By
Matthew Jackson
April 29, 2009
Part of living in the information age is a horrific reliance on technology. How else could so much information spread to all corners of the globe? Information is like the Ebola virus at a punk rock concert. In order to be the awesome person you should be, you must have access to the 21st century’s wealth of knowledge, and this means that you need a laptop.
My laptop recently decided to die. The thing gave no notice. There was no little message that said, “Hi, this is your computer. I just wanted to let you know that I’m going to kick it next Friday at 8:49 p.m., so be sure to back up your files. Sorry about this, but there’s nothing you can do. I’ve made up my mind. Sincerely, your laptop.”
Not receiving any warning meant that my various midterm essays went up in metaphorical smoke, but that didn’t bother me much.
The real tragedy is how I’ve possibly lost a truly mind-boggling amount of music — something like a playlist that would run for a constant, non-repeating month — and I had to suffer a whole weekend without Facebook. How is anyone expected to be an up-to-date member of society without Facebook?
Among the worst elements of a computer crash is the unpredictable element of hard-drive retrieval. I live in nervous anticipation of exactly how much of my music will find its way back onto my new laptop.
Regarding “new laptops,” though, how many people have a broad and precise understanding of technology? Admittedly, quite a few. For the rest of us, though, the purchase of a new laptop is daunting.
Do you get a chic, hip and stylish Mac or peruse the wider options of the PC market? What are the elements that matter? How does any Internet research help?
Unleash most of us in clothing stores, music stores, cafés or bars, and we know what to buy — even if we’re in the market for something we’ve never bought before, there is an expected element, and a pair of jeans can be tried on and experienced before committing.
How do you make a sound choice when buying a laptop?
For anyone in this same dilemma, I found a solution: YouTube. There is a very helpful series of videos that debate the integrity of Macs and PCs. These videos are short — about 30 seconds each — the “Mac vs. PC” series essentially raises pop culture and technology-related questions in order to help viewers decide with which computer they better relate. I found this significantly helpful in my computer research and feel confident that I made the correct choice.
I am once again an up-to-date member of connected information-age society. I can obsess over the goings-on of my friends’ Facebook pages, watch the newest viral videos from YouTube and play Spider Solitaire from dawn to dusk — and then to dawn again.
Reach columnist Matt Jackson at opinion@dailyuw.com.
2 Comments
#1 Aaron M.
on April 29, 2009 at 1:28 a.m.(Seattle, WA | UW Community)
This article's content is rather disappointing considering we have top 10 undergraduate and graduate programs in Computer Science & Engineering.
Firstly, you discuss the "unpredicunpredictable element of hard-drive retrieval". Did your hard-drive explicitly crash? Why weren't you running a backup (there's a plethora of FREE online backup providers as well as this cheap thing called an external hard-drive... you could've been mirroring your data on that and if you were really worried, turn to tertiary storage such as tape or compact disc storage media (I'm pretty sure you can back-up your entire 8GB iPod nano on a DVD and by pretty sure I mean 100% certain)). How do you know it wasn't a faulty stick of memory? How do you know your power supply didn't fail? Why is it always the hard-drive.. I know that they commonly fail (seeing how the disk read/write head is moving about as fast as a cruising 747) but but guess what, you CAN BUY A NEW ONE FOR MUCH CHEAPER THAN A NEW LAPTOP.
Secondly, your "Mac vs. PC" discussion is irrelevant. You only need to replace your laptop's failing hardware. An unbiased tech support "guru" could've told you that in under 30 seconds (guess what you get for free as a UW student...). Besides, the "Mac vs. PC debate" only relates to your choice of operating system. Yes, it's true that only Mac hardware will run the Mach OS (no, that's not a typo, Wikipedia it), but with Apple's Intel partnership you can now run Windows on an Apple laptop through a well-integrated, visually seamless virtual machine. And why support the fat cats of Cupertino or Redmond when you could wander down to the next UW surplus sale, pick-up a cheap used laptop that's good enough for your needs, and slap a Linux distribution on there? I thought college was about diversification...
Finally, I'm disappointed that all the hard-work and study I put into operating systems, computer architecture, and HCI might be entirely wasted since apparently all you, along with several others at an outstanding public university really need out of your computer is a web browser and word processor so when you're not "writing papers" you can peruse Facebook or watch videos on YouTube.
At least when my laptop died last year I knew why: I spilled beer on it at 3am on a Friday morning while Ballmer peaking, trying to get a web app debugged and running.
And how do you learn this stuff without studying computer science? There are these things on the internet called blogs. You could keep tabs on Slashdot for starters. I think you'll get an occasional chuckle from TheDailyWTF. All of these "nerdy" websites have RSS feeds (so does the Daily's site, but you'd probably never know it) so you don't even have to visit them. You can just subscribe to them with Google Reader. I sincerely hope you knew about that...
#2 terra_incognita
on April 29, 2009 at 4:37 p.m.(Seattle, WA | UW Community)
You know, it only takes a few seconds to back up your files on a usb drive, save stuff on an external hardrive, email documents to yourself, etc. There are so many options for keeping backups of important files, programs, documents, etc. and you don't have to be that tech-savvy to do so. You obviously didn't value your precious playlists that much or else you surely would have kept them stored elsewhere. Your fault.
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