. Not quite Twofer Tuesday or even Taco Tuesday but still useful.

The must read of the week for anyone even remotely connected to technology, which means all of us, is Kids Can't Use Computers... And This Is Why It Should Worry You by Marc Scott. And by "kids" he means Most Grownups Too. Read the whole thing but here's a taste:

There’s a narrow range of individuals whom, at school, I consider technically savvy. These are roughly the thirty to fifty year-olds that have owned a computer for much of their adult lives. There are of course exceptions amongst the staff and students. There are always one or two kids in every cohort that have already picked up programming or web development or can strip a computer down to the bare bones, replace a motherboard, and reinstall an operating system. There are usually a couple of tech-savvy teachers outside the age range I’ve stated, often from the Maths and Science departments who are only ever defeated by their school laptops because they don’t have administrator privileges, but these individuals are rare.

Not really knowing how to use a computer is deemed acceptable if you’re twenty-five or over. It’s something that some people are even perversely proud of, but the prevailing wisdom is that all under eighteens are technical wizards, and this is simply not true. They can use some software, particularly web-apps. They know how to use Facebook and Twitter. They can use YouTube and Pinterest. They even know how to use Word and PowerPoint and Excel. Ask them to reinstall an operating system and they’re lost. Ask them to upgrade their hard-drive or their RAM and they break out in a cold sweat. Ask them what https means and why it is important and they’ll look at you as if you’re speaking Klingon.

Here's one my sons could have told me: Gamers will save the PC. "A growing number of users are migrating to tablets and smartphones as the specs of these devices continue to mature. With that shift, the remaining PC users are going considerably high-end."


And from PC "Mag" (Remember PCMag? Online only for several years) one thing you should know how to do - How to Clone a Hard Drive - and one thing you maybe shouldn't do unless you have some spare liquid nitrogen - How to Overclock Your CPU.