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dkaddict
June 10th, 2007, 11:37 AM
I may have mentioned this elsewhere when replying to other posts. I want to get an idea of what others feel about stuff like this.

A friend of mine only uses the net to email his friends every now and then. He had AO(hel)L broadband and decided to ditch it almost a year ago because of his aforementioned up-time on the web. Now he uses dial-up. In a cruel twist of his purse strings, however, making the switch back to dial-up wasn't so thrifty. He runs XP. XP gets virused pretty easily. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised at the number of comps that get infected during the time it takes me to write this post. Now, as it stands, my friend has to spend more money on virus protection than he does using the net for his own needs. His biggest comp bill comes in the form of paying the AV company for keeping his AV updated and paying for the call to download said updates. Is that absolutely stupid or am I missing something here?

Ok, I have told him about Linux but he really doesn't need the hassle of installing another OS. No, I will rephrase that. He doesn't know how to install an alternative OS. He wants to keep XP because he doesn't want to have to learn how to use all of the alternative apps such as Open Office. Fair play I say. What really confuses me, however, is the fact that I have offered to help him install and configure an Open Source AV app, telling him he will lose the update charge and be left with the call charge for downloading the updates and he has flatly said no. He reckons that free software must be vulnerable and exponentially inferior to proprietary software. Is that crazy or is it me who is barking?

If you ask me, MS Win has the dice and will keep them for a while yet. The way that they have cornered the OS software market is not to be scoffed at. By making so much of 95, 98, ME, 2000, and XP (I can't comment on VISTA because I haven't tried it and very much doubt if I will) inaccessible to your every day user, so a general consent among those low level end users has arisen which is centred around the fear of doing anything other than double clicking on icons on the Win desktop. And even doing that instills fear into the minds of some users. The solution that Microsoft presents before these fearful people who have made MS so wealthy and powerful by purchasing it s products, is for them to spend more money on software that one shouldn't need if one has just spent over £100 on *******. The spiral perpetuates downward.

My questions are, will this situation ever change?
Does Open Source software stand a chance of reaching the people who would benefit most from its multitudinous virtues?

Opinions will be valued.

PEACE

dk

Swab
June 10th, 2007, 11:50 AM
I may have mentioned this elsewhere when replying to other posts. I want to get an idea of what others feel about stuff like this.

A friend of mine only uses the net to email his friends every now and then. He had AO(hel)L broadband and decided to ditch it almost a year ago because of his aforementioned up-time on the web. Now he uses dial-up. In a cruel twist of his purse strings, however, making the switch back to dial-up wasn't so thrifty. He runs XP. XP gets virused pretty easily. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised at the number of comps that get infected during the time it takes me to write this post. Now, as it stands, my friend has to spend more money on virus protection than he does using the net for his own needs. His biggest comp bill comes in the form of paying the AV company for keeping his AV updated and paying for the call to download said updates. Is that absolutely stupid or am I missing something here?

Ok, I have told him about Linux but he really doesn't need the hassle of installing another OS. No, I will rephrase that. He doesn't know how to install an alternative OS. He wants to keep XP because he doesn't want to have to learn how to use all of the alternative apps such as Open Office. Fair play I say. What really confuses me, however, is the fact that I have offered to help him install and configure an Open Source AV app, telling him he will lose the update charge and be left with the call charge for downloading the updates and he has flatly said no. He reckons that free software must be vulnerable and exponentially inferior to proprietary software. Is that crazy or is it me who is barking?

If you ask me, MS Win has the dice and will keep them for a while yet. The way that they have cornered the OS software market is not to be scoffed at. By making so much of 95, 98, ME, 2000, and XP (I can't comment on VISTA because I haven't tried it and very much doubt if I will) inaccessible to your every day user, so a general consent among those low level end users has arisen which is centred around the fear of doing anything other than double clicking on icons on the Win desktop. And even doing that instills fear into the minds of some users. The solution that Microsoft presents before these fearful people who have made MS so wealthy and powerful by purchasing it s products, is for them to spend more money on software that one shouldn't need if one has just spent over £100 on *******. The spiral perpetuates downward.

My questions are, will this situation ever change?
Does Open Source software stand a chance of reaching the people who would benefit most from its multitudinous virtues?

Opinions will be valued.

PEACE

dk

If your friend doesn't want to hear the truth there isn't much you can do. Some people will never move until everyone else does.

jgrabham
June 10th, 2007, 11:52 AM
1)Get AVG
2)Thats his problem, he just wants to be with the huddled masses doing what hes told for the rest of his life!

MonkeyBoy
June 10th, 2007, 12:16 PM
It seems to be a common attitude.

A while ago a woman in my office told me that her husband's work occasionally sent him Excel spreadsheets, Word docs, etc. and he didn't have MS Office to open them. She said they had looked in the local pc world and were stunned by the prices of MS Office. She asked my advice so naturally I gave her a link to OpenOffice.

I asked a week later how things were going and apparently her husband had gone to OpenOffice's site and had a look but eventually didn't trust free software to be legitimate so spent £150 or so on MS Office. D'oh!

jgrabham
June 10th, 2007, 12:32 PM
It seems to be a common attitude.

A while ago a woman in my office told me that her husband's work occasionally sent him Excel spreadsheets, Word docs, etc. and he didn't have MS Office to open them. She said they had looked in the local pc world and were stunned by the prices of MS Office. She asked my advice so naturally I gave her a link to OpenOffice.

I asked a week later how things were going and apparently her husband had gone to OpenOffice's site and had a look but eventually didn't trust free software to be legitimate so spent £150 or so on MS Office. D'oh!

Couldnt she have borrowed an ms office disk from someone- I don't know anyone who goes out and buys office, they get it with their computer, and if not they borrow a disk that someone got with their computer :]

Swab
June 10th, 2007, 12:33 PM
Couldnt she have borrowed an ms office disk from someone- I don't know anyone who goes out and buys office, they get it with their computer, and if not they borrow a disk that someone got with their computer :]

It sounds like she was fishing for a pirated copy anyway.

davidwfox
June 10th, 2007, 01:39 PM
dk

To some degree I can empathise with your friend. But not with his refusal to accept the worth of open source software, or free software. There is excellent free AV software out there - AVG, Avira, Avast - to name just three, and of course a host of other brilliant software.

The struggle of Linux against MS though is something else. MS have done a superb snow job conning a huge majority of computer users into using an inferior OS, but it does have a lot of plusses for the average, non-technical Joe. There is a basic tenet in conflict - divide and conquer. MS are close-knit, powerful, and you can see from their regular acquisitions how they swallow up any company that threatens their solidarity. Linux on the other hand is as fragmented as you could ever want it to be, and it gets even more fragmented as time goes by. They must sit back at Redmond and marvel at the number seagulls fighting for the handful of crumbs that Sir William of Gates missed. Where does a ******* user go to get a meaningful and understandable comparison of the ever-growing proliferation of Linux flavours, in order to get the courage and confidence to take the leap from his comfort zone?

I have 20+ years of computing experience, almost all of it with MS. I am not afraid of computers. For years I wanted to make the shift to Linux but:
a) Could not get enough confidence in any one particular distro;
b) Could never come to terms with the persistently geeky language used on the vast majority of forums and "help" areas. I will admit that, thankfully, that's improving, but it still has a long way to go.

A few weeks ago I installed the latest, well-publicized release from one of the semi-commercial majors. The new OS wouldn't recognize my USB mouse. I contacted their help website and the advice I got? Use another distro! Fortunately, along with that gem of help came a really sensible suggestion - try Ubuntu - and here I now am.

Getting to this stage of my Linux / Ubuntu experience has not been easy and still has several unresolved problems, but I'm determined to work my way through them. Two examples. The Java runtime environment, and Flash Player, are two commonly required add-ons for web surfers. In ******* they are generally pretty effortless to download and install, Flash Player (in my experience) always being a fully automatic process. Not so with Linux. The first website I found that needed Flash Player helped me to download it, then gave the instructions on how to install it - Open a Terminal window and navigate to the directory where Flash Player deposited itself, then ..... Huh!! I'm quite sure everyone reading this posting knows precisely how to do that, but we're talking here about 68 year old Mrs Smith who has just bought a computer with Linux pre-loaded and hasn't the vaguest notion what this pop-up is on about! Come on guys, this does NOT encourage the masses to migrate. Luckily I came across another site, also requiring Flash Player, but this one was a little better organised and it not only helped with the download but it also took care of the installation - a la *******. Java was (and still is) something else. What a performance to (try to) install that one! After a complicated sequence of Terminal entries I ended up getting nowhere because of a root password issue. With ******* I download a JRE file, chose Run, and it installs itself. I have installed JRE many times over the years, always without problems.

These are the sorts of issues that Linux must resolve if the masses are to be converted. I'll keep battling with these problems until they're resolved, but I'm not the average Joe. I like computing and and I like challenges. Mr Average wants to turn on his system and use his programmes, send his emails, surf the web, ..etc.. - not battle with the OS. Yes, I know the legacy system has more security holes than a Swiss cheese, needs anti-virus software, needs a firewall, has the blue screen of death as a regular guest, and all the other criticisms you can justifiably level at it, but it WORKS.

So how do we educate the masses? Consolidation is probably out. There are too many distros, many of them well entrenched and with a following of diehards. I think it's going to need one, good distro to lead the charge, and Canonical could very well be it. The tiny snapshot that I see of a typical community bodes extremely well for Ubuntu. People know the name. I've come across people who already have Ubuntu installed. My experience is that it loads fast, and of course it's stable. It has problems that have to be resolved; it is already very user-friendly and it must keep developing this. The free supply of disks is superb marketing; (if anyone from Canonical is reading this - one suggestion: resume your ploy from a couple of years back of automatically supplying extra disks. I'll confess I didn't hand out any of the extra ones on the first occasion because I was disappointed with the install (5.10) and I've still got most of the disks. But 7.04 is a great improvement and I've copied it 6 times already for friends).

And then dk, it will be up to you and me and others like us to pass on our experience and our enthusiasm to friends (open-minded ones!) and, as with so many products, word of mouth will put Linux / Ubuntu at it's true position in the IT world. As the popularity grows, then application developers will continue to write Linux versions, so the popularity will then grow further - the snowball effect.

Sorry to hog so much space.
David Fox

jgrabham
June 10th, 2007, 01:42 PM
Linux on the other hand is as fragmented as you could ever want it to be, and it gets even more fragmented as time goes by.


So we are on NTFS then??

Feba
June 10th, 2007, 02:08 PM
He reckons that free software must be vulnerable and exponentially inferior to proprietary software.

A common misconception, usually caused by actufucinbeleivzacommercialitis. Some people have just been so retarded by the fact that they can't understand that software is data, not plastic. It's free to build and distribute, the only cost is creating it, which a lot of people don't realize people will do for themselves.

This ties in to the whole "Open-source means hackers can see all the ways to infect you!!" thing too. People just don't realize how it works. I say let them waste their money... If I can have the same luxuries in life as someone who's spending twice as much, that's just stretching my paycheck further. If people aren't under the delusion that they need that much money, they won't get paid that much money.

smoker
June 10th, 2007, 02:08 PM
I have 20+ years of computing experience, almost all of it with MS. I am not afraid of computers. For years I wanted to make the shift to Linux but:
a) Could not get enough confidence in any one particular distro;
b) Could never come to terms with the persistently geeky language used on the vast majority of forums and "help" areas. I will admit that, thankfully, that's improving, but it still has a long way to go...

excellent view of how a great deal of new users struggle, glad you found ubuntu and hope you're here for the long haul:D

dkaddict,

some people are just sheep, they will never try new things, or venture out of their self-made pen, so if they want to waste a load of hard-earned rather than try something that is better, and is free, then what can you do? maybe in a few years they will come round, or maybe they never will...

davidwfox
June 10th, 2007, 02:18 PM
Sorry - I didn't mean that the disk is fragmented, I mean that the Linux world is fragmented. A potential convert from MS looks at "Linux" and sees a bewildering number of distros, all called Linux. MS doesn't need to divide Linux in order to conquer it, the Linux world has done it for them. It's an aspect that has to be overcome if Linux is to gain appeal to a greater number of MS users. In order to make the change there has to be a viable alternative to what a ******* user knows and tolerates, and selecting and understanding that alternative has to be clear. At the moment, it's a muddy playing field. There's what - 50 or so alternative "Linux"s? 6 - 10 majors and a host of smaller systems, all doing their own thing. That's what I meant about it being fragmented.

use a name
June 10th, 2007, 02:20 PM
What really confuses me, however, is the fact that I have offered to help him install and configure an Open Source AV app, telling him he will lose the update charge and be left with the call charge for downloading the updates and he has flatly said no. He reckons that free software must be vulnerable and exponentially inferior to proprietary software. Is that crazy or is it me who is barking?
It seems as if people think that oss, and especially open source firewalls and AV, are vulnerable because the code is available to hackers etc. Indeed, any sub-par defense system would be more vulnerable, but just because it is open source, any hack enthousiast who breaks it for fun (on his own system) can immediately patch it and get credit for it. Not much possiblilty for some vulnerability that is clear from the source code to last long. (Not that it will be released with obvious vulnerabilities, but just to show how testing goes further than with closed source software.)

dkaddict
June 10th, 2007, 02:26 PM
I couldn't have dreamt of a better response. Thanks.

My experience of reading the many and varied discussions which focus on similar questions as the ones I posited in my first post is telling me that the name of the game is user friendliness. IMHO Ubuntu is as user friendly as *******. Given enough exposure to a distro that is as complete as Ubuntu, I am sure, would convert a significant amount of the Win prisoners into staying with Linux. I too have had to get around a few problems with regards to hardware compatibility during my journey with Linux. I have sorted them out though, and I reckon that I would have had a really hard time trying to do so if they had occured in *******. I would suggest that the sheer amount of support in the Open Source/Ubuntu community gives rise to a parity between MS Win and Ubuntu user friendliness.

When I used to rely on XP for my sojourns into Cyber Space, I used AVG most of the time. Maybe I am a bit crazy, but I have always thought that free software would be better than proprietary software. It just seems to make sense because the people who code the apps do so for themselves so why would they make them to do anything other than what they want them to do; ie stave off viruses?

peace

dk

Feba
June 10th, 2007, 03:18 PM
That's what I meant about it being fragmented.This is just something windows users need to learn to deal with. We have cultural differences. MS cannot make everyone happy, so they try to appeal to the most common type of user. Linux can be infinitely changed, so there's something for everyone.

Linux is about the computer doing what you want it to do, not the other way around.

derjames
June 10th, 2007, 03:34 PM
for windows xp SP2/vista (1) install AVG or Avast which are free to use, (2) activate the windows firewall, (3) install ccleaner and (4) install spyboy... all of them are free to use... but more important watch out where you navigate on the web and what files are you opening...
cheers

ryanVickers
June 10th, 2007, 03:42 PM
I would hack in by going to terminl and typing "hackin" and then ip adress (it's windows, why shouildn't it work! :)) and then replace xp with ubuntu, change a few theme's he'll never know the difference! Except it might actually work! :p :lolflag:

jgrabham
June 10th, 2007, 04:28 PM
Sorry - I didn't mean that the disk is fragmented, I mean that the Linux world is fragmented. A potential convert from MS looks at "Linux" and sees a bewildering number of distros, all called Linux. MS doesn't need to divide Linux in order to conquer it, the Linux world has done it for them. It's an aspect that has to be overcome if Linux is to gain appeal to a greater number of MS users. In order to make the change there has to be a viable alternative to what a ******* user knows and tolerates, and selecting and understanding that alternative has to be clear. At the moment, it's a muddy playing field. There's what - 50 or so alternative "Linux"s? 6 - 10 majors and a host of smaller systems, all doing their own thing. That's what I meant about it being fragmented.

I know, i was a joke, about NTFS getting Defragmented a lot!