The Necessity of Computers In Daily Life

[dsquire]

Perspective on the necessity of computers in daily life...

An unemployed man goes to try for a job with Microsoft as a cleaner. The manager there arranges for an aptitude test (Section: Floors, sweeping and cleaning). After the test, the manager says: You will be appointed on the scale of $30 per day. Let me have your e-mail address, so that I can send you a form to complete and advise you where to report for work on your first day. Taken aback, the unemployed man protests that he is neither in possession of a computer nor of an e-mail address. To this the MS manager replies: Well, then, that really means that you virtually don't exist and can therefore hardly expect to be employed.

Stunned, the man leaves. Not knowing where to turn and only having about $10 left, he decides to buy a 10 kg box of tomatoes at the supermarket. Within less than 2 hours, he sells the tomatoes singly at 100% profit. Repeating the process several times more that day, he ends up with almost $100 before going to sleep that night. And thus it dawns on the man that he could quite easily make a living selling tomatoes.

Getting up early and earlier every day and going to bed late and later, he multiplies his hoard of profits in quite a short time. Not too long thereafter, he acquires a cart to transport several dozen boxes of tomatoes, only to have to trade it in again shortly afterwards on a pickup truck. By the end of the second year, he is the owner of a fleet of pickup trucks and manages a staff of a hundred former unemployed people, all selling tomatoes.

Considering the future of his wife and children, he decides to buy some life assurance. Calling an insurance adviser, he picks an insurance plan to fit his new circumstances. At the end of the telephone conversation, the adviser asks him for his e-mail address in order that he might forward the documentation. When the man replies that he has no e-mail, the adviser is stunned: "What, you don't even have e-mail? How on earth have you managed to amass such wealth without the Internet, e-mail and e-commerce? Just imagine where you would have been by now, if you had been connected from the very start!" After a moment's silence, the tomato millionaire replied: "Sure! I would have been a cleaner at Microsoft!"

Moral of the story:
1: The Internet, e-mail and e-commerce do not need to rule your life.
2: If you don't have e-mail, but work hard, you can still become a millionaire.
3: Seeing that you got this story via e-mail, you're probably closer to becoming a cleaner than you are to becoming a millionaire.
4: If you do have a computer and e-mail, you're already being taken to the cleaners by Microsoft.
 

Cheers 

Don

[Fergus OMore]

Actually the story is apocryphal but attributed to William Somerset Maughan. Eventually, the story became part of a film called Trio and tells the story of a unemployed man who seeks employment as a church verger. Sadlly, Mr Foreman cannot read and write and loses the job. He passes a small empty shop on a street corner, rents it as a tobaconist's. He works hard, does well and eventually gets a string of shops.
The story ends with someone trying to get him to agree a major contract. Of course, he cannot sign- he's illiterate. In amazement, he is questioned about what he would have become had he those skills. The reply is simply ' A Bloody Verger!'

There's the story, too, of four young lads that left school at the age of 14 during the last days of the war when there was no education for British kids. It is quite a story but you will have to wait, the last character is now over 81 and has no intention of joining the other three-just yet.

[ieezitin]

You know, Knowledge is power. It always has been.

You should not have to pay for it, but should be earned.

The beauty of the internet is that treated with caution, with good research skills and the right desire most knowledge can be acquired for free. That in my opinion is all its good for other than for communication the rest of it is shear trash.

The best moral from the story in my eyes is nothing beats honest hard work.   Anthony

[Lew_Merrick_PE]

Prolog:  Let me start by stating that I built my first microcomputer (back when such a distinction was important) in 1967.  My brother's high school sweetheart was at MIT and had joined the ARPA microcomputer development project.  She needed somebody who could "cut" PC boards and solder.  Guess who got elected?

In 1971, I got to work on the project that installed and qualified the first modern (2D) CAD package (Gerber/IDS) at Boeing.  I have been using CAD, CAE, and CAM tools pretty much ever since.  I got my first MODEM (75 Baud) as part of this effort.  I am always amazed in retrospect that Ward Christiansen and Irv Hoff did not get together and take out a "contract" on me for all the time I harassed them as I got that system working.

In the mid-1970's I started college.  I joined the Academic-Defense Information Network (ADIN) team.  I actually have a letter (currently somewhere in storage) from our ADIN team leader from the spring of 1977 when he and other ADIN team leaders had run around Capitol Hill looking for funding to expand that network (one of the five "sources" for today's internet).  In that letter he explains that ONLY the freshman representative from Tennessee (Al Gore) had ANY IDEA what they were talking about -- and he (Al Gore) was the one who got the funding released for that development.  BTW, I had the same e-mail address from 1975 through 1999 (when ADIN operations were finally shut down).

I spent much of 1982-1988 working for the National Bureau of Standards (NBS -- killed in 1984 and replaced with the National Institute of Standards Technology -- which exists ONLY to protect "intellectual property rights") and NASA.  Much of this time was devoted to creating the modern CNC machine tool controller and connecting CAD to CAM operations.

Story-1:  Mid-last week (25 January 2012) I was taking part in a proposal development meeting.  There were 16 graduate engineers (not counting myself as I never completed my degree) including half-a-dozen or so PhD engineers.  The question posed was, "How large a beam do we need to carry this load?"  They were SHOCKED when I pulled out my "always carry with me" handbook and answered that question in a matter of a couple of minutes using pencil, paper, and calculator.  THEY were going to construct a model using 3D CAD and submit it to analysis using FEA (CAE) software and expect to have the answer back "in a couple of hours."

The 16 graduate engineers in this meeting were ALL younger than 40.  They had NEVER SEEN a general beam loading diagram.  They had NO IDEA how to calculate an Area Moment of Inertia or how to relate that to a beam's Section Modulus -- or what either had to do with the strength or stiffness of a beam!

Story-2:  In 2006 I was a member of the team designing a new fuel pump to handle hypergolic fuels for orbital transfer vehicles.  The main analyst for our team was a freshly-minted MSME type.  He provided us (the rest of the team) with the required flow pressures and flow factors to use in designing the pump.  We built the Mark-I prototype -- and it only provided 5% of the required fuel flows.  Needless to say, there was a lot of angst and blame-proposing going on.  I spent the better part of a week combing through the analysis.  There, in line 6 of his spreadsheet was a pressure-drop value implying that we were going to pull a vacuum to -35 psia!  I probably stared as this a couple of dozen times before its implication hit me (this is equivalent to saying that we are going to get a temperature below absolute zero!).  When asked about this, our freshly-minted MSME type said that he "downloaded the equations from Wikipedia!"

The re-designed fuel pump is currently providing fuel to the vector (steering) thrusters carrying the Curiosity rover to Mars...

Moral:  Computers are wonderful, but they do not replace knowledge and understanding.

[Dean W]

That's a good one, Don.  Too bad about all the other blabber.  I'm with the 'mater seller.  ;)

[Troutsqueezer]

Good God, the Internet has become so ubiquitous, it is just plain silly to proclaim it only has one or two good uses. Variations on usage is probably in the millions and exponentially growing.

I use the computer for many many things in my life. It is how I make a very good living, currently working with thousands of other engineers designing Ivy Bridge along with other future generation microprocessors. It is a big part of life now and will only get bigger.

[BK]

Most modern cars and heavy vehicles all rely on computers to run, if there's a problem, they shut the engine down. the problem with this is, you can't fix it yourself.