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On Sun, Jan 08, 2006 at 12:08:21PM +0000, Rob Beard wrote:
> Ben Goodger wrote:
>
> > people on this list who have installed Linux for older friends
> >
> > and they have no problem using it, (can anyone give feedback
> > on this)
> >
> >
> > As a fifteen-year-old with an apparent IQ of 150-odd, I consider
> > myself more intelligent and mature than most of my peers (who are
> > nearly all older than me), large proportions of whom are
> > extraordinarily chav-like.
>
> Reminds me of what I was like when I was your age. Okay, I don't
> think I had the high IQ, but I found most of the people in my class
> were fairly immature and wanted to mess around. I was just happy
> spending my time in the computer rooms learning more about programming
> & PCs.
>
Ask someone how much they rely on their computers, and then ask them why
they should not be prepared to spend 5% (1%) of their time spent using
computers to learn enough to secure themselves, make it work better. The
answer always come back "why"
I suppose a similar situation is with cars: if it goes wrong, call the
AA / RAC; take it to a garage and get it fixed.
Mind you that is how the Japanese car makers suceeded: they made cheap
cars, then they made cheap cars that did not break; and then they made
good looking cars that did not break. Now they are repeating the cycle
with cheap to run good looking cars that do not break (hybrid fuel
efficient engines). None of the steps were flashy, but people decided to
buy them. Leyland has gone, Chrysler has gone, Ford and General Motors
do not look in particularly brilliant shape. Toyota is doing great.
> > Their behaviour is closely documentable by me and so I can make the
> > following observations:
> >
> > - As a sixteen-year-old cannot annoy people with nudges, shared
> > backgrounds, weemees, webcams, audio, file transfer, integrated crappy
> > games and such, they will not consider using gaim, despite its advantages.
> > - A fifteen-year-old does not see the point in switching to Firefox,
> > because "tabbed browsing is useless". Then again, perhaps this point
> > is redundant.. they think that bein ard will protect their computers
> > against IE.
> > - A fifteen-year-old says that Linux is "crap", after booting up a raw
> > livecd of Ubuntu for ten minutes. He refused to elaborate much on
> > this, but I think that his largest complaint was that it didn't look
> > enough like Windows.
> >
> > This leads me to believe that the average teenager (like the boy
> > previously mentioned) are incredibly superficial creatures.
>
> I know what you mean. I provided a copy of OpenOffice (1.1.4 I think)
> to my ex childminder. Her daughter who is 13 moaned that it is too
> different to MS Office!
>
> I promptly told her daughter that if she wanted Office, her mum would
> have to fork out £100 or so for a student licence.
>
> >
> > A lady friend of mine, who runs a language tuition business, was
> > advised that she should remove AVG from her computer and, when she
> > next had £50 or so to spare, buy a copy of Norton Internet Security. I
> > offered to install Linux instead and save her the fifty pounds. Four
> > days later, I recieved a telephone call saying that her computer was
> > behaving strangely, with time issues. She seemed to have got it into
> > her head that Linux had caused the problem. As it turned out, it was a
> > CMOS battery (she's one of these eco-slaves who turns their PC off at
> > the wall, without realising that it needs juice to keep the time
> > running) problem; I replaced the battery and it works now, but she
> > will not touch Linux.
> >
> I've had that not just with Linux, but when working on PCs for friends.
> I fix the computer and as soon as something goes wrong (usually user
> error - or even worse, relatives of my friends who don't have a clue
> about computers but think they know everything go and screw it up) I get
> the blame.
>
> > Oh, and I have convinced my school's librarian to allow us to
> > distribute Ubuntu CDs from her desk. She hasn't quite got the
> > principle ("ooh, free enterprise! yes, carry on..") but we're getting
> > there.
> >
> Thats good. I was going to say, the school could charge say 50p to the
> students to cover the distribution costs :-) although from what I
> remember of school kids, they don't like paying for anything unless they
> really need it.
>
People only value things when they have to pay (time, money) for them
> Rob
>
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