Open Letter to a Digital World

jg21 writes "Exasperated after spending 5 hours removing spyware and trojans from his wife's Windows PC, sysadmin Chris Spencer has written an impassioned Open Letter to a Digital World. In the letter he reviews the 'elephants in the closet' - i.e. unfixed bugs and glaring security vulnerabilities - that Microsoft in his view hopes ordinary users will ignore, including some discussed in previous Slashdot stories."

Comments

Re:I don't get it.

[ninewands]

I agree with the parent poster.

My wife Was using Win98 and IE6.1 SP whatever up until six months ago. Her IE installation got so corrupted with spyware that it wouldn't even launch, so I installed Firefox and Thunderbird with my favorite extensions (AdBlock, TTLO, User Agent Switcher, etc.) and it took her all of 3 days to fall in love with it.

I then picked up a cut-price generic Athlon box, that was some 12 times as fast as her old machine at Fry's for about $200.00, installed Fedora Core 2 on it and gave it to her. To make her feel like she had a safety belt, I also got her "Linux for Non-Geeks" which she has barely opened. Her first question when the box booted up after the install was "where's Firefox?"

She now snipes at Windows almost as much as the most zealous penguinista at your local Junior High. She will occasionally run into content on the 'net that won't load, but when she asks me about it, it's usually something designed to exploit Windows' poor security model (like ActiveX controls and browser hijacks).

She's happy with her newer, faster machine and is learning to love the penguin, but I would NEVER have done it if she wasn't: 1) willing to learn, and 2) pre-conditioned by a few months' favorable experience with Firefox and Thunderbird.

Re:I don't get it.

[the_rev_matt]

Hear hear! I've had similar experiences with friends and family in the past. During the .com days I got calls all the time "can you come undo the stupid shit I did to my computer?" One of the biggest selling points of linux, to me, is that for four years I've not had to fix a single computer for software related issues. None of my computers has had any problems I didn't create myself (like accidentally deleting the home tree). The calls started tapering off real fast when I started saying "I don't use Windows, so I'm not up to date on what to do to fix it."

The sad part was realizing how many people were friends solely because I could fix their computers. Once I stopped being their free 24/7 tech support line they disappeared.