Only 39% Curse At Their Computers? 286
netbuzz writes "That's what we are to believe based upon a survey of 14,284 individuals conducted by security vendor Avira. That survey found that 39 percent of respondents 'cursed or yelled at the computer out loud.' And no computer is needed to calculate the implication: 61% of those participating in the poll believe themselves to have never once uttered a profanity or raised their voice in the direction of a malfunctioning machine. Are the majority of us genuinely possessed of such remarkable self-control? Or might some of these self-reported stoics be exercising a bit of selective memory?"
Re:Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
I curse at Linux. All. The. Time. Just becasue it is a somewhat more stable and secure OS does make it completely stable and happy. Nor does it prevent hardware problems from manifesting in ways that make you convinced something is screwed up the OS (until you dig deeper). For that matter it doesn't prevent me from making typos or misremembering commands or options that cause the computer to something other than what I intended. Indeed, thanks to the fact that I work far more in Linux than Windows, I probably curse it far more as well.
I've changed over the years myself (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was younger, I used to swear and curse and destroy keyboards when I faced something frustrating. Not so much when I coded, because if something goes wrong with your code, more often than not it's your fault and you can correct it. No, the real frustration comes when trying to work with Windows, or some other piece of software with idiosyncrasies that drive you up the wall.
Nowaways, I don't swear or bang keyboards anymore. Instead, I just sit in front of the screen, and I let this feeling that I'm probably gonna be there, wasting my life away for hours once more, sink in my stomach.
I mean, reinstalling Windows or restoring your backups because the stupid hard drive crashed, or configuring a stubborn driver, or trying to share a stupid printer from Win 7 to XP, ... it's just like an itch you can't scratch isn't it? You just gotta do it and you know it's gonna take fucking longer than it should. What's the point of becoming angry on top of that hey...
In short, now that I'm older, the anger has turned into quiet desperation.
Re:Self-Control (Score:4, Interesting)
As Mark Twain pointed out in his autobiography, everybody swears, it's just a matter of whether they use the conventional curse words or not. An old lady saying "oh dear" in a particular way is definitely swearing, it's just covered up with a different choice of words.