thinkMoult » maid http://thinkmoult.com Seriously who ever reads this description. Sun, 08 Apr 2012 03:22:49 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Mass-amateurisation of the Internet http://thinkmoult.com/2009/07/28/mass-amateurisation-of-the-internet/ http://thinkmoult.com/2009/07/28/mass-amateurisation-of-the-internet/#comments Tue, 28 Jul 2009 02:59:35 +0000 Dion Moult http://thinkmoult.com/?p=809 I cannot pretend it isn’t a commonly known fact that the Internet (and technology in general) has led to the mass-amateurisation of many professions – journalism has become blogging, we see photography websites, animation portals due to the advent of Flash, writers, graphic and sound artists, and of course 10 year old programmers.

I recently arrived in Jakarta to visit my relatives. In Jakarta and most Asian countries it’s quite normal to have a maid in the house. They are treated much as part of the family and are normally full-time. The maid in my aunt’s house has a boy around my age and a baby girl who loves to play hide and seek with me – or maybe she’s too scared to come out all the time. The maid’s name is “L”, mainly because I feel it disrespectful to call her “the maid” in this post – she is a very pleasant person.

Anyway, I had some free time and so I opened up my laptop. Unable to get online just yet I decided to start up my local server and began coding a new feature into Eadrax. P, who is L’s son wandered into the room and peeked at my screen. I had just switched to a new tab in Firefox and was testing out some MySQL queries in PHPMyAdmin. Without a moments hesitation he said:

“Dion, itu SQL iya?”

Translated into English, this means:

“Dion, that’s SQL, yes?”

You have to understand that he has never owned his own computer (until very recently I was informed). He  is unfortunately not privileged to have high-end education, and only pops into the Cybercafe once in a while to “learn how to use the computer” for his university course – unrelated to computing. And of course, he’s 17.

Further probing found he had two blogs (here and here), knew some Windows command prompt commands, knew about SQL injection (uhhh – well…), knew about Linux and Ubuntu, and was quite familiar with the concept of ripping off HTML codes (or any client-side visible code really) to implement in his own fashion.

I’m sorry, but 99% of the people in my school don’t know about SQL injection. I would say 95% don’t know any command prompt commands of any sort (well, knowing `ping` or `ipconfig` doesn’t count), 80% don’t know how to rip and implement source code, 60% won’t know about Linux, let alone Ubuntu, and well – I guess only 50% don’t have a blog of some sort.

Talk to the average government school student and you would find those percentages skyrocket – except for the blog one maybe.

There is of course the chance that I have stumbled upon an irregularity but I do believe that this is a trend we are all underestimating.

Similar experiences, anyone?

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