Computer Driving Licences - let's make the compulsory.

[morningside.livejournal.com]

Okay, admittedly I'm living in fantasy land here, but sometimes I just wish there was a compulsory computing test that people had to pass before being allowed to use a PC unaccompanied. There's already a qualification called the 'European Computer Driving Licence', so why not make it that potential PC users have to pass that? It wouldn't make us unnecessary - we'd still be needed to fix genuine computer problems, just ones that weren't the result of stupidity. How so? Because not only users have to pass a test - consisting of various basic but common sense questions, and a practical test too - they could be given penalty points. User caught putting games on the PC? Penalty points. Caught distributing a virus? Penalty points. Rack up enough points, and the user could be banned from using a PC, and being forced to go back to pen and paper. Ah well, I can always dream.

Comments

[nix.livejournal.com]

you're not the only one thinking about this.

there is

[irishmasms.livejournal.com]

if you GTFG, or look back in the community I posted about it some time ago

[reynardo.livejournal.com]

Oh crumbs - which college?
She-who-used-to-be-sole-tech-support-at-a-NSW-TAFE-(*coughBlueMts*)-college.

[reynardo.livejournal.com]

Dammit, what drugs are you on and how can I get some? It sounds like they wear off in the end, but even so, just for a few short hours of dreamy bliss...

[trdsf.livejournal.com]

I have long been of the opinion that a brief test on basic PC skills, or even a simple IQ test, should come up right after the BIOS boot screen... fail it, and you'll have to come back later and try again, say, after you've actually read the freakin' manual. And some people just shouldn't be allowed to operate anything with more moving parts than a screwdriver.

Application Bias

[(Anonymous)]

Being a secondary student myself (Age: 13!!), at my school we have a 'Computer Drivers License' course. Problem is:

1. I'm too smart for any tech unit at my school. I bet $5 AUD that if I were to ask a tech teacher what BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) is, and what it does, they wouldn't know. They also wouldn't know how to program in a language that isn't as frucking stupid/simple/easy as Visual Basic.


2. All the courses are biased anyway:
   
   
   
   • Word processing: M$ Word. I use OpenOffice, you clod!
   
   
   • Graphics Manipulation: PaintShop Pro. I use the GIMP.
   
   
   • Email: MS Outlook. I use Mozilla Mail and KMail. I'm not dumb enough to send in HTML either, like what they teach.
   
   
   • Web page design: MS FrontPage Express. And where the teacher codes by hand, it is with obsolete and nonstandard tags. F'ing hell, I actually write a browser and some day I'm going to walk over to the web design teacher and wack them on the head. Dealing with pages not written to W3C standards is annoying at times.
   
   
   • Programming: Visual Basic all the way :( . I program in Java. (You'll find it hard to believe I am the lead developer on Jazilla (http://jazilla.sourceforge.net)).

Oh, they make us pay for all of the software mentioned above (besides Visual Basic) no matter if we use it or not.

I do agree with your points system, though. Some people are idiots. Yesterday, a fellow student *still* had the Slammer virus. 100kb/sec over 802.11b (instead of the usual 2kb/sec of DHCP requests to broadcast) and the school admin seeing his firewall load meter go through the roof doesn't go unnoticed. All systems were patched against Slammer a year ago, and it appears one user didn't do it... (actually, pratically every system is full of 27+ unpatched holes. School admin is going to set up a updates server and force updates)

- mcbridematt (http://mcbridematt.dhs.org).