When I was at school, aged 15 or 16, (not particularly long ago) they did try to teach us to cook. There were two major problems, however: it was under the heading of 'food technology', and the teaching standard was absolutely terrible.
The problem with that title was all the baggage that came with it. The course required things like design briefs and so on, because they had shoehorned cooking into the same (mandatory and poorly taught) stream as woodworking and other similar courses. The idea of rotating between cooking, woodwork and a few other modules that don't stick in my mind was a good one, but they made it almost totally useless by the way they structured the exercise. The teachers might even have been competent if they'd been left to show us the practical aspects of how to make 'x', but I remain dubious about that.
There was also a course called PSE (personal and social education). They have since attached about 3 further letters to the name, but the concept remains the same - a small amount of time dedicated to the teaching of general life skills as you suggested. It was also an absolute joke. Basically, just imagine a syllabus written by the hippie stereotype teacher from Beavis and Butthead and a government education minister. Their hearts were in the right place, but the implementation was a complete failure - the students didn't take it seriously, the teachers didn't know what they were doing and nobody really achieved anything. If they'd thrown us some useful factual information on these life skills rather than having a room full of bored teenagers sit and listen to feel-good crap that didn't really apply to their lives, it would probably have worked a lot better.
My point, I suppose, is that any attempt at direct, practical education that I've seen has been chewed up and spat out by the same buzzword-wielding bureaucrats who think it's a good idea to set targets for the entirety of the school-leaving population to go to university, only for many of them to waste three or four years and a huge amount of money that could have been used learning a skilled trade as the summary suggests.
I think the point was Dollhouse vs Firefly, not Dollhouse vs SCC. Dollhouse got pretty interesting towards the end, but it was not a patch on Firefly.
Fox have now acknowledged their mistake in cancelling Firefly by saying "Hmm, we made a mistake last time. Rather than resurrect the show we shouldn't have cancelled in the first place for a second season, we'll renew the newer, less popular show by the same people."
Maybe I underestimate people, but I rarely go wrong by assuming low scientific literacy in the general population. Admittedly I didn't RTFA, I just assumed it was the BBC one I'd read earlier in the day, so I was thinking it was aimed at a general audience.
I will, of course, also ensure that I use the -lifeform suffix in future to ensure I don't cause any offence to non-person citizens:)
What's equally odd is that to the layperson I'm sure 'data encoding using differing polarisations and wavelengths of light' means about as much as 'data encoding in five dimensions'. I guess they decided the latter sounds better.
Maybe it's just part of the geek mindset. I do want to know how the watch works, or how the car is put together, or how they get the bristles into the toothbrush, or whatever.
Just because that understanding isn't strictly necessary to use the product doesn't mean I don't want to know. Moreover, when I do know how something works I'm much more likely to be able to take an educated guess at how I might overcome a problem for myself.
If everyone knew what was going on the need for technicians would vanish. It's time to get over it and be professional and do your job which is helping people do their jobs by supporting their technology.
I know what you mean, and I don't think anyone sees it as a major problem, but the reason that it annoys me is that (in my experience) the customers who do things like calling the computer a hard drive are the ones who are under the deluded impression that they know what they're talking about. I have no issue with a pleasant customer who puts a computer on my desk and says "Err, it's not working."; as you said, it's my job to know how to diagnose and fix the computer, not theirs. I find it irritating when someone with the same level of knowledge tells me "My hard drive is broken, does it need more RAM?" or some equally nonsensical statement. If you don't know what you're talking about there's no harm in admitting it, you look a lot worse stringing together random 'tech' words in the hope that you sound smart.
In cree the word for monitor I have found is teevee. The word for computer is hard drive. Who am I to say they are wrong? I just have to make it's still working for them when I am 500 miles away back home.
Separate issue, in my opinion. In the context of the article we're communicating in fluent English. In English, hard drive and computer are not synonyms.
With regard to your first point, I have to disagree. I think I have more power to remove a member of my government (thus depriving them of that salary) than I do to change the upper management of major companies which have a major impact on my life. I also think history has shown that poor performance on the part of a business owner is by no means a guarantee to failure and good performance from a politician is no guarantee of success (and vice versa).
You misinterpreted my second point, however. I actually agree with your take on the matter. I wasn't saying that we should accept the consequences of the selfish actions of politicians, I was saying that we should acknowledge that many (most? all?) people are often going to act in their own self interest at the expense of others - we are not going to be able to change this part of people's nature, so we should ensure (to use the exact words of my original post) "the limitations on the remit of any particular agency should err strongly on the side of 'too strict'". That sounds pretty much like what you're saying when you suggest we "work hard to keep it in check". Accept that's how people are going to behave, and set up the system to prevent it from being damaging, or indeed to make it so that their self interest and the public's interests are one and the same.
Firstly: it's lucky you don't have modpoints, that's not how the system's supposed to work. There's no '-1: Disagree' moderation. You're supposed to discuss, not to hide what you don't happen to agree with.
Secondly: yes, I think the NHS is worth the money, overall at least. I also agree with you that organisations which would never work in the private sector (I don't know enough about English Heritage to comment specifically) can often, but not always, be a good use of public money.
I agree with the GP too, though. The multiple layers of bureaucracy waste an astonishing amount of money doing things that we have come to accept are 'part of what the government does'. The majority of politicians are in it for money and power, just like the majority of businesspeople; we should accept that, because it's not changing any time soon. It's not necessarily inherently harmful, it just means that the limitations on the remit of any particular agency should err strongly on the side of 'too strict' - that is very much not the case now.
Well it worked... I've already used up all my actual graphics outputs and now I'm trying to think of an excuse (other than "it's cool") to get an expensive USB touchscreen.
Damn companies trying to trick me with that whole "making stuff I want to buy" scam.
But Google does accurately provide the link to the brand you asked for. It's almost invariably the top link of the actual search results, which are freely included and not interfered with by Adsense payments. In fact, for any moderately popular brand there will be pages upon pages filled entirely with various suppliers of precisely the trademarked brand name you searched for.
The search results - the 'true' product of your search, include only the keyword Armani. To me this is akin to being placed in the Armani section of the hypothetical store. Surrounding the search results, but separate from them, are the context adverts - these point to other brands you are likely to be interested in. Akin to flyers, or posters on the wall, in my opinion.
I think the key issue is that they do not redirect or alter the main body of your search. Only the data presented alongside, related to but not part of the search is for sale.
Fair point, but I'm still inclined to believe Google is in the right here. Apart from anything else, the actual non-sponsored listings are not affected, and they're free; if I search for American Airlines the first real result is their website, at no cost to them whatsoever. The only cost is if a company demands to be top in the sponsored listings as well, and to block out the suggestion of their competitors' products.
To warp a tenuous analogy even further: Google is like a department store. The customer enters and asks an assistant to direct them to the Armani suits. The assistant immediately shows them to the Armani section and while doing so also hands them a flyer suggesting they may also like to look at Gucci or Prada.
I can't think of any reasons to have a problem with it other than the excessively contrived or the whining spoilsport types. It's a cool project, it took up a window for maybe a day, and there was a bit of noise outside for a few hours.
I don't think anyone's particularly saying they're offended, just that the marketing scheme is a bit of a joke.
Imagine they made a website targeting a male stereotype, showing a laptop being used in some sports context on a backdrop of explosions and guitar riffs. I can only assume the average Slashdotter would chuckle and treat it as if it were marketing to 'dumb jocks', pointing out that it didn't even mention the technical merits of the machine. We wouldn't be offended, but I think most people here would look down on the site with something between disdain and pity. I expect the phrase "How stupid do they think we are?" would come up, with people wondering why one wouldn't just buy it on the normal Dell site where actual product comparisons are available.
That's what people are saying here - not that it's deeply offensive, just that the level of sophistication is laughable and that talking down to one's customers is a quick way to lose them.
You're right, the number of exploits doesn't necessarily mean it's a more secure system, but the fact that (as you say) there aren't a proportionate amount to the size of the userbase does seem to imply decent security.
I personally haven't heard of any exploit in the wild except the trojan, for which the user has to be willing to provide their password to any old bit of software with unknown providence - to be honest I don't know how one could protect against that on any system. If there are other exploits out there I would like to know about it, but if there aren't then the author has no right to say it's "trivial to launch exploits against the Mac" unless he's demonstrating that by writing them himself.
You misunderstand; the speed rankings were taken from the Futuremark article, which used specific benchmarking software. I just added the Acid3 results to demonstrate that fast does not equate to poor rendering quality.
Interesting idea, but the Acid3 test seems to disagree. In order of fastest to slowest browser (taken from TFA), the test results are (according to Wikipedia):
I do, however, agree with another poster who pointed out that it's odd that Safari was the only beta included. If they'd included Opera and Chrome's preview releases they'd have scored 100 on the Acid3, and potentially higher on the speed tests too.
Did they present you with any alternative version of the story?
While I admittedly don't put much faith in a story on a blog by some guy I've never heard of, I am (for the moment) more inclined to believe the person who went public with something that they would otherwise have had no reason to comment on over the officer who stands to come out looking like an ass.
Although you jest, I'm actually surprised at how confident and competent the NSA seem here. Maybe it's just an (unfair?) association I've built up that government organisation = technically incompetent, and I know they employ a lot of very smart people, but it surprises me that they were so far ahead of the teams that they could pick exactly what level of difficulty to set their attacks at.
Seeing at some of the work that's presented at conventions, the brilliantly paranoid security systems that the likes of OpenBSD have, and some of the distinctly embarrassing news stories about the latest government network being hacked by some guy in a basement, I guess I was just expecting the NSA to get more of a run for their money than "Yeah, we pitched it so they couldn't quite win. No problem really."
I'd be interested to see how a team harvested from the basements of MIT or Caltech would stack up in a challenge like this, actually.
I haven't used Office 07, although from what I've seen of it in the news I think I'd probably agree with you - I'm surprised if companies are happy to switch to it without factoring in retraining but not to do the same for OpenOffice.
Windows 7, however, still seems like an evolutionary step in interface design - it still 'feels' like XP, which actually surprised me. I've not used Vista for more than a few minutes so I can't comment on that really. I don't use Windows that much any more at all, actually, but I've got the Release Candidate running in a VM to see what it's like, and honestly the only interface feature that really struck me was the OSX style 'dock' taskbar; I'm sure that's going to result in a good few calls to tech support when it rolls out.
You have to look at it in the right way - to you or me Windows 7's interface doesn't operate differently (on a broad level) to OSX or Ubuntu, but try using one or other with the 'list of things to click on' mentality. You'll see that the vast majority of changes that MS makes to the Windows interface don't break that line of thinking - often if they do move things they're still using the same icon and in roughly the same place. Trying to do that on Ubuntu won't work - things have moved, they have different names, different icons and they look different when they open up; it's nothing that couldn't be remedied with an hour (at the very most) of looking around the screen and reading things, but because of a combination of people's acceptance that they "don't get computers" (or indeed even their wilful ignorance) and plain old laziness and resistance to change, they will decide that their new computer is not ready to use like their old one was.
The only way I can see around this is marketing. Linux netbooks were pretty much marketed as 'just another computer' and people accordingly expected them to be like every computer they'd used before - hence all the problems I've mentioned in these last two posts. If a company (Apple, I'm guessing) were to make a major point of how their interface is a whole new idea (not true, but this is advertising...) far in advance of their competitors they'd have a much better chance of people opening the box with a different mindset.
People like you are a tiny minority in the market, though, that's the issue here. You already use open source software, you know how to adapt to a different desktop environment, you know in advance what your preferred programs are, and so on. Perhaps more importantly, you don't immediately blind yourself to what's written on the screen in front of you just because the box it's written in looks a bit different.
Most users are scared by what they don't recognise, and an awful lot of them still insist on learning to do things by rote, memorising a set of steps rather than taking the (short) time needed to get an understanding of what they're doing. One of the things that always gets me is when someone asks (for example) how to print something - I don't blame them for not knowing how to perform a certain task, but nine times out of ten they could have worked it out for themselves simply by bringing up each menu in turn and reading them until they saw 'Print'. Not only that, they'd then remember for next time, no help needed. As it is though, they'll ask and more often than not someone will just tell them rather than gently directing them to think about it; subsequently they remember "Click the menu at the top left then hit 'Print' near the bottom", which is OK in itself. Then when they come to the next task, say making a new document, they ask someone else, and remember the rough location on the menu...
To them, Linux is not ready to go - I'm surprised how many people seem to be misinterpreting that comment. It's not ready to go because it doesn't look familiar enough, because things aren't in the same place, because things are labelled differently. I find it unfortunate that so many intelligent people still see computers as something that they don't understand, and therefore never make the effort to try to get the basics, but for now that's how things are and that's why Linux is more work than Windows for the average user.
There are plenty of 'just a phone' handsets out there. They work perfectly well, they're cheap and by definition they don't really need to be updated or redesigned - that's why they never make the news.
What do you expect the headlines to read? "Nokia 1100 still excellent basic phone, just like it was six years ago"?
The funny thing is, it seems like there's not really a comparable alternative in some Western countries.
Tata is pitching their homes at about 1.5 times their target market's annual income. Relatively speaking, it looks like that would place these at about £35,000 in the UK. In comparison, the Ikea homes were placed at a minimum of three times the income of the target market, and more like 5 or 6 times in many cases.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was at school, aged 15 or 16, (not particularly long ago) they did try to teach us to cook. There were two major problems, however: it was under the heading of 'food technology', and the teaching standard was absolutely terrible.
The problem with that title was all the baggage that came with it. The course required things like design briefs and so on, because they had shoehorned cooking into the same (mandatory and poorly taught) stream as woodworking and other similar courses. The idea of rotating between cooking, woodwork and a few other modules that don't stick in my mind was a good one, but they made it almost totally useless by the way they structured the exercise. The teachers might even have been competent if they'd been left to show us the practical aspects of how to make 'x', but I remain dubious about that.
There was also a course called PSE (personal and social education). They have since attached about 3 further letters to the name, but the concept remains the same - a small amount of time dedicated to the teaching of general life skills as you suggested. It was also an absolute joke. Basically, just imagine a syllabus written by the hippie stereotype teacher from Beavis and Butthead and a government education minister. Their hearts were in the right place, but the implementation was a complete failure - the students didn't take it seriously, the teachers didn't know what they were doing and nobody really achieved anything. If they'd thrown us some useful factual information on these life skills rather than having a room full of bored teenagers sit and listen to feel-good crap that didn't really apply to their lives, it would probably have worked a lot better.
My point, I suppose, is that any attempt at direct, practical education that I've seen has been chewed up and spat out by the same buzzword-wielding bureaucrats who think it's a good idea to set targets for the entirety of the school-leaving population to go to university, only for many of them to waste three or four years and a huge amount of money that could have been used learning a skilled trade as the summary suggests.
I think the point was Dollhouse vs Firefly, not Dollhouse vs SCC. Dollhouse got pretty interesting towards the end, but it was not a patch on Firefly.
Fox have now acknowledged their mistake in cancelling Firefly by saying "Hmm, we made a mistake last time. Rather than resurrect the show we shouldn't have cancelled in the first place for a second season, we'll renew the newer, less popular show by the same people."
Maybe I underestimate people, but I rarely go wrong by assuming low scientific literacy in the general population. Admittedly I didn't RTFA, I just assumed it was the BBC one I'd read earlier in the day, so I was thinking it was aimed at a general audience.
I will, of course, also ensure that I use the -lifeform suffix in future to ensure I don't cause any offence to non-person citizens :)
What's equally odd is that to the layperson I'm sure 'data encoding using differing polarisations and wavelengths of light' means about as much as 'data encoding in five dimensions'. I guess they decided the latter sounds better.
Which is a damn shame, since PDF is actually a decent document format.
Maybe it's just part of the geek mindset. I do want to know how the watch works, or how the car is put together, or how they get the bristles into the toothbrush, or whatever.
Just because that understanding isn't strictly necessary to use the product doesn't mean I don't want to know. Moreover, when I do know how something works I'm much more likely to be able to take an educated guess at how I might overcome a problem for myself.
If everyone knew what was going on the need for technicians would vanish. It's time to get over it and be professional and do your job which is helping people do their jobs by supporting their technology.
I know what you mean, and I don't think anyone sees it as a major problem, but the reason that it annoys me is that (in my experience) the customers who do things like calling the computer a hard drive are the ones who are under the deluded impression that they know what they're talking about. I have no issue with a pleasant customer who puts a computer on my desk and says "Err, it's not working."; as you said, it's my job to know how to diagnose and fix the computer, not theirs. I find it irritating when someone with the same level of knowledge tells me "My hard drive is broken, does it need more RAM?" or some equally nonsensical statement. If you don't know what you're talking about there's no harm in admitting it, you look a lot worse stringing together random 'tech' words in the hope that you sound smart.
In cree the word for monitor I have found is teevee. The word for computer is hard drive. Who am I to say they are wrong? I just have to make it's still working for them when I am 500 miles away back home.
Separate issue, in my opinion. In the context of the article we're communicating in fluent English. In English, hard drive and computer are not synonyms.
With regard to your first point, I have to disagree. I think I have more power to remove a member of my government (thus depriving them of that salary) than I do to change the upper management of major companies which have a major impact on my life. I also think history has shown that poor performance on the part of a business owner is by no means a guarantee to failure and good performance from a politician is no guarantee of success (and vice versa).
You misinterpreted my second point, however. I actually agree with your take on the matter. I wasn't saying that we should accept the consequences of the selfish actions of politicians, I was saying that we should acknowledge that many (most? all?) people are often going to act in their own self interest at the expense of others - we are not going to be able to change this part of people's nature, so we should ensure (to use the exact words of my original post) "the limitations on the remit of any particular agency should err strongly on the side of 'too strict'". That sounds pretty much like what you're saying when you suggest we "work hard to keep it in check". Accept that's how people are going to behave, and set up the system to prevent it from being damaging, or indeed to make it so that their self interest and the public's interests are one and the same.
Firstly: it's lucky you don't have modpoints, that's not how the system's supposed to work. There's no '-1: Disagree' moderation. You're supposed to discuss, not to hide what you don't happen to agree with.
Secondly: yes, I think the NHS is worth the money, overall at least. I also agree with you that organisations which would never work in the private sector (I don't know enough about English Heritage to comment specifically) can often, but not always, be a good use of public money.
I agree with the GP too, though. The multiple layers of bureaucracy waste an astonishing amount of money doing things that we have come to accept are 'part of what the government does'. The majority of politicians are in it for money and power, just like the majority of businesspeople; we should accept that, because it's not changing any time soon. It's not necessarily inherently harmful, it just means that the limitations on the remit of any particular agency should err strongly on the side of 'too strict' - that is very much not the case now.
So they weren't left to suffer the consequences of their poor business decisions, they were propped up with public money instead.
Well it worked... I've already used up all my actual graphics outputs and now I'm trying to think of an excuse (other than "it's cool") to get an expensive USB touchscreen.
Damn companies trying to trick me with that whole "making stuff I want to buy" scam.
But Google does accurately provide the link to the brand you asked for. It's almost invariably the top link of the actual search results, which are freely included and not interfered with by Adsense payments. In fact, for any moderately popular brand there will be pages upon pages filled entirely with various suppliers of precisely the trademarked brand name you searched for.
The search results - the 'true' product of your search, include only the keyword Armani. To me this is akin to being placed in the Armani section of the hypothetical store. Surrounding the search results, but separate from them, are the context adverts - these point to other brands you are likely to be interested in. Akin to flyers, or posters on the wall, in my opinion.
I think the key issue is that they do not redirect or alter the main body of your search. Only the data presented alongside, related to but not part of the search is for sale.
Fair point, but I'm still inclined to believe Google is in the right here. Apart from anything else, the actual non-sponsored listings are not affected, and they're free; if I search for American Airlines the first real result is their website, at no cost to them whatsoever. The only cost is if a company demands to be top in the sponsored listings as well, and to block out the suggestion of their competitors' products.
To warp a tenuous analogy even further: Google is like a department store. The customer enters and asks an assistant to direct them to the Armani suits. The assistant immediately shows them to the Armani section and while doing so also hands them a flyer suggesting they may also like to look at Gucci or Prada.
I can't think of any reasons to have a problem with it other than the excessively contrived or the whining spoilsport types. It's a cool project, it took up a window for maybe a day, and there was a bit of noise outside for a few hours.
To put it bluntly: lighten up a bit!
I don't think anyone's particularly saying they're offended, just that the marketing scheme is a bit of a joke.
Imagine they made a website targeting a male stereotype, showing a laptop being used in some sports context on a backdrop of explosions and guitar riffs. I can only assume the average Slashdotter would chuckle and treat it as if it were marketing to 'dumb jocks', pointing out that it didn't even mention the technical merits of the machine. We wouldn't be offended, but I think most people here would look down on the site with something between disdain and pity. I expect the phrase "How stupid do they think we are?" would come up, with people wondering why one wouldn't just buy it on the normal Dell site where actual product comparisons are available.
That's what people are saying here - not that it's deeply offensive, just that the level of sophistication is laughable and that talking down to one's customers is a quick way to lose them.
You're right, the number of exploits doesn't necessarily mean it's a more secure system, but the fact that (as you say) there aren't a proportionate amount to the size of the userbase does seem to imply decent security.
I personally haven't heard of any exploit in the wild except the trojan, for which the user has to be willing to provide their password to any old bit of software with unknown providence - to be honest I don't know how one could protect against that on any system. If there are other exploits out there I would like to know about it, but if there aren't then the author has no right to say it's "trivial to launch exploits against the Mac" unless he's demonstrating that by writing them himself.
You misunderstand; the speed rankings were taken from the Futuremark article, which used specific benchmarking software. I just added the Acid3 results to demonstrate that fast does not equate to poor rendering quality.
I do, however, agree with another poster who pointed out that it's odd that Safari was the only beta included. If they'd included Opera and Chrome's preview releases they'd have scored 100 on the Acid3, and potentially higher on the speed tests too.
This update alone isn't even that big - if you're using auto update on a machine that was previously patched up to date, 10.5.7 is only 286MB.
Did they present you with any alternative version of the story?
While I admittedly don't put much faith in a story on a blog by some guy I've never heard of, I am (for the moment) more inclined to believe the person who went public with something that they would otherwise have had no reason to comment on over the officer who stands to come out looking like an ass.
Although you jest, I'm actually surprised at how confident and competent the NSA seem here. Maybe it's just an (unfair?) association I've built up that government organisation = technically incompetent, and I know they employ a lot of very smart people, but it surprises me that they were so far ahead of the teams that they could pick exactly what level of difficulty to set their attacks at.
Seeing at some of the work that's presented at conventions, the brilliantly paranoid security systems that the likes of OpenBSD have, and some of the distinctly embarrassing news stories about the latest government network being hacked by some guy in a basement, I guess I was just expecting the NSA to get more of a run for their money than "Yeah, we pitched it so they couldn't quite win. No problem really."
I'd be interested to see how a team harvested from the basements of MIT or Caltech would stack up in a challenge like this, actually.
I haven't used Office 07, although from what I've seen of it in the news I think I'd probably agree with you - I'm surprised if companies are happy to switch to it without factoring in retraining but not to do the same for OpenOffice.
Windows 7, however, still seems like an evolutionary step in interface design - it still 'feels' like XP, which actually surprised me. I've not used Vista for more than a few minutes so I can't comment on that really. I don't use Windows that much any more at all, actually, but I've got the Release Candidate running in a VM to see what it's like, and honestly the only interface feature that really struck me was the OSX style 'dock' taskbar; I'm sure that's going to result in a good few calls to tech support when it rolls out.
You have to look at it in the right way - to you or me Windows 7's interface doesn't operate differently (on a broad level) to OSX or Ubuntu, but try using one or other with the 'list of things to click on' mentality. You'll see that the vast majority of changes that MS makes to the Windows interface don't break that line of thinking - often if they do move things they're still using the same icon and in roughly the same place. Trying to do that on Ubuntu won't work - things have moved, they have different names, different icons and they look different when they open up; it's nothing that couldn't be remedied with an hour (at the very most) of looking around the screen and reading things, but because of a combination of people's acceptance that they "don't get computers" (or indeed even their wilful ignorance) and plain old laziness and resistance to change, they will decide that their new computer is not ready to use like their old one was.
The only way I can see around this is marketing. Linux netbooks were pretty much marketed as 'just another computer' and people accordingly expected them to be like every computer they'd used before - hence all the problems I've mentioned in these last two posts. If a company (Apple, I'm guessing) were to make a major point of how their interface is a whole new idea (not true, but this is advertising...) far in advance of their competitors they'd have a much better chance of people opening the box with a different mindset.
People like you are a tiny minority in the market, though, that's the issue here. You already use open source software, you know how to adapt to a different desktop environment, you know in advance what your preferred programs are, and so on. Perhaps more importantly, you don't immediately blind yourself to what's written on the screen in front of you just because the box it's written in looks a bit different.
Most users are scared by what they don't recognise, and an awful lot of them still insist on learning to do things by rote, memorising a set of steps rather than taking the (short) time needed to get an understanding of what they're doing. One of the things that always gets me is when someone asks (for example) how to print something - I don't blame them for not knowing how to perform a certain task, but nine times out of ten they could have worked it out for themselves simply by bringing up each menu in turn and reading them until they saw 'Print'. Not only that, they'd then remember for next time, no help needed. As it is though, they'll ask and more often than not someone will just tell them rather than gently directing them to think about it; subsequently they remember "Click the menu at the top left then hit 'Print' near the bottom", which is OK in itself. Then when they come to the next task, say making a new document, they ask someone else, and remember the rough location on the menu...
To them, Linux is not ready to go - I'm surprised how many people seem to be misinterpreting that comment. It's not ready to go because it doesn't look familiar enough, because things aren't in the same place, because things are labelled differently. I find it unfortunate that so many intelligent people still see computers as something that they don't understand, and therefore never make the effort to try to get the basics, but for now that's how things are and that's why Linux is more work than Windows for the average user.
There are plenty of 'just a phone' handsets out there. They work perfectly well, they're cheap and by definition they don't really need to be updated or redesigned - that's why they never make the news.
What do you expect the headlines to read? "Nokia 1100 still excellent basic phone, just like it was six years ago"?
The funny thing is, it seems like there's not really a comparable alternative in some Western countries.
Tata is pitching their homes at about 1.5 times their target market's annual income. Relatively speaking, it looks like that would place these at about £35,000 in the UK. In comparison, the Ikea homes were placed at a minimum of three times the income of the target market, and more like 5 or 6 times in many cases.