I would imagine that what made, and continues to make computers
boring is concentrating on the equipment, rather than concentrating
on what you can do with it.
And that applies to cameras. Do you really think that if there were
only three camera manufacturers left, all photography would become
boring?
A little imagination required, I think, Mike.
rayk
Hmm...this sounds to me like it's coming from a knocker who just can't do it with computers (right back atcha, mate).
For the record, coming from someone who did have a career as a network engineer, it was not the equipment, the operating systems, or figuring out something creative to do with them that resulted in my disappointment with the industry -- it was the end-user. Whether the people were accountants, doctors, lawyers, photographers, housewives, graphic designers, etc. and all the way from the lowest level janitor to the highest level officer of the company, the majority of them were completely unknowledgeable about computers and their expectations of them were ridiculous.
Unfortunately, this did not stop them from insisting on using them as tools in their career field of choice. Just like photographers are expected to know their equipment before they use it for their profession, is it so much to ask someone to learn about their computer equipment before they use it for their profession?
This is hijacking the thread and soapboxing quite a bit, but that's one of the reason why it burns me up when I see some of the self-proclaimed "pros" on this forum reply to posts from amateur photographers with quipping or snipping retorts like, "Learn about your camera and then start taking pictures." These very same professional photographers are the type of people who would have me, a senior network engineer, stat-paged in the middle of the night because their computer was "running too slow". 99.9% of the time the problem was that the filled up their 20GB hard drive in their underequipped Apple computer (that they insisted on buying even though it was completely incompatible with our network) with 200 different shots of the exact same product because even though they have a digital camera they're still shooting with it like it was film (ie, not deleting the shots they're not going to use).
Meanwhile, that page took me away from the tedious task of reading the log from a "sniffer" trying to figure out why the entire accounting department is claiming the network is "dog-slow", only to later find out it's because some nit-wit junior accountant's secretary has a teenage son who has worked at BestBuy for a whopping two weeks, who decided in their infinite computer related wisdom to recommend the purchase of a network hublet for each accountants LAN connection, so that they can have five network connections in each office for group "brainstorming sessions" with notebook computers. Remove all the hublets and look at that -- the network is back up to speed, almost as if there's a science or at least a planning requirement to designing a proper network.
Oh, wait, look at that....I have voicemail from the VP of Marketing who declares that Microsoft Office sucks and his buddy "who works for a Fortune 500 company in California" says that they're all using Apple Newtons instead of PocketPCs, so he now wants to know why they can't use Newtons, too (even though they've been out of production for a decade). Meanwhile, I'm being accused of "holding back" their entire marketing team because Microsoft Outlook has some ridiculous "limitation" where it cannot sync 10,751,000 contacts with a PocketPC with 64mb of RAM.
It doesn't matter anyway because now I have to go home and patch things up with my high school aged son and daughter, because I just yelled at them when they called to tell me that they can't print their Biology report on our home printer for some reason. Yup, I get it at work, at home, and...
...oops! Bumped into the neighbor at the grocery store. What? Oh, yeah, your home computer isn't connecting to the internet ever since little Johnny downloaded all that pornography last week? Yeah. Oh, no -- not a problem at all. I just get paid $200/hour to do this for a living, but I'll just drop over to your house and fix the results of your son's porno-fetish on my own time (which I don't have) for absolutely free. By the way, if you ever get a brain tumor, just ask our neighbor the Neurosurgeon to pop it out of your head for free, too. Heck, he was probably just planning on playing golf that day anyway. Oh, and don't forget our other neighbor, Jayk, is a professional photographer. I'm sure he'll gladly take Christmas card photos of your entire extended family for free, too. I mean, be for real -- what does it take to point and click a frickin' camera, right?
It's the people. Not the equipment. Not the operating system. And trust me, in my career I've figured out plenty of clever things to do with a computer that just knock my socks off, but would bore the non-techies to absolute tears. That was the hobby part that I lost because every other part of the career was just one annoyance after another. And when the OP decides to make the big jump from amateur to pro, and has some bride's mother chewing on his ear during the entire bridal shoot, or some art director telling him that lettuce on that Ultimate Burger isn't properly lit to show it's fresh crispness, or senior VP of marketing for Bushwacker Ski Shop insists that pictures be taken of their new line of skiis only at the true North Pole instead of fake snow at a studio, he'll be think the exact same thing:
"Why the heck did I ruin this perfectly good hobby?"
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