I don't know about mailing micro SDs, but I was recently involved in trying to send a USB HDD through the mail from the US to Canada. Unsuccessful several times. USPS returned with no explanation.
Did you attach the correct customs form and accurately declare the contents?
I've purchased server hard drives from Canadian eBay merchants without a problem, but haven't tried the other direction. But you'd think if the USPS was worried about information crossing the borders, they'd stop it in both directions.
The extended border region doesn't obviate the need for reasonable suspicion. It is only in ports of entry that suspicion is not required to justify search.
* Normally under the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the American people are not generally subject to random and arbitrary stops and searches.
* The border, however, has always been an exception. There, the longstanding view is that the normal rules do not apply. For example the authorities do not need a warrant or probable cause to conduct a “routine search.”
* But what is “the border”? According to the government, it is a 100-mile wide strip that wraps around the “external boundary” of the United States.
* As a result of this claimed authority, individuals who are far away from the border, American citizens traveling from one place in America to another, are being stopped and harassed in ways that our Constitution does not permit.
* Border Patrol has been setting up checkpoints inland — on highways in states such as California, Texas and Arizona, and at ferry terminals in Washington State. Typically, the agents ask drivers and passengers about their citizenship. Unfortunately, our courts so far have permitted these kinds of checkpoints – legally speaking, they are “administrative” stops that are permitted only for the specific purpose of protecting the nation’s borders. They cannot become general drug-search or other law enforcement efforts.
* However, these stops by Border Patrol agents are not remaining confined to that border security purpose. On the roads of California and elsewhere in the nation – places far removed from the actual border – agents are stopping, interrogating, and searching Americans on an everyday basis with absolutely no suspicion of wrongdoing.
And the DHS doesn't seem to be afraid to stop and question motorists far from the "real" border even if there's no reasonable suspicion at all:
at work I'm using a 5 year old, cast-off desktop that was deemed too slow for Windows
I think he might have been referring to that part of your post, but perhaps you didn't remember you wrote it.
Most people don't speak about their own actions in third-person voice, so if someone says "I ate a pop-tart that was deemed too old to be edible", it's a pretty good bet that the person that ate it is not the person who deemed it unsuitable. Likewise, if someone is using a "cast-off desktop that was deemed too slow", it's a pretty good bet that the person using is is not the one who deemed it too slow, else I would have said "I'm using a cast-off desktop that *I* deemed too slow for windows".
Now if we could get the Supreme Court to roll back their validation of DHS's declaration that the "border" actually extends 100 miles inland from the actual border. Half the population of the USA lives within this extended "border zone".
When you're a farmer, this is easy. When you're an hourly worker in a corporation, or any modern office worker, this is impossible in most places. (unless you're lucky enough that yours allows flexible hours.)
I'm with the crowd to keep DST all year.
It doesn't really help the farmer either, since the cows want to be milked at the same time each day and they rarely pay attention to DST changes.
Every time I have to deal with timezones I wish everyone was UTC I know for a lot of people including my self the next day would change part way through the day but it's so annoying to deal with as many time zones as we have today. While we are at it can we fix it so no month has less than 30 days or more then 31?
Things would be worse without timezones since it's not like everyone will go to have a 09:00UTC - 17:00UTC workday, they'll work based on the local solar time (which is why timezones were invented in the first place). So without timezones you'd have to remember "Let's see... it's 14:00 UTC here now and I just got to work, so is my west coast colleague awake yet? Hmm.. let me look up the sunrise. Oh yes, here it is, his local sunrise is at 14:30UTC so he's probably still in bed, I guess I better call him later. I wonder when he'll get off work...hmm...if sunrise is at 14:30, he probably starts work around 16:30, so maybe he'll be home around 01:30UTC.
Fixing the calendar is hard since (like timezones), years are tied to natural phenomena and 365 is only evenly divisible by 5 and 73. So you could have five 73 day months (plus a leapday), or maybe could go with 13 months of 28 days to give 364 days. Just make the extra 1.25 days a holiday.
Indeed, but there's literally about zero effort to just not fall back. This is low hanging fruit on the pain-in-the-ass fruit tree.
Except for changes to every computer, embedded or otherwise, that would normally "fall back" and thus have the wrong time for half the year, there is zero effort involved. If you have zero responsibility for maintaining anything, yes, there's zero effort.
It would be somewhat less effort to fall back one more time and then stay there, since it is somewhat easier to set up systems to stay on standard time year-round than to stay on daylight saving time.
Congress changed the DST dates in 2005 (effective 2007), so ending DST wouldn't be any worse than that.
I thought spacecraft used absurdly expensive radiation hardened 20 year old processors because providing enough shielding to prevent radiation from disrupting a conventional processor is weight prohibitive. Does this only apply to deep space probes?
Unless employees needed to use the VPN to use communication resources like email, IM, etc; just because they didn't connect to VPN doesn't mean they weren't doing work. If VPN is the only metric that they have to judge worker productivity, it's the managers that should have been fired.
When I work from home, I often don't connect to the VPN at all - I can use email and IM without VPN so unless I need to send/receive data on a corporate fileserver or remote into my work desktop computer, there's no reason to get on VPN.
And my home computing environment is much nicer than my environment in the cube - I have 3 monitors at home (can't do that at the office, because if I have 2 monitors (even if I bring my own), then everyone will want them), a faster computer with much more RAM, and I can play the speakers as long as I want, no need to use headphones.
As astronomer Dr. Hugh Ross noted, sending a probe to Mars to search for life is pointless if that probe is not programmed to both recognize and ignore earth-based life because our planet "contaminates" the other planets down-solar-wind from us all the time. Indeed, spores and whatnot are able to waft high enough into our atmosphere to be caught by the solar wind and taken into space, to land who knows where.
But how would you know if the spore originated on earth, or it originated somewhere else and colonized the earth?
There are 400 billion stars in our Galaxy. Each one of us could take a crap on a different planet, and that would still leave a 1% margin of error when we detect life on another planet.
Environmentalism belongs in an environment where actual living breathing human lives are at stake.
ps - those visiting to Mars will have to hold in their farts.
But for the foreseeable future, we're not going to be visiting anything outside our solar system.
Sure, for the first few missions go ahead and sterilize the bacteria. But once it's been pretty well established you're looking at a ball of rock and/or ice, just let the bacteria grow. See if life from Earth can grow in other climates. It might actually help to understand the variability of conditions for sustaining life a whole lot better than aiming a telescope into space and measuring the X-rays and infrared light for Earth-like conditions.
How do you determine that with any certainty? We're just now drilling deep underground into a sealed antarctic lake that may contain bacteria that's been living there for thousands of years.
There are people stating we may have put Streptococcus on the moon.
This is in dispute - many say that the camera was contaminated after its return on earth.
There is no one qualified to begin to tell us how a organism from a unknown planet might work. The reality is the best we have is guesses. 295 degrees Fahrenheit is no wear near the flash point for many living organisms and their progeny. The only safe way is to quarantine permanently everything off planet, until the time needed to research all these possibilities has been done. This may mean life appointments to quarantined research areas for off planet exploration employees.
I've never heard "flash point" applied to microorganisms - how does one determine the flash point of a microorganism and how does that relate to its survivability on another planet? Does the progeny of an organism have a significantly different flash point from the original organism?
I'm so glad we put so much effort into protecting other planets.
Now how about we stop tossing radioactive shit all over our own? kthx.
I don't think that's NASA's department. You'd have to talk to the Department of Energy to ask them to stop letting coal plants emit so much radioactive waste products if your goal is to limit radiation release.
USB is slower with high CPU overhead and that eats up USB bandwidth that you may need for other USB stuff.
USB 3.0 is about the same speed as SATA - 5 Gbit/sec versus 6 Gbit/sec
I can't imagine that CPU overhead is much worse than SATA on a modern CPU that's probably just hanging around waiting for the I/O to finish anyway.
I can stream audio to my USB audio player and my mouse/keyboard work fine while running a backup to a USB 3.0 hard drive, so I don't think I'm constrained by bus bandwidth.
That said, I've never really noticed much speed improvement with Readycache using a 16GB USB flash drive or 32GB SD card. (or both at the same time). But when I popped an mSATA SSD into the WWAN slot on my laptop and moved the operating system to it, I noticed a dramatic increase in speed and usability.
why not have a 2-4GB ram disk with slower / older ram on some kind of card / sata device? Just use it for temp stuff and it does not need a battery back up.
I remember having an ISA card that acted like a RAM disk back when computers had much more serious memory constraints, I think I had it on an 8086, which had a 1MB addressable space limit.
It was incredibly fast, I was using it to hold temporary files to help speed up a sort that wouldn't fit in memory - I think it had 128KB of RAM and it was incredibly fast - well, as fast as an 8 - 16MB/sec ISA bus could be.
But I can't imagine that there's much of a market for this type of accelerator these days since most people that want fast RAM disk performance just add more RAM to their computer and let the operating system manage it - getting a new motherboard with more RAM capacity if needed. I did find this card, which includes a backup battery so it's not just a RAM disk, the contents don't go away when you turn off your computer:
My mum does because she uses Windows at work, so knows that and has no interest in learning new things or figuring out why one OS is better/worse than the other. She just wants everything to work the same as it does at her office. You see that's the difference, I gave her the best solution, you just want to sell everyone your religion.
You're either trolling or are confusing two different issues. One issue the large choice of Linux distros (which is both a weakness and a strength of the Linux platform), the other issue is incompatibility of most Microsoft apps with Linux.... Why would your mom care whether you gave her Ubuntu or Redhat when neither one will let her (easily) run Windows apps?
The original poster said his mom was on WinXP and is still using AOL for internet, so it doesn't sound like she has stringent office suite needs.
When it comes time to upgrade to a new computer, your mom's going to have to get used to something new whether she wants to or not - Win8 is quite a bit different than WinXP... some Linux variant would probably be more comfortable to her than Win8.
You must suck with computers. I have an eight year old 3.2ghz p4 that is running Win7 just fine.
I don't know if you read my post, but I'm not running Win7, I'm running Linux. I'm not the one that said it was too slow for Windows. I'm the one that said "it runs quite well with Kubuntu...".
I left Linux for the same reasons for the most part.
Of everything he mentions, the only one I've had problems with is the audio. My Wifi is rock solid, and I've had no performance problems on my thinkpad, and at work I'm using a 5 year old, cast-off desktop that was deemed too slow for Windows, but it runs quite well with Kubuntu including 3D desktop effects.
But audio is a bit of a problem, I've started to kill -9 the pulseaudio daemon before starting up my audio player, otherwise the player just hangs while waiting for the audio device. This happens on my desktop and laptop with different audio hardware so it's not just one buggy driver.
Pretty much all of the software I need is available as an Ubuntu package, so fragmentation/incompatibility hasn't really affected me.
If you're willing to move her to Win7 and away from AOL software, why not just move her to Linux?
Which distro/version? And herein lies the problem...
What's the problem? Your mom isn't going to care if she's running CentOS, Redhat, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora, whatever. Pick the one that *you* are most comfortable with and go with it. I went with Ubuntu + XFCE, but any distro would have worked fine.
If you're willing to move her to Win7 and away from AOL software, why not just move her to Linux?
No one ever posts a story here explaining how and why trying to move his Mom or Dad to Linux blew up in his face. But I am betting it happens more a lot more often then the geek is willing to admit.
There is nothing that cuts deeper or wounds the elderly more than being treated like a snot-nosed kid.
Fix what needs to be fixed.
Do it quietly, do it simply, Leave everything else alone.
I made such a post quite a while ago. I moved my then-girlfriend from Windows to Linux after her laptop got an incurable virus infection. She was fine with it and had no problem using it - I think I had configured fvwm2 to look like WinXP, so the interface was familiar to her. She even had no problem with Openoffice. But then came the day when she wanted to install a custom app from work so she could work from home - there was no way to get it to work, even under Wine.
She's moved on to a Mac now (supplied by her employer) and if she needs to run a Windows app that's not available as a web-app, she remotes into the terminal server at work.
So not exactly "blowing up in my face", but it definitely didn't work out.
You'll blow the $450 in savings in no time supporting a Windows or Linux box. I'm ready to tell all my relatives that I no longer support Windows boxes, and they can go buy Macs if they want something that works. Linux works for me, but I'm willing to blow an afternoon scripting something arcane (and something the Mac does out of the box). I'm not willing to do that for a relative. My time has value.
Really? Have you ever supported a Linux box? They've had it for almost 3 years now, and after the first couple weeks, they've had no problems or questions. The machine auto-updates with security updates, and last time I was home, I upgraded them to the latest Ubuntu LTS release. Even after that version upgrade, they had no questions because all they really see is a web browser.
You put a lot of effort in instead of just buying them a Mac. Do you have hobbies or a sex life?
An afternoon of software setup wasn't a lot of effort.
Keeping my wife's parents happy enhances my sex life.
What's the cheapest 17" macbook cost? $700? The refurb Dell I sent them cost $250. And I'd still have to do tech support even if I sent them a Macbook.
I would suggest that this is the perfect market segment for a Chromebox or Chromebook. The HP Chromebook with the 14" screen is ideal for those with ageing eyesight, they boot up really fast and do everything many "parents" do. The only issue is the lack of Skype, I think Android tablet is the solution there. You can fix the camera issue with an EyFi card. Printing will probably require a new cloudprint capable device or using something like a Raspberry Pi as a smart print server.
I remain convinced that the ChromeOS has it roots in a senior Google exec sick and tired of doing tech support for a parent:-)
At the time, it was the price of a tablet that kept me away from Android, but also mom claimed that she had to use a printer for printing recipes. However, last time I went home, the inkjet cartridges had dried up from lack of use and they didn't want to buy new ones because they print so rarely. I'll consider a chrome book the next time they need a computer, but I haven't seen any 17" chromebooks -- they need a big screen for visibility, resolution doesn't matter, but they need big fonts. An external monitor isn't really viable since they set the laptop up on the kitchen table when they want to use it.
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I don't know about mailing micro SDs, but I was recently involved in trying to send a USB HDD through the mail from the US to Canada. Unsuccessful several times. USPS returned with no explanation.
Did you attach the correct customs form and accurately declare the contents?
I've purchased server hard drives from Canadian eBay merchants without a problem, but haven't tried the other direction. But you'd think if the USPS was worried about information crossing the borders, they'd stop it in both directions.
The extended border region doesn't obviate the need for reasonable suspicion. It is only in ports of entry that suspicion is not required to justify search.
The ACLU seems to think otherwise:
http://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/fact-sheet-us-constitution-free-zone
And the DHS doesn't seem to be afraid to stop and question motorists far from the "real" border even if there's no reasonable suspicion at all:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ef3_1361978936
at work I'm using a 5 year old, cast-off desktop that was deemed too slow for Windows
I think he might have been referring to that part of your post, but perhaps you didn't remember you wrote it.
Most people don't speak about their own actions in third-person voice, so if someone says "I ate a pop-tart that was deemed too old to be edible", it's a pretty good bet that the person that ate it is not the person who deemed it unsuitable. Likewise, if someone is using a "cast-off desktop that was deemed too slow", it's a pretty good bet that the person using is is not the one who deemed it too slow, else I would have said "I'm using a cast-off desktop that *I* deemed too slow for windows".
Now if we could get the Supreme Court to roll back their validation of DHS's declaration that the "border" actually extends 100 miles inland from the actual border. Half the population of the USA lives within this extended "border zone".
When you're a farmer, this is easy. When you're an hourly worker in a corporation, or any modern office worker, this is impossible in most places. (unless you're lucky enough that yours allows flexible hours.)
I'm with the crowd to keep DST all year.
It doesn't really help the farmer either, since the cows want to be milked at the same time each day and they rarely pay attention to DST changes.
Every time I have to deal with timezones I wish everyone was UTC I know for a lot of people including my self the next day would change part way through the day but it's so annoying to deal with as many time zones as we have today. While we are at it can we fix it so no month has less than 30 days or more then 31?
Things would be worse without timezones since it's not like everyone will go to have a 09:00UTC - 17:00UTC workday, they'll work based on the local solar time (which is why timezones were invented in the first place). So without timezones you'd have to remember "Let's see... it's 14:00 UTC here now and I just got to work, so is my west coast colleague awake yet? Hmm.. let me look up the sunrise. Oh yes, here it is, his local sunrise is at 14:30UTC so he's probably still in bed, I guess I better call him later. I wonder when he'll get off work...hmm...if sunrise is at 14:30, he probably starts work around 16:30, so maybe he'll be home around 01:30UTC.
Fixing the calendar is hard since (like timezones), years are tied to natural phenomena and 365 is only evenly divisible by 5 and 73. So you could have five 73 day months (plus a leapday), or maybe could go with 13 months of 28 days to give 364 days. Just make the extra 1.25 days a holiday.
Must be rough having first world problems.
All problems in first world nations are first world problems (by definition), but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be remedied.
Indeed, but there's literally about zero effort to just not fall back. This is low hanging fruit on the pain-in-the-ass fruit tree.
Except for changes to every computer, embedded or otherwise, that would normally "fall back" and thus have the wrong time for half the year, there is zero effort involved. If you have zero responsibility for maintaining anything, yes, there's zero effort.
It would be somewhat less effort to fall back one more time and then stay there, since it is somewhat easier to set up systems to stay on standard time year-round than to stay on daylight saving time.
Congress changed the DST dates in 2005 (effective 2007), so ending DST wouldn't be any worse than that.
I thought spacecraft used absurdly expensive radiation hardened 20 year old processors because providing enough shielding to prevent radiation from disrupting a conventional processor is weight prohibitive. Does this only apply to deep space probes?
Unless employees needed to use the VPN to use communication resources like email, IM, etc; just because they didn't connect to VPN doesn't mean they weren't doing work. If VPN is the only metric that they have to judge worker productivity, it's the managers that should have been fired.
When I work from home, I often don't connect to the VPN at all - I can use email and IM without VPN so unless I need to send/receive data on a corporate fileserver or remote into my work desktop computer, there's no reason to get on VPN.
And my home computing environment is much nicer than my environment in the cube - I have 3 monitors at home (can't do that at the office, because if I have 2 monitors (even if I bring my own), then everyone will want them), a faster computer with much more RAM, and I can play the speakers as long as I want, no need to use headphones.
As astronomer Dr. Hugh Ross noted, sending a probe to Mars to search for life is pointless if that probe is not programmed to both recognize and ignore earth-based life because our planet "contaminates" the other planets down-solar-wind from us all the time. Indeed, spores and whatnot are able to waft high enough into our atmosphere to be caught by the solar wind and taken into space, to land who knows where.
But how would you know if the spore originated on earth, or it originated somewhere else and colonized the earth?
There are 400 billion stars in our Galaxy. Each one of us could take a crap on a different planet, and that would still leave a 1% margin of error when we detect life on another planet.
Environmentalism belongs in an environment where actual living breathing human lives are at stake.
ps - those visiting to Mars will have to hold in their farts.
But for the foreseeable future, we're not going to be visiting anything outside our solar system.
Sure, for the first few missions go ahead and sterilize the bacteria. But once it's been pretty well established you're looking at a ball of rock and/or ice, just let the bacteria grow. See if life from Earth can grow in other climates. It might actually help to understand the variability of conditions for sustaining life a whole lot better than aiming a telescope into space and measuring the X-rays and infrared light for Earth-like conditions.
How do you determine that with any certainty? We're just now drilling deep underground into a sealed antarctic lake that may contain bacteria that's been living there for thousands of years.
There are people stating we may have put Streptococcus on the moon.
This is in dispute - many say that the camera was contaminated after its return on earth.
There is no one qualified to begin to tell us how a organism from a unknown planet might work. The reality is the best we have is guesses. 295 degrees Fahrenheit is no wear near the flash point for many living organisms and their progeny. The only safe way is to quarantine permanently everything off planet, until the time needed to research all these possibilities has been done. This may mean life appointments to quarantined research areas for off planet exploration employees.
I've never heard "flash point" applied to microorganisms - how does one determine the flash point of a microorganism and how does that relate to its survivability on another planet? Does the progeny of an organism have a significantly different flash point from the original organism?
I'm so glad we put so much effort into protecting other planets.
Now how about we stop tossing radioactive shit all over our own? kthx.
I don't think that's NASA's department. You'd have to talk to the Department of Energy to ask them to stop letting coal plants emit so much radioactive waste products if your goal is to limit radiation release.
USB is slower with high CPU overhead and that eats up USB bandwidth that you may need for other USB stuff.
USB 3.0 is about the same speed as SATA - 5 Gbit/sec versus 6 Gbit/sec
I can't imagine that CPU overhead is much worse than SATA on a modern CPU that's probably just hanging around waiting for the I/O to finish anyway.
I can stream audio to my USB audio player and my mouse/keyboard work fine while running a backup to a USB 3.0 hard drive, so I don't think I'm constrained by bus bandwidth.
That said, I've never really noticed much speed improvement with Readycache using a 16GB USB flash drive or 32GB SD card. (or both at the same time). But when I popped an mSATA SSD into the WWAN slot on my laptop and moved the operating system to it, I noticed a dramatic increase in speed and usability.
why not have a 2-4GB ram disk with slower / older ram on some kind of card / sata device? Just use it for temp stuff and it does not need a battery back up.
I remember having an ISA card that acted like a RAM disk back when computers had much more serious memory constraints, I think I had it on an 8086, which had a 1MB addressable space limit.
It was incredibly fast, I was using it to hold temporary files to help speed up a sort that wouldn't fit in memory - I think it had 128KB of RAM and it was incredibly fast - well, as fast as an 8 - 16MB/sec ISA bus could be.
But I can't imagine that there's much of a market for this type of accelerator these days since most people that want fast RAM disk performance just add more RAM to their computer and let the operating system manage it - getting a new motherboard with more RAM capacity if needed. I did find this card, which includes a backup battery so it's not just a RAM disk, the contents don't go away when you turn off your computer:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815168001
It probably has lower latency than an SSD, but it acts as a 1.5 Gbit SATA interface, so transfer rate is limited to 150MB/sec.
I've also seen SSDs on a PCIe card, but that's not quite the same.
My mum does because she uses Windows at work, so knows that and has no interest in learning new things or figuring out why one OS is better/worse than the other. She just wants everything to work the same as it does at her office. You see that's the difference, I gave her the best solution, you just want to sell everyone your religion.
You're either trolling or are confusing two different issues. One issue the large choice of Linux distros (which is both a weakness and a strength of the Linux platform), the other issue is incompatibility of most Microsoft apps with Linux.... Why would your mom care whether you gave her Ubuntu or Redhat when neither one will let her (easily) run Windows apps?
The original poster said his mom was on WinXP and is still using AOL for internet, so it doesn't sound like she has stringent office suite needs.
When it comes time to upgrade to a new computer, your mom's going to have to get used to something new whether she wants to or not - Win8 is quite a bit different than WinXP... some Linux variant would probably be more comfortable to her than Win8.
You must suck with computers. I have an eight year old 3.2ghz p4 that is running Win7 just fine.
I don't know if you read my post, but I'm not running Win7, I'm running Linux. I'm not the one that said it was too slow for Windows. I'm the one that said "it runs quite well with Kubuntu...".
I left Linux for the same reasons for the most part.
Of everything he mentions, the only one I've had problems with is the audio. My Wifi is rock solid, and I've had no performance problems on my thinkpad, and at work I'm using a 5 year old, cast-off desktop that was deemed too slow for Windows, but it runs quite well with Kubuntu including 3D desktop effects.
But audio is a bit of a problem, I've started to kill -9 the pulseaudio daemon before starting up my audio player, otherwise the player just hangs while waiting for the audio device. This happens on my desktop and laptop with different audio hardware so it's not just one buggy driver.
Pretty much all of the software I need is available as an Ubuntu package, so fragmentation/incompatibility hasn't really affected me.
If you're willing to move her to Win7 and away from AOL software, why not just move her to Linux?
Which distro/version?
And herein lies the problem...
What's the problem? Your mom isn't going to care if she's running CentOS, Redhat, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora, whatever. Pick the one that *you* are most comfortable with and go with it. I went with Ubuntu + XFCE, but any distro would have worked fine.
If you're willing to move her to Win7 and away from AOL software, why not just move her to Linux?
No one ever posts a story here explaining how and why trying to move his Mom or Dad to Linux blew up in his face. But I am betting it happens more a lot more often then the geek is willing to admit.
There is nothing that cuts deeper or wounds the elderly more than being treated like a snot-nosed kid.
Fix what needs to be fixed.
Do it quietly, do it simply, Leave everything else alone.
I made such a post quite a while ago. I moved my then-girlfriend from Windows to Linux after her laptop got an incurable virus infection. She was fine with it and had no problem using it - I think I had configured fvwm2 to look like WinXP, so the interface was familiar to her. She even had no problem with Openoffice. But then came the day when she wanted to install a custom app from work so she could work from home - there was no way to get it to work, even under Wine.
She's moved on to a Mac now (supplied by her employer) and if she needs to run a Windows app that's not available as a web-app, she remotes into the terminal server at work.
So not exactly "blowing up in my face", but it definitely didn't work out.
You'll blow the $450 in savings in no time supporting a Windows or Linux box. I'm ready to tell all my relatives that I no longer support Windows boxes, and they can go buy Macs if they want something that works. Linux works for me, but I'm willing to blow an afternoon scripting something arcane (and something the Mac does out of the box). I'm not willing to do that for a relative. My time has value.
Really? Have you ever supported a Linux box? They've had it for almost 3 years now, and after the first couple weeks, they've had no problems or questions. The machine auto-updates with security updates, and last time I was home, I upgraded them to the latest Ubuntu LTS release. Even after that version upgrade, they had no questions because all they really see is a web browser.
You put a lot of effort in instead of just buying them a Mac. Do you have hobbies or a sex life?
An afternoon of software setup wasn't a lot of effort.
Keeping my wife's parents happy enhances my sex life.
What's the cheapest 17" macbook cost? $700? The refurb Dell I sent them cost $250. And I'd still have to do tech support even if I sent them a Macbook.
I would suggest that this is the perfect market segment for a Chromebox or Chromebook. The HP Chromebook with the 14" screen is ideal for those with ageing eyesight, they boot up really fast and do everything many "parents" do. The only issue is the lack of Skype, I think Android tablet is the solution there. You can fix the camera issue with an EyFi card. Printing will probably require a new cloudprint capable device or using something like a Raspberry Pi as a smart print server.
I remain convinced that the ChromeOS has it roots in a senior Google exec sick and tired of doing tech support for a parent :-)
At the time, it was the price of a tablet that kept me away from Android, but also mom claimed that she had to use a printer for printing recipes. However, last time I went home, the inkjet cartridges had dried up from lack of use and they didn't want to buy new ones because they print so rarely. I'll consider a chrome book the next time they need a computer, but I haven't seen any 17" chromebooks -- they need a big screen for visibility, resolution doesn't matter, but they need big fonts. An external monitor isn't really viable since they set the laptop up on the kitchen table when they want to use it.