Technical people don’t understand

I say this only because I don’t understand, and because I am (in some respects) a technical person.

All people seem to want to use the internet for is to play stupid little coffee break games.

It doesn’t make any sense. Here we have a global communications medium allowing you to connect with like minded, interesting people from pretty near every country on Earth. We have essentially the common knowledge of the world at our fingertips. SETI@Home indicates that if you bother to harness it, you can have as much computing power as you would ever care to use.

And yet… coffee break games. And magazine quizzes.

People do this with computers, too. There’s a disconnect between what computers (in particular, computer software) can do and what people strive for. As a software guy, this is frustrating to no end. I want to scream, “Do you know what kind of powerful machine you have sitting at your desk? Have you no vision? Have you no imagination? You just want to use it to send pictures of cats to all your friends!

Of course, maybe what frustrates me is that all I want to do is play stupid little coffee-break games. Technical people are no different; our games are just slightly geekier and perhaps a tad more complicated.

But whenever a person with a computer and a vision comes along… watch out! They’re dangerous