Hey Dork Forest denizens, I have a small confession
to make, and I hope you won't hate me for it. In a world where everything
seems to have become polarized, where you're either with us or against
us, where the angry extremes have shouted down the middle, I stand
like a colossus, firmly astride both sides of the deep canyon that
divides computerdom like a chasm.
I'm biplatformed. That's right, I'll cheerfully
have computer congress with Macs and PCs, and while I don't deny
that both have their unique strengths and weaknesses, I am unwilling
to pick a side. Call me the Switzerland of this particular conflict,
happy to sit on the sidelines and line my pockets with the gold
of both parties.
I'm a computer doctor of sorts, and what I see
is that Macs and PCs are both heir to all the silicon ills, and
the vast majority of the disease starts between the keyboard and
the chair.
Mac partisans will cry, "but what about viruses?
and spyware? These evils don't affect our kind!" And I will
say, keep saying that, and the scabrous malefactors who rain this
particular terror down will turn their jaundiced eyes upon you,
too. Nobody likes a smug asshole, so keep your mouth shut.
In the meantime, take note of what really causes
data loss - nine times out of ten, it's not viruses, or sneakware,
or any outside nasties at all. It's you. You drag the wrong folder
to the trash, you ignore the clicks and clanks of a hard disk about
to spin its last, you blithely defer the backups that would save
your ignorant ass.
So don't talk to me about viruses. Tell me when
you last backed up your critical files. Tell me when you last ran
Software Update, or Windows Update. Tell me when you last ran Disk
Utility, or ScanDisk. Then do it again, and take the backups offsite.
There's an old joke about how you can tell the
computer programmers at the supermarket. They're the ones scanning
their own groceries, because they don't trust anyone else to do
data entry. Funny how that's flipped around now, eh? Nowadays, we
all scan our own stuff at the market and we all code our own MySpace
pages. We're all programmers now! The dork forest grew and swallowed
us all.
