If you bought something closed source, you'd have a license to go through, it just wouldn't be the GPL. If you read a book, there is no license: there's implied things you can and can't do with it, but no license printed in the beginning of the book. The same thing goes for art, music, and most other forms of copyrighted material. I don't know if it's possible to put a license on these things or not; I haven't seen it done. Before looking for a license to use on it, you might want to make sure that it's possible to apply a license to it.
Re:Not willing to go to jail to prove a point?
on
DMCA 2, Freedom 0
·
· Score: 1
I don't think that they meant it was a conspiracy, I think that they meant a big media corporation is more likely to be sympathetic to another big media corporation than to an individual. Plus, many of the companies that "bought" the DMCA are conglomerates that do own a large percentage of the media, especially the television media, which is the best way to reach Joe Sixpack.
FLTK or FOX (a little OT)
on
GTK-- vs. QT
·
· Score: 1
Both libraries you mentioned have their disadvantages (one isn't always free and isn't normal C++, the other doesn't exactly have the best windoze support), but IMHO, FLTK and FOX both seem to avoid these pitfalls. Both support windoze and unixy platforms with X. FOX is capable of doing more things, but FLTK is as fast a heck.
As for Safeweb, it's not "gone." If you're not willing to pay for the service then it clearly wasn't worth anything to you, so why are you all lamenting? If they are charging unreasonable prices then that's another story. But all you whiners make me sick.
If you pay for the service, you need a way to pay and they need an address to bill, hence you are not anonymous and the entire purpose of the service is defeated. (I know, they have the IP address you're coming from anyway, but if you're daisy chaining (going through proxies to other proxies) that won't help them unless they can get the cooperation of the owners of the proxies between you and them.)
Free (capital F) software is NOT Communism!!!
on
SourceForge Drifting
·
· Score: 1
The open source utopia reminds me of "Das Kapital" by Karl Marx. It resultet in Communism, which is a great way of life, if it was at all possible. It's about everyone being happy and sharing (open source). But we know how North Korea is doing, do you remember Sovjet and Cuba? It's just as bad as depotism or the French monrachies before the revolution.
Those all used force to make people give their stuff away. Nobody likes being made to give stuff up, so of course no one's going to motivated to work well under Communism. Free software is entirely voluntary. If you're coding to make a profit, you're right that there probably isn't much in Free software for you, but if you're coding for the love of code (the way the best software always seems to be done, whether Free or not) you ARE making a profit: other people see your program and "Hey neat program, by the way I wanted this feature so here's a patch to add it..." you see your creation grow.
What you have to ask yourself if you would accept open source/communism ideas in your daily life. Do you want to slave 12 hours a day and have the same living standard as someone who is just playing around all day (I rather play all day myself, but nobody is paying me for that)? Think about it some, what is the purpose of free software really?
People who had to slave twelve hours a day had to do it because their stuff was being taken away to give it to the goof-offs. Software is not food. If I eat your food, you can't eat it. If you give me a copy of your software, you still have your copy and nobody lost anything. It was because the stuff was taken away that they had to slave 12 hours to get more, with Free Software nobody has to slave twelve hours for anything because nothing's been taken away.
Please don't use the Free Software/Communism analogy because 1. It's wrong (see above) and 2. That is playing right into Microsoft et als' trap: "Communism" is already a negativly charged word in the public mind, and they'd love to have such an easy way to discredit Free Software "You don't want <product>, it's done by a bunch of commies, buy our product and support Capitalism" BOOM ideological biases kick in and the user buys without even thinking about technical quality.
Robert Heinlen is a VERY well-known science fiction writer. I would guess that at least 90% of Slashdotters have read at least one of his books.
Probably the best known of his books is "Stranger in a Strange Land", a book about a human being who was raised by Martians and later brought back to Earth. Martians (in the book) had an activity called "grokking" which was to understand deeply (deeper than the average human being ever does or will do). This is where the term "grok" (as you have probably seen it used here) comes from.
Another one of his books mentioned a lot on Slashdot is "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", which is about a prison colony on the moon (it's actually mainly inhabited by the descendants of the original inhabitants of the prison colony, but they're still treated like prisoners) that revolts to form its own nation, with the help of a self-aware computer.
Heinlen is also known for being rather vocal about his Libertarian views, and this sometimes comes across in his books, such as in "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls".
Whether or not you agree with his political views, you can still enjoy his works, and I strongly suggest that you try them.
If you let the Great Programmer into your life and remain faithful, you wouldn't have any reason to be angry.
Computer literacy under school control freaks?!
on
Laptops in Every Backpack
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Many teachers and school people in general are techno-phobic anal-retentive control freaks. (Yes, there are exceptions to the rule, but those are usually good teachers who are still stuck with their hands tied due to a control-freak principal.) They will often have the insane urge to regulate everything, to the extent that some poor kid gets yelled at for changing the background.
If the usage of laptops is at all regulated by the school, it won't help to acheive their computer literacy goals, because the students won't be allowed to experiment and learn and will be held down to the (generally low) level of computer literacy of the adults feeling the need to regulate them.
Forget anything about kids changing the operating system on their computer, they probably wouldn't even be allowed to install any new software. Can you imagine some bright seventh grader getting in trouble for installing a C compiler (or even Visual Basic)? I have not yet met a computer literate child who learned what they know under the paranoid control of the teachers. To really learn, they'd need to experiment, and I don't think there's much chance of a school allowing that.
To improve computer literacy, computers need to go to kids outside of the control of the school. Perhaps it is possible to teach them to act like a monkey pushing buttons (make a word document), but for them to actually learn anything they need to experiment and play. Due to the authoritarian nature of schools, the only place for this is outside of school.
SuSE is a good first distribution because it lets you work at whatever your level is. It has setup tools named YaST (Yet another Setup Tool) and YaST2 for general system work (adding a printer, etc.) and SaX (SuSE advanced XConfigurator) or SaX2 for setting up X (the base on which you run a GUI). As you learn more about Linux, you can rely less on the setup tools and begin to do stuff by hand, but the setup tools will still be there to use for the harder stuff and (here's what makes it different) the tools will continue to work despite (almost) any changes you have made without using the tools. This way if you feel like experimenting with something and the experiment goes wrong, you can use the tools to bail you out.
Another advantage of SuSE is that YaST/YaST2 work without X, which means that if something goes wrong and keeps you from running X you can still use the tools in case you need them to fix the problem. Since you've got an older computer, you will probably be glad the config tools don't use X just because of the increased speed.
Whatever you choose, have fun. Linux is Linux no matter what distro you use.
A couple sites that might be helpful with any distro: The Linux hardware compatibility database (http://lhd.datapower.com) and linmodems.org (http://www.linmodems.org). Often first-time Linux users will have winmodems, and win-just-about-every-thing-else. These sites can help get win-crap^h^h^h^hhardware working under Linux.
Is this some new way of testing the durability the machines? Just how heavy is Linux anyway? From what height did they drop it? ______________________________________
Producing a product doesn't mean you're entitled to make money from it, the other half of the free market is that there must be people willing to buy it. If a company goes out and produces a bad product and doesn't make money because no one is willing to buy crap, this is the free market working. Adobe has been producing a crappy product . People/corporations have been paying for this product. When someone comes along and shows that the product is a piece of crap, it's expected that there will be a major reduction in the amount profit for Adobe. There's nothing wrong with Adobe losing money over something that was (ultimately) their fault. ______________________________________
A useful (and non /.ed) site with downloads...
on
AtheOS 0.3.5 Released
·
· Score: 1
It seems that a lot of the spam-bots try to filter out certain forms of spam-proofing and remove the word spam from email addresses. After switching to an email account with the word "spam" actually as part of the username, my spam count has plummeted. Of course, time spent explaining to people that that actually is an email address and not spam-proofing is required, but you only need to tell someone once for all of the times they'd write, while you would have to delete spam every time it came in. ______________________________________
There is a large tendency to over-regulate computers as it is (DMCA, etc.). The last thing anyone (sane) would want to do is give the over-regulation MORE power. Think of all the recent cases (DeCSS, Dmitry Sklyarov, etc.)... you do NOT want the people who thought stuff like this illegal to have the power of the death penalty in their hands.
I meant to say that if you take a digital representation of any episode of Barney, XOR it with itsself, and OR the result with the DeCSS source code... ______________________________________
Anyone else notice that when you take a digital representation of any episode of Barney, XOR it with itsself, and then AND the result with the DeCSS source code, you get a copy of the DeCSS source code?
If the MPAA is stupid enough to be unable to understand DeCSS isn't for copying DVDs, are they stupid enough to fall for the above? ______________________________________
'open source: "share and enjoy"; shared source: "look but don't touch"'
Could that be why Microsoft's being nasty towards open source? Maybe they aren't evil after all, they just think we're telling them to "go stick your head in a pig"? ______________________________________
People expect some sort of anonymity online. If all Doubleclick had tried to do was customize which banners you saw, that wouldn't have been so evil. There was something going on (I don't remember the details) where other companies would look for Doubleclick cookies when you gave personal information to buy something, and if you had a Doubleclick cookie your Doubleclick identity was linked to your real identity. (Again, I don't remember the details, and I don't remember if they're still doing this.) The other evil thing about online data collecting companies is spam.
You are not giving anyone your address by watching a television show. The cable companies ALREADY know your address from your billing info. Your cable company will know who you are whether they do customized ads or not. If they tried to sell your profile combined with your address to tree-spam companies, THAT would be evil. ______________________________________
GNU Basic (www.multimania.com/sxpert/gnuvb/ for the goat wary) Gnome Basic (www.gnome.org/gb for the goat wary) KBasic (www.kbasic.org for the goat wary)
I love that joke, but I don't really think it's very accurate anymore. Linux is, in general, very easy to install these days. Red Hat 7.1 went onto my computer way easier than Windows ever has, and everything works (well except for my printer which will print post script fine, but not text, but I can't say that I have ever had a completely cleans Windows Install either) without a whole lot of effort on my part.
When you say "installs easily", you are right, for people who have prior knowledge. Yes, Linux is to the level where the install is easy for the people who are familiar with basic concepts (hard disk partitioning, or even what a hard disk is), but (for example) the average English teacher wishing to do report cards via computer will not be able to do it. I'm referring to the less computer literate portion of computer users, the people who might not make it through a Windows install and just use whatever's already there. No matter how simple the Linux install gets, those people (and there are a lot of them) will not be able to do it. People who don't really care what system they are using in the first place "so long as I can get task xxx done". If you take a few hours to explain to them the advantages of Linux (crashes a lot less, free), and ensure them that you will help them through the "technical stuff", you'd be surprised how they'd respond (people in "the real world" are fed up with crashing software too). Once they have the system set up and have learned to use it for the tasks they need, they won't notice the technical differences, but they will notice two things: the stability and the price. All they usually will want to do is a few basic tasks (surf the web, print things, etc.), and it doesn't take that long to show them those few tasks. The levels where they would notice major differences are levels they probably never tried to go to with Windows anyway.
Windows comes on the computer- "Why should I install this Linux thing? The computer works fine now." There is not a damn thig to be done about this. Until you can go into CompUSA and buy a computer with linux on it and get support from some guy sitting behind a counter at a major retail chain, forget it. People are afraid to install APPLICATION SOFTWARE, forget about OS's. When I look at the CompUSA ads and see that they offer free installation of simple utility programs, I think "Damn, there is actually a demand for someone to install Office as an add on service.", my neighbor thinks "Well great, now I don't have to pay someone to install Office for me." The non-technical user is a lost cause until an alternative OS can get preinstalled in a retail chain.
Remember, this is probably the same "non-technical user" who has their nephew (why does it always seem to be a nephew?) take care of all the "technical stuff" such as software installs, etc. (depending on the experience of the nephew in question, this may or may not be a good thing). If it works, they really don't care. In terms of convincing them to switch, remember that it does not take someone technically oriented to resent losing their work to a system crash or wasting time rebooting. One of the best times to talk to someone about switching is after Windows has done something to get the user really upset (even if it was actually a Windows-based program an not Windows its self). Also, there seems to be some basic human trait to make people resent "success" and root for "the underdog", which can be appealed easily in most people. Once you've helped them set up, it doesn't take that long to make sure it continues to work. So long as there is the "technical person" there on the occasion that they have trouble (either to fix it or to talk to the "scary" tech support person for them) they're happy. The average Slashdotter is probably already serving as the "technical person" for a couple non-technical friends/relatives/coworkers (even if it is only due to the fact it would be rude to tell them to go away), so if you're going to be in that position anyway...
I don't really have a response to your point two... but like you said, the situation keeps improving. ______________________________________
Slashdot Mirror
If you bought something closed source, you'd have a license to go through, it just wouldn't be the GPL. If you read a book, there is no license: there's implied things you can and can't do with it, but no license printed in the beginning of the book. The same thing goes for art, music, and most other forms of copyrighted material. I don't know if it's possible to put a license on these things or not; I haven't seen it done. Before looking for a license to use on it, you might want to make sure that it's possible to apply a license to it.
I don't think that they meant it was a conspiracy, I think that they meant a big media corporation is more likely to be sympathetic to another big media corporation than to an individual. Plus, many of the companies that "bought" the DMCA are conglomerates that do own a large percentage of the media, especially the television media, which is the best way to reach Joe Sixpack.
Both libraries you mentioned have their disadvantages (one isn't always free and isn't normal C++, the other doesn't exactly have the best windoze support), but IMHO, FLTK and FOX both seem to avoid these pitfalls. Both support windoze and unixy platforms with X. FOX is capable of doing more things, but FLTK is as fast a heck.
As for Safeweb, it's not "gone." If you're not willing to pay for the service then it clearly wasn't worth anything to you, so why are you all lamenting? If they are charging unreasonable prices then that's another story. But all you whiners make me sick.
If you pay for the service, you need a way to pay and they need an address to bill, hence you are not anonymous and the entire purpose of the service is defeated. (I know, they have the IP address you're coming from anyway, but if you're daisy chaining (going through proxies to other proxies) that won't help them unless they can get the cooperation of the owners of the proxies between you and them.)
The open source utopia reminds me of "Das Kapital" by Karl Marx. It resultet in Communism, which is a great way of life, if it was at all possible. It's about everyone being happy and sharing (open source). But we know how North Korea is doing, do you remember Sovjet and Cuba? It's just as bad as depotism or the French monrachies before the revolution.
Those all used force to make people give their stuff away. Nobody likes being made to give stuff up, so of course no one's going to motivated to work well under Communism. Free software is entirely voluntary. If you're coding to make a profit, you're right that there probably isn't much in Free software for you, but if you're coding for the love of code (the way the best software always seems to be done, whether Free or not) you ARE making a profit: other people see your program and "Hey neat program, by the way I wanted this feature so here's a patch to add it..." you see your creation grow.
What you have to ask yourself if you would accept open source/communism ideas in your daily life. Do you want to slave 12 hours a day and have the same living standard as someone who is just playing around all day (I rather play all day myself, but nobody is paying me for that)? Think about it some, what is the purpose of free software really?
People who had to slave twelve hours a day had to do it because their stuff was being taken away to give it to the goof-offs. Software is not food. If I eat your food, you can't eat it. If you give me a copy of your software, you still have your copy and nobody lost anything. It was because the stuff was taken away that they had to slave 12 hours to get more, with Free Software nobody has to slave twelve hours for anything because nothing's been taken away.
Please don't use the Free Software/Communism analogy because
1. It's wrong (see above) and
2. That is playing right into Microsoft et als' trap: "Communism" is already a negativly charged word in the public mind, and they'd love to have such an easy way to discredit Free Software "You don't want <product>, it's done by a bunch of commies, buy our product and support Capitalism" BOOM ideological biases kick in and the user buys without even thinking about technical quality.
Robert Heinlen is a VERY well-known science fiction writer. I would guess that at least 90% of Slashdotters have read at least one of his books.
Probably the best known of his books is "Stranger in a Strange Land", a book about a human being who was raised by Martians and later brought back to Earth. Martians (in the book) had an activity called "grokking" which was to understand deeply (deeper than the average human being ever does or will do). This is where the term "grok" (as you have probably seen it used here) comes from.
Another one of his books mentioned a lot on Slashdot is "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", which is about a prison colony on the moon (it's actually mainly inhabited by the descendants of the original inhabitants of the prison colony, but they're still treated like prisoners) that revolts to form its own nation, with the help of a self-aware computer.
Heinlen is also known for being rather vocal about his Libertarian views, and this sometimes comes across in his books, such as in "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls".
Whether or not you agree with his political views, you can still enjoy his works, and I strongly suggest that you try them.
How could anyone forget the man who taught us about the fnords?
If you haven't read his work yet, you don't know what you're missing. Try here for some book excerpts. It's probably best to start with the fiction, like The Illuminatus! Trilogy and The Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy.
that Zork was a terrorist training tool. ;-)
Anyone who already knows Lisp have any suggestions on a good place to start?
From the Elcomsoft press release:
Those interested in contributing to Sklyarov's defense fund should make donations by wire to:
First Union National Bank
Philadelphia, PA
ABA #031201467
Account #: 2000104359781
Account Name: Duane, Morris & Heckscher LLP
Escrow Account
Contributors MUST reference "The Dmitri Defense Fund - R0247-2" on all incoming wires.
Donations by Check should be sent to the following address:
The Dmitri Defense Fund
c/o Duane, Morris & Heckscher LLP
100 Spear Street, Suite 1500
San Francisco, California 94105
USA
Checks must be payable to "DMH Escrow Agent for Dmitri Defense Fund."
Just in case anybody didn't read the article...
If you let the Great Programmer into your life and remain faithful, you wouldn't have any reason to be angry.
Many teachers and school people in general are techno-phobic anal-retentive control freaks. (Yes, there are exceptions to the rule, but those are usually good teachers who are still stuck with their hands tied due to a control-freak principal.) They will often have the insane urge to regulate everything, to the extent that some poor kid gets yelled at for changing the background.
If the usage of laptops is at all regulated by the school, it won't help to acheive their computer literacy goals, because the students won't be allowed to experiment and learn and will be held down to the (generally low) level of computer literacy of the adults feeling the need to regulate them.
Forget anything about kids changing the operating system on their computer, they probably wouldn't even be allowed to install any new software. Can you imagine some bright seventh grader getting in trouble for installing a C compiler (or even Visual Basic)? I have not yet met a computer literate child who learned what they know under the paranoid control of the teachers. To really learn, they'd need to experiment, and I don't think there's much chance of a school allowing that.
To improve computer literacy, computers need to go to kids outside of the control of the school. Perhaps it is possible to teach them to act like a monkey pushing buttons (make a word document), but for them to actually learn anything they need to experiment and play. Due to the authoritarian nature of schools, the only place for this is outside of school.
SuSE is a good first distribution because it lets you work at whatever your level is. It has setup tools named YaST (Yet another Setup Tool) and YaST2 for general system work (adding a printer, etc.) and SaX (SuSE advanced XConfigurator) or SaX2 for setting up X (the base on which you run a GUI). As you learn more about Linux, you can rely less on the setup tools and begin to do stuff by hand, but the setup tools will still be there to use for the harder stuff and (here's what makes it different) the tools will continue to work despite (almost) any changes you have made without using the tools. This way if you feel like experimenting with something and the experiment goes wrong, you can use the tools to bail you out.
Another advantage of SuSE is that YaST/YaST2 work without X, which means that if something goes wrong and keeps you from running X you can still use the tools in case you need them to fix the problem. Since you've got an older computer, you will probably be glad the config tools don't use X just because of the increased speed.
Whatever you choose, have fun. Linux is Linux no matter what distro you use.
A couple sites that might be helpful with any distro: The Linux hardware compatibility database (http://lhd.datapower.com) and linmodems.org (http://www.linmodems.org). Often first-time Linux users will have winmodems, and win-just-about-every-thing-else. These sites can help get win-crap^h^h^h^hhardware working under Linux.
Is this some new way of testing the durability the machines? Just how heavy is Linux anyway? From what height did they drop it?
______________________________________
Producing a product doesn't mean you're entitled to make money from it, the other half of the free market is that there must be people willing to buy it. If a company goes out and produces a bad product and doesn't make money because no one is willing to buy crap, this is the free market working. Adobe has been producing a crappy product . People/corporations have been paying for this product. When someone comes along and shows that the product is a piece of crap, it's expected that there will be a major reduction in the amount profit for Adobe. There's nothing wrong with Adobe losing money over something that was (ultimately) their fault.
______________________________________
www.atheos.com._ _____
________________________________
It seems that a lot of the spam-bots try to filter out certain forms of spam-proofing and remove the word spam from email addresses. After switching to an email account with the word "spam" actually as part of the username, my spam count has plummeted. Of course, time spent explaining to people that that actually is an email address and not spam-proofing is required, but you only need to tell someone once for all of the times they'd write, while you would have to delete spam every time it came in.
______________________________________
I know this is a humor piece, but still...
There is a large tendency to over-regulate computers as it is (DMCA, etc.). The last thing anyone (sane) would want to do is give the over-regulation MORE power. Think of all the recent cases (DeCSS, Dmitry Sklyarov, etc.)... you do NOT want the people who thought stuff like this illegal to have the power of the death penalty in their hands.
______________________________________
Oops, pre coffee.
I meant to say that if you take a digital representation of any episode of Barney, XOR it with itsself, and OR the result with the DeCSS source code...
______________________________________
Anyone else notice that when you take a digital representation of any episode of Barney, XOR it with itsself, and then AND the result with the DeCSS source code, you get a copy of the DeCSS source code?
If the MPAA is stupid enough to be unable to understand DeCSS isn't for copying DVDs, are they stupid enough to fall for the above?
______________________________________
It's still legal to link to it!!
______________________________________
'open source: "share and enjoy"; shared source: "look but don't touch"'
Could that be why Microsoft's being nasty towards open source? Maybe they aren't evil after all, they just think we're telling them to "go stick your head in a pig"?
______________________________________
People expect some sort of anonymity online. If all Doubleclick had tried to do was customize which banners you saw, that wouldn't have been so evil. There was something going on (I don't remember the details) where other companies would look for Doubleclick cookies when you gave personal information to buy something, and if you had a Doubleclick cookie your Doubleclick identity was linked to your real identity. (Again, I don't remember the details, and I don't remember if they're still doing this.) The other evil thing about online data collecting companies is spam.
You are not giving anyone your address by watching a television show. The cable companies ALREADY know your address from your billing info. Your cable company will know who you are whether they do customized ads or not. If they tried to sell your profile combined with your address to tree-spam companies, THAT would be evil.
______________________________________
GNU Basic (www.multimania.com/sxpert/gnuvb/ for the goat wary)
Gnome Basic (www.gnome.org/gb for the goat wary)
KBasic (www.kbasic.org for the goat wary)
______________________________________
I love that joke, but I don't really think it's very accurate anymore. Linux is, in general, very easy to install these days. Red Hat 7.1 went onto my computer way easier than Windows ever has, and everything works (well except for my printer which will print post script fine, but not text, but I can't say that I have ever had a completely cleans Windows Install either) without a whole lot of effort on my part.
_
When you say "installs easily", you are right, for people who have prior knowledge. Yes, Linux is to the level where the install is easy for the people who are familiar with basic concepts (hard disk partitioning, or even what a hard disk is), but (for example) the average English teacher wishing to do report cards via computer will not be able to do it. I'm referring to the less computer literate portion of computer users, the people who might not make it through a Windows install and just use whatever's already there. No matter how simple the Linux install gets, those people (and there are a lot of them) will not be able to do it. People who don't really care what system they are using in the first place "so long as I can get task xxx done". If you take a few hours to explain to them the advantages of Linux (crashes a lot less, free), and ensure them that you will help them through the "technical stuff", you'd be surprised how they'd respond (people in "the real world" are fed up with crashing software too). Once they have the system set up and have learned to use it for the tasks they need, they won't notice the technical differences, but they will notice two things: the stability and the price. All they usually will want to do is a few basic tasks (surf the web, print things, etc.), and it doesn't take that long to show them those few tasks. The levels where they would notice major differences are levels they probably never tried to go to with Windows anyway.
Windows comes on the computer- "Why should I install this Linux thing? The computer works fine now." There is not a damn thig to be done about this. Until you can go into CompUSA and buy a computer with linux on it and get support from some guy sitting behind a counter at a major retail chain, forget it. People are afraid to install APPLICATION SOFTWARE, forget about OS's. When I look at the CompUSA ads and see that they offer free installation of simple utility programs, I think "Damn, there is actually a demand for someone to install Office as an add on service.", my neighbor thinks "Well great, now I don't have to pay someone to install Office for me." The non-technical user is a lost cause until an alternative OS can get preinstalled in a retail chain.
Remember, this is probably the same "non-technical user" who has their nephew (why does it always seem to be a nephew?) take care of all the "technical stuff" such as software installs, etc. (depending on the experience of the nephew in question, this may or may not be a good thing). If it works, they really don't care. In terms of convincing them to switch, remember that it does not take someone technically oriented to resent losing their work to a system crash or wasting time rebooting. One of the best times to talk to someone about switching is after Windows has done something to get the user really upset (even if it was actually a Windows-based program an not Windows its self). Also, there seems to be some basic human trait to make people resent "success" and root for "the underdog", which can be appealed easily in most people. Once you've helped them set up, it doesn't take that long to make sure it continues to work. So long as there is the "technical person" there on the occasion that they have trouble (either to fix it or to talk to the "scary" tech support person for them) they're happy. The average Slashdotter is probably already serving as the "technical person" for a couple non-technical friends/relatives/coworkers (even if it is only due to the fact it would be rude to tell them to go away), so if you're going to be in that position anyway...
I don't really have a response to your point two... but like you said, the situation keeps improving.
_____________________________________