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Author: Petr Sopuch & Stefan Stefanov, MG Příbor, Czech Republic

Computer as a moron..

Computers – pro & cons

Příbor 28. 01. 2008

Pablo Picasso's words “Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.”

To begin the article we would like to ask you one simple question: do you have a computer at home? Almost everybody will certainly answer YES. At least 99 % will answer positively. Nowadays it shows that nearly everyone and everything depends on computers. And as nearly everyone works with PC, the question is very topical.

But the situation was quite different some years ago. First computers didn’t look like the same way like today. Huge parametres, minimal performance, very small capacity hard discs in oposition on several times bigger capacity - in the past when you had 20 MB it was great, nowadays 500 GB starts to be a standard and it is nothing unusual to have the capacity about 1 TB) much more better graphic cards. It is impossible to compare them: for imagination most of mobile phones are much better than the first computers. You can even choose either to have a laptop, which you can carry anywhere you want to, or a personal computer with amazing performance and power. To sum up this comparison we can say, time has changed but on the other hand every new version of that machines is based on previous version, so without beginnings it wouldn’t be in today’s form.

Computers have become an essential part of our lives and, as with every new invention, they have their pros and cons. For example games are a very popular way of spending time on your computer. But just imagine the influence on a child when he or she controls his or her soldier, shoots enemies, kills people and animals, destroys buildings, machines, cars. There is blood everywhere, everything explodes, human beings scream and and when his/her soldier is killed it doesn’t matter... You wait a few seconds and they are alive again ready to kill and destroy! Hurray!?

Another situation is when your child is driving a “computer” car. They can go at 250 kilometres per hour through a city, along streets and, of course, because of the excessive speed they will crash! At that speed if they hit a truck which is moving in the opposite carriage-way What happens? In a real life, obviously, you would die, your car wouldn't be a car, it would be something unrecognizable. But in this game you have the opportunity to watch slow-motion video footage of the “crash”, as the “computer” truck is flying away and your child’s car stops. By the way, Matrix is everywhere...Sadly, more and more of these high-speed crashes are taking place on teh roads each year, so how far removed from reality is the experience of playing a game from real life, and what effect does this kind of activity have on young people who are learning to drive a real car. Just imagine the behaviour of young people using their first possibilitybehind the steering-wheel of a real car to experience the kind of thrills and excitement that they have enjoyed when driving fast and dangerously in a large number of popular PC games. What are the results? One possibility is that the car will end up destroyed and its driver will be dead or seriously injured.

The problem of free time?

What do you think is better? Playing computer games, watching movies and hanging out on the internet, or playing football, reading, walking outside, riding your bike, drawing, talking with friends and parents, helping people? In our opinion, it is better to do everything in the real world rather than try to than simulate the world by playing games, watching movies etc. Peter Drucker once made a very valid point when he said that, “The computer is a moron.” But, as we see it, surely it depends on who's using the computer and what they're using it for.

Of course, we should also speak about the internet. Do you think that it is a safe area? Can you imagine how many strange people there are waiting and trying to chat with your child? Have you ever thought how many obscene videos and pictures there are on the internet, accessible to everyone? And lots of dangerous or frightening articles, for example with instruction on how to make a bomb or how to kill yourself. In addition to that there are other risks such as websites and links where hackers are just waiting for an innocent, naive person to click on a particular page and they will have opportunity to steal personal data ot transfer his internet connection to a very expensive, premmium-rate connection? You need to think about all of this before you go online or allow your children to surf the web.

Let’s now have a look how computers can help. Firstly computers help you to study and continually improve your knowledge of a subject. On the internet you can find lots of information about various topics which you can use for your schoolwork (like homework, reports, projects etc). At this point, the words of Pablo Picasso spring to mind: “Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.”

If you want to find a weather forecast, currency rate, and for example news about the world of fashion, turn on your PC, make connection to the internet and search everything you want. As for our own experience, we use computers in our English lessons. Let's face it, without computers even this Yomag article wouldn't have been written or sent to the editors or published online.

Nowadays every company needs computers for book-keeping, arranging orders, and we don’t know what else. There are so many examples to choose from. You can make an objection and say that what we've mentioned above can all be done without computers, but isn’t it much easier and faster by computer? And when it comes to things like airplanes and equipment for hospitals, computers can make modern life a lot safer than the traditional human methods.

In conclusion we can say that computers are important part of our life, I think that most people can’t imagine their life without them and I agree. It is just fact, that todays society is dependent on these machines and it won’t be different. But what is target of importance? To be careful, to not trust every person, every internet page, every mail, to be realist. Nobody will give you anything for free ...