Fighting FUD with Humor

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday October 26, 2005 @10:52AM from the laughter-the-best-medicine dept.

Technophiliac writes to tell us MadPenguin in running a review of "Fighting FUD With Humor" Marcel Gagné's 2nd edition of "Moving to Linux". From the article: "The biggest obstacle is fear. Modern Linux distributions are easy to install and easy to use. Unfortunately, we are constantly presented with messages telling us that it's too hard and that the average person couldn't possibly grasp the complexity. That's rubbish. People aren't stupid and people who use computers learn new things all the time."

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It's true by Prof.+Pi · 2005-10-26 11:07 · Score: 5, Interesting

I knew someone who hand-coded HTML to make web pages around 1997, before HTML-authoring tools were common. And these were pages with graphics and menus. But she was absolutely convinced that she should use Microsoft products because you'd have to be "a computer genius" to use anything else. I couldn't convince her that writing a file in LaTeX was structurally very similar to hand-editing HTML. She had a complete psychological block, and would even get mad at me for daring to use anything else.