In this case, a person (such as yourself) operated a computer without even knowing it! Can an absolute newbie sit down at a computer without knowing how to use one? Assuming that a computer is set up to operate on touch command - the answer is again, yes! Touch command software allows users to literally touch objects on a monitor and tell the computer what to do with a finger. The email messages are often disguised as important messages from well-known online establishments, and they often try to scare their readers into clicking links with threats of closing an account of some sort. Sometimes the links are harmless and attempt to con the reader into volunteering personal information (credit card number), but other times the links attempt to download harmful software onto a computer. If you want to use your computer for cruising the web, sending email, or performing simple word-processing or spreadsheet tasks, a computer with the basic components that we just described should suffice. If you want to use a computer to help with a career in multimedia however, you're going to need to accessorize your system with a scanner, printer, digital camera, tablet, or digicam for example. Fortunately, there's an alternative to commercial software and although it isn't new, it's one of the most under-exploited opportunities in the computer industry. We're talking about shareware - software that you can try before buying. Shareware has a long history and was rather popular in the days where BBS (bulletin board systems) reigned the online industry. sit extension). Double-clicking one of these kinds of files will open up a window that displays the contents of the archive. In most cases, you can double click a file inside this window to use it, or you can select it and drag the file to a folder to view later. Depending on how you elected to install Winzip or StuffIt, you may be able to right-click a . Or if a program were to calculate a date "x" days from now, the variable "x" would be an unknown piece of data until we tell the program what "x" is. In programming, it's sometimes required to work with unknown pieces of data. That's when conditions come in handy. Conditions allow a program to perform an action based on the outcome of a previous command.3 Using this type of instruction, we could instruct a program to do one thing if the "x" variable in our latter example turned out to be 7 days, and then do different thing if the variable turned out to be 3 days.