Won't work... Read up on Joe Job. My father has been Joe Jobbed when he retired and had too much time on his hands and started fighting SPAM. It wasn't pretty.
I'm still sceptical. We'll see when I switch my mom over to Ubuntu 12.04LTS and if my support calls go up, it isn't a discoverable interface. My mom isn't technical, but she is science-y and has curiosity. Attributes most users do not have.
Seems reading comprehension goes down after 50 too. Allow me to quote myself:
Try doing this crap with the 50+ non-techy people (I must specify this because I know that otherwise I'll summon all the 50+ slashdot dwellers who will say they can cope... You're not the people I talk about)
That means YOU are not one of the normal users. Proof: you read slashdot.
No, I don't. Mainly because I didn't figure it out. I just typed in when I saw the search text. Normal users really do not behave at all like us. Seasoned users will look in deeper levels, In Gnome2, everything is basically in 2nd level, where 1st level is a category understandable by humans.
I know it sounds elitist, but I don't give normal users much credit.
Ok... Simple task: run a calculator. Ah, and we're talking mouse-bound users.. No usage of keyboard allowed.
That's the discoverability... Right there... Calculator even is an easy example as the Unity search gets it right when typing "Calc".
Your kids and your wife? Most likely tech natives and they have a role model right there. Try doing this crap with the 50+ non-techy people (I must specify this because I know that otherwise I'll summon all the 50+ slashdot dwellers who will say they can cope... You're not the people I talk about)
It is now on my "to check out" list. Thank you. I need to find a solution before 10.04 LTS runs out of support. I still have time, but I can't change distro nilly-willy for my users.
I don't entirely agree. One thing that I liked about Ubuntu is that I could pretty much install it for anyone who wasn't computer literate and have them safely and easily do basic user tasks. To be able to support them well, I tend to use the same settings as they are so that I can help them even when I'm not in front of a computer.
You can imagine that those kind of people are less likely to cope with huge paradigm shifts like Gnome2->Unity? The two most important of these users I have are my own mother and my mother in law. I don't foresee much problems with my mom, she's a science person (Master in Chemistry) and she'll cope. It will take her effort, but she's aware these changes require it. Mother in law though? Oh, boy, I so dread Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (I only give them LTSes)
It's not that I cannot install a different distro or install a different DE. I can, it's just that Ubuntu (10.04 LTS) did give perfectly sane defaults with a reasonable interface with good discoverability. I personally see that gone with Unity.
I have looked into Debian for an alternative, but Ubuntu does give a significant amount of polish (I'd mention the "Language Support" applet, for which I haven't found a decent alternative in Debian. I live in a multi-lingual environment, and it's pretty much the best tool I've seen in any operating system. It's not the only thing ) Linux Mint has been highly recommended on slashdot, and I'll most likely check it out sooner or later. I should also give Lubuntu a shot (LXDE, I use that on my Asus EEE 701 4G). It might be the way out of this mess. When doing a PXE installation of Ubuntu 11.10 it's given as a true option.
All in all, switching to Unity is alienating the userbase. Tech people because they don't like the dumbed down aspect of it, and non-tech people because of the familiarity (and let's face it, pretty traditional way of doing things of GNome2). Except for the light destop environments, I see none of the big ones being even remotely desirable... I know people think that GNome2 looks old, I happen to disagree. It's mature. Iron out the tiny bugs and annoyances and you'd get a rock stable useful UI. However, we can't do that in the open source world. Always, new, alway rewrite alway try out the newest language. Cut it already and realize this needs to stop.
Weird, I have the admin access to the Google Apps Domain of my in law family (after all, I created it). I rarely (to never) log in, but I just did to check this. Copy paste from the administrative console:
Sie knnen bis zu 100 Nutzerkonten für diese Organisation erstellen.
This definitely isn't a paid Google Apps Domain. I created it years ago, though. New Google Apps Domains might have different restrictions.
Forgive them... It's what most people get exposed to. After all you can quickly run that on your desktop to do cool stuff. Try setting up a Xen Server at home and run a few instances. Not that it's hard (I've done it on an old Athlon MP 2400+/4GB RAM as I got exposed to Xen at work and wanted to look deeper into it), but it's far from typical desktop use. Add in "weird" (for the desktop world) hardware like fibrechannel SANs, etc, and the population who have gotten exposure to enterprise level virtualization dwindles.
In the consumer market? Yes. In the business market, you're definitely mistaken. I don't know why, but once an organization becomes of a certain size, Microsoft is unavoidable and PHBs, CEOs and other three-letter-higher-ups absolutely want only to hear about Microsoft.
As such, I'd wager to say that, yes, there are people who love Microsoft and have very high brand loyalty to it.
Of course, it doesn't have the religious following Apple has, but there are some real Microsoft lovers[1]. Events like Vista, toned their vocality down, but with the advent of 7, they are back in full force. (I still think 7 is a polished Vista and made too much changes where not required. I still despise the interface. )
[1] Like people shelling out good money for Windows Server for a home server...
I remember Microsoft Flight Simulator 5 on DOS. It was awesome, it even ran at 640x480 in 256 colours (I think). It was absolutely amazing for it's time. White is Flight Simulator now? As far as I know the last release was Microsoft Flight Simulator X, but that's eternities ago
There is an open source flight simulator called "FlightGear", but I never got the hang of it.
Ok... However, then you don't know, or, are ignoring history. Do you really want to go back to prohibition? Including the disastrous effects it had on society? I did read the last paragraph, but you were already factually incorrect on the level of what alcohol does to you. If someone get facts wrong in his comment, I tend not to take the rest of the comment seriously.
As weird as it might sound, as an alcoholic, I am in favour of decriminalizing all drugs. The harder ones, preferably under medical supervision in order to help the addicts (do note, alcohol is a hard drug by most categorizations). Pot, definitely doesn't categorize as a hard drug.
Depends... I know "to hang somebody" usually means by the neck. Commonly used as a method of execution. However, it is perfectly possible to hang a corpse in different ways to something. For example ropes under the remains of arm stumps (assuming the arms have been cut off too and only a torso remains)
Interesting (and fucking stupid BIOS behaviour). I will try that out when I'm at mom's place. Won't be in a few, but I will keep it in mind. I hope it helps. Thanks in advance for your input.
One of the first things I did... Set the SSD first. Didn't change a thing. I just wonder if it isn't grub that is trying to show its menu but doesn't output anything and waiting for a timeout. As I'm not all that often at my moms place, I can't check right now (well, I can login by ssh, but that won't give me real answers:-) ). My bet is something that delays grub for some reason. It boots, so it's no big deal... Still, annoying. It's very new hardware (Gigabyte GA-A75-D3H with AMD A6 CPU), and I have one other issue with the sound crackling under Ubuntu. Fixes I've found by Googling didn't fix the issue. Not a deal breaker, but annoying.
That's interesting. I have this "black screen blinking cursor" on my moms new computer. Takes a (felt) eternity before it switches to the Ubuntu logo and then boots in a blink of an eye. The system has an SSD system disk. I just guessed it was the BIOS being slow. I should really look deeper into that.
I don't get this "burn to CD". Who cares? I rarely, if ever, do that. Just use PXE and be done with it. All Linuxes and all BSDs, I know of, allow that easily. Apparently even Windows XP could be installed over PXE, but it was a series of hacks and not easy. I don't know about the more modern Windows versions.
My only rationale for this is that alcohol and tobacco dont have strong mental effects
Alcohol doesn't? I've been dry for over a year and a half, and I can assure you that alcohol has very strong mental effects and that includes hallucinations. Not in the sense that stones talk or you can see music, but that's LSD, not pot (I don't smoke pot, but I know those who do). Anyway, back to alcohol. Look up delirium tremens.
Alcohol is a very dangerous drug *if* you're prone to abuse it. I should have been warned, it's rampant in my family. However, for most people alcohol is just a re-creative drug. A few beers on a party, a good wine with a nice meal. Well, from what I've seen with pot, many people do use it exactly in that way. Instead of drinking a beer in the evening, the smoke a joint and that's it. My suspicion is that there are people who are genetically predisposed to abuse marijuana. They are the equivalent of alcoholics for pot.
I can and I have gotten this new for 525€. As a matter of fact, I bought three at that price (each): one for my, one for my sister and one for my brother. The trick? I've been subscribed to their consumer newsletter for ages. You pretty much get a 5% off coupon every month. Now, I don't care about 5% and it won't incite me to purchase, but it's nice to have this in case you need new hardware. The thing is, I discovered that sometimes they do have an action where you get 5%, 10%, 25% or 50% coupons, a bit like a scratch card system. Type in the code and see how much you get. When I get those, I just configure a sweet, but expensive, machine, apply the code and see what happens. I never ever expected them to give me 50% off EVER.... but they did, and I jumped on the occasion.
So again, yes, you can hand will get this NEW for 600€, you just have to be incredibly lucky.
As for the longevity of Dell. My dads previous Dell was a, if I recall correctly, Inpiron 8500 bought around 2000. We're talking P-III class. It lasted a whopping 9 years. We did a ram upgrade and a disk upgrade over the time, and my dad stopped using it because the hinge cracked... after 9 years. At work we have Dell for all desktops and laptops. Haven't had a single problem yet. Dell is not the quality you'd get from Apple, but pretty decent in my experience.
Apple also had its duds. I owned an iBook G3 from 2001 to 2004. It is one of the laptops I kept least long! Why? Because the logic board failed. It was a known fault and my luck would have that it happened to me after the extended warranty (extended due to the know fault) ended at Apple. I tried getting it repaired but the repair quote cost me 170€ (No Apple stores in my country...) and the repair would have cost in excess of what a new laptop cost. Frankly, a 2000€ laptop (back in 2001 when I bought it) lasting a mere three years is unacceptable. All my PC machines lived in excess of 5 years, when the simply got too slow to be used on the desktop any more.
Slashdot Mirror
The Joe Job article linked to backscatter, that was the actual term I was looking for.
Won't work... Read up on Joe Job. My father has been Joe Jobbed when he retired and had too much time on his hands and started fighting SPAM. It wasn't pretty.
I'm still sceptical. We'll see when I switch my mom over to Ubuntu 12.04LTS and if my support calls go up, it isn't a discoverable interface. My mom isn't technical, but she is science-y and has curiosity. Attributes most users do not have.
Seems reading comprehension goes down after 50 too. Allow me to quote myself:
That means YOU are not one of the normal users. Proof: you read slashdot.
Is it? Do you know how most normal users do copy/paste? A hint: it's not with ctrl-C, ctrl-V.
No, I don't. Mainly because I didn't figure it out. I just typed in when I saw the search text. Normal users really do not behave at all like us. Seasoned users will look in deeper levels, In Gnome2, everything is basically in 2nd level, where 1st level is a category understandable by humans.
I know it sounds elitist, but I don't give normal users much credit.
Ok... Simple task: run a calculator. Ah, and we're talking mouse-bound users.. No usage of keyboard allowed.
That's the discoverability... Right there... Calculator even is an easy example as the Unity search gets it right when typing "Calc".
Your kids and your wife? Most likely tech natives and they have a role model right there. Try doing this crap with the 50+ non-techy people (I must specify this because I know that otherwise I'll summon all the 50+ slashdot dwellers who will say they can cope... You're not the people I talk about)
It is now on my "to check out" list. Thank you. I need to find a solution before 10.04 LTS runs out of support. I still have time, but I can't change distro nilly-willy for my users.
I don't entirely agree. One thing that I liked about Ubuntu is that I could pretty much install it for anyone who wasn't computer literate and have them safely and easily do basic user tasks. To be able to support them well, I tend to use the same settings as they are so that I can help them even when I'm not in front of a computer.
You can imagine that those kind of people are less likely to cope with huge paradigm shifts like Gnome2->Unity? The two most important of these users I have are my own mother and my mother in law. I don't foresee much problems with my mom, she's a science person (Master in Chemistry) and she'll cope. It will take her effort, but she's aware these changes require it. Mother in law though? Oh, boy, I so dread Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (I only give them LTSes)
It's not that I cannot install a different distro or install a different DE. I can, it's just that Ubuntu (10.04 LTS) did give perfectly sane defaults with a reasonable interface with good discoverability. I personally see that gone with Unity.
I have looked into Debian for an alternative, but Ubuntu does give a significant amount of polish (I'd mention the "Language Support" applet, for which I haven't found a decent alternative in Debian. I live in a multi-lingual environment, and it's pretty much the best tool I've seen in any operating system. It's not the only thing ) Linux Mint has been highly recommended on slashdot, and I'll most likely check it out sooner or later. I should also give Lubuntu a shot (LXDE, I use that on my Asus EEE 701 4G). It might be the way out of this mess. When doing a PXE installation of Ubuntu 11.10 it's given as a true option.
All in all, switching to Unity is alienating the userbase. Tech people because they don't like the dumbed down aspect of it, and non-tech people because of the familiarity (and let's face it, pretty traditional way of doing things of GNome2). Except for the light destop environments, I see none of the big ones being even remotely desirable... I know people think that GNome2 looks old, I happen to disagree. It's mature. Iron out the tiny bugs and annoyances and you'd get a rock stable useful UI. However, we can't do that in the open source world. Always, new, alway rewrite alway try out the newest language. Cut it already and realize this needs to stop.
Ah, that makes sense then... I just checked one of the Google App Domains, I manage and it said up to 100 users (which is overkill).
Weird, I have the admin access to the Google Apps Domain of my in law family (after all, I created it). I rarely (to never) log in, but I just did to check this. Copy paste from the administrative console:
This definitely isn't a paid Google Apps Domain. I created it years ago, though. New Google Apps Domains might have different restrictions.
Forgive them... It's what most people get exposed to. After all you can quickly run that on your desktop to do cool stuff. Try setting up a Xen Server at home and run a few instances. Not that it's hard (I've done it on an old Athlon MP 2400+/4GB RAM as I got exposed to Xen at work and wanted to look deeper into it), but it's far from typical desktop use. Add in "weird" (for the desktop world) hardware like fibrechannel SANs, etc, and the population who have gotten exposure to enterprise level virtualization dwindles.
I thought it was 50 users for free... Did they change that?
www.debian.org
In the consumer market? Yes. In the business market, you're definitely mistaken. I don't know why, but once an organization becomes of a certain size, Microsoft is unavoidable and PHBs, CEOs and other three-letter-higher-ups absolutely want only to hear about Microsoft.
As such, I'd wager to say that, yes, there are people who love Microsoft and have very high brand loyalty to it.
Of course, it doesn't have the religious following Apple has, but there are some real Microsoft lovers[1]. Events like Vista, toned their vocality down, but with the advent of 7, they are back in full force. (I still think 7 is a polished Vista and made too much changes where not required. I still despise the interface. )
[1] Like people shelling out good money for Windows Server for a home server...
I remember Microsoft Flight Simulator 5 on DOS. It was awesome, it even ran at 640x480 in 256 colours (I think). It was absolutely amazing for it's time. White is Flight Simulator now? As far as I know the last release was Microsoft Flight Simulator X, but that's eternities ago
There is an open source flight simulator called "FlightGear", but I never got the hang of it.
Ok... However, then you don't know, or, are ignoring history. Do you really want to go back to prohibition? Including the disastrous effects it had on society? I did read the last paragraph, but you were already factually incorrect on the level of what alcohol does to you. If someone get facts wrong in his comment, I tend not to take the rest of the comment seriously.
As weird as it might sound, as an alcoholic, I am in favour of decriminalizing all drugs. The harder ones, preferably under medical supervision in order to help the addicts (do note, alcohol is a hard drug by most categorizations). Pot, definitely doesn't categorize as a hard drug.
Depends... I know "to hang somebody" usually means by the neck. Commonly used as a method of execution. However, it is perfectly possible to hang a corpse in different ways to something. For example ropes under the remains of arm stumps (assuming the arms have been cut off too and only a torso remains)
Interesting (and fucking stupid BIOS behaviour). I will try that out when I'm at mom's place. Won't be in a few, but I will keep it in mind. I hope it helps. Thanks in advance for your input.
One of the first things I did... Set the SSD first. Didn't change a thing. I just wonder if it isn't grub that is trying to show its menu but doesn't output anything and waiting for a timeout. As I'm not all that often at my moms place, I can't check right now (well, I can login by ssh, but that won't give me real answers :-) ). My bet is something that delays grub for some reason. It boots, so it's no big deal... Still, annoying. It's very new hardware (Gigabyte GA-A75-D3H with AMD A6 CPU), and I have one other issue with the sound crackling under Ubuntu. Fixes I've found by Googling didn't fix the issue. Not a deal breaker, but annoying.
That's interesting. I have this "black screen blinking cursor" on my moms new computer. Takes a (felt) eternity before it switches to the Ubuntu logo and then boots in a blink of an eye. The system has an SSD system disk. I just guessed it was the BIOS being slow. I should really look deeper into that.
I don't get this "burn to CD". Who cares? I rarely, if ever, do that. Just use PXE and be done with it. All Linuxes and all BSDs, I know of, allow that easily. Apparently even Windows XP could be installed over PXE, but it was a series of hacks and not easy. I don't know about the more modern Windows versions.
Alcohol doesn't? I've been dry for over a year and a half, and I can assure you that alcohol has very strong mental effects and that includes hallucinations. Not in the sense that stones talk or you can see music, but that's LSD, not pot (I don't smoke pot, but I know those who do). Anyway, back to alcohol. Look up delirium tremens.
Alcohol is a very dangerous drug *if* you're prone to abuse it. I should have been warned, it's rampant in my family. However, for most people alcohol is just a re-creative drug. A few beers on a party, a good wine with a nice meal. Well, from what I've seen with pot, many people do use it exactly in that way. Instead of drinking a beer in the evening, the smoke a joint and that's it. My suspicion is that there are people who are genetically predisposed to abuse marijuana. They are the equivalent of alcoholics for pot.
So again, yes, you can hand will get this NEW for 600€, you just have to be incredibly lucky.
As for the longevity of Dell. My dads previous Dell was a, if I recall correctly, Inpiron 8500 bought around 2000. We're talking P-III class. It lasted a whopping 9 years. We did a ram upgrade and a disk upgrade over the time, and my dad stopped using it because the hinge cracked... after 9 years. At work we have Dell for all desktops and laptops. Haven't had a single problem yet. Dell is not the quality you'd get from Apple, but pretty decent in my experience.
Apple also had its duds. I owned an iBook G3 from 2001 to 2004. It is one of the laptops I kept least long! Why? Because the logic board failed. It was a known fault and my luck would have that it happened to me after the extended warranty (extended due to the know fault) ended at Apple. I tried getting it repaired but the repair quote cost me 170€ (No Apple stores in my country...) and the repair would have cost in excess of what a new laptop cost. Frankly, a 2000€ laptop (back in 2001 when I bought it) lasting a mere three years is unacceptable. All my PC machines lived in excess of 5 years, when the simply got too slow to be used on the desktop any more.
Sorry, mistyped the model number. It's "L502x".