Page 5 - Florida Sentinel 1-8-19

Editorial/Column
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Computers Were Supposed To Make Our Lives Better
aybe you are not old
enough to remember the days when we used the typewriter for just about everything. The Smith- Corona was a very popular manufacture and if you watched TV shows like Mad Men, the typewriter is in full effect. The typewriter was limited and saw a slow death when the first IBM PC came
to life.
A Smith-Corona type-
writer on eBay can set you back over three hundred dol- lars as certain models are now considered antiques. The average consumer be- came hungry for a better ma- chine to conduct word processing, drawing graphics and to play basic card games. The PC was supposed to make our lives easier by sending emails half way around the world, processing more data at a rapid rate and made editing documents a synch.
Instead, we seem to be working harder and spend- ing more time on our com- puters, tablets and mobile phones than we ever did be- fore. Paralegals, business people, graphic artists all seem to spend a substantial amount of time on their computers every day. In some cases, hard working professionals even take their work home to edit the final
draft of a document before it is accepted by the boss.
We spend countless hours on the week-ends screaming at our laptops and tablets as if they really can hear our frustration and feel hours of mental painful.
Realistically, a computer or tablet is a modern-day ve- hicle for endless hours of drama. Many world renown computer scientists worry that we spend too much time with electronics instead of personal time with our chil- dren and actual friends.
After the dot.com inter- net debacle in the 80s, the sales of the desktop comput- ers continue to increase each year. Hungry consumers, no longer wanted to surf the web just to buy clothes or electronics. Web program- mers started to realize the importance of communica- tion and Facebook brought us the benefits of social media right to our door step. Aunts, uncles, long lost best friends were now able to find each other and relive distant memories through instant twenty-four-hour communi- cation.
As good as social media has been, it also gave birth to the worst of the internet. Cy- bercrime took over when perverted older men saw an opportunity to meet and greet innocent underage
children who were elated to talk to an older more dubi- ous adult.
Safe space was one of those social media dangers where sex offenders rou- tinely browsed the web look- ing for potential victims. It didn’t take long for law en- forcement to step in and started to monitor sex of- fender’s activities. Hackers, too, came up with clever ways to steal credit card numbers by forcing us to click on a drive by sites or in- visible JavaScript banners loaded with malware.
Web surfers found them- selves reformatting their computers repeatedly be- cause of an infected operat- ing system caused by one of a million strains of nasty de- structive viruses. We spent more time trying to keep our computers safe from the in- ternet rather than enjoying the benefits of the computer itself.
Many owners of the Apple box or Linux based PC’s may not agree, but there was a time when very few people could afford an apple computer. A MAC even now can set you back over $2,000. As technology con- tinues to develop each year, the workloads it is designed for seem to also increase making it harder for us to enjoy the internet.
(Eric Hall holds a Mas- ter’s Degree from the Univer- sity of South Florida in Instructional Technology and Cybersecurity Digital Forensics. He has been a computer technician for over twenty years. He is formerly the manger and owner of Comptech PC, Inc., in Fort Pierce, Florida. Follow him on Facebook.)
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C. Blythe Andrews 1901-1977 (1945)
C. Blythe Andrews, Jr. 1930-2010 (1977)
2019? Year Of The Woman
ot since the 19th century presence of American
women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony has the light of female leadership shown as brightly as it currently is on D.C.’s Capitol Hill. Indeed, this New Year, 2019, promises a political package that could easily outdistance any prognostication as to what would happen if women took a majority role in Amer- ican government.
Start with Nancy Pelosi. Democratic Speaker for the House of Representatives, hard-bitten, hard-charging, capable as any admiral on a politically stormy sea, Pelosi leads a charge of women who include a bumper battalion of African Americans – including our na- tion’s first Somali-American-Muslim House represen- tative – and includes two Native Americans and for the first time, a LGBTQ representative.
Most suffragettes of the past would be proud. Names like Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman would live again as women roll up their sleeves much like World War II’s Rosie-the-Riveter and prepare to remake America more like the image of the Statue of Liberty.
But a question looms amidst the female hoopla. The ghost of Hillary Clinton as America’s first female pres- ident refuses to be silenced, asking why women didn’t rise up during her candidacy and usher in history. The fear remains, if women could not write their signature collectively then, why now? The answer seems to be part of the word “diversity,” not only sexual, but cul- tural, intellectual as well as political. But such possibil- ity for leadership – even for a second female presidential candidate – will be hard-pressed in up- coming months.
So, why should we know that 2019 is the Year of the Woman? Why don’t we look in our own backyard, and see how women are faring in Tampa-Hillsborough County.
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TUESDAY, JANUARY 8, 2019 FLORIDA SENTINEL BULLETIN PUBLISHED EVERY TUESDAY AND FRIDAY PAGE 5