Slashdot Mirror
Please Don't Ask Me About Windows On Christmas
Like many Slashdot users I spend a wee bit of my otherwise leisure
time doing gratis tech support for people I may not even know. I usually don't
mind too much but last Christmas I got more than one call from distant
relatives that, along with wanting to spread holiday cheer, had me weigh in on
whatever might be wrong with their new gadget. I was pleased as punch to see this
article in the NYT (F.R.Y.Y.Y) about
where I might be able to send the less techo hip. If you do *Windows* tech
support for grandma after hours this article might also come in handy." Here are a couple of previous articles about the sorry state of conventional support options -- perhaps articles like this will spark some entrepreneurial ideas, too.
Typically, those things include cables and batteries, along with such obscurities as RF modulators, a little-known requirement for hooking a new DVD player to an old television set.
Who the hell has a television this old (I haven't seen one without RCA input in a decade) and a DVD player? Huh? Huh? Please, tell me.
More to the point of the headline (if not the article. Yet another shitty summary of an article. According to standardized test scores, I wasn't as good at picking out the main topic. Clearly, I was leaps and bounds above CT and the rest of the gang.): Good God, will someone please port Quicken to Linux so that I can force my mother to switch? Barring that, does anyone have a copy of Win2K that I can put on her machine and not give her the admin password for?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Upgraded to Linux?
Sorry, I thought by upgrade you meant "more functionality" or "easier to use"...
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Actually I'd say that's really not slashdot material.
I live in a giant bucket.
The funny thing is that I have helped many complete strangers with Linux.
Windows, on the other hand, is frustrating to work with because it's crap.
Windows is a crappy operating system. It should have been decrappified before it shipped. But Microsoft didn't do their job. So now I'm doing stuck with decrappifying Windows for them.
Except I'm not getting paid. And also by working with Microsoft I'm competing against my own company who competes with Microsoft.
It makes me a little bitter because right now every company that works with computers but isn't named Microsoft is sufferring. But Microsoft isn't sufferring... No No. Microsoft is able to make 85% profit.
And why is Microsoft so profitable? Because all the difficult decrappifying work is done for free after the systems have been shipped, that's why.