Your teachers aren't geology or geography professors, I hope. The mentality that's driving up housing prices in the Bay Area is certainly not thinking of "long term" factors like earthquake stability.
Just like the Bay Area is made up of many micro-climates, the "stability" of the land varies tremendously over a small area. If by Silicon Valley you mean the greater San Jose area and up the Peninsula to, say, Redwood City, you have a bunch of re-claimed wetlands next to the bay, floodplains, and other drainages that will Not Be Good Places To Be if a major earthquake occurs. Not to mention that Silicon Valley is between two major faults--the San Andreas to the west and the Hayward (which is due for a major quake, according to some geologists) to the north-east.
The Loma Prieta earthquake of ten years ago had its hypocenter over 50 miles south of San Francisco, but liquefaction destroyed many structures in SF. Liquefaction occurs when moderately saturated ground is shaken, as in an earthquake, and loses cohesion. Next time you are at the beach pick up some moist sand and shake it vigorously. It'll soon have the consistency of jelly.
This was most striking in Santa Cruz, where I currently live. The downtown area, a floodplain, was destroyed, but the UC Santa Cruz campus had little damage, as it was on limestone bedrock.
It would take one hell of a mudslide to send a house in Boulder Creek (inland by at least five miles, through mountainous terrain) into the Pacific. The Santa Cruz mountains have a lot of mudslides due to good moisture orthographics (Boulder Creek averages over 60 inches of rain a year, while San Jose, 20 miles away, gets less than 15). 90% of all precipitation in California falls between November and April, and most of that comes in January and February.
It's somewhat amusing to watch essentially the same people every winter being interviewed by local reporters in front of their river-front homes that flooded (again). Sometimes the reporters use adjectives to describe them like "plucky" and "brave" for enduring this. I guess I'd be plucky and brave too if I repeatedly hit myself in the head with a mallet and never learned to stop....
Everyone's heard of the myth of the Eskimo's and their words for snow, and a lot of people both believe it and infuse it with some sort of larger sociological/linguistic significance, but it's bunk.
A rebuttal to the myth (there are many). There's no such language as "Eskimo," and, like the fish in the proverbial fish story, the number of snow words tends to grow with each retelling.
A lot of people have responded here with what they think a newbie does, or what somebody who is used to Windows or the Mac OS would do if they were forced to switch to Linux.
The problem with this is that these are all opinions, opinions that may or may not match what actually happens with non-technical newbie Linux users.
So, why doesn't somebody do some usability testing? Get 10 non-technical Windows users and 10 non-technical Mac users, sit them down in front of a Linux box, some with GNOME, some with KDE, and have them do some tasks (write a letter using a word processor, send an e-mail to this address, etc.). If you wanted to add some control to it, have some technically inclined Windows and Mac users who have never used Linux try to do the same tasks.
For this experiment, forget the installation and configuration aspect of using a computer, because most non-technical users have somebody do that anyway.
Have them record what they liked/didn't like/were frustrated by in using their GUIs. Observe them while they're working. Interview the users. Get a feel for what the troubles your non-technical newbies would have if they had to switch to Linux.
You'd learn a lot more about real-world problems in adopting Linux than the speculation that usually goes along with these kinds of projects. There would a lot of tangential, but interesting, things you'd learn about the current state of Linux desktops as well.
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Just like the Bay Area is made up of many micro-climates, the "stability" of the land varies tremendously over a small area. If by Silicon Valley you mean the greater San Jose area and up the Peninsula to, say, Redwood City, you have a bunch of re-claimed wetlands next to the bay, floodplains, and other drainages that will Not Be Good Places To Be if a major earthquake occurs. Not to mention that Silicon Valley is between two major faults--the San Andreas to the west and the Hayward (which is due for a major quake, according to some geologists) to the north-east.
The Loma Prieta earthquake of ten years ago had its hypocenter over 50 miles south of San Francisco, but liquefaction destroyed many structures in SF. Liquefaction occurs when moderately saturated ground is shaken, as in an earthquake, and loses cohesion. Next time you are at the beach pick up some moist sand and shake it vigorously. It'll soon have the consistency of jelly.
This was most striking in Santa Cruz, where I currently live. The downtown area, a floodplain, was destroyed, but the UC Santa Cruz campus had little damage, as it was on limestone bedrock.
It would take one hell of a mudslide to send a house in Boulder Creek (inland by at least five miles, through mountainous terrain) into the Pacific. The Santa Cruz mountains have a lot of mudslides due to good moisture orthographics (Boulder Creek averages over 60 inches of rain a year, while San Jose, 20 miles away, gets less than 15). 90% of all precipitation in California falls between November and April, and most of that comes in January and February.
It's somewhat amusing to watch essentially the same people every winter being interviewed by local reporters in front of their river-front homes that flooded (again). Sometimes the reporters use adjectives to describe them like "plucky" and "brave" for enduring this. I guess I'd be plucky and brave too if I repeatedly hit myself in the head with a mallet and never learned to stop....
A rebuttal to the myth (there are many). There's no such language as "Eskimo," and, like the fish in the proverbial fish story, the number of snow words tends to grow with each retelling.
A lot of people have responded here with what they think a newbie does, or what somebody who is used to Windows or the Mac OS would do if they were forced to switch to Linux.
The problem with this is that these are all opinions, opinions that may or may not match what actually happens with non-technical newbie Linux users.
So, why doesn't somebody do some usability testing? Get 10 non-technical Windows users and 10 non-technical Mac users, sit them down in front of a Linux box, some with GNOME, some with KDE, and have them do some tasks (write a letter using a word processor, send an e-mail to this address, etc.). If you wanted to add some control to it, have some technically inclined Windows and Mac users who have never used Linux try to do the same tasks.
For this experiment, forget the installation and configuration aspect of using a computer, because most non-technical users have somebody do that anyway.
Have them record what they liked/didn't like/were frustrated by in using their GUIs. Observe them while they're working. Interview the users. Get a feel for what the troubles your non-technical newbies would have if they had to switch to Linux.
You'd learn a lot more about real-world problems in adopting Linux than the speculation that usually goes along with these kinds of projects. There would a lot of tangential, but interesting, things you'd learn about the current state of Linux desktops as well.